康复性流动视角下的健康与养生旅游研究展望

Prospects of the Study of Health and Wellness Tourism under the Perspective of Therapeutic Mobilities

健康与养生旅游在近20年得到了快速的发展,也越来越受到学术界的重视。然而已有的相关研究多为描述型研究,主要关注健康与养生旅游的供给特征、需求特征和政治经济学分析,很少有研究对旅游促进游客身心健康的机制作出理论解释。本文提出应该借鉴健康地理学中"康复性流动"的概念来理解健康与养生旅游的现象,突破目前健康与养生旅游研究缺乏理论视角和理论贡献的困境。康复性流动理论为理解流动、地方和健康提供了理论视角,可应用到健康与养生旅游研究中解释旅游流动促进健康的内在机制,同时,其理论深度和广度也可以在旅游的情境中进一步完善和丰富。这两者的结合可促进旅游地理学和健康地理学的交叉,进一步推进对地方、流动与健康关系的认识。

Health and wellness tourism has become a new trend for travel in the last two decades and gained growing attention from the academic world. However, most of the existing studies are descriptive, focusing on the particular aspects of health and wellness tourism's supply and demand, as well as its political economic analysis. There is still a lack of theoretical explanation for the mechanism how tourists improve their health and wellbeing during their travels. This paper proposes that the concept of ‘therapeutic mobilities' should be adopted to understand the phenomenon of health and wellness tourism so as to resolve the dilemma of lacking theoretical perspectives and contributions in current health tourism research. The conceptualization of therapeutic mobilities provides a theoretical perspective for understanding the relations between mobilities, place and health, and therefore it can be applied to the tourism research field to examine how tourism mobilities promote people's health and wellbeing. Meanwhile, the context of travel can further enhance the depth and breadth of therapeutic mobilities theory. The integration of health tourism and therapeutic mobilities will advance the intersection of tourism geography and health geography, providing a deeper understanding of mobilities, place and health.