Camping in Clearing

Abstract

Camping confounds the imaginaries of indulgence and comfort that glisten from the pages of travel and lifestyle magazines. The glossy layouts, filled with pictures of all-inclusive beach resorts and cruise ships, promise to fill the hollowness of modern lifestyles with an overabundance of just about everything. Instead of pampered luxury, however, camping embraces discomfort and lack — not so much as pleasures in and of themselves but as reminders that less is often more. This chapter is about those empty intervals in space and time that trigger our creative impulses by making room for us to move in different directions, to create unexpected connections, or to arrange our social worlds in new ways. I look to camping, as a practice and as a metaphor for life in an uncertain world, to explore concepts we rarely associate with tourism — concepts such as emptiness or unfinishedness. To do this, I first draw on the ontologies of Martin Heidegger’s ‘clearing’ and Plato’s chora, reading them through the critical lenses offered by feminist theorists Elizabeth Grosz and Betsy Wearing, before turning to Paulo Freire’s notions of ‘unfinishedness’ to reflect further on alternative ontologies for tourism.