The Sense of Ritual in the Tourism Experience: Diverse Cultures and Native Concepts in a two-nation Comparison

Through the process of modernization, people have become more alienated from others and their own cultural heritage. Thus they need tourism more than ever before to find spaces outside their functional domains to seek the real and deep subjective experience in the sense of being. Therefore tourist experience is becoming a core area. Studying tourist experience from the perspective of ritual has shown its unique anthropological advantage in many respects. However, the tourism ritual theory has also been questioned in its basic assumption and empirical basis. This study, via empirical study and theoretical innovation, will examine the sense of ritual in tourism: explain the sense of ritual’s operational mechanism in the tourism experience; research tourists’ cognitive differences regarding the sense of ritual in Chinese and US’s cultural contexts; take Chinese and US’s “native concepts” as a basis for the theoretical development