LONE WOLVES? ISOLATION AND SOLITUDE WITHIN THE FRONTIER TRAVEL EXPERIENCE

The frontier traveller, venturing out into the peripheral parts of our world such as the poles, the peaks of mountains or the great deserts, must deal with the remoteness and riskiness of the setting. The traveller is mentally apart from friends and family, and immediate rescue may be difficult, if not impossible. This article explores the attraction of remoteness, isolation and solitude for the frontier traveller, using qualitative interview and biographical data collected in a study of frontier travel experiences. Some participants referred to intense, spiritual experiences at the frontier, with the remoteness and silence of their journeys facilitating reflection, both internal and external. Isolation and solitude appear to engender a sense of freedom and escape from the cares of everyday life in the frontier traveller, while the study also highlights the attraction of self‐sufficiency in remote settings, particularly during the solo frontier travel experience, where the individual is forced to make decisions and manage situations, without recourse to another's advice, skills or experience. The resultant heightened challenge and risk was perceived as a form of authenticity by some participants. The links between isolation and opportunities for self‐actualization are also noted in this article. The implications of these findings for marketing tourism experiences are examined, given the potential for the peripheries to become more accessible to tourists in the future, as well as the role played by culture and privilege in these types of adventurous experiences in far‐flung locations.     

Embodied and sensory encounters: death,bereavement and remembering in children’s family and personal lives

ABSTRACT

Whilst children’s ‘significant’ death and bereavement experiences have received considerable attention as constituting a family trouble, this article examines children’s rarely considered perspectives on encounters with death, bereavement and remembrance which are intrinsic to family and personal lives. Family homes are a site for younger children’s previously unexplored embodied, sensory and material engagements with death, bereavement and remembrance. These engagements occur through children’s treasuring and displaying of keepsakes and photographs, and through children bearing witness to dying pets and deceased bodies. Via these temporally and spatially located practices, familial and cultural values are passed on to children, family is constituted, and children are embedded in a broader kinship group. The article illuminates how children vividly recount experiences of death, bereavement and remembering, invoking ‘home’ and other private spaces as places in which death is experienced and retold.     

Pacifism and the Question of Responsibility

ABSTRACT

This article explores the relationship between pacifism and responsibility through conversations with four white U.S. women formed in historic peace church traditions. The conversations resist the dominant tendency to present pacifism and responsibility as dichotomies. For these women, responsibility is not an absolute criterion to which a pacifist position must answer; nor is it a worldly commitment shunned by faithful adherence to the gospel. Rather, responsibility is a crucial yet highly contextual consideration in the pacifist life one cannot but live. This article concludes that it is a mistake to utilize responsibility as an external criterion by which to judge pacifism and a mistake to deny the importance of responsibility in a pacifist life. Both of these dichotomous arrangements mischaracterize the lived experience and moral reflection of the interviewees. The question of responsibility is not whether one should be a pacifist, but how to live nonviolently in a violent world.