Space Perception And Identity Building For Hikers Under The Mobility Paradigm

Modern society is a society based upon mobilities.As a grand narrative theory,mobility has been used to analyze many issues in social science.Physical movement;the socially shared meanings ascribed to such movements and the experienced and embodied practice of movement are the core elements of the mobility research.With the emergence of the body geography and emotional geography,the core issue of human geography have changed,they called for more attention on human boby and their emotion experience,and the social space,truly to be people-oriented.Studies on the hiking topic is well suited to be analyzed by mobility paradigm as a theoretical framework: the intensity and scale of hiker’s physical movements are much greater than normal travelers;their sensory feelings keep changed when facing changing physical spaces so that their comprehensive spatial perceptions and special tourist experiences are being built;their identities have thereforebeen constantly constructed during their movement as well.Using mobile ethnography method,content analysis and narrative analysis,take the domestic well-known the old Huizhou-Hangzhou trail as a case,.The author went to the trail two times.,and selects 25 hikers’ blogs which record their spatial perceptions and identity construction from nearly 600 blogs of national famous independent travel websites such as Mafengwo.as qualitative data.The results show that the perception of pedestrian space and place can be divided into two types,: the embodied experience and the moving experience.;Progressive experience that changed over time.In according to this,the social identity and self-identity of the hikers will also change.In conclusion,the hikers’ spatial perceptions have been categorized into four types:first is the perception of enjoyment and escape formed from scenery-rural life;second is the perception of tired and conquest formed from physical fitness-outdoor challenge;third is the perception of cultural pilgrimage formed from culture-history;and the last is the perception of environmental protection formed from natural-ecological environment.In sum,the innovative contributions of this paper lie in two aspects: on the one hand pay more attention on the social space and the human body and their emotional during hiking movement,add emotional dimension in the study of human-land relationship;on the other hand,hope it could help the development of the hike destination and design satisfactory hiking product.