Serious leisure imaginaries: The construction of tourists, locals and localities in scuba diving tourism

Abstract

Scuba diving is a global leisure activity today often undertaken as a form of tourism, counting millions of practitioners. Drawing on my experience of diving in different parts of the world, as well as on various forms of documentation, this article focuses on the structural characteristics of this form of purposeful tourism. As a sport, scuba diving follows certain routines and regulations and can thus be seen as a form of serious leisure; that is, leisure involving plans and demands. As a form of tourism, it is a particular way of imagining the world, based on a specific form of cartography and mass mediated images and stories of the vast blue and its inhabitants. My argument is that when undertaking scuba as a form of tourism, whether guiding or being guided, divers submit to the structures of both the sport and the touring. These then determine both how they dive from a technical point of view and how they come to think about diving and indeed, in a sense, the world. Divers are thus guided by ‘serious leisure imaginaries’. Altogether, scuba diving tourism here emerges as a transformative social force where tourists, locals and localities are constructed simultaneously in a dynamic interplay.