For many tourists and scholars, ‘far from home’ is a geographically and culturally distant location. Being away from home (place of origin) and being among others can be seen as an anthropological condition of the quest for the other and others: To be a tourist as an archetypal of existence in postmodern times, as an existence of a continued movement of search that brings people from one place to another and drives them from one experience to the next while escaping their existential condition as an alien among aliens or rather as another among others temporarily for moments of “authenticity”.
Being a tourist is thus not another way of “being-there” opposed to a familiar being at home; it is a spatial transport of being “as such” within a society. This diagnosis implies two points. (1) The difference between global mobilities (international tourism) and local mobilities (residential tourism) is neutralized in this movement of search. (2) Attention is paid to the back and forth between “crowds” and spatial as well as symbolic close relationships: In tourist places the movements of search temporarily come to a standstill. This leads to the question if and how this local spatial proximity has meaning and is relevant for sociality.
Tourism consumption generates a special spatial distribution of “third places” (not in the sense of Soja but in the sense of Ray Oldenburg) and by that geography of relationships – direct encounters between the individual and the “mass production society”. Although these “third places” are places of socialization (Vergesellschaftung), they are accentuated in a different way. Far away from functional assignments, processes of collectivisation (Vergemeinschaftung) are esthetically experienced under a short-term neutralization of external realities, for example in a themed guided tour or hike, at the evening bingo in the hotel, at the “regular places” on the beach, at the après-ski or while doing gymnastic exercises. Part-time collective experiences and shared feelings form latent post-traditional communities: The nomadic existence leads to the next third place and to the next immersion in a collective experience.