Giving Habitus a Break: Charter Tourism and Nationalism
 

Hazel Andrews, London Metropolitan University

This paper is based on an ethnography, involving periods of participant observation, of charter tourists to the Spanish holiday resorts of Magaluf and Palmanova, Mallorca. It uses Bourdieu’s concept of habitus to understand how constructions of ‘British’ national identity are signalled in the resorts and how these are embodied and lived by the tourists. Such an approach advances the sociological and anthropological knowledge of tourism in that it challenges the notion concerning the underlying motivations of tourists’ travels as a search for authenticity in the other. The paper concentrates on three main areas of social life: space, the body, and food and drink. It demonstrates that the study of charter tourists is a rich source of data for the illumination of questions of national identity and that the holiday is a time of articulation for an aspect of the self which, in this case, is an expression of effervescent Britishness.