From mediascape to meaning and back again: An interactionist analysis of spiritual tourism in Sedona, Arizona

Traveling for religious or spiritual purposes is not a new activity in late modern life. However, spiritual tourism seems to be on the rise today as people seek spiritual meaning in a variety of non-institutional practices and settings. This is particularly the case for those who identify with the broad spiritual term, New Age.;Sedona is one particular place or, as one New York Times author called it, a "soaring pantheistic cathedral," in which New Age seekers continue their quest for existential meaning. Actual numbers vary, but somewhere between 200,000 and 600,000 pilgrim-tourists travel to Sedona annually to experience its powerful vortexes, or energy spots, and to experience a variety of spiritual products, practices and people.;Broadly, this dissertation explores Sedona as a New Age tourist destination through the narratives constructed by New Age practitioners and New Age pilgrim-tourists. It asks what Sedona as spiritual means, how Sedona's spiritual mediascape is constructed, and how experiences there come to be embodied as transformative. Theoretically, this dissertation explores these people and this place through the analytical frame of mediated interactionism. This frame focuses on a web of mediated interactions that embeds a particular, New Age imaginary in Sedona's landscape, helping constitute it as a powerful, spiritual place and community. Also, this web helps pilgrim-tourists embody this imaginary, allowing them to construct aspirational narratives of self that help orient them in moral space, giving them direction and purpose. In short, the goal of this dissertation is to understand how a New Age imaginary gets embedded in a particular place and embodied by particular people during their leisured activities.;This analysis is poised to contribute to ongoing discussions of religion in American life, particularly those discussions that (a) involve the role of mediated commodities in religion, (b) focus on non-institutional religious practices, and (c) focus on religious/spiritual travel as a site for meaning construction. This analysis broadly addresses conditions and practices under which identity and meaning are constructed by a particular group of people and the integral place leisure has assumed in these constructions. Finally, this analysis addresses the constitutive and creative role of mediated interactions in the construction of place and Self, and it addresses social implications embedded in such constructions.