Not long ago, my friend and colleague Lauren Grodstein contacted me for a story she was writing about ethical travel. In the process of answering her email questions, I realized that I have misgivings about the rhetorical level at which we generally discuss ethical travel issues. Hence, my answer turned into a rant of sorts about the traps progressive-minded people can fall into when they discuss the ethics of travel.

Here’s an outtake from our Q&A:

What is it like to be a privileged white American traveling through the second or third world? What sort of pangs do you feel – if you feel any pangs at all? How do you combat them?

Anywhere you travel — even in poorer parts of the industrialized world — I think you’re occasionally going to feel a bit of guilt at the relative wealth you have in relation to the people around you. But I think it can be paternalistic to over-think or over-examine this guilt, since this guilt tends to be internal dialogue among privileged travelers themselves. People in some parts of the world might be poor, but they’re not stupid — and your “pangs” and pity aren’t going to help them.

So the easiest way to combat the guilt of third-world travel is to travel mindfully. This means breaking out of the bubble of mass tourism and traveling within the local economy — taking local transportation, staying at mom-n-pop guesthouses, patronizing neighborhood eateries.

By the way, “privileged white American” is a reductive and somewhat political term that doesn’t really help in the analysis. “Privileged” is the key factor here, and it’s condescending to think that people of other races and nationalities are somehow exempt from the ethical equation.

In general, I prickle when emotional or overtly political language is applied to ethical travel, because that can skew your perspective of reality. That Nicaraguan kid who looks heartbreaklingly impoverished might consider himself lucky because he has shoes and goes to school, and his father never had those privileges growing up. He might enjoy a game of soccer with you in the town square, and he might think it’s cool if you go and eat at his aunt’s sandwich shop, but he doesn’t need your pity and he doesn’t give a crap about how your familiarity with post-colonial theory has given you an arsenal of technical terms to describe his social situation.

“Ethical travel” tends to be a dialogue among fairly earnest, liberal-minded travelers — not the package-tour meatheads who constitute the worst stereotypes of un-ethical travel. The thing is, package-tour meatheads tend to be “ghettoized” by their handlers, and — from the isolation of an all-inclusive resort, or an all-night pub-crawl, or a five-cities-in-six-days tour bus — they rarely come into contact with locals who aren’t already jaded to (and profiting from) their presence.

Thus, as ethical travelers, we have a more difficult task as we seek out more authentic corners of our host culture. Reveling in our superiority to the package-tour meatheads isn’t enough; we also need to be critical of the clichés within our own milieu — and for the most part I think these are political clichés that trap us into patterns of reductive thinking. As I say in my book, “regardless of whether your sympathies lean to the left or the right, you aren’t going to learn anything new if you continually use politics as a lens to view the world. At home, political convictions are a tool for getting things done within your community; on the road, political convictions are a clumsy set of experiential blinders, compelling you to seek evidence for conclusions you’ve already drawn.”

Thus, in addition to patronizing the local economy and avoiding the condescension that comes with pity, a central goal of the ethical traveler should be to listen to people in the host culture. This sounds simple enough, but I’ve lost count of the well-meaning travelers who chatter mindless odes of goodwill on the assumption that their hosts share their liberal-minded middle-class post-traditional values. Asking questions and listening to the answers is always better than spouting platitudes and preaching opinions.

Elsewhere in my book I point out that “politics are naturally reductive, and the world is infinitely complex. Cling too fiercely to your ideologies and you’ll miss the subtle realities that politics can’t address. You’ll also miss the chance to learn from people who don’t share your worldview. If a Japanese college student tells you that finding a good husband more important than feminist independence, she is not contradicting your world so much as giving you an opportunity to see hers. If a Paraguayan barber insists that dictatorship is superior to democracy, you might just learn something by putting yourself in his shoes and hearing him out. In this way, open-mindedness is a process of listening and considering — of muting your compulsion to judge what is right and wrong, good and bad, proper and improper, and having the tolerance and patience to try and see things for what they are.”

On a final note, I think ethical travelers should try to travel slowly, since it’s hard to understand your host culture if you’re always rushing around from place to place.

Can you tell me any stories of traveling through an impoverished region and using your privilege (money, passport, etc.) to make your experience better?

(more…)

With the global rise of political Islamism, many pundits have recently begun paying closer attention to the writings of Egyptian scholar and Muslim Brotherhood publicist Sayyid Qutb (1906-1966), whose radical Milestones and 30-volume In the Shade of the Koran are said to be masterpieces of jihadist thought and persuasion. These writings, which some analysts consider to be an ideological influence on violent Islamist movements such as al-Qaida, contain an uncompromising anti-Western slant that Qutb supports with observations from his travel experiences in the United States.

In these classic jihadist works, Qutb is never all that specific about how and where he went about assembling his presumed expertise on American culture, but biographers note that he spent a majority of his 1948-50 U.S. sojourn as a scholarship student at Colorado State College of Education, in the high-plains town of Greeley. Moreover, not long after his return to Egypt from the United States, Qutb attempted to sum up his expatriate experience in “The America I Have Seen,” a short travel memoir that appeared in the November 1951 issue of Egypt’s Al-Risala magazine.

As travel reportage, “The America I Have Seen” doesn’t exactly provide the reader with a vicarious window into living in the United States. Structured as a series of short, thematic arguments, Qutb’s essay primarily attempts to prove that America — despite its great wealth and scientific genius — suffers from a corrosive moral and spiritual primitiveness. This thesis might have carried some rhetorical weight had Qutb backed it up with evidence from his own experiences, but — oddly — the Egyptian traveler didn’t have many direct encounters worth sharing. Of the 54 brief sections in “The America I Have Seen,” only seven allude to specific real-life observations; the other sections consist of broad generalizations and secondhand anecdotes. Perhaps his most memorable direct recollection is described as follows:

In summary, anything that requires a touch of elegance is not for the American, even haircuts! For there was not one instance in which I had a haircut when I did not return home to even with my own hands what the barber had wrought, and fix what the barber had ruined with his awful taste.

Qutb’s exasperation with American barbers humanizes him in an unexpected way: In spite of his relentless didacticism, we realize that our skeptical Egyptian exchange student was really just a querulous sojourner in an unfamiliar land, compulsively judging everything he saw through the rosy, idealized lens of his home culture.

Indeed, biographers have implied that Qutb’s experience in the United States is what convinced him to reject Western values, but “The America I Have Seen” is clearly the memoir of a man who traveled to America seeking evidence for conclusions he’d drawn before he ever left Egypt. Never deviating from the Muslim fundamentalist assumptions he set forth in Social Justice and Islam (written before he visited the U.S. and published in 1949), Qutb’s travel essay reflects the stereotyped sentiment — commonly encouraged by the Egyptian prejudices of his day — that America’s material culture was morally inferior to the spiritual civilization of the Arab world. In fact, were one to strip the political cloaking from his essay, it’s apparent that Qutb’s experience of America was characterized by an oddly familiar combination of superficial experiences, paranoid conjectures, and passive culture shock.

In other words, before Qutb returned to Egypt to write his most influential and incendiary Islamist treatises (for which he was ultimately hanged by Egyptian president Gamal Nasser in 1966), the man who would one day influence terrorists passed his time in America as the most banal of interlopers: a tourist.

The anthropological and sociological study of tourism is a fairly recent phenomenon. Fifty years ago, social scientists largely regarded tourists as irritating aberrations in what were otherwise “pure” research environments. As anthropologist Erve Chambers notes in his 2000 book Native Tours, “so long as the idea of culture remained bound in place and time…phenomena such as tourism could rarely be viewed as more than an unwelcome intrusion upon the neat categories and orderly distinctions with which anthropologists were wrestling.”

This notion began to change in the 1970’s, when sociologist Dean MacCannell published The Tourist: A New Theory of the Leisure Class (1976), and anthropologist Valene L. Smith edited an anthology entitled Hosts and Guests: The Anthropology of Tourism (1977). Both books examined the complex social and cultural aspects of travel, and treated tourism as a historically valid expression of human behavior and society. Two decades later, when globalization became a buzzword and cross-cultural travel began to take on new meanings, academic interest in tourist behavior intensified even more.

To a large extent, these studies of tourism explored the ways in which the traveler brings his home culture and assumptions with him. In The Tourist Gaze: Leisure and Travel in Contemporary Societies (1990), for example, sociologist John Urry quotes scholar Jonathan Culler, who noted that tourists are “semioticians reading the landscape for signifiers of certain pre-established notions” — asserting that travel behaviors, in the context of displacement, have much to reveal about the prejudices of one’s home society. Similarly, in Tourism: Between Place and Performance (2002), editors Simon Coleman and Mike Crang note that the Western tourist actively seeks to root himself in certain habits and manifestations of home, even as he travels. Away from his home, the traveler is nonetheless beholden to it psychically.

However, while many of these tourism studies broke new academic ground, they invariably focused on the modern conception of home, and the one-way impacts of Western tourism on developing cultures. Often using the lens of Marxism or post-colonialism to critique their tourist subjects, many of these researchers seemed to be operating on the weirdly colonialist assumption that individuals from poorer countries were not also traveling abroad and having their own “tourist” experiences. The superficiality of middle-class American tourists exploring the East was analyzed in depth, but few scholars considered the possibility that Easterners might be having similarly superficial experiences as they traveled to America for study, work, and (occasionally) recreation.

Qutb’s “The America I Have Seen” first appeared in English in 2000, as part of an anthology entitled America in an Arab Mirror: Images of America in Arabic Travel Literature. Edited by Kamal Abdel-Malek, this collection translates and showcases a century’s worth of essays originally written in Arabic by Egyptian, Palestinian, Moroccan, Lebanese, and Syrian travelers. Containing a wide range of positive and negative views on the United States, one strength of the anthology is that it provides an interesting perspective on what Arabs thought about America in decades past, well before the rift between East and West became a daily media obsession.

The charm of the essays in America in an Arab Mirror is not that Arab travelers see the world in a unique way, but that they can be just as credulous, self-absorbed and touristically dorky as their American counterparts. For example, many writers in the Arab anthology echoed the standard tourist complaints with unfamiliar food, including Egyptian author Jadhibiyya Sidqi, who spends the first two pages of her 1962 memoir “America and I” outlining her distaste for salad dressing. Elsewhere, reporter Muhammad Hasan Al-Alfi’s 1989 essay “America: The Jeans and the Switchblade” expresses shock at the rituals of a “satanic celebration” — which might have been shocking indeed were he not describing Halloween festivities in Minnesota.

Moreover, some encounters described by the Arab travelers sound as if they could be case studies from tourism sociology textbooks. In the 1982 travel narrative “America: Paradise and Hellfire,” journalist Adil Hammuda is so obsessed with New York’s violent reputation that he inflates a seemingly benign encounter with an airport panhandler into a near-death experience. “[He] just sold me my life for only ten dollars,” Hammuda declares. “Everything is expensive in New York, everything, that is, except human life… As a stranger in New York you may be assaulted, torn apart, even killed for no reason.” Scholar Dean MacCannell describes this exact same sentiment in The Tourist. “Couples from the Midwest who visit Manhattan now leave a little disappointed if they do not chance to witness and remark on some of its famous street crime,” he writes. “One is reminded that staged ‘holdups’ are a staple motif in Wild West tourism.”

Of course, not all of the Arab travelers in Adbel-Malek’s anthology are caricatures of touristic awkwardness. As is the case in Western travel circles, many of the Arab sojourners are perceptive, self-aware, and willing to question their own cultural assumptions. Some even acknowledge their own analytical limitations as tourists. “[W]hat I saw…pales in comparison to what I have not seen,” reports scientist Muhammad Labib al-Batanuni in his 1930 essay “The Trip to America.” “One can view many things in a hurry and not know exactly which to write about and which to ignore. As the classical Arab poet puts it: ‘Many were the gazelles that passed by the hunter / But he was unable to decide which to catch.’” Elsewhere, Egyptian scholar Zaki Najib Mahmud attempts to refute Arab prejudices in his 1955 travelogue “My Days in America”: “I am amazed that these people are known for leading materialistic lives while we Egyptians consider ourselves spiritual,” he writes. “The ‘Americans’ isn’t just a meaningless term, they are human beings. If you wish to utter anything against them, keep silent until you have met individuals from amongst them…”

Sayyid Qutb’s analysis of America is not nearly so generous. A primary case in point would be his appraisal of American sexuality, which he finds primitive and debauched. To this day, Qutb’s biographers take these conclusions at face value, with some Muslim analysts going so far as to insist that Qutb found the U.S. a place of “widespread sexual anarchy.”

The setting that so scandalized Qutb, however, was not a place of hippie-era love-ins or disco-era cocaine orgies, but Truman-era conservatism. Greeley, Colorado in 1949 was a dry town, with an abundance of churches and not a single bar. Still, our Egyptian traveler was able to locate a den of licentiousness in none other than a church sock hop. “And they danced to the tunes of the gramophone,” Qutb writes, “and the dance floor was replete with tapping feet, enticing legs, arms wrapped around waists, lips pressed to lips, and chests pressed to chests. The atmosphere was full of desire.” Qutb then goes on to describe — without alluding to a conversation with any girl in particular — American girls’ knowledge that “seductiveness lies in the round breasts, the full buttocks, and in the shapely thighs, sleek legs and she shows all this and does not hide it.”

As these passages suggest, Qutb was content to play the role of voyeur during his time in America, interpreting events not as they might have been understood by the Americans who lived them, but as they sparked his fevered and pious imagination. Jazz was “music that the savage bushmen created to satisfy their primitive desires”; football fans were “enthralled with the flowing blood and crushed limbs, crying loudly, everyone cheering for his team”; sexual choice was “a gripping slavery and a relapse to the first primitive levels.” American haircuts were a disgrace, and the practices of salting watermelon and drinking unsweetened tea (both unknown in Egypt) were revelatory signifiers of cultural stupidity.

Indeed, by the end of “The America I Have Seen,” the Qutb comes off sounding less like a nascent Muslim Marx than the Arab equivalent of a floral-shirted American account executive demanding “freedom fries” on the French Riviera.

In some instances, it’s tempting to point out how the essays collected in America in an Arab Mirror seem to prophetically allude to the events of 9/11, or the current Iraq war. In the 1946 essay “The Flying Sphinx”, for instance, Egyptian short story writer Mahmud Taymur, expresses both awe and disgust at the skyscrapers of New York. “They are eloquent in expressing the inherent inferiority complex in the American psyche,” he writes, “which prompts this young rising nation that has been blessed with resources, knowledge, and an undisputed position among nations, to cry out to the world: ‘Look at me, I am the greatest one of all!’” Forty years later, Palestinian intellectual Yusuf al-Hasan appears to predict the workings of the current Bush administration in a 1986 essay called “The Washington Memoirs”:

Americans don’t understand the workings of history, especially when they deal with foreign affairs. …If the situation abroad affects American comfort and pockets, then America interferes; it doesn’t look for the reasons that led to that bad situation but seeks to punish and to ‘take immediate action,’ just like the cowboy who lives in a world in which on the fastest to pull his gun survives. …The American doesn’t really care about the bloodletting of hundreds of people in the Arabian Gulf, nor the ruin of the economic infrastructure and national wealth of countries in the region. His only concern is to safeguard the flow of oil. That is all.

For the most part, however, the writing in America in an Arab Mirror does not prophesy so much as it reveals the perceptions and prejudices of Arab travelers trying to decipher a strange land for their home audience. In essay after essay, popular Arab stereotypes about America — including sexual promiscuity, ostentatious wealth, and the impersonality of Western life — are affirmed, clarified or refuted according to the sensibilities of the different writers. Naturally, a collection of essays by Easterners presuming to reveal the mysteries of the Occident to other Easterners invites an interesting literary comparison — and anthology editor Abdel-Malek says as much in the preface. “A question that was raised by a Princeton Arabist after one of my talks,” he writes, “was whether Arab writings on America could be regarded as a case of Occidentalism, a counter-Orientalism of sorts. I leave it to the reader to devise his or her own answer to it after reading this anthology.”

Not long after Abdel-Malek wrote this, Ian Buruma and Avishai Margalit provided a formal examination of Occidentalism in their eponymous 2002 New York Review of Books essay, which outlined Eastern anti-liberal stereotypes about the West. According to Buruma and Margalit, the Occidentalist harbors “a deep hatred of the City, that is to say, everything represented by urban civilization: commerce, mixed populations, artistic freedom, sexual license, scientific pursuits, leisure, personal safety, wealth, and its usual concomitant, power.” To the Occidentalist, America is mechanically efficient, but lacking in soul; flashy, but culturally mediocre; rational, but devoid of feeling; comfortable, but cowardly.

In the case of Sayyid Qutb, Buruma and Margalit’s template fits seamlessly. Almost all the Occidentalist bases are neatly covered in “The America I Have Seen”, including sweeping statements on morality (”the matter of morals and rights are an illusion to the conscience of the American,” writes Qutb, “he cannot taste it”), technology (”nothing existed in them besides the crude power of the mind and the overwhelming lust for sensual pleasure”), and religion (”there is no one further than the American from appreciating the spirituality of religion”). Indeed, at times “The America I Have Seen” can read like an instructional Ur-text on Occidentalist rhetoric.

What is most striking about Qutb’s essay, however, is not that it conforms to the notions of Occidentalism, but that its language would easily be considered Orientalist were it not originally composed for an “Oriental” audience. According to Edward Said, Orientalist writing reinforces European prejudices by presuming to speak with authority on behalf of the Orient and the people who live there — often using exaggerated and half-understood examples to represent the whole of society. “…[P]eople, places and experiences can always be described by a book,” Said writes, “so much so that the book (or text) acquires a greater authority, and use, than even the actuality it describes.”

Similarly, while Said objects to Western scholars who imply that life is cheap and death a spectacle in the Orient, Qutb makes his own misleading inferences about life and death in “The America I Have Seen.” Specifically, Qutb expresses shock at the fact that, in times of death, Americans are not as outwardly expressive of their sorrow as are Egyptians. Of course Qutb doesn’t cloak his observations in such neutral terms, because he doesn’t consider Western funeral practices to be a cultural difference as much as a telltale failure of American emotion. Using three examples (two of which are second-hand anecdotes, one of which is drawn from an overheard snippet of conversation), Qutb seeks to reveal presumed American indifference in the face of death by alluding to the seeming cheerfulness of a wake, as well as a widow who is being encouraged to resume her social activities after the death of her husband, and another woman who expresses relief at the security of her late husband’s life insurance payments.

Instead of analyzing these examples (which themselves are already exaggerated by our author’s breathless reportage), Qutb transitions directly into a memory from his youth in Egypt, when he witnessed his chickens’ seeming sorrow when one of their number was slaughtered in front of them. “It was an emotional surprise for everyone who had been in the house,” Qutb writes soberly. “A surprise unexpected from birds as low on the evolutionary scale as these chickens.” The clumsy inference here is that — for all their vaunted technology and progress — Americans are civilizationally inferior to poultry.

In the decades since Sayyid Qutb’s death, the ideas he espoused (including a utopian view of sharia law, an inflexible opposition to Western culture and values, and the advocacy Islamic theocracy as the only legitimate state) have been combined with puritanical Saudi Wahhabist ideals to influence the rise of militant groups such as Islamic Jihad and al-Qaida. Scholars don’t agree on whether or not Qutb would have approved of al-Qaida’s tactics, but it’s safe to conclude that he shared their dream of toppling secular governments and setting up theocratic, anti-Western regimes across the Muslim world.

However, considering that Qutb’s rejection of Western values and modernity was informed by such a willfully cartoonish misinterpretation of American culture, it’s natural to wonder how his beliefs might have been tempered had he been a more engaged traveler.

In many ways, Qutb’s disgust with all things American during his Colorado stint was typical of someone undergoing culture shock, which anthropologist Kalervo Oberg defined as rejection of a host country based upon frustration and anxiety in the face of the unfamiliar. Under such stressful circumstances, the traveler attaches heightened importance to his home culture. “All difficulties and problems [back home] are forgotten and only the good things…are remembered,” wrote Oberg in a 1960 article for Practical Anthropology. “Instead of trying to account for conditions as they are through an honest analysis of the actual conditions and the historical circumstances which have created them, you talk as if the difficulties you experience are more or less created by the people of the host country for your special discomfort.”

In addition to identifying the symptoms of culture shock, Oberg also suggested remedies:

An objective treatment of your cultural background and that of your new environment is [important] in understanding culture shock. …Once you realize that your trouble is due to your own lack of understanding of other people’s cultural background and your own lack of the means of communication rather than the hostility of an alien environment, you also realize that you yourself can gain this understanding and these means of communication.

To retroactively apply this perspective to Qutb’s experience, however, is to presume an open-mindedness that he simply did not possess.

Had Edward Said referenced Qutb’s travel essay in Orientalism (or used similarly insidious outtakes from other Eastern writers) his treatise might well have been a more balanced analysis of how people respond to Otherness. Said himself hints at this notion early on in his book, asserting that it is “perfectly normal for the human mind to resist the assault on it of untreated strangeness; therefore cultures have always been inclined to impose complete transformations on other cultures, receiving these other cultures not as they are but as, for the benefit of the receiver, they ought to be.”

In reality, what has come to be understood as an “Orientalist” perspective is invariably the opinion of a far-from-home traveler, Western or Eastern, who comes into contact with a limited number of people; someone who can’t fully understand his surroundings, and who compulsively judges his host culture by the standards of his own.

By coming to America and seeing only what he’d already formulated in his mind, Sayyid Qutb didn’t merely provide a prudish Islamist role model for 9/11 ringleader Mohammed Atta; he proved that cultural self-absorption is an ecumenical tourist vice, capable of traveling the globe in both directions.

Rolf Potts is the author of Vagabonding (Random House, 2003). The above essay originally appeared in the October 2006 issue of The Believer.

This week, Brooklyn-based writer (and erstwhile traveler extraordinaire) Ayun Halliday debuted her fourth book, Dirty Sugar Cookies : Culinary Observations, Questionable Taste, which “takes readers into the unpredictable mind and comical experiences of a true anti-foodie, giving even the most hopeless cooks a moment of relief from self-criticism, and the least discriminating eaters a reality check.” If it’s like any of her past books, it should be funny stuff!

Today, for my stop on Ayun’s virtual book tour, I’m debuting one of her previously unpublished travel-food stories, “Tommy’s 21st Birthday Cake”…

After a couple of months in Southeast Asia, Isaac and I had hit that point that’s not so much homesickness as a longing to transport one’s closest friends to one’s vacation spot. Sometimes it’s possible to achieve a pretty good facsimile with people you’ve only just met. We had succeeded in doing so with an international cast from our Koh Phangan guest house, but on our final evening’s revels, I accidentally destroyed the illusion by knocking boots with Erik, a handsome Swede, in the Gulf of Thailand. (Sometimes it doesn’t pay to go with the flow.) Naturally, I denied everything as hotly as my hangover would permit aboard a boat bound for the mainland, but Isaac wasn’t fooled. I was miserable. Having sullied our happy memories of that particular bunch of insta-friends, I felt we didn’t deserve another.

Two weeks later, we found ourselves in a remote guesthouse a few miles outside of Pai. It was brand new, and Sam, the owner, was having trouble convincing the Lonely Planet hordes to try his place over the ones endorsed by the guidebook. The only other guests were Tommy, a ponytailed American lad, and Simon, a Bangkok-based Australian who was old enough to be bald. (Which is to say somewhere around thirty, otherwise known as really, really old.) The first afternoon, we were fairly stand-offish, reading, playing solitaire and speaking of hill tribe treks as if they were something we would make independently of each other, but the ice gave way as the sun set. Sam broke out the rice whiskey, Isaac broke out his guitar and Simon broke out a packet of twigs and herbs to add to the whiskey. He’d bought it in the market, charmed by the label’s boast: Tiger Power Improve Your Sex! It was some strange shit. Its medicinal value is debatable and its claim overstated, but it did seem to draw our little group together into a cohesive and tightly bound whole. We laughed. We cavorted. We added innumerable verses to a little anthem we’d made up about Mountain Lodge, and at Sam’s urging sang it for two solid hours. We nearly came to blows, but things worked out okay, when Simon backed down, admitting that perhaps Isaac shouldn’t be held personally responsible for U.S. foreign policy.

We spent the next few days calling on various hill tribe families whose children Sam taught on an intermittent basis. We drank moonshine from an elderly lady’s still. We bathed in streams. We rode elephants, ate a civet, and sang that fucking Mountain Lodge song another million or so times. It amazed me, given how close we’d become, that Tommy waited until we were tramping back up the road to the guesthouse to let it slip that it was his birthday.

(more…)

The following essay, written by the late critic John Malcolm Brinnin, was first presented as the keynote address to the 1991 Key West Literary Seminar. At this year’s seminar in Key West, “Travel and the Sense of Wonder” was mentioned in several contexts, and Thomas Swick, who wrote about Brinnin in his blog of the event, passed along a copy to me. In the interest of giving it a wider audience online, I am sharing Brinnin’s essay here.

Space-age technologists tell us that we are the first people for whom it is possible to possess any corner of the globe within twenty-four hours — the first traveler’s for whom the fourth dimension is not a mere hypothesis but an available experience. This very afternoon, you or I could leave the White Sands Missile Range or the Houston Space Center and, tomorrow, be set down in some vestigial pocket of the Stone Age. Bucketed beyond ‘the sound barrier, we could arrive at a place where existence depends on crude tools and weapons, and enter a time still innocent of chronology. Yet what we can do, literally, is but a demonstration of what, figuratively, writers have always done. From Marco” Polo’s pictures of a brutish territory not yet called Siberia to Jan Morris’s descriptions of the terraced promenades of Simla, we have seen how imagination can turn a location into an event and fix it permanently into consciousness. In that process, the carelessness of time is brought to account, arrested for moments the sum of which we call history.

Notions like these have led me to my theme: the role of a sense of wonder in the impulse to travel and then in the enterprise of travel writing. I would like to think that this sense is essential; but I know it is not. Some of the soupiest travel writing on record has been done by moonstruck impressionists aspiring to literature; some of the best by close observers aiming to convey no more than pertinent information, a credible economic or sociological overview, a guidebook devoid of Chamber of Commerce soufflé.

Yet you know as well as I that great travel writing is suffused by a sense of wonder as compelling as it is elusive. A phenomenon that cannot be conclusively defined, it remains best comprehended by its effects. Of these, the most constant is the way in which a sense of wonder discloses a capacity for wonder impervious to its opportunities. A great narrative of travel is the product of a writer for whom the given subject is but a convenient focus — a chance to draw upon a personal vision that exists before and after any number of its adventitious expressions. Unfortunately, a sense of wonder cannot be instilled, installed, or otherwise attained. Rather it is something like a musical sense — if not quite a matter of absolute pitch, a disposition, something in the genes as exempt from judgment as the incidence of brown eyes or blue. When it’s there, its presence is- indubitable; when it’s absent, it’s not likely to be missed. But even individuals without a flick of Wonder can respond to its perceptions and, sometimes, its audacity.

Not long ago, when the now hapless city of Beirut was the so-called Paris of the Middle East, I spent a few days there — one of them on an excursion to Baalbek to see the great temple of the sun associated with its ancient name, Heliopolis. The trip was made in a car shared with strangers and a Lebanese driver. When our visit to the gigantic ruins was over, we squeezed back into our seats in a stunned silence that seemed the only appropriate response to such overwhelming magnificence. This spell lasted for many miles, broken, finally, by the muffled syllables with which each of us tried to describe the indescribable. The only one who did not open her mouth was a well-upholstered woman of sixty — until, that is, she was quite ready to speak her mind. “What I want to know,” she said, “is how American Express finds these places.”

(more…)

The following essay, written by novelist Michael Mewshaw, was first presented as the plenary address at the 2004 South Central MLA Conference in New Orleans on October 28, 2004. It was included this year with the orientation materials for the Key West Literary Seminar, and I share it here with the intention of giving it a wider audience online.

I’ve traveled here to New Orleans from London, where I spend part of each year. And most of you have traveled some distance from your homes and universities so that I can lecture and you can listen to a lecture about travel writing. At first blush this might seem a dubious topic, or at any rate a lightweight one for a Modern Language Association meeting. But in the course of the coming hour I hope to persuade you that travel, far from being a frivolous diversion best left to the yokels on Bourbon St. with their ball caps, beer cans and zany tee shirts, is in literary terms a crucial act.

First, of course, we must define our terms! According to some critics and cavilers, travel no longer exists. It’s all been replaced by the plague of tourism. And tourism, we’ll have to concede, ranks just below racism or pedophilia on the Politically Incorrect Index. We may do it but we don’t like to admit it. We would all prefer to be authentic travelers, not tourists, if only we could.

But it is my contention — and one of my themes tonight — that travel in the traditional sense is still possible and moreover, it is important for writers and thus to readers. Just as religious faith has lingered on long after the alleged death of God, and just as writers have continued to produce novels long after the much-discussed demise of that genre, people still do scuttle around the globe, reenacting rituals that were supposed to have died off ages ago. At the most basic level, they do so, it seems to me, in order to enjoy what poet Wallace Stevens called the pleasures of “merely circulating.” Perhaps because immobility reminds us of that ultimate fact of life — i.e. Death — we remain eager to prove we’re still alive by moving around and rubbing up against our fellow travelers. Seen objectively, many of us appear to have been hard-wired to follow migratory patterns that lead not just to a destination but to a condition in which “discovery” remains a potential reality even in places where masses of human beings have proceeded us.

The good doctor Freud speculated that “a great part of the pleasure of travel lies in the fulfillment of these early wishes to escape the family and especially the father.” In that sense, travel may be viewed as a rebellious, even a subversive act, part of the process of self-actualization I travel to define and assert my existential identity. I travel. Therefore I am.

(more…)

Last month, Harper’s editor Lewis Lapham announced his retirement after nearly thirty years on the job. I’ve been an enthusiastic Harper’s subscriber for over a decade, but I’ve always found Lapham’s monthly “Notebook” column to be the most irritating part of the magazine. Pompous, frequently contemptuous, and dripping with purple overstatement, Lapham’s front-of-the book essays always spew some variation of the same, alarmist jeremiad: The powers-that-be are evil; the vulgar masses are little more than hoodwinked automatons; the end is near for anyone with the intellectual jam to recognize it as such.

These monthly screeds (which will continue, despite his retirement from other magazine duties) might be more compelling if Lapham demonstrated a shred of reportorial energy or curiosity. Instead, they bear the unmistakable stamp of the armchair essayist: Broad generalizations are presented as unquestionable fact; rhetorical nuance and uncertainty are utterly absent; Enlightenment philosophers are quoted at length. Indeed, nobody in contemporary letters has such a talent for sounding convincingly erudite and utterly clueless at the same time (a fact evidenced in 2004, when it was revealed that Lapham’s column savaging the speeches of the Republican convention was written a full two months before the convention was held).

In recent years, no individual has been the focus of Lapham’s scorn more frequently than George W. Bush — which is ironic, since the two men are practically twins: Both of them come from blue-blood and old money; both received elite preparatory schooling and graduated from Yale; both have demonstrated an inability to helm a profitable business (for much of Lapham’s tenure, Harper’s has been bailed out to the tune of $2 million each year by the J. Roderick MacArthur Foundation); both profess to know what’s best for the kind of common Americans they’ve certainly never met; both display an alarming self-satisfaction and lack of curiosity for anything that falls outside of their own ideological rubric.

In fact, while Lapham’s opinions invariably carry a left-wing slant, he would seem to be a profoundly conservative thinker — someone who has never questioned the insipidity of his elite, east-coast patrician-intellectual assumptions.

This in mind, I have drafted the following letter to Mr. Lapham, in the hope that he might use his retirement to broaden his horizons.

Dear Mr. Lapham,

Congratulations on your retirement from Harper’s. You’ve had a fine tenure; your creation of the Harper’s Index was a masterstroke in and of itself. I often refer to various front-of-the-book “Readings” from Harper’s on this blog, and I’ve quoted your apt musings on media here in the past. You have plenty to feel good about from your time as an editor.

Now that you’ll have some free time, however, I have a suggestion for you: Pack your bags. Hit the road. Get lost. Do a little open-ended travel — and let it expand your worldview.

By this, I don’t mean you should head to Europe on a lecture tour with Gore Vidal and Noam Chomsky. This would be pleasurable for you, I’m sure, but I doubt it will do much to challenge the prejudices you have accumulated in a career that has never strayed from the most elite social settings. After all, to borrow something you once said about your own writing, travel “is about inquiry; it’s not about the promulgation of the truth, it’s about a search for the truth” — and I doubt your search will yield anything new if you confine yourself to the company of left-wing public intellectuals (and the sycophants who line up to hear them lecture).

Hence, once your bags are packed, I suggest you strike out solo for the American heartland — that gaping, dimly perceived synapse between New York and San Francisco — to meet new people and have new experiences.

I know for a fact that you are desperately under-traveled in the inner U.S., because you frequently advertise it as a sign of intellectual purity. In your May 2005 column, for example, you wrote that President Bush flaunts “his ignorance as proof of his virtue, claiming that America can rule and govern a world about which it chooses to know as little as possible.” This assertion might have carried some rhetorical weight had you not smugly boasted your own cultural-geographical ignorance earlier in the same essay (”My travels seldom took me anywhere except to California,” you quipped, “and although I heard rumors of the religious enthusiasms roaming the American plains, I chose to regard them as preposterous”).

Thus, just as I would implore President Bush (and his ilk) to humbly explore other countries until his passport is dog-eared and tattered, I encourage you to visit places that were never on your radar when Hotchkiss and Cambridge and midtown Manhattan were shaping your perception of the world. Go to places like Idaho, or Alabama, or my home state of Kansas. Drink beers with guys who weld for a living. Spend a week working (with your fellow retirees) as a greeter at Wal-Mart. Sit in with kids in classrooms where “Intelligent Design” threatens the science curriculum.

Odds are — after a few months of earnest wandering through “flyover country” — you will find a level of humanity, local wisdom and social complexity that will allow you to write your “Notebook” column with a little more nuance and a little less bombast.

Your readers, I believe, will share in the discovery as you make your world bigger.

Yours optimistically,

Rolf Potts
http://rolfpotts.com

A few years ago, when the tide of war was shifting in Afghanistan, Northern Alliance troops began using a contemptuous moniker for the Pakistani, Uzbek, and Chechen militants who were fighting alongside the Taliban. “The [Afghan] people,” Alliance commander Ustad Mohammed Atta told TIME magazine, “want to kill these tourists.”

Not “terrorists”, mind you, “tourists”. Obviously, the pejorative sense of that word had come a long way since European elites first sneered at the English commoners who took Thomas Cook’s inaugural group tours in the 19th century.

Moreover, it seems we have come to the point where “tourist” — like “asshole”, or “politically correct” — has no meaning but the pejorative, and would never be a term anyone would apply to oneself. As John Flinn noted in his recent San Francisco Chronicle column, “among the status-conscious, the word ‘tourist’ has come to mean ‘anyone who travels in a style I consider inferior to the way I like to think I do it.’”

Or, as Evelyn Waugh put it a couple generations ago, “the tourist is always the other chap.”

Flinn goes on to make a good argument for dropping the tourist-traveler debate altogether — but somehow I doubt the travel milieu will ever lose its snarky obsession with “tourists”. An illustrative case in point would be that of travel writer Daisann McLane, who made a well-stated case for why we’re all “tourists” in a 2002 interview with World Hum. “We think a ‘traveler’ is cool, the ‘tourist’ is not,” she said, “and there’s a lot of snobbery attached to identifying oneself as the former. But I think we should let that go. We are all tourists. If you can afford a round trip ticket to Laos, and you go there for personal stimulation, not for a job, even if you end up staying for six months on the floor of a Hmong hut in a remote village, you’re still a tourist.”

This kind of logic might have been devastatingly conclusive were it not for the fact that McLane’s own column tagline at National Geographic Traveler was, “How to be a Traveler, Not a Tourist”.

As is the case with Anthony Bourdain (who I recently skewered for his similarly insipid Travel Channel promotion), I’d wager that this slogan was never McLane’s idea. Still, it points to the fact that — like a case of genital herpes — the tourist-traveler dichotomy will never go away, no matter how irritating it becomes.

The heart of this dichotomy, of course, lies in our own insecurities about travel. In the movie Fight Club, Edward Norton’s character, who has been crashing support-group meetings to boost his self-esteem, drops the t-word when another crasher, named Marla, starts showing up at the meetings. “Marla, the big tourist,” he mutters. “Her lie reflected my lie.” Similarly, we all travel with the knowledge that, by definition, a person journeying to a foreign place is an outsider, a dilettante, a superficial presence. Other travelers (i.e. “tourists”) only remind us of that fact.

And that’s why we go to such great pains to make distinctions and split hairs. Six years ago, while working on the set of Leonardo DiCaprio’s The Beach, I was amused to discover that 21st Century Fox’s handlers were dividing all the extras into two groups, “tourists” and “travelers”. No actual travel credentials were required; the production assistants simply made their decisions on the basis of fashion. That is, if you had dreads or wore a sarong or sported tattoos or clutched a set of bongos, you were grouped together with the “travelers”. If kept your hair short or wore nice clothes or had a reasonably neat appearance, you spent your on-camera time as a “tourist”. Though my suntan was lacking at the time, I made the cut as a “traveler” on the basis of my hair (which was longish) and clothing (which, while not suitably ethnic, was a bit tattered).

Despite such reductive methodology, however, I’ll admit I felt a small flush of pride as I took my place in the extras’ tent with the other “travelers”. Just like being picked first for a game of kindergarten kickball, I had proof that I had made the cut: I was a member of the elite.

Ultimately, the rhetoric of tourists and travelers is not just trapped in the rituals of human vanity; it has become hopelessly mixed up in the postmodern wash. After all, Paul Fussell and David Brooks have gone so far as to make fun of the people who make fun of tourists (Fussell calls them “anti-tourists“; Brooks calls them “travel snobs“) — and it’s only a matter of time before someone else writes a rant making fun of the people who make fun of the people who make fun of tourists.

When this happens, I know I’ll have my bases covered, since no less an authority than 21st Century Fox has already determined that I am a traveler. That is, not a tourist.

(more…)