Intangible heritage tourism and identity

This note seeks to examine the relationship between existential intangible tourism and personal identity. Due to the impacts of globalization, tourism faces a new paradigm of increasing social complexity and the recent impotence of traditional boundaries. In such an environment, the past liaison between identity and local place vanishes. The discussion indicates that intangible heritage tourism can provide a source of identity separate from local places, becoming in effect an "existential tourism". In this paper, Japanese flamenco tourism is used to shed light on the theme in general. (c) 2007 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.