Travel and Transformation

Garth Lean, Russell Staiff

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781409467632
• eBook ISBN: 9781317006572
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Hospitality, Travel & Tourism Industry
• Index: Business

Travel and tourism have a long association with the notion of transformation, both in terms of self and social collectives. What is surprising, however, is that this association has, on the whole, remained relatively underexplored and unchallenged, with little in the way of a corpus of academic literature surrounding these themes. Instead, much of the literature to date has focused upon describing and categorising tourism and travel experiences from a supply-side perspective, with travellers themselves defined in terms of their motivations and interests. While the tourism field can lay claim to several significant milestone contributions, there have been few recent attempts at a rigorous re-theorization of the issues arising from the travel/transformation nexus. The opportunity to explore the socio-cultural dimensions of transformation through travel has thus far been missed. Bringing together geographers, sociologists, cultural researchers, philosophers, anthropologists, visual researchers, literary scholars and heritage researchers, this volume explores what it means to transform through travel in a modern, mobile world. In doing so, it draws upon a wide variety of traveller perspectives - including tourists, backpackers, lifestyle travellers, migrants, refugees, nomads, walkers, writers, poets, virtual travellers and cosmetic surgery patients - to unpack a cultural phenomenon that has captured the imagination since the very first works of Western literature.

Chapter 1

Exploring Travel and Transformation

Garth Lean, Russell Staiff and Emma Waterton

Travel has a long association with the idea of transformation, both in terms of the self and social collectives. Some of the earliest surviving works of literature, such as The Epic of Gilgamesh ([eighteenth–tenth century BCE] 1972) and Homer’s The Odyssey ([eighth century BCE] 2004), tell tales of individuals heading off on ‘heroic’ quests that would strip them of their worldly possessions, status and relationships, bringing them to the bare essentials of being and, consequently, transforming their thinking and behaviours. One need only scan the back-cover blurbs of the travel books at their local book store to see that this trope is still alive and well. Even if we consider pre-recorded history, archaeology and genetic science locate the origin of the human species in East Africa, our ancestors rising to their feet, spreading across the globe and forming diverse social structures and cultures in relationship with the unique contexts in which they found themselves. Physical mobility enabled these social groups to move, and interact, in various ways around the world – to varying degrees of distance, through different modes of travel and with divergent intentions – exploring, ‘salvaging’, ‘saving’, invading, pillaging, exploiting, conscripting, conquering, colonising, converting, forming alliances with, studying, learning from, ‘educating’, ‘re-educating’, ‘enlightening’, and spreading diseases, languages, beliefs, flora, fauna, genes, cultures, practices, objects (to name only a few limited and vague labels) across, and between, continents in processes that were undeniably transformative for both ‘visitor’ and ‘visited’. Beyond individuals, these collective movements acted to alter and mark spaces, places, landscapes and ecosystems. And of course these places, in all their various stages of alteration, acted upon the individuals, collectives, minds, bodies, life-forms and objects moving through, engaging with and relocating to them, along with those inhabiting (whether ‘temporarily’ or ‘permanently’), in varying ways. As such, our present selves, and social, cultural and ecological landscapes, are indelibly marked by, and entwined in, this complex history of human mobility.

Transformation in the context of contemporary corporeal travel is arguably even more complex. Some commentaries have argued that the world in which we travel offers few of the opportunities for novelty and discovery that were available in past travels; the world has been ‘discovered’ – it is ‘known’ and does not afford the same possibility for transformation. It has been contended that people no longer need to travel corporeally and can experience places through literature, visual and Internet media. For others, this itself is a problematic argument because it detracts from the richness of the physical travel experience; the embodied, sensual performances that take place, the unique psychological and physiological reactions triggered by physical, carnal encounter, the altered performances that travel away from familiarity seems to permit and the effects of the plethora of random happenings that may unfold – varying degrees of encounter with mobile, fluid and transforming spaces, places, landscapes, people/s and objects at unique moments in time.

Recent research by one of the editors supports this, arguing that anyone can be transformed by corporeal travel, a phenomenon influenced by a complex array of processes taking place ‘before’, ‘during’ and ‘after’ any given physical travel experience (see Lean 2012a, forthcoming). Drawing upon a movement to position geographical, sociological and cultural thinking within a mobilities paradigm (see Bauman 2000, 2005, Urry 2000, 2007), this work argues that one does not simply move from one physical location to another, varying in discernible degrees of difference to their own, with an eventual return to the place of origin. Instead, one travels as an emotional and sensual being that has been travelling (albeit to varying degrees) physically, virtually, imaginatively and communicatively since, before any particular corporeal travel experience. These travels endue an individual with unique, and complex, subjectivities that may be triggered (or not) in all manner of ways throughout a journey. What is more, a traveller is not a static body moving through space. Just as ‘before’ a journey, they continue to travel in ways that stretch well beyond physical movement, and all of these mobilities feed into a continually changing ‘self’, shifting in different moments and spaces.

Unprecedented physical mobility, and a greater diversity of cultures on the move than ever before (not to mention non-physical mobilities), has not only increased the likelihood of familiarity, but also the possibility of the ‘exotic’, both at ‘home’ and abroad. The ways in which individuals encounter and interact (or do not) with these elements, and the manner in which these various individuals and collectives mark and shape – and are marked and shaped by – the environments and places through which they move, vary ad infinitum. Thus, we would argue that an increasingly mobile and fluid world does not limit the potential for transformation through physical travel; rather, it makes it a far more complex, multifaceted and intricate phenomenon to explore.

Given the common association of transformation with travel, it is somewhat surprising that it has remained relatively underexplored and unchallenged, with little in the way of a balanced corpus of academic material surrounding such themes. Instead, much of the literature remains focused upon describing and categorising travel and tourism experiences from a supply-side perspective, and taxonomising travellers on the basis of their level of involvement and interest, often using problematic, and uncritical, assumptions. Occasional forays into theory have generated some important milestone contributions (see Bruner 1991 for example), but there have been few new attempts at a rigorous re-theorisation of the issues. Thus, while threads of research have emerged that take ‘transformation’ seriously, these have tended to focus upon particular niches – study abroad (see for example: Creamer 2004, Fordham 2005, Stephenson 1999), backpacking (see for example: Matthews 2007, Noy 2004a, 2004b), volunteer tourism (see for example: Broad 2003, Matthews 2008, Wearing et al. 2008), nature-based recreation (see for example: Beaumont 2001, Charters 1996, Ross and Wall 1999) and so forth. Among many other things, research looking at these themes has argued that travel can promote learning (for example, of languages, cultures, history, religions and places; see for example: Forgues 2005, Immetman and Schneider 1998, Roberson 2002, 2003), cross-cultural understanding and peace (see for example: Blanchard and Higgins-Desbiolles 2013, D’Amore 1988a, 1988b, Litvin 1998, 2003, Moufakkir and Kelly 2010, Pizam 1996, Pizam et al. 1991, Var and Ap 2001), an awareness of various global issues (for example, poverty, conflicts, migration, trade and power imbalances; see for example: Butcher and Smith 2010, Palacios 2010, Salazar 2002, 2004), environmental consciousness and sustainability ideals (see for example: Beaumont 2001, Charters 1996, Lean 2009, Ross and Wall 1999) and wellness (see for example: Kottler 1997, 2002, 2003, Kottler and Montgomery 2000). It is also argued that these momentary insights can have long-term attitudinal and behavioural implications (Kottler 1997, Lean 2009, 2012b).

Much of the scholarship conducted on this topic to date presents tourism and travel in an overly positive light. In fact, Pritchard et al. (2011: 941–2) write that the position taken by scholars purporting to the transformative benefits of tourism, which ‘combines co-transformative learning and action’, represents the emergence of an ‘academy of hope’ (this article was subsequently reworked as the introduction for Reisinger (2013)). It is important to acknowledge, however, that this ‘positive vision’ is contested. Some argue that travel simply reinforces an existing way of seeing and acting in (and on) the world, supporting prejudices, misguided/‘false’ representations and, in the case of travel from developed to less developed nations, the continuation of colonial relations (Bruner 1991, 2005, Hall and Tucker 2004, Tucker and Akama 2009). Research and anecdotes also suggest that any ‘positive’ effects that may be delivered by tourism and travel are often only temporary, falling by the wayside as more pertinent concerns capture one’s attention upon return (Lean 2009, Salazar 2002, 2004). This overemphasis on the benefits of tourism/travel arises from a failure to adequately acknowledge the negative impacts, the power imbalances between those who benefit, and those who do not, including other facets like who has the right to access tourism/travel and who determines what constitutes a ‘positive’ transformation. There is also a reluctance to look at the broader landscape of non-leisurely physical mobilities (working abroad, migration, refugees, forced migration) and their intersections and commonalities with tourism. There is a significant risk that comes with framing tourism as a panacea – and this has been explored extensively over the last two decades, and should not be forgotten.

Given the arguments presented above, this volume calls for an extensive reinvigoration of the scholarship examining transformation through physical travel, with the aim of developing a new, wide ranging canon of work investigating travel and transformation. This is a key theme in the conceptualisation of tourism, travel and mobilities, and it is important that a body of scholarship is developed that explores it in its full complexity. We know that travel can be transformative: as highlighted above, the belief that it can act as an agent of change which broadens the mind, among other transformative qualities, stretches back to the earliest recorded stories and literature (Leed 1991). Yet, there seems to be a number of problematic assumptions embedded within that belief, especially those concerning who can be transformed, the circumstances in which transformation/change can, or cannot, occur, the types of transformation that can, and cannot, be brought about and what constitutes the very nature of travel itself. Many of these assumptions abide by an out-dated paradigm of tourism/travel research that has a modernist fascination with developing typologies and conceptualising travel as movement between static, unchanging locations in a formulaic and predictable manner. In addition, it often frames tourism and travel as a process that is the antithesis to one’s ‘everyday existence’ (see Lean 2012a: 153; see also Mavrič and Urry 2009).

With this in mind, we see it as important that the academy begins to draw upon new and emerging debates not only within tourism studies, but cognate fields such as geography, heritage studies and cultural studies, to name but a few, in order to adequately explore not only travel and transformation but travel and tourism more broadly (see Franklin 2007, Franklin and Crang 2001, Robinson and Jamal 2009). For example, the importation of a Mobilities paradigm into the field has helped to highlight the redundancy of many earlier attempts at touristic enquiry. Now, more than ever, we are aware of the richness and complexity of such a state of continual travel – the ways in which people move and do not move, separate from and continue connections, the ways in which travel and transformation are represented and storied, and subsequently distributed, the ways in which spaces, places, individuals, minds and bodies are marked and transformed, and continue to be shifted through ongoing mobilities, and the relationship of the transformations brought by physical travel to other mobilities. It is the intention of this volume to build upon emerging work looking at transformative travel in order to provide a catalyst for a multi- and interdisciplinary cohort of scholars to explore travel and transformation in a contemporary context. While the volume itself is not a comprehensive exploration of these issues (this would be impossible to achieve), we hope it whets the appetite and provides a springboard for exciting, colourful and creative new avenues of enquiry under the banner of travel and transformation.

The Gravitational Pull of Modernity and (Late/Post) Modernism in a Mobile World

All movement transforms: spaces, places, people and environments. All movement is transformative whether we move from our bed to the garden, from our abode to the local market, from remote village to bustling town or city, from New York to Phnom Penh, from Kabul to Sydney. Movement is what we are; movement is what makes everything – the universe, planets, galaxies and all life forms. Movement is everywhere and everything. No movement, because of time and the endless fluidity of place, is repeated and so each movement through time/place transforms, changes, creates and destroys. Movement defines things, gives them shape, identities, chronologies and trajectories. And conversely, there is no stasis, ever.

Thus, in the widest sense, this ‘truth’ of the universe, of the nature of all things, visible and invisible, animates the chapters in this volume. Unsurprisingly, given the rubric of the book when we called for contributions, a theme that permeates the chapters is movement/mobility/travel, all of which are inextricably interconnected with transformation/change/identities. Not cause and effect, but interchangeable because all movement changes. A second theme is an analytic that we would want to describe as an ongoing dance between modernity and modernism but perhaps with a re-imagined choreography, a culturally inscribed analytic born of particular history/ies and particular knowledge practices (that are, in these chapters, Western ways of seeing, knowing and representing). How do we think movement and transformation?

Most of the writers occupy a potent space that exists in, around and between coexisting nodes (that are themselves never stable or static): social analysis and poetics; Western modernities and advanced/post modernisms; observing/feeling/being and recording these; understanding/rationality and affect/aesthetics. What is remarkable is that the writers not only investigate movement/transformation, but also create writings that themselves are full of dynamism, fissures, loops, portals, speculations, open-endedness as though resolutions, destinations and certainties would deny the subject being thought. For the writers in this volume transformation is never complete and never entirely fulfilled, teleology is denied; destinations are provisional, just temporary moorings at most. Significantly, in these writings, the horizon is always receding, always being re-calibrated even when the subjects/travellers set out to purposely change their lives in some way, whether through walking, migrating to a new country, backpacking, cosmetic surgery, as exiles, as pilgrims and so on.

On one level, despite the common subject matter – travel and transformation – quite tenuous threads hold these chapters together. Both ‘travel and ‘transformation’ are simultaneously nebulous, elastic and porous concepts that are co-produced by particular circumstances and, when put together, they become even more so for most of the contributors. But this lack of any easy idea of consensus or commonality gives way, on another level, to something that is symptomatic of the collection. Born of modernity and modernism, travel and transformation as a description is beholden to the historical conditions that make it visible and intelligible and the post- (or late-) modern circumstances that enable the investigation of travel and transformation to be a form of critical engagement that reverberates beyond the ‘travel and transformation’ tag.

Despite historical antecedents (St Paul, the Buddha, Lao-Tsu), transformative travel is a modern post-Enlightenment conception (as are almost all ideas about contemporary travel), a phenomenon grounded in modernity and therefore propelled by the traits associated with ‘modern life’: disenchantment, alienation, migration, the urban condition, industrialisation and commodification, fractured identities, liberation, notions of the ‘individual’ and of ‘freedom’, loss, displacement, exile, memory, powerlessness, marginalisation, survival, struggle, escape, creativity, post-colonialism, existential angst, secularism, globalisation, cosmopolitanism, sectarianism and so forth. The reign of Western modernity has produced both the phenomenon and our understanding of that phenomenon, both the means to be ever more mobile and the deep ambivalence about a life of perpetual motion, the desire and the willingness to move with our faces turned, almost by compulsion, towards tomorrow, or the future (however conceived) and yet with a deep-rooted critique of the conditions that enable travel and transformation with its implicit (partial) denial of the past, of previous states of being except in memory, as a measure of our movement, as a marker of pre- and post-travel/transformation, perhaps as nostalgia, as a scar, an imprint of loss.

How is it that we are alert to the pain of the exile, the yearnings of the dispossessed, the liminal experiences of backpackers and overseas volunteers, the anguish of forced migration, the desire to change our bodies, the quest for self-knowledge, the journeys of outsiders, artists and poets, the need for transcendence, the search for ‘wholeness’ in places/worlds deemed fractured, splintered and empty of meaning? The visibility, the understanding and the emotional resonances – often powerfully evoked and felt – by individual subjects that we meet in this collection are, in turn, dependent on our ability as readers to not just empathise but recognise and know. What makes this possible? Modernity and mode...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Figures
• Notes on Contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Prelude Flensed
• Chapter 1 Exploring Travel and Transformation
• Part I Transformation Speculations
• Part II Transformation, Representation, Story
• Part III Transformation in Motion
• Part IV Marking Transformation
• Conclusions
• Index