Networks and tourism - Mobile social life

This article shows that much tourism should no longer be seen as marginal and by implication "unnecessary". Rather, traveling, visiting, and hosting are necessary to social life conducted at-a-distance. It is argued here that research has neglected issues of sociality and corporeal copresence and thereby overlooked how more and more tourism is concerned with (re)producing social networks-with (re)visiting and receiving the hospitality of friends and kin living elsewhere and fulfilling social obligations. The article documents how much tourism is not an isolated "exotic island" but a significant set of relations connecting and reconnecting "disconnected" people in face-to-face proximities where obligations and pleasures can go hand in hand.