Expectations,Experiences, and Memories: Ecotourism and the Possibilities for Transformations

This essay explores how ecotourism destinations and media materials rhetorically construct ecotourists’ anticipations, experiences, and memories through ethnographic and rhetorical analyses. Using theory related to phenomenology, this study examines how expectations are formed through rhetorical tropes such as the sublime, the exotic, and the dangerous adventure. In turn, these expectations direct attentions towards specific experiences and memories. However, because ecotourism activities become critical experiences with other natural and social worlds that supersede everyday practices, these events have the potential to foster critical awareness of self, other, the natural world, and practices related to traveling, shaping the environmental self and identity.