| This project is an interpretive analysis of the appeal of adventure ecotourism through a case study of whitewater paddling. It is based on eighteen months of multi-site ethnographic fieldwork with a transnational community of paddlers who migrate around the world in search of whitewater, as well as discursive analysis of texts written by adventure athletes in a variety of sports. I focus on the interaction between three different subgroups within the adventure tourism population: (1) independent adventure athletes; (2) commercial adventure tour guides; and (3) commercial adventure tourism clients. Adventure ecotourism's popularity has increased dramatically in recent decades, inspiring substantial attention in both popular and academic media. Within this literature, the pursuit of adventure is often viewed as the function of an innate, universal human need for novelty and excitement. In challenge to this view, I observe that adventure tourism is practiced predominantly by white, upper middle-class members of advanced industrial societies and has experienced the bulk of its growth since the mid-1960s. Others studies noting these dynamics suggest that adventure thus represents an act of resistance against the confines and pressures of modern Western society. I contend, by contrast, that adventure ecotourism may actually be a means of fulfilling a traditional upper middle-class work ethic compelling continual progress through disciplined labor in a postindustrial era in which many conventional avenues for progress have been frustrated and the virtues of a material, work-focused existence called into question. I suggest that, far from an expression of escape and liberation, adventure may actually contribute to the discontent and restlessness widely experienced within mainstream modern social life. |
