Commodification of Spiritual Experience in Tourism
The International Journal of Religion and Spirituality in Society July 9, 2026 Huong Xuan Vu
Commodification in spiritual tourism has ambivalent effects: it can widen access and support experiences of awe, mindfulness, meaning-making, and spiritual well-being, but also foster performative spirituality, expectation inflation, fragile authenticity, decontextualization, symbolic extraction, unequal value capture, and the displacement of community authority. The review proposes a continuum model of commodification—infrastructural, experiential, and extractive—and argues that the key issue is whether market mediation remains subordinate to ritual integrity, psychological safeguarding, community custodianship, and equitable benefit-sharing.