Reclaiming drama in tourism research: a dramatological analytic

Drama as symbolic action is overlooked in tourism research failing to take into account how dramaturgic interactions shape touristic relations, spaces, and systems. This note presents a novel theoretical analytic to study symbolic action and embodied tourism performances. This dramatological perspective seeks to understand the civic dramaturgic processes of extracting shared meaning from the co-performance and instantiation of symbolic representations. It moves forward to reinstate the place of drama in tourism scholarship, and clear confusion from common misconceptions about the essence of drama in touristic settings and behaviours. It is shown that civic dramaturgy can advance our understanding of tourism as an embodied practice by complementing and expanding extant performance studies and theory interlinked with symbols, social interactions, imaginaries, and cultures.