Travel as Religious Experience

What is travel? Why do we do it? What does it do for us, and to us, and to the world around us? What is the worth of travel, and what is its cost? In this short series of articles, I want to think around some of these questions. My aim is to find not answers but analogies, alternative ways of thinking about travel and travellers that might challenge some old preconceptions. In the coming weeks, I’ll be looking at travel as an epic quest or adventure, as an act of cultural ‘cannibalism’ and as a new form of imperialism. To kick off, though, I invite you to think about travel as a kind of religious ritual.

Picture the scene: There’s a lake or a river or something like that, maybe even a sea. And it’s sunrise, or sunset, it doesn’t matter which, and the sun slides low across the sky like an egg yolk. All along the shoreline, lined-up up like little lanterns, are the beach huts or bungalows or whatever - the backpacker barracks. And out front, on the balconies and rooftops, sprawled across cushions or strung-out in hammocks, are the travellers themselves.

Tarquin is deep in a dog-eared Dumas he traded two towns back.  With his free hand (and much deliberation) he strokes a ponderous beard. His is a fossilised figure: skin coarse and cracked as old leather, hair the texture of twine. On his feet, chappals worn to a crisp; his vest is peppered with holes. He looks up. Across the deck, four round and ruddy-faced girls sit perched on poofs like hens on the nest. They gossip, giggle. One scans idly through photos as another sows beads in her hair. One is consulting the guidebook. One is writing a postcard. Gap years, thinks Tarquin, with a cock of his pierced ‘brow, slaves to the Lonely Planet. “They change their climate, not their soul, who rush across the sea.” Hmmm. Maybe he’ll feed them that one later, if he deigns to converse.

So consider: a ritual, loosely defined, is a kind of social operating procedure. It’s a time-tested template, a pre-cut pattern of acts and utterances, which, properly connected, can communicate changes in the status of participants. A wedding ceremony is an obvious example. There are vows and rings and drunken speeches, and these have to be used in just the right place, at just the right time, to make the marriage effective. So too with funerals, christenings, Bar Mitzvahs, you name it. A ritual doesn’t have to be religious of course. Graduations, hazings, even stag- and hen-nights – all involve a certain modus operandi (think silly clothes and public performance), adherence to which serves to signpost safe passage from one life-stage to the next.

Now in secular society, we’re somewhat starved of decent life-changing rituals. You’d be hard-pressed to argue that a stag-night is as mind-blowingly transformative as the Hindu vel kavadi or an Amerindian vision quest (despite, perhaps, the noble efforts of the best man). But regardless, we all still partake in rituals. In fact, they appear to be pretty much indispensable to human culture. By following the established procedure at certain key stages of our lives, we’re in effect ‘reinvesting’ in society, subscribing to its overarching ethos. Thus, every time we do a ritual, we at once remake society.

So how does all this apply to travel, you might justly ask. Let’s think again about the gaggle of gap years sketched out above. Every year, approximately 100,000 school-leavers head overseas prior to embarking on work or further education. Many more young people take similar breaks during or after their studies, or in-between jobs. Among this growing demographic, which is worth an estimated £2.2 billion in the UK alone, there are two major gap year options: project-based trips with organisations such as Global Vision International (GVI) and Voluntary Service Overseas (VSO); or budget backpacking through Asia, Australasia and the Americas. Of those who opt for the latter, some 25,000 visit Thailand, Australia and New Zealand in the same outing, making this the pre-eminent gap year circuit. Already, then, we have the first elements of ritual: time and place. But what else? Well, for a start you need the costume. (Rituals, you will recall, work best in garish garb.) Ponchos, sarongs, fisherman’s pants: practical, yes, but also symbolic. Like braids, dreadlocks, tattoos and piercings, this decorative dress denotes a departure from everyday life and heightens the sense of occasion. There are other adornments too: the journal; the guidebook; the low-slung knapsack. And then there is ritual talk: “where are you going?”; “where have you been?”; “did you ‘do’ this monument/trek/natural wonder?”; etc. Drink, drugs and digital photos, sun, sea and social networks – these too are ubiquitous features.

Travel, then, becomes ritual; there is an order of action, a template to be followed. Upon their return from the wilderness, our young vagrants are transformed (or reformed) into worldly-wise Westerners, new sovereign citizens of a global era. (Theirs is the Earth and everything that’s in it!) Through their reintegration, initiates renew a vow to society. In return, society bestows on them the mantle of maturity, endorsing their experience as life-changing and morally valid.

But what of Tarquin, and his scorn, and his esoteric fiction? What of all those who recognise the ritual and take pains to avoid it? Is travel, for Tarquins, still quasi-religious? Here, the idiom of ritual is surely redundant. Consider, instead, a pilgrim, or a wandering ascetic. Both are in search of spiritual fulfilment, the latter through acts of denial, the former through transit itself. For souls such as Tarquin, travel affords a path to enlightenment, whether through disavowal (detachment from one’s home-world), austerity (renunciation of material comforts) or more formal spiritual practice (yoga, meditation and so on). In such cases, travel seems less an assent to cultural values than a means to reflect upon and challenge them.

So there we have it. What appears a humble waterfront guesthouse is in fact a stage upon which various reverent rites are enacted, be it a kind of coming of age ritual akin to an aboriginal walkabout or the righteous restraint of the shoestring ascetic. Viewing travel in this light is in no way meant to devalue it - quite the opposite in fact. While at one level these foreign forays are decidedly frivolous, at another they can be seen to fulfil basic social functions. Indeed, for many in the West today, overseas travel has come to fill the void vacated by ‘real’ religions, providing meaning, purpose, awe and wonder, as well as a sense of belonging. As we shall see in the following article, it may also serve to satisfy an ancient appetite for adventure and the itching innate in our figurative feet.

Travel as Epic Adventure

In the last article, I set out the idea that travel can serve a quasi-religious function akin to a ritual or pilgrimage. This week, I want to look at our motivation in a different light. Rather than viewing travel as a kind of religious experience, it is, I contend, an epic adventure, a journey of discovery whose destination, as Henry Miller once suggested, ‘is never a place but a new way of looking at things’. Above all else, it affords us a new way of looking at each other, and at ourselves. More tellingly perhaps, it offers the chance to change what we see, to ‘find’ oneself and fashion it anew.

“We’d just made it to Camp 3, halfway up the Lhotse Face, when the storm set in. 24,000 ft., -20°C, and the snow’s coming in literally at right angles… I remember thinking: there’s a very real chance I’ll die here tonight! We just had to bunk down and hope for the best… The next morning the sky had cleared completely, and to see that sunrise – I’ve never felt anything like it…”

“The rooms were filthy, I mean really dirty: the sheets hadn’t been washed, the bathroom was a state, I was like ‘honestly!’ So we got the maid up but of course she doesn’t speak English. Anyway, the manager was ever so nice about it – we got upgraded to the Queen suite, proper VIP treatment! And the food was fantastic…”

Whatever one says about travel, whatever truths one tries to mine from its representative depths, it is most certainly, literally, an adventure. Be it two weeks in Malta or two years in Tibet (visa permitting), the act of travel presupposes the same encounter with the unknown that is at the heart of every adventurous undertaking. The term itself is suggestive: ‘adventure’ is derived from the Latin advenire, ‘to arrive, come about or befall’. As such, we might view the adventure as a series of unforeseen episodes that befall one, much as the gorgon befell Perseus or Gene Hackman befell the Poseidon. And as travel is more or less a matter of letting things befall one, of submitting to the new and unfamiliar in the pursuit of pleasure, it is, by definition, an adventure.

So what are these things we allow to befall us? Which novel events comprise the adventure? To name but a few of this endless assortment, there are different climates, different foods, different modes of dress. Often, the language too is unfamiliar, while elsewhere we may encounter disparate laws, singular customs, foreign fauna and strange currencies. More generally, travel rests on a series of oppositions or inversions in the fabric of everyday life. Thus, we swap cold weather for warmth, city living for country, fast living for slow, stress for calm and so on, perhaps vice versa. While the extent of these inversions may vary – not everyone swaps the rat race for an ashram or the Arctic for Arabia – they have in common the essence of adventure, namely, the substitution of novelty for normality.

Why, then, do we take pleasure in reversing our daily routines? For creatures of habit, as humans are, what is to be gained from abandoning the comfort of familiarity? Well, the first and most obvious explanation is that the highs justify the lows, which is to say that the unforeseeable pleasures equal or exceed the unforeseeable pains. So it is, then, that the sunrise trumps the blizzard, the food trumps the filth and so on. By extension, travel offers the possibility of discovering paradise, a place where pleasures don’t merely trump pain, they trivialise it. But travel isn’t simply the upshot of a cost-benefit analysis, its aim being to increase our net measure of pleasure. In fact, the epic adventure is less a quest for paradise than a quest for ourselves. Now this might sound like a clumsy cliché, and granted, it can be unwieldy. But there is truth to this truism, for in the course of the adventure, in the process of displacing our persons from their usual surrounds, we cannot help but arrive at a fuller conception of our characters. This is equally true of those who travel with us, be they friends, partners or family: change someone’s context, induce the unfamiliar, and you see what stuff they are made of. For the vast majority of people, this is arguably the ultimate appeal of travel: it is a means and a medium to know one another, an adventure to be shared. But what of those who prefer to go solo? Why the desire to ‘find’ oneself? And what does this actually mean?

At this point, things get a little messy. Traditionally, people have thought of the ‘self’ as something absolute, unchanging; we are born with a certain nature – good, bad, brave, dumb, etc. - and that’s the way we remain. Existentialism changed all this by arguing that the self had to be discovered in the course of existence (hence the name), only for postmodernism to shift the goalposts once again by asserting that the self was in fact an illusion. Now this might all seem pretty abstract, but these various ideas have had some very concrete effects. Existentialist concepts of freedom and choice, for example, were readily apparent in the counter-cultural movements of the ‘50s and ‘60s, which spawned the first era of self-seeking travellers. A generation and a half later, and we’re starting to see evidence of the postmodernist claim that the self exists only as a self-penned, self-conscious caricature; we do x, y and z not because we need or even want to, but because we want ourselves to appear like we do. Viewed this way, the desire to travel is inseparable from the desire to appear (i.e. look and feel) like a traveller, just as the need for adventure is synonymous with the need to appear adventurous. Travel, then, is a brand that helps to define one’s identity. Like the food we eat, the car we drive and the clothes we wear, it works to confer on us sense of our own individuality. Nevertheless, like any other product, it is subject to the market and the whims of consumerism, a theme that I’ll return to in the following article.

Travel as Consumption

The Apple iPad, Reebok Classics, Sainsbury’s Taste the Difference Aegean tomato and yak cheese focaccia – ours is an age of consumerism. From our first forays to the sweet shop, through birthdays, toy ads and Christmas lists, we are subtly schooled in the art of desire; by the time we reach early adulthood, we are all grandmasters of the craft. We know what we want, we know how to get it, we know how much it costs. We know why it’s better than its rivals, why Fad magazine gave it 8/10 neighbour’s asses, why Stephen Fry is tweeting about it.

We know what we want.

And we know we don’t need it.

Consumption has been called the pre-eminent postmodern act. It’s the means through which we in the West, adrift in a world without meaning, cut loose from nature and history, traverse these troubling times. It is our lifejacket. It is also our straightjacket. For the first time in history, entire societies are engaged in acts of holistic consumption. We buy not merely what we need to survive, but also what we need (or so it may seem) to ensure a happy existence. And so we buy safety, comfort, beauty and health, learning, leisure and love. We buy status, power, a sense of inclusion. We even buy our adventures.

In the age of consumerism, everything is commoditised. To buy or not to buy, that is the question. Rainforests, footballers, hospital beds – the infectious logic of the market makes products of them all. And tourism shows no immunity.

Transnational travel makes culture a commodity. When the ethic of consumption is extended to new people and places, everything comes with a price. Visit to the palace - $12; mountain trek - $35; traditional dance performance - $8; sense of self-worth – priceless. Today’s holiday brochures boast bargains like an Argos catalogue; instead of homeware and cheap electronics, we find tigers, temples and tribal villages. All are commodities, just the same.

We buy these things for the same reason we buy any other nonessential product: to look better, feel better or else appear better. We are, in effect, cultural cannibals, consuming culture so as to assimilate some aspect of it. Thus, New York confers cosmopolitanism, India spirituality, the Caribbean coolness and so on. And then there are optional extras, side dishes if you like. A five-star hotel suggests status, a wine tour imparts taste, the prefix ‘eco-’ implies ethical acumen. In the realm of the tourist-cannibal, you are what you eat.

And thus, we travel to consume; it’s all that we know how to do. Consumption is our (shop) window on the world, framing our every experience. Just as once we defined ourselves by what we produced, now it is what we consume. Consumption, then, is mandatory, involuntary even. And travel is yet another market place. It is the new mall in a small town, with new stores, new brands and new possibilities. And so we buy flights and daytrips and waterproof clothing and rugs and postcards and carved wooden statues and tea and timeshares and tailor-made suits. We buy everything and anything. New malls are opened, new cultures consumed. Supply follows demand.

Supply follows demand, but with a marked dislocation: demand from the West; supply from the Rest. So travel is a form of imperialism, an expansionist project in which vast armies of pleasure-seekers are deployed daily to ‘colonise’ new lands, safe in the knowledge that their motives are sound (the customer is always right). It is to this issue, together with other inadvertent effects of travel, that I dedicate the following articles.

Travel as Imperialism

 “I do not want my house to be walled in on all sides and my windows to be stuffed. I want the cultures of all the lands to be blown about my house as freely as possible. But I refuse to be blown off my feet by any. I refuse to live in other people’s houses as an interloper, a beggar or a slave.”

- Mohandas K. Gandhi (1869-1948)

In last week’s piece, I looked at the idea that travel is simply a symptom of the chronic consumerism that defines the current era. This gluttonous urge to splurge has made culture a commodity, as surplus demand from the West makes markets of the Rest. With this in mind, we have no choice but to wonder: is travel a new form of imperialism?

Consider: the Age of Imperialism (1850-1914) saw the leading Western nations – Britain, France, Germany, Japan and the US – engaged in a tireless quest for virgin lands to sow with their surplus capital. Put simply, industrial capitalism was generating more wealth than anyone knew what to do with while at the same time expending most of the West’s natural resources (coal, timber, etc.), so the hunt was on for new, resource-rich territories in which to invest some cash. These wealthy imperialists were like capitalist parasites, draining their hosts of their land and labour and blighting their cultures to boot. From political organisation to the economy, social structures to morality, imperialism affected (or perhaps infected) every aspect of society, relieving its victims of all autonomy and breeding an abject dependence. The colonists, for their part, saw such sorry subordination as evidence of backwardness, and so justified their presence as promoting both material and moral development. Surprisingly, people bought this.

And now consider: the Age of Tourism (1950-) has seen the major Western nations – Britain, France, Germany, Japan and the US – engaged in a tireless quest for virgin lands to sow with their surplus capital. Put simply, late capitalism has generated more wealth than anyone knows what to do with while at the same time expending most of the West’s natural resources (picturesque landscapes, pristine nature, etc.), so the hunt is on for new, resource-rich territories in which to invest some cash. These wealthy tourists are like capitalist parasites, draining their hosts of their land and labour and blighting their cultures to boot. From political organisation to the economy, social structures to morality, tourism has affected (or perhaps infected) every aspect of society, relieving its victims of all autonomy and breeding an abject dependence. The tourists, for their part, see such sorry subordination as evidence of backwardness, and thus justify their presence as promoting both material and moral development. Surprisingly, people buy this.

Travel is imperialism. It is born of inequality, of gaps of power and wealth. Like imperialism, travel involves territorial expansion and the occupation of foreign lands. In both cases, the colonised regions are subject to control from beyond their borders, as economic and political structures are increasingly shaped by those in far-flung metropoles. As a consequence, local livelihoods are transformed; it’s out with farming, fishing and forestry, in with service, subservience. At the heart of this arrangement is dependence. It is a guest-host relationship in which the host is wholly at the mercy of its parasitic guest. As such, the latter must be kept happy; anything that the guest desires is promptly provided, regardless of its fit with local tradition. Swimming pools, beach bars, English breakfasts and banana pancakes – these are the wants of imperial travellers. If the good sahib wishes to eat a hamburger in Hyderabad, or if ma’am sahib is wont to wear her miniskirt in Marrakesh, so be it! As ever, the West knows best.

All this poses a paradox: does travel destroy the very cultures it purports to encounter? If the tourist is indeed a parasite that contaminates all it consumes, if it is replete with infectious moralities, then what becomes of its host? These questions form the backbone of next week’s article.

Travel as Cultural Perversion

In last week’s piece, I looked at the idea that international travel is a neo-colonial venture founded on domination and dependence. This expansionist regime, it was argued, restructures economies, transforms traditions and pollutes public morality, much as imperialism has done in previous centuries. At the end, we were left with a prickly paradox: does travel destroy the very cultures it purports to encounter?

On the surface, the answer seems clear. Anyone who’s holidayed abroad has at some point faced the awkward realisation that their presence, and that of others like them, has left a tourist-shaped blotch on the landscape. We see the clubs in Faliraki or the Brit bars in Bangkok or the child prostitutes in Mombasa, and we can’t help but think that maybe, just maybe, there’s something a touch wrong with this whole tourism thing. “All this stuff”, as some gnarled traveller might lament, “all this Western, bourgeois stuff – this isn’t the real [India/China/Mexico/Wales]”. Implicit in this appraisal is the idea that buried below the tacky crust of Western materialism congealing across the globe is a panoply of ‘authentic’ cultures waiting to be discovered. These bastions of authenticity are seen as traditional and timeless, pristine and primordial. Inside, we find simple folk, quaint and superstitious, the custodians of custom. All is perfect and lovely, then we come along…

Though seemingly self-evident, the assertion that tourism damages culture is in fact a product of Orientalist fantasy. It presupposes that cultures are static and bounded, and, moreover, that some (i.e. those in the East or the ‘developing world’) are innately ‘traditional’, such that tourists, as conduits of modernity, cannot help but sully them. But of course, cultures are not solid but fluid; they are always converging, intermingling. This flow of information and innovation has existed since time immemorial; it brought stone tools from Africa, farming from the Near East, industry from Britain and Starbucks from the States. Cultures, then, are always changing; there is no primal state, no ‘real’ India/Africa/Belgium. It is important to accept that shopping malls are as much a part of Indian culture as yoga, that cell phones are not alien to Africa, that Belgium has more to it than waffles. To believe otherwise is to endorse a vaguely racist worldview, in which Africa, Asia and parts of the Americas are seen as essentially primitive or backward. From this standpoint, cell phones, shopping malls and other accoutrements of modernity, though legitimate in the West, are perverting to the Rest, as if our ‘less developed’ cousins were children who must be kept apart from grown-up vices.

If cultures are always mixing, if they blend and bleed like liquids, then clearly they cannot be damaged: tourism can’t ‘harm’ culture any more than a teabag can ‘harm’ a cup of hot water. Fair enough, you might say, but what about Majorca, where each year the population of 850,000 is swamped by some 6 million holidaymakers, or Vang Vieng in Laos, a one-stop-shop for bawdy backpackers – surely here we have signs of travel’s perniciousness? Again, though, one must bear in mind that in the period before tourism (B.T.) these sites did not exist in some pre-contact vacuum, hermetically sealed from history and the winds of cultural change. 2000 years ago Majorca was occupied by the Romans, and later by the Vandals, Moors and Byzantines, while 100 years B.T. Laos was a French protectorate. Clearly, these cultures are always in flux. What some may perceive as a problem with tourism is in fact a problem with change itself. This is interesting for a number reasons, not least because cultural change is a fact of life, but also for what it says about the Western (postmodern) condition, born as it is of temporal ruptures and a sense of paradise lost. But putting aside our own histrionics for a moment, let us think about this from our hosts’ perspective. For most in the ‘developing world’, cultural change means improved infrastructure, higher wages, better access to healthcare and so on; it is something to be desired. While tourism undoubtedly changes livelihoods, it may also offer a path to development that we in the West, though increasingly disillusioned by material ‘progress’, have no grounds to deny anyone. In next week’s piece, I’ll look at this, the emancipatory potential of tourism, in more detail.

Travel as Development

In last week’s piece I looked at the idea that travel ‘damages’ cultures, and showed how, perhaps counter-intuitively, this is in fact a meaningless assertion; culture is not some ancient and fragile ornament in danger of destruction, but rather a heady flux of thoughts and things, ever-flowing, ever-changing. To argue that the tourist ‘damages’ their host culture is to presuppose an essence where none really exists. What we damage, if anything, is a chimera – our own idealised image of the world we inhabit.

But let’s make one thing clear: while it may be nonsense to claim that travel ‘damages’ other cultures, this is not to say that tourism is wholly without effect for its host communities. Clearly, international travel has countless consequences, some of which, depending on who you ask, will be perceived as negative. Thus, ecologists might highlight habitat destruction, economists might warn of dependency and clerics might mourn for morality. It’s not difficult to think of ways that the global travel industry (or any modern enterprise for that matter) can be seen as dysfunctional; indeed, such social pathologising is for many a popular pastime. But what about travel’s positives? Can tourism help as well as hinder, and if so, how?

The belief that travel brings development is arguably its raison d’être. Nations invest in tourism for the same sake they invest in other industries – to boost employment and GDP – and it is this economic contribution that is most often cited as beneficial. However, there is no reason to suppose that economic development is necessarily equitable. Mass tourism, for example, may source both work and income, but the vast majority of its profits are siphoned off by ‘big businesses’ (tour operators, hotel groups, etc.) with next to nothing remaining in the host communities. This begs the question: if tourism brings development, what sort of development is it? In order to address this issue, we must first embark on a whistle-stop tour through the history of this curious concept…

‘Development’, you see, is a strange idea. It presupposes that some parts of the world are inherently inferior or ‘underdeveloped’ (i.e. economically, technologically, culturally), while other parts, by virtue of some arbitrary disparities, are self-defined as ‘developed’ and thus qualified to instruct. (This is the transnational equivalent of a kind of “when I was your age…” reasoning.) There is no standard definition of ‘development’; it is simply what we have (prosperity, equality, obesity, etc.) and the rest lack. Herein lies the logic of international aid.

The history of development can be divided into three eras. When the idea came into being shortly after World War II, the onus was on economic change in the former colonies. The Western nations invested heavily in these fledgling states, often restructuring entire economies, but things rarely got any better; quite the opposite in fact. Loss of livelihoods, urban overcrowding and environmental catastrophes were among the many bleak consequences of rapid industrialisation, just as they had been in Europe a century before. Unlike their predecessors, though, these newly industrialised states had no overseas empires to help balance the books. All they had, or so it seemed, was poverty, lots and lots of poverty.

In the 1970s, the international development community, faced with the problems it had all but created, shifted its emphasis from economic development to ‘basic needs’ such as sanitation, water provision, food security and poverty alleviation. (This was the era of Band Aid, Comic Relief and news footage of babies with flies in their eyes, a time when Europe and the States, in a bilious discharge of hypocrisy, dug deep into their pockets and into their hearts to help avert disasters in which they themselves were complicit.) The basic needs approach was intended to help the world’s poorest and most marginalised peoples, thereby promoting more equitable development. Again, though, the results have been somewhat mixed; the new approach casts the world’s poor as needy infants whose woes will be abated with a little spoon-feeding, forgetting, of course, that poverty, hunger and the like (i.e. ‘underdevelopment’) are human-made (i.e. social, political) problems. Put another way, basic needs development can only tackle the symptoms of poverty, not its causes. And more worryingly, it may leave beneficiaries dependent on aid, with little scope for self-actualisation.

Since the 1990s, the failings of both state-directed and basic needs development have led policy-makers to seek new ways of tackling global inequality. Recent years have seen a surge in ‘grassroots’ approaches that aim to foster sustainable, people-led development. Often, these are associated with ideas about human rights: the right to land, the right to resources, the right to self-reliance. Development now must be bottom-up and empowering; ‘give a man a fish…’ and so on…

The forms of development offered by travel reflect these three stages. As mentioned above, mass tourism may bolster a country’s GDP, but it does so at the cost of widening the wealth gap, levelling livelihoods and damaging the environment; in this sense, it is much like the heavy-handed (and ill-fated) economic development of the post-war period. The basic needs approaches of the 70s and 80s, meanwhile, have their parallels in Lonely Planet-style ‘independent travel’, which sees tourists frequent family-run hotels and restaurants, employ local tour operators and use public transportation. Here, tourism may serve to engender more equitable economic development, but it does little to undermine the structures of inequality and may in fact reinforce them.

When we come to development’s most recent guise, that of sustainable, bottom-up action, we once again find a convergence with the modern tourism industry. Specifically, it is so-called ‘responsible travel’ that mirrors the grassroots turn; now, tourism must be planned and produced by the people themselves, with profits feeding back into the community. In this way, tourism, like development, can be rendered sustainable; travel becomes ‘ethical’. ‘Teach a man to fish…’

Now there are several ways we could go from here. We could question the integrity of these ‘ethical’ credentials. We could look at the marketing of morality in the Age of Green. We could speculate whether grassroots development, like its precursors, is destined for debacle, and ask what this might mean for its travel-based twin. These are all interesting issues. But in the next set of articles I want to take the discussion in a different direction.  Putting aside all the polemics, the simple question remains: given that tourism exists, given that it has countless consequences that may be perceived as good or bad (depending on who you ask), how, then, should we travel? In next week’s piece we will begin to reflect on this matter.

Travel as Morality: Where Should We Travel?

In the series so far, we have looked at modern-day leisure travel from a range of provocative perspectives: travel as religion, adventure or chronic consumption, as imperialism, idealism or international development. The point of these at times pejorative polemics was to get us thinking about what travel is, which paves the way for more moral musings on the matter of what travel should be. This forms the theme of these final two essays.

Before we kick off, a word about normative ethics. (Don’t worry – it’s not as scary as it sounds.) Normative ethics, quite simply, are concerned with ‘should’ questions. Should we go to war? Should we have the death penalty? Should we legalise bigamy? And so on. ‘Should questions’ are funny things really. They allude to a kind of template for existence (e.g. ‘what you should have done was…’) where none really exists. Nevertheless, we are everywhere confronted with normative claims (e.g. ‘you should recycle’, ‘you shouldn’t pick your nose’, ‘you should get a haircut’) and travel is little exempt; the question ‘where should we travel?’ is of this same type. Bear in mind, though, that what is normative is also subjective; in the end, what you should do is up to you.

So where should we travel? Well, at the time of writing, the Foreign and Commonwealth Office advised against all but essential travel to over 50 countries, including Pakistan, Iraq, Afghanistan, Somalia, Zimbabwe and Haiti. Such places, we are told, are unsafe, but is this reason enough not to travel there? Here, as with any normative dilemma, we suppose there are pros and cons. There are x number of reasons why we shouldn’t travel (the risk to our safety, the cost of insurance, the concern of our family and friends, etc.) and y number of reasons why we should (supporting economies, offering aid, spreading democratic ideals, etc.). Ultimately, our decision boils down to a crude cost-benefit analysis; we weigh our gain against others’ using our own subjective scales and then take action accordingly. If the balance tips in our hosts’ favour, we may feel free to proceed. If, however, it is only us guests who stand to gain (as is the case for self-styled ‘disaster tourists’, gawping shutter-bugs with a Robert Capa complex), we might do well to reconsider.

Often, the normative issue isn’t one of danger and disaster; for some countries, the question of whether or not to travel is based on political considerations. Take Burma for example. On the one hand, we are told that tourism provides economic benefits to civilians and ‘raises awareness’ of their situation; on the other, we hear that it sources income to the military junta, thus furthering the cause of oppression. Should we travel to Burma, or Tibet, or the DRC? Again, the normative is subjective. Whether or not one chooses to visit such places cannot be seen as either a violation of or an assent to some essential moral standard. Rather, the decision is a personal one that is likely informed by a wide range of factors: our thoughts about democracy and freedom, our sense of adventure, our concern for how others may see us and so on. It is not about a right or wrong choice. Nor is it about perfect information (e.g. ‘don’t you know that [Country X] has the one of the world’s worst human rights records’) – the normative makes no appeal to reality. What should we do? Look once again at the scale, and make a personal choice.

There are some tourist destinations that are contentious for reasons other than risk or political instability. In recent years, the dense forests of Western Papua and the upper Amazon Basin have become sites for so-called ‘first contact tourism’, in which wealthy hicks cough up upwards of $5000 to come face-to-face with a previously ‘untouched’ people. Okay, so ‘first contact’ may be a myth – almost all the world’s tribes have had at least some interaction with ‘the outside world’ – but regardless, one is inclined to wonder how anyone’s personal moral scale can tip in favour of such a trip. It would be difficult to argue that the terms of this arrangement are anything other than slack-jawed adventure freak-show for me, bother and bemusement for them. This, then, is as close as we come to a normative consensus, for it is nonsense to allege that anyone other than oneself derives significant benefit. Indeed, only the intruder takes pleasure in intrusion.

So where should we travel? Well, the answer comes not in the shape of a neat list of safe and civil locations, but rather in the form of another question: how should we travel? As the present debates makes clear, it’s often not where you go that matters (even in a subjective sense) but what you do when you get there. (Compare, for example, cholera relief in Haiti with a cross-dressing pub crawl in Crete.) So how should we travel? We’ll return to this question in next week’s piece.

Travel as Morality: How Should We Travel?

In last week’s piece, we began looking at the normative ethics of travel, or what I otherwise called ‘should questions’. ‘Should questions’ come in many shapes and sizes, from the trivial (e.g. ‘should I put the kettle on?’) to the profound (e.g. ‘should I pull the plug?’). In the context of travel, we find a similar spectrum; there are little ‘should questions’ (e.g. ‘should I take a towel?’) and big ‘should questions’ (e.g. ‘should I really be here?’). Previously, we looked at the question ‘where should we travel?’, which, I argued, is best answered with another question: ‘how should we travel?’. This brings us to the thrust of this week’s piece.

To recap briefly, it is important to remember that ‘should questions’ have no ultimate answer (outside organised religion that is); in making decisions, all we have are our own subjective scales of cost and gain, right and wrong. Now this can seem a little scary for a species obsessed with order, and for this reason most folk hold fast to normative ideas, going so far as to try to convince others of the rightness of their own perspectives. My aim here, however, is not to impose my own answers to the question ‘how should we travel?’ so as to appease my personal doubts. Instead, I invite you to move beyond the shoulds and should-nots to a land that is governed by instinct. Allow me to explain…

This morning, when you got up, showered, had breakfast or whatever, did you ask yourself: ‘how should I act today?’? Of course you didn’t. And the reason is that for the most part we are totally immersed in our day-to-day activities, such that much of what we do is instinctive. To put this another way, we don’t need to waste time with the question ‘how should I act today?’ – we know automatically – and the same can be said for ‘how should we travel?’; when we are properly immersed in any activity, there is no call for conscious strategy. Immersion, then, is key. It does not answer ‘should questions’ so much as makes them disappear. And so, for the rest of this article, I want to think about some possible paths to ‘immersive travel’.

To be immersed is to be wholly engaged or absorbed in one’s environment, to recognise unity. For the casual traveller, one way to achieve this level of engagement is to study something of their new setting; a language is an excellent place to start, but one might also consider music, dance or martial arts, to name but a few. In each case, the learning process brings one into contact with both culture (in an abstract, historical sense) and the bearers of that culture: the people themselves. Crucially, this contact is reciprocal not reactive, born of unity not difference. Through study, then, it is possible to achieve immersion; the more one learns, the deeper one goes.

Like learning, work can induce immersion. Now the idea of working whilst on holiday may seem horrendous to some, conjuring images of sun-loungers strewn with spreadsheets and sand in your Blackberry. But ‘work’, in a more general sense, refers simply to any task or undertaking in which, to co-opt its scientific definition, energy is transferred from one physical system to another. To work, then, is to invest energy in something, and travel affords us countless opportunities for this. Voluntourism, as it has come to be known, comprises a wide array of activities, from teaching and care work to construction and conservation. Providing the project is well-realised (unfortunately, there is no guarantee of this), voluntary work can lead to a special form of immersion, in which the individual shares not only a social space with others but also their methods and motives. Again, unity prevails.

The prospect of immersion is not limited to long-term travel. Even if there’s not enough time to study yoga or lend a hand in leper colony, one can still look to immerse oneself in this new social reality. Chatting with people, hanging out, sharing a cup of tea – these are all ways of breaking down the barrier between guest and host. And through flows unity, immersing all around it. When we notice our common humanity, when our interactions are not merely instrumental but also empathetic, any question of how one should act dissolves in intuition. There are no abstract, antagonistic classes (i.e. ‘tourists’ vs. ‘other cultures’), there are simply people, other real people.

So, how should you travel?

Well, how did you act today?