Spiritual seekers in esoteric tourism contexts. The Damanhur Community in Italy

Our case study is the Federation of Damanhur, one of the most long-lived spiritual communities in Europe, located in Catholic Italy. Every year, Damanhur hosts thousands of visitors who experience the community thanks to daily tours, weekly stays and seminars. These visitors can be simply curious, sympathizers or spiritual seekers. In this paper we present the ‘ten days Amine experience’, a participant observation performed by one of the authors during the summer of 2016 in a group mainly composed of spiritual seekers. This experience is here analyzed through a performative approach that is particularly suited to analyzing the Damanhur site and which presents itself as a hierarchy of spaces designed for one or more performance modalities. The research highlights the existence of a dialectic between the motivational characteristics of Aminè spiritual seekers, on the one hand, and the communitarian and esoteric characteristics of Damanhur, on the other, which determine a gap between the ...