Exploring Embodied Luxury: Practice-theoretical autoethnography of a yoga retreat holiday

Traditionally, luxury is presented as conspicuous, expensive and extraordinary products and services in branding and marketing literature. Nevertheless, in contemporary society the understanding of luxury has extended towards experiential and unconventional forms. Consumer research and unconventional luxury literature understand luxury as a social construct in which the intangible, fleeting, emotional intensities are meaningful. Correspondingly, in luxury tourism debates an interest towards exploring the intangible nature and variation in tourists’ interpretations of luxury has emerged. However, the unconventional forms of luxury in tourism have received limited attention until today. There is an apparent need to continue the luxury research discussions with explorations that make visible embodied forms of knowing and complement the dominant psychological understandings of luxury in tourism.

As a result, this research explores the emergence of embodied knowing of luxury in the situated, ongoing sociomaterial practices of a yoga retreat holiday. To accomplish this task, three research questions are set: 1) In what kind of practices does luxury unfold in a yoga retreat holiday? 2) How does the embodied knowing of luxury emerge when engaging in practices? 3) What does the embodied knowing of luxury empirically mean, and how can it be methodologically studied? In this study, tourism is understood as a practice in which the embodied knowing of luxury is emerging. The epistemological practicetheoretical approach to embodiment originates from organisational studies and more precisely, from the aesthetic, sociomaterial approach to practices which see the formation of knowledge as an active embodied doing as knowing-inpractice. Exploring luxury within the tourist’s sociomaterial practices enables to unfold the affecto-rhythmic nature that allows the capacity for luxury to emerge. In this thesis theory, methodology and empirical approach were evolving simultaneously. The selected approach allowed to theoretically and empirically demonstrate how luxury emerges in a yoga retreat holiday as affecto-rhythmic agencements. Five practice agencements were forming and recognised as follows: Orienting, Reconnecting, Adjusting, Guarding and Releasing practice.

Empirically, the luxury phenomenon is explored within multi-sited, evocative autoethnography over a period of five years in yoga retreat holidays in the premises of a luxury hotel in Thailand. In addition to the author’s personal empirical material, the fieldwork material entails photographs, videos, websites, and other material of the hotel and yoga studios provided for tourists. However, the most essential empirical material is carried in the knowing and affectivities of the body of the researcher. The body-reflexivity in the autoethnographic research process enabled to demonstrate the ephemeral, affecto-rhythmic nature of practices that emerges as embodied luxury. The study empirically demonstrates how the aesthetic tastebased judgements of the appropriate affecto-rhythmic nature of practices allow the capacity to engage in the flow of embodied knowing of luxury in tourist practices.

This dissertation contributes to the luxury and tourism research discussions. In luxury research, it expands the prevailing debates by showing how the lived, living and acting sensuous body is a knowledgeable actor in tourist practices, rather than understanding the tourist as disembodied and passive. The study highlights the active role of a tourist in the production of luxury experience. Second, it contributes to practice-theoretical studies in luxury literature in theorising luxury within the situated, ongoing sociomaterial practices that are entangled with affects and rhythms, and accomplished together with the heterogeneous actors of human, nonhuman and natural actors beyond the mere personalised perceptions. Third, it complements the discussions of unconventional luxury by drawing attention to the intangible, inconspicuous, aesthetic and ethical nature of luxury emerging within affecto-rhythmic sociomaterial practices. In tourism research, the dissertation complements the existing embodiment discussions and contributes to rejecting dualistic knowledge formation. The thesis continues the discussions of relational sociomaterial practices in tourism and presents the body as ‘an agencement of embodied knowing and resonant materiality that is able to affect and be affected’. It illustrates how ethics is done in touristic practice. From the methodological perspective, through the study of practices by means of body-reflexivity in autoethnography, the existing psychological understandings in luxury explorations are extended in the dissertation. The embodied and methodological approach complements the dominant rational-cognitive methods and external observations of luxury practices in tourism and luxury research. The researcher’s body is seen as inherent in unfolding the embodied luxury with the autoethnographic approach of this thesis.