Anthropology and Travel

Abstract

Why do people travel? Travel has always been central to humanity. While mass tourism only originated in the nineteenth century, seasonal migration, pilgrimage and other forms of travel existed in most societies long before that period. Today, the practice of journeying across imagined as well as physical ‘borders’ is practically universal, and travel encompasses many areas of social life. Undoubtedly, transnational mobility is now one of the most pervasive and visible activities the world over. While travel motivations widely differ, ‘free’ movement is often fuelled by the incessant desire for novelty and difference and propelled by prefabricated images and myths about ‘Other’ peoples and places. At the same time, human mobility is marked by fundamental imbalances of power, reflecting economic disparities, and providing grounds for sociocultural conflict. As a central dimension of globalisation, cross-border travel offers us a useful lens on many key questions about transnationalism and cosmopolitanism, identity and heritage, commoditisation, historical and cultural representation, authenticity and ownership, inequality, gender relations, environmental sustainability, and more. How do people move across various sociocultural boundaries and how do they create specific cultures of mobility? Drawing upon contemporary anthropological concepts and theories of movement and border crossings (rather than place and location), this course analyses ‘travel’ as a dynamic set of sociocultural practices and discourses. Students are invited to think critically about the complex interrelationships between various forms of border-crossing human mobilities.