understanding rafting guides: occupational devotees or lifestylers? sandro carnicelli filho...
TRANSCRIPT
Understanding Rafting Guides:
Occupational Devotees or Lifestylers?
Sandro Carnicelli FilhoUniversity of the West of
Scotland
Who is the Rafting Guides?
Arnould and Price (1993) as an impresario who helps the participants to transform experiences into treasured, culturally constructed memories of personal growth.
On the other hand, Holyfield (1999) describes rafting guides according to their personal characteristics affirming that the vast majority of guides are young college students, with white skin colour, middle-to upper-middle socio-economical class, doing a seasonal job that requires a lot of physical effort and sharing the desire to be outdoors.
Research• 8 WEEKS IN QUEENSTOWN
• SUMMER SEASON 2008/09• SUMMER SEASON 2009/10
• PARTICIPANT OBSERVATION
• 22 IN-DEPTH INTERVIEWS
• CONTENT ANALYSIS
What is Liminality?
Liminality
Wickens and Sonmez (2003) travellers experience a liminal world, a non-ordinary world, that enables them to pursue some pleasures that could not be achieved in a routinised everyday life.
Nisbet (1969) the concept of liminality is connected to the need of uncertainty and has been employed to identify the transitory space between what is known and what is unknown.
This space for liminal experiences is defined as “the metaphorical crossing of some imagined spatial or temporal threshold” (Pritchard and Morgan 2006, p.764).
Varley (2011) adds that the liminal experience of sea-kayakers is also based on the exploration of territories that are on the edge, territories where the water of the sea meets the dry land.
The tourist is the active participant of liminal experiences and has been defined as a liminal person in a threshold state (Ryan and Hall 2001).
This liminal space is not usual for sea-kayaker tourists; it is a non-ordinary space and a non-ordinary experience (Varley 2011).
LifestylersOccupational Devotees
Stebbins (2004) defines occupational devotion as a “strong and positive attachment to a form of self-enhancing work, where the sense of achievement is high and the core activity (set of tasks) is endowed with such intense appeal that the line between this work and leisure is virtually erased” (p. ix).
The ‘occupational devotee’ finds self-fulfillment in her or his work, a work that may have roots in “serious” leisure (Stebbins 2009)
Occupational Devotees
This group of Guides is characterised by their long years working in the rafting industry, their position in the company (usually senior guides and trip leaders) and their commitment to organisational rules. These guides are usually married and instead of a transient lifestyle they are based in Queenstown all year around. The ‘occupational devotee’ have a worker identity that is not always equivalent to their personal identity.
‘Occupational devotees’ transformed their serious leisure into
a professional activity.
White-water Rafting as a LIFESTYLE
“I cannot call this a job or work. Job is something boring. This is lifestyle.”
“This is kind a hobby, it is what I love to do, so my job is part of my lifestyle. To me this is not a job. This is part of my life.”
“At the end of the day I get paid to do my hobby, I get paid to have fun, and how many people can say that?”
“Rafting for me combines passion with lifestyle and enables me to work and travel to different countries and live life away from the conventions of everyday life.”
LifestylersThe ‘lifestylers’ have white-water rafting as their serious
leisure activity but typically they are single and young guides in a junior position, with a transient lifestyle and living between four and six months in each hemisphere following the white-water rafting summer seasons. The ‘lifestylers’ are also characterised by their lack of possessions and their association with a wide circle of friends.
‘Lifestylers’ are travelers working in a liminal space and, paradoxically, the place they consider home is the place where they go during holidays
Queenstown is this liminal space for lifestylers’; the space where every year guides encounter each other and share experiences for few months before leaving again for another country. Due to its transient population and seasonality Queenstown is the space of the known and unknown. They know all the restaurants and bars, and they have friends around, but at the same time it is just a transitory space between seasons.
The results of this study indicate that some of the white-water rafting guides have a transient lifestyle. The rafting guides investigated in this research appeared as constructors of leisure experiences in a liminal environment. Finally, Queenstown is the space where every 6 months lifestylers encounter occupational devotees to share their experiences.
ConclusionQueenstown is also the ‘home’ of occupational devotees; people who decided to stay and create ‘roots’ in the same place and work for the same company and find self-fullfilment without the necessity of a liminal life
