UNDERSTANDING THE BIBLE AS THE ROOTS OF PHYSICAL DISPLACEMENT: THE ORIGIN OF TOURISM

Maximiliano Korstanje
University of Palermo

Graham Busby
University of Plymouth

Abstract
Popular Wisdom valorizes tourism as an industry inextricably intertwined with physical displacement. Whereas academicians emphasize that tourism was a product of technological revolutions linked to mass-transport which accelerated and improved the ways of traveling, less attention has certainly been given to the real origin of tourism. The present paper explores the influence exerted by the Bible (Old and New Testaments) in the configuration of modern tourism. Based on exegetical methods, this work shows how workers are frequently socialized in a diversity of norms (commandments). Tourism, which is characterized by a physical movement, allows these workers to break temporarily these duties to be cyclically reintroduced to their daily obligations once they return. This aspect of modern tourism can be very well compared with the ritual of confession or the purification of the soul. The guilt derived from the repression of the father in Freudian terms claims for a sacrifice to resume the time of sin with forgiveness. That way, visitors who launched to explore paradisical places situated in faraway parts of the world experience an unavoidable need to come back home. This is because “holidays” purify the sins (duties) that burden people at work whereas, once they have expiated their acts, they are available to be driven to their societies once again.

Keywords: Biblical text, mythical archetype, displacement, rest, tourism

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