Transformative Travel in a Mobile World

Garth Lean

• Publisher: CAB International
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781780647548
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Hospitality, Travel & Tourism Industry
• Index: Business

This book presents the re-theorisation of travel and transformation. It explores the factors that influence the behaviours of a traveller, how these become entwined in experiences and how travel experiences continue on a traveller's return. It uses the notion of transformation to redevelop the temporal and spatial boundaries of physical travel, develop a model for unpacking transformation and to look at new methods in the exploration of travel research.

1 Mobilizing Travel and Transformation

It was only upon my return that I realised how distant I had been in West Africa. It didn’t cross my mind as I discarded my itinerary to spend Christmas with Johanna. Nothing clicked when I gave into desire and covered my original 7-week ‘approved’ route in 3 weeks in order to travel to Mali. I didn’t think twice about ignoring government advice to complete an overnight trek into the Sahara with a Tuareg family who spoke not a word of English. Goat urine dripping through the ceiling on an 18-hour bus journey to Bamako was tolerable. Travelling into ‘off-limits’ Côte d’Ivoire seemed rational. Discovering I was one of only a few foreigners in recent years to cross the remote north-western border of Manankoro into rebel-held northern Côte d’Ivoire didn’t stop me squeezing onto the back seat of a medium-sized car with four others for the 12-hour gauntlet run of rebel checkpoints. These all became part of a performance of travel where my role as researcher was all but forgotten as I became embroiled in the very topic I had come to Africa to investigate. In the moment, at least, it seemed I had been transformed by travel.

Travel and Transformation

Physical travel has a long association with personal transformation, dating back to the earliest works of ‘Western’ literature such as The Epic of Gilgamesh ([18th–10th century BCE] 1972) and Homer’s ([8th century BCE] 2004) The Odyssey. As historian Eric Leed (1991: 26) argues, throughout history departure has offered individuals an opportunity to remove themselves ‘from a defining social and cultural matrix’. As I experienced in West Africa, bodily relocation enabled the alteration of a reality-confirming amalgam of roles, performances, relationships, expectations, objects, languages, symbols and sensual experiences. Beyond this, Leed argues that travel is deeply embedded in the formation and continuing transformation of societies and cultures. As Leed, and also Löfgren (2002) highlight, this is well illustrated by the many historical links between words for travel, transition and experience, and the prevalence of journeying metaphors used to describe all manner of transitions, along with life itself.

Travel remains heavily promoted as an agent of change. Among many other qualities, it is often claimed to promote learning (e.g. of languages, cultures, history, religions and places), global mindedness, cosmopolitanism, personal enlightenment, cross-cultural understanding, an awareness of various global issues, environmental consciousness and ‘wellness’. Wherever travel is re/presented, whether in tourism brochures, magazines, movies, documentaries, television shows, books, blogs, commentaries or conversations, the notions of change and transformation are often deeply entwined.

Views about the transformative nature of travel, however, have also been contested (albeit rarely in comparison to its promotion as an agent of change). In relation to the ‘benefits’ that may be brought by an international sojourn, some argue that travel simply reinforces an existing way of seeing and acting in the world, supporting prejudices, misguided/‘false’ representations, romantic visions/performances and, in the case of travel from ‘developed’ to ‘less developed’ nations, the continuation of colonial relations (e.g. see Bruner, 1991, 2005; d’Hauteserre, 2004; Hall and Tucker, 2004; Mowforth and Munt, 2009; Tucker and Akama, 2009). Research and anecdotes also suggest that the effects of travel are often only temporary, falling by the wayside as more pertinent concerns capture one’s attention upon their return ‘home’ (Salazar, 2002, 2004; Lean, 2009). What is more, in a modern, mobile world, where communication technologies, increased flows of peoples and globalization arguably make familiarity increasingly more available when we travel (and the ‘unfamiliar’ more accessible without needing to travel), it is often claimed that the opportunities travel once provided to distance ourselves from Leed’s concept of a ‘defining social and cultural matrix’ are no longer as available as they once were and, as a consequence, the chance of transforming through travel less probable.

With these considerations in mind, in this book I conduct an exploration of the process of travel and transformation in a modern, mobile world. I probe the often unquestioned assumption that travel is simply transformative, and observe the complexities of the phenomenon and how it is interpreted and re-interpreted by those who identify themselves as having been transformed by travel. To achieve this, I draw upon data from an ongoing, longitudinal study of travel and transformation that I have been conducting since 2005. These data include the accounts of 79 travellers from 18 different nations, supplemented by interviews with willing participants every 2 years (Chapter 2 provides further details about these participants and methods). I also reflect upon my own journeys, physical and otherwise, over the course of the project.

It is important to note at the outset that this volume is not a guide on how to be transformed by travel. As I argue throughout, the number of elements entwined in the process of transformation through travel are innumerable, and travellers’ experiences too unique, diverse and complex to generalize. This book, then, is concerned with conducting an exploration of the phenomenon itself – an observation of the various ways in which the embodied and sensual experiences of physical travel in a modern, mobile world influence travellers, and how these experiences come to be entwined in their life courses.

Transformative Travel – A Conceptual Lens

Before continuing, it is important to address two key conceptual issues – namely, why the book focuses upon ‘transformation’ and how I use, and conceive of, both ‘transformation’ and ‘travel’ within it. In many ways, my understanding of these terms has been a journey in itself, my interpretation evolving over the 10-year life of the project, through exploring alternate disciplinary perspectives (as theoretical landscapes have evolved), and by observing my own experiences and those of others (in particular, my participants).

Transformation

As you may have noticed in the opening paragraphs, I have used a variety of terms interchangeably – transformation, change, transition, learning – to loosely describe the same phenomenon. To be honest, I started using the term ‘transformation’ in 2005 without a great deal of thought. My work on travel and transformation commenced as a 1-year undergraduate Honours research project that sought to investigate whether tourism experiences could be used to change knowledge, values, attitudes and behaviours. This was undertaken in the interests of achieving the objectives of sustainable development – specifically, whether travel could be used as a tool for creating, what I called at the time, ‘Sustainability Ambassadors’.¹

When developing the conceptual lens for this initial study, I happened across a book written by American psychologist Jeffrey Kottler (1997) called Travel that Can Change Your Life: How to Create a Transformative Experience. While the book was coming from a completely different angle (it was written as a self-help therapy handbook for those wanting to use travel as a catalyst for changing problematic aspects of their life), I thought a phrase that Kottler had used, ‘transformative travel’, had a nice, alliterative, ring to it and I consequently came to use the term to describe my own work (and the term became increasingly prominent after I started promoting my research). I left it to respondents to self-identify themselves as having been transformed by travel and, not wanting to limit the breadth of the experiences collected, avoided conceptualising or defining transformation.

When the project evolved into a PhD, and the focus broadened from sustainability to all manner of changes that may unfold as a result of travelling, I began looking for a theory that would not only help to explain the process of transformation but, also, how those aspects of being undergoing transformation (e.g. knowledge, attitudes, values, thinking, behaviour and reality) come to be possessed by an individual to begin with. The theoretical lens I settled upon was social constructionism and, in particular, Peter L. Berger and Thomas Luckmann’s treatise on the sociology of knowledge, The Social Construction of Reality (1966).² Drawing upon theories from a variety of social theorists, social psychologists and philosophers, this seminal work attempted to explain why we come to think and act in particular ways, along with how these facets of being are maintained and transformed.

Berger and Luckmann’s theory conceived society as a dialectic composed of three concurrent movements – externalization, objectivation and internalization. As Berger (1967: 4) observed in a later volume:

Externalization is the ongoing outpouring of human being into the world, both in the physical and the mental activity of men [sic]. Objectivation is the attainment by the products of this activity (again both physical and mental) of a reality that confronts its original producers as a facticity external to and other than themselves. Internalization is the reappropriation by men [sic] of this same reality, transforming it once again from structures of the objective world into structures of the subjective consciousness. It is through externalization that society is a human product. It is through objectivation that society becomes a reality sui generis. It is through internalization that man [sic] is a product of society.

From the perspective of social constructionism, an individual’s thinking and behaviours come to be internalized, and maintained, through processes of socialization. During the first phase, ‘primary socialization’, an individual is born into an objective social structure, and takes on the roles and attitudes to which they are exposed by significant others (e.g. parents, close family and caregivers). In the next stage, ‘secondary socialization’, institutions and institution- based ‘sub-worlds’ are internalized through acquiring the role-specific knowledge required for the various pursuits in which an individual engages over their life course (e.g. study, work, sports, hobbies and membership of groups/organizations). For Berger and Luckmann, transformation required the dismantling of an individual’s reality and the introduction of a plausible alternative, again through processes of socialization. For the strongest transformations to occur, they argued that individuals needed to be separated from familiar others and roles (the main processes that construct and maintain a particular way of thinking and being in the world), ideally through physical segregation.

While the above is a somewhat oversimplified summary, it is sufficient to convey the appeal I initially saw in using Berger and Luckmann’s thesis to examine travel and transformation. Through the lens of their treatise, physical travel could be conceptualised as having the potential to provide physical segregation from familiar social relationships, roles and routines that establish, and maintain, a particular way of thinking, along with enabling exposure to alternate processes of socialization that may impart alternative knowledge, realities and behaviours.

My infatuation with Berger and Luckmann’s thesis did not last long, however. Once I began to analyse data from my respondents, the limitations of drawing upon a 50 year-old sociological theory to explore a contemporary context soon became apparent. Since they penned their treatise in the mid-1960s, the ‘social world’ that Berger and Luckmann were observing had undergone radical changes, shifting into what Zygmunt Bauman (2000) calls ‘liquid modernity’.³ While Berger and Luckmann focused primarily on physical co-presence (where the reality of everyday life is centred on the ‘here and now’ of individuals interacting mostly face-to-face), technological advancements (such as mobile telephony and the internet) have enabled social collectives to form and interact with one another beyond the limitations of physical proximity. With the rise of the ‘digital age’, information has developed modes of mobility separated from ‘material form’ and presence (Urry, 2007). Noting the emergence of a ‘mobilities paradigm’ (unpacked further in Chapter 2), John Urry (2007) writes that, to varying degrees, information has the potential to be everywhere instantaneously along fluid networks, blurring both spatial and temporal dimensions. The world becomes based less upon ‘predictable co-presence’ and more upon dynamic flows (Urry, 2007: 162):

Specific others are not simply ‘there’; or rather they are or may be there but mainly through the mediation of what I term virtual nature, the panoply of virtual objects distributed in relatively far flung networks . . . These bodily augmentations also enable and effect the spreading out of social networks that increasingly depend, even for friendship and family life, upon these virtual objects lurking in the background and often unnoticed.

In reading the accounts of my participants, it became overwhelmingly apparent that the implications of increasing mobilities for conceptualising travel and transformation (particularly from the perspective of social constructionism) were immense. While travellers might physically remove themselves from a certain geographic location, particular ways of being could potentially be reinforced by the various flows of people, symbols, information, objects/ materialities (etc.) they encounter, and maintain connections with, while travelling (not only physically, but also through technology and the imagination, etc.). Furthermore, in a mobile world, travellers are increasingly likely to engage with various elements of the spaces, places and landscapes though which they travel prior to departure, and to continue engaging with them upon their return. With increasing mobilities, the distinctions between notions such as ‘here’ and ‘there’ and ‘home’ and ‘away’, arguably, become far less clear. It was, therefore, necessary for any conceptualisation of transformation I used in my work to take these considerations into account.

Given this mobilities context, and the inadequacies of definitions premised upon a notion of social stasis, how then is transformation then best conceptualised? In its most basic configuration, ‘transformation’ can be defined as ‘a marked change in form, nature, or appearance’ (Transformation, 2010). While disciplines such as adult education have more rigid definitions developed on the back of learning theory with the purpose of determining educational outcomes (and, I would argue, also grow out of a static conceptualisation of social life that has yet to undergo any substantial ‘mobile’ reworking), the notion of transformation explored in this book is more permeable.⁴ In my work, I conceive of transformation as a fluid concept, interpreted both subjectively by individuals and objectively within their social settings and institutions. There are innumerable elements of a person’s being that are open to transformation (knowledge, attitudes, beliefs, behaviours/performances, roles, routines, relations, imaginings and stories/narratives, to name only a handful) and, of course, these are all interrelated, influencing each other in numerous ways. Transformation of any of these aspects will be interpreted differently, and given varying degrees of importance, by different individuals and social groupings at different moments in time. In addition, one’s transformations are not static – different aspects of being continue to alter over one’s life course, in different ways, at different rates, through innumerable sensual and embodied encounters with various places, peoples, objects/materialities, ideas, imaginaries, etc. what is more, individuals do not possess a single identity/discernible self. Instead, an individual’s multiple identities/selves are fluid, and can alter in different contexts. As such, change/s experienced will not necessarily be all-encompassing.

It is the objective of this book (and my research) to explore how physical travel relates to this vision of transformation. While terms such as transformation, change, transition and metamorphosis may not be strictly synonymous (and I am sure by using them interchangeably, I will be ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Figures
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Mobilizing Travel and Transformation
• Story I Nicole
• 2 Investigating Transformative Travel – A Mobile, Embodied and Sensual Approach
• Story II Andrew
• 3 ‘Before’
• Story III Tegan
• 4 Travels through Mobile Spaces, Places and Landscapes – A Sensual Essay
• Story IV Carita
• 5 ‘During’
• Story V Evelyn
• 6 ‘After’
• Afterword
• References
• Index