Creative Tourism and Its Role in the Flourishment of Religious Creativity and Spiritualism. Mehrab Sadeghnia, Hamideh Amiryazdani

The main motivations behind creative tourism, as a new form of tourism in the postmodern world, consist in achieving a new understanding of the “self” and the pursuit of “meaning,” “identity,” and “authenticity,” which have transformed the paradigm of tourism. With the development of the phenomenon of “spiritualism” in our time in which people turn away from the religion as a predetermined and organized phenomenon, in these new styles, the criterion is not to discover the religious other; it is to discover the self in the other. In this paper, we introduce the essential difference between creative tourism as an instance of postmodern tourism and cultural tourism, and we will examine the component of spirituality in creative tourism, and then elaborate the former as an opportunity for the development and understanding of religious beliefs and a ground for the creativity of the religious culture. Using historical-hermeneutical approach, this paper examines the concept of "spirituality" in lived travel experience of a creative tourists and argues that when discussing spirituality of tourism, one potential avenue is flourishment of religious creativity. A key objective of this paper therefore, is to provide an initial mapping of, and insights into this territory.