Serie

Thomas O'Dell
Spas and the Cultural Economy of Hospitality, Magic and the Senses
2010 | engelska

ISBN: 978-91-85509-35-5
Förlag: Nordic Academic Press

Recent years have seen a rapidly growing hotel business built around health and well-being. Leisurely experiences are packaged, staged and consumed as commercial commodities – the tourist complexes have become part of the so called ‘cultural economy’.
In Spas – the Cultural Economy of Hospitality, Magic and the Senses ethnologist Tom O’Dell uses spas to highlight the manner in which the culturalization of the economy has developed.
The author takes his readers on a journey from the seventeenth century into the present and shows how issues of hospitality, well-being and religious magic have been handled in commercialized settings through history. He also anchors his discussion firmly in a cultural analysis of the body and senses that draws upon recent work in cultural theory that has been developed in the humanities and social sciences.