Anthropological research tells us that exchange is a universal human activity. It is found in all societies and communities, whether large-scale market-based societies, or small-scale subsistence societies, and across all times. Our everyday lives are filled with different kinds of exchange; not only commercial exchanges when we swap money for desired goods and services, but also exchanges of love, friendship, community. Exchange can be predictable, the stuff of habit such as the visit to the (super)market, but it can also be unexpected, fun, unusual and uncertain. Exchange does not, however, exist in a social vacuum. Mauss famously identified ways in which exchange between human beings is both enabled and constrained by a number of societal and cultural forces, organised variously as market structures, social hierarchies or cultural values. As John Davis puts it: Exchange is interesting because it is the chief means by which useful things move from one person to another; because it is an important way in which people create and maintain social hierarchy; because it is a richly symbolic activity, all exchanges have got meaning; and because for Britons and many others it is an important source of metaphors about social relations, about social order, about the fundamental processes of nature. This sense of exchange in the context of tourism finds a specific turn majorly focused on culture and cultural items. People travel to broaden their cultural perspective and also share their precious cultural insights with the people who care about the sense of exchange. Many ties and relations take form through tourism and cultural curiosity starts to thrive through tourism.
Pilgrimage Tourism and the Revitalization of Cultural Heritage
