One of the main notions of the “mobility turn” was that previously clear-cut categories of mobility were becoming more and more hybrid, with blurred boundaries. In particular, tourism has been shown to be more frequently combined with work, less separated from daily places and rhythms, etc. This contribution both illustrates this blending of tourism mobilities with daily preoccupations, and argues that conceptual categories such as tourism and lifestyle mobility remain mostly valid to build a diverse, refined understanding of the mobility spectrum.
The case study is outdoor sport tourism: people travelling for the pursuit of outdoor sport practices. The main empirical material is a series of 76 semi-structured interviews with participants in 3 such sports: paragliding, kayaking and rock climbing. For this presentation, I focus in particular on those among the participants who travel the most extensively and thus tend to a lifestyle mobility pattern.
The main proposition of this presentation is a model for the analysis of leisure mobilities: a gradient with various degrees of engagement with a leisure practice. Such a model allows to show the continuum of practices, from leisure activities in the daily environment requiring only short-distance mobility, to lifestyle mobilities based on the pursuit of the same leisure. But it also allows to differentiate practices through the parameters of engagement, mainly time spent and distance travelled. That way, lifestyle mobility is understood as the higher end of engagement with a mobility practice—be it travelling for a sport or travelling for the sake of travel. This also helps to delve in the detail of practices and expose the variety of mobility patterns that tend toward lifestyle mobility while still keeping some aspects of sedentarity: retirees who buy a second home in places that they have visited as tourists many times, seasonal workers who settle for a few months in a place close to their leisure interests, etc.
Mots clés : tourism|lifestyle mobility|engagement|leisure
A105013VG