000 02272cam a2200241 4500
100 1 _aZHANG Han
700 _aQIAN Junxi
245 _aReconciling essential and socially constructed selves:
_bHan Chinese travelling to Tibet and the making of assemblage self/
_cHan Zhang and Junxi Qian
260 _c2022
520 _aIn post-reform China, Han Chinese urbanities traveling to Tibet have contributed to a new literary genre that documents tourist mobility as a means of self-finding and self-exploration. The sample of data in this study consists of 28 book-length travel writings by Han travellers, and the primary research question addresses the relationships between tourism mobility and self-making, a widely debated issue in cultural and tourism geographies. Engaging with the conceptual tension between an essential self and a socially constructed self, this study argues that while Han writers' travels to Tibet are germane to the hunt for an essential self as a hidden treasure to be redeemed, the self is by no means merely introspective, but intrinsically relational and constituted by social, embodied and materially mediated practices. For the purpose of reconciling and synthesizing the two theoretical positions, this study proposes an alternative concept known as the 'assemblage self', which tries to capture how the more-than-human and more-than-representational dimensions of mobilities can speak back powerfully to the phenomenology of the self. This concept is relational and performative in the sense that it is constituted by networks of discourses, practices, and materialities. We develop this concept by engaging with the recent literature on more-than-representational mobility as a conceptual nexus connecting the concepts of the essential self and the socially constructed self.
650 _aCHINA
650 _aASIA PACIFIC
650 _aMORE-THAN-REPRESENTATIONAL MOBILITY
650 _aTHE SELF
650 _aTOURISM MOBILITY
650 _aTRAVEL
650 _aTIBET
650 _aWRITING
773 _aAsia Pacific Viewpoint :
_gVol.63, No.2, August 2022, pp.180-193 (8)
598 _aCHINA, ASIAPAC
856 _uhttps://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/apv.12344
_zClick here for more
945 _i67803.1001
_rY
_sY
999 _c41798
_d41798