Emotion and memory in nostalgia sport tourism: examining the attraction to postmodern ballparks through an interdisciplinary lens

Abstract

Nostalgia sport tourism, one of Gibson's [1998. Sport tourism: A critical analysis of research. Sport Management Review, 1, 45–76] three forms of sport tourism, appears to have received little scholarly attention in contrast to active sport tourism and event sport tourism [Fairley, S. (2003). In search of relived social experience: Group-based nostalgia sport tourism. Journal of Sport Management, 17, 284–304; Gibson, H. J. (2002). Sport tourism at a crossroad? Considerations for the future. In S. Gammon & J. Kurtzman (Eds.), Sport tourism: Principles and practice (pp. 123–140). Eastbourne: Leisure Studies Association; Gibson, H. J. (2003). Sport tourism: An introduction to the special issue. Journal of Sport Management, 17, 205–213; Ritchie, B. W., & Adair, D. (2004). Sport tourism: An introduction and overview. In B. W. Ritchie & D. Adair (Eds.), Sport tourism: Interrelationships, impacts and issues (pp. 1–29). Buffalo, NY: Channel View]. Despite this apparent lack of research relative to the other two domains, insightful and thought-provoking scholarship has emerged within nostalgia sport tourism. Sociology, which is one of sport tourism's parent disciplines, has influenced much of this scholarship [Gibson, H. J. (2004). Moving beyond the ‘what is and who’ of sport tourism to understanding ‘why’. Journal of Sport Tourism, 9(3), 247–265; Harris, J. (2006). The science of research in sport and tourism: Some reflections upon the promise of the sociological imagination. Journal of Sport & Tourism, 11(2), 153–171]. Among other things, this epistemological orientation has yielded the importance of emotion and memory to nostalgically oriented experiences. This paper considers the emergence of emotion and memory within nostalgia sport tourism and, in so doing, continues this sociological emphasis. In particular, it argues that interaction ritual (IR) theory [Collins, R. (2004). Interaction ritual chains. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press], a micro-sociological perspective, can be used to provide scholars with a deep understanding of tourists' and excursionists' motivations for engaging in nostalgically oriented experiences. Three additional constructs from the field of sport geography – place, placelessness [Relph, E. (1976). Place and placelessness. London: Pion], and topophilia [Tuan, Y.-F. (1974). Topophilia: A study of environmental perception, attitudes, and values. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall] – are posited as useful supplements to IR theory that can enable sport tourism scholars to develop a more nuanced conceptualization of those elements inherent within nostalgically oriented sport sites. These theoretical positions are synthesized and used as a framework to examine sport tourists' and excursionists' attraction to the recent ‘throwback’ esthetic of contemporary Major League Baseball park design.