Spiritual Tourism for Quest and Transformation: A Study Through the Gender Lens using Duoethnography Approach

In travel and tourism research, ‘spirituality’ has been postulated as a major proposition to evoke an emotional valence leading to transiency. Travelling, as a mode of realization of one’s deeply embedded gnostic power, might trigger transcendental awakening that connects an individual mind with assorted level of consciousness. However, spiritual tourism has been restricted to the taxonomic notion of travelling and has frequently been explained in the context of social, historical and economic parameters. The discursive shift from a ‘religious’ to ‘spiritual’ travel needs to be addressed in the light of transformative quest that a spiritual tourist embarks upon. Transformation, in the domain of transformative research on gender, has been considered as part of the empowering and emancipating process that women experience through travel. Yet, application of transformative research in explaining the experiential shift from ‘religious’ to ‘spiritual’ travel remained scarce. This paper conflates the theoretical discussion of spiritual tourism with personal accounts of travel memoirs across gender. The study deploys duoethnography approach towards analysing male and female experiences of transformation through spiritual travel. The theory governing the stages of mythic quest by Joseph Campbell (1973) was used to explain the transformative shift. Photo elicitation technique was used to explore multiple layers of meaning evoked through deep emotions, memories and realizations. The process of duoethnography was between the authors and consisted of face-to-face conversations, memory-walk, email exchanges and social media posts. The data for the study was made up by the personal spiritual travel photographs of the authors. Memories & life stories, reflections and understanding of experiences also served as data in addition to the photographs. Based on the initial set of findings, the study used random walk method to extract shared content (visuals and text) from three purposively selected spiritual travel groups from Facebook. The overall findings suggested that both women and men spiritual tourists experience varying existential and behavioural transformations based on their transformative learning. Quest was found to induce spiritual travel in both women and men.