Abstract
Purpose The purpose of this paper is to deconstruct the backpacker label by reconstructing it using the historical antecedent of drifting. Following the deconstruction of backpacking’s near past, the author build a clearer conceptual foundation for backpacking’s future. Design/methodology/approach The study is framed by scenario planning, which demands a critical review of the backpacking and an appreciation of its history in order to understand its future. Findings Backpacking, ever evolving, remains difficult to articulate and challenges researchers to “keep up” with its complexity and heterogeneity. This paper argues that researchers must learn more about how backpacking “works” by opening a dialogue with its past, before engaging in further research. The paper finds that a poor conceptualisation of backpacking has led to a codification of backpacker criteria. Practical implications Backpacking remains a research topic which draws disparate researchers using criteria that produces disparate results and deviations. By understanding its past, researchers will be better placed to explore the emancipatory impulses that drive backpackers today and in the future. Originality/value This papers’ value lies in the retrospection process which explores backpacking’s near past so as to “make sense” of present research and present scenarios for it is the immediate future. The paper re-anchors backpacking by investigating the major historical, social and cultural events leading up to its emergence.
Highlights
Backpacking as an “alternative” form/type of tourism generates a distinct way of “being-in-the-world” as individuals characterised by extensive spatial mobility and time and space flexibility travel for up to one year or more on routes that span the globe (Berdychevsky et al, 2013)
From the scholars who contest the conflicting claims to its origin (Loker-Murphy and Pearce, 1995), the entrepreneurs who seek to extend it as a label (Bell, 2008), to the backpackers who wish to distance themselves from it (O’Regan, 2016); there is little agreement as to the nature of backpacking homogeneity or heterogeneity, its past or its future
As thinking about future scenarios requires an accurate appreciation of history in order to understand the future (Yeoman, 2008), this paper explores drifting, which has symbolic, cultural, structural and historic continuity with backpacking, and is seen as the most direct precursor of backpacking (Hannam and Diekmann, 2010; Sørensen, 2003)
Summary
Backpacking as an “alternative” form/type of tourism generates a distinct way of “being-in-the-world” as individuals characterised by extensive spatial mobility and time and space flexibility travel for up to one year or more on routes that span the globe (Berdychevsky et al, 2013). There has been a rapid increase in their visibility as a distinct form of tourism. The media is flush with “backpacking” related images, films, fiction, oral histories, documentaries, reality television shows and soap operas (O’Regan, 2016). As a label or category, “backpacker” and “backpacking” can generate a surprising amount of debate. This paper argues that backpacker research in the social sciences has stalled as form-related attributes have become fixed defining criteria for manipulative hypotheses stated in advance in propositional form and subjected to flawed empirical tests
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