Paper short abstract:

Analyzing the practice of trekking, we would reflect on how it produces a temporary, unhistorical and universalized (non)place where individuals live an experience of self that can be politically questioned. A phenomena of inocentization (Barthes) seems to occur on subjective and collective levels.

Paper long abstract:

The study I propose is based on ethnographic comparative descriptions of touristic experiences of trekking on the island of Corsica (France) and on the Serra Gaúcha (Brazil). In order to understand what kind of place is invented, performed, experimented, and shared during this practice, we should pay attention to its social-cultural construction. The study of the"excursive phenomena" through its values, objects used, techniques of the body and discourses expressed during the contemplation of landscape, reveals this kind of ritual as a mythic reorganization of urban fragments (or a crossing of flows), performed by a middle class group. The place trekkers temporally create has been imagined and prepared during the everyday life as a scene where "I" will experiment a complete sensation of being. During the practice, a constant attention on corporeity (pleasures, tiredness, power, hurting, physical progress...), a repetitive affirmation of loving nature, and a lack of social and cultural diversity, turns the ritual into an obvious, natural, politically uncriticizable phenomena. Therefore, the experience seems universal to a trekker who lives an heroization of himself. Consequently, the ritual provides a place were a dominant group performs "technics of self". What kind of (bio)power (Foucault) is supported by these seasonal rises of places? Our societies being hallmarked by an aggregative normative obligation of freedom and self assurance, we would question if the trekkers aren't providing an image of idealized lifestyle to the rest of the society. Stars of a social order, they reproduce the "spectacle society" functions.