Reconciling essential and socially constructed selves: Han Chinese travelling to Tibet and the making of assemblage self

Abstract

In post‐reform China, Han Chinese urbanities traveling to Tibet have contributed to a new literary genre that documents tourist mobility as a means of self‐finding and self‐exploration. The sample of data in this study consists of 28 book‐length travel writings by Han travellers, and the primary research question addresses the relationships between tourism mobility and self‐making, a widely debated issue in cultural and tourism geographies. Engaging with the conceptual tension between an essential self and a socially constructed self, this study argues that while Han writers' travels to Tibet are germane to the hunt for an essential self as a hidden treasure to be redeemed, the self is by no means merely introspective, but intrinsically relational and constituted by social, embodied and materially mediated practices. For the purpose of reconciling and synthesizing the two theoretical positions, this study proposes an alternative concept known as the ‘assemblage self’, which tries to capture how the more‐than‐human and more‐than‐representational dimensions of mobilities can speak back powerfully to the phenomenology of the self. This concept is relational and performative in the sense that it is constituted by networks of discourses, practices, and materialities. We develop this concept by engaging with the recent literature on more‐than‐representational mobility as a conceptual nexus connecting the concepts of the essential self and the socially constructed self.

Plasmatic thinking and tourism: Plasmatic modernity

“…Among the emerging body of work on relational materialism, assemblage theory stood out theoretically for its sensitivity to the expressiveness of disparate component parts becoming caught up in networks and forming connections beyond the original network. Assemblage theory provides an alternate theoretical opportunity for tourism studies to reconceptualise on the social within tourism places by going beyond tourist attractions as aggregate wholes (Anderson and McFarlane, 2011;Anderson et al, 2012;Zhang and Qian, 2022). Assemblage theory allows an array of heterogenous entities to be foregrounded in analysis, including desires, wishes, material things within the attraction, technology and decentring but still retaining the humans, thereby forging distributed sociomaterial agencies and autonomies.…”