Gabriel R. Ricci - Travel, Tourism, and Identity

Travel, Tourism and Identity

EDITORIAL BOARD MEMBERS

Irving Louis Horowitz (19292012)

Founding Editor

Peter L. Berger

Director, Institute on Culture Religion, and World Affairs, Boston University

Hamid Dabashi

Hagop Kevorkian Professor of Iranian Studies and Comparative Literature, Columbia University

Robin Fox

Professor, Department of Anthropology, Rutgers University

Carl Gershman

President, National Endowment for Democracy

Eugene Goodheart

Edytha Macy Gross Professor of Humanities Emeritus, Brandeis University

Walter Laqueur

Distinguished Scholar, Center for Strategic and International Studies

Michael Ledeen

Freedom Scholar, Foundation for Defense of Democracies

Leslie Lenkowsky

Director of Graduate Programs for the Center on Philanthropy, Indiana University

Kenneth Minogue

Board of Directors, Centre for Policy Studies; Academic Advisory Council, Bruges Group

Nicholas Rescher

Professor, Department of Philosophy, University of Pittsburgh

Gabriel Ricci

Editor of Religion and Public Life; Chair, Dept of History, Elizabethtown College

David Ronfeldt

Senior Political Scientist, The RAND Corporation

Jeffrey Schaler

Professor, School of Public Affairs, American University

Dominique Schnapper

Member, French Constitutional Council; Director, Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales

Lionel Tiger

Charles Darwin Distinguished Professor of Anthropology, Rutgers University

Murray Weidenbaum

Center on the Economy, Government & Public Policy; Washington University in St. Louis

Travel, Tourism and Identity

Culture & Civilization, Volume 7

Gabriel R. Ricci, editor

First published 2015 by Transaction Publishers

Published 2017 by Routledge

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ISSN: 1947-6280

ISBN 13: 978-1-4128-5676-8 (pbk)

On the Cover: Englishman in the Campagna by Carl Spitzweg, 18081885, (c. 1845)

Travel, Tourism and Identity

Culture & Civilization, Volume 7

Contents

Gabriel R. Ricci

William Hutton

Maria Kostaridou

Vasiliki Galani-Moutafi

David Wills

Loretta Proctor

John P. Bieter and Nina M. Ray

Velvet Nelson

Raquel Bello Vzquez

Elias J. Torres Feij

Kelly Virginia Phelan

A. Pablo Iannone

Bente Heimtun

Mahua Bhattacharya

Taso Lagos

Aeron Haynie

Jim Potts

Gabriel R. Ricci

IN FAMILIAR SURROUNDINGS, cultural patterns and social coherence are taken for granted. However, what assumptions may be unquestioned to a member of a particular social group could otherwise seem strange and require orientation to an outsider. When our confidence is shaken after encountering new surroundings, we quickly realize that our habitual behaviors and thinking might require some adjustment. Previously engrained knowledge may suddenly appear out of place and in need of recalibration, just as when we encounter a foreign tongue and realize that our passive understanding of language will now require grasping a new language in order to act and think in ways that were previously taken for granted. This psychological phenomenon is typically encountered through travel and in the role of a tourist where the environmental character of cultural patterns is pronounced.

Volume 7, Travel, Tourism and Identity of Culture & Civilization addresses what sorts of negotiations are involved when we establish transitory contact with another group or, in some cases, attempt to assimilate to a foreign space. Whether it is traveling alone, seeking exile, relocating as a group, or touring with a dedicated purpose, established identity, cultural uniqueness, and worldview can be placed in question. In some cases finding interpretive equivalents to match the environmental character of home may be within reach; in other cases, the traveler discovers that establishing new connections requires an orientation to a history and traditions that frame the local discourse and an awareness of political aspirations that define a future outlook. Making these connections will surely enhance the travelers or tourists experience; not making them risks ones becoming a marginalized figure, momentarily living without a history and detached from the promise of a communitys future. Success at social adjustment can be as simple as becoming familiar with something that was previously unknown and through a deliberate process of inquiry that something ultimately coheres with ones life experience. However, in the process, the traveler should be prepared to appear as a stranger, particularly if what seems as natural in a new environment to an indigenous population is disorienting to the traveler, who must first find his bearings.

As a stranger, the traveler enters a destination but can never be of that destination. In the lead article, William Hutton introduces this theme in the persona of Dio Chrysostom, the ancient Greek orator who repeatedly invoked his travels. Here, we find how the dislocation and deracination of the traveling personas point of view discovers a standpoint from which he can cast a critical eye on the status quo and the world of the familiar. More than Dios immediate predecessors, Hutton shows that Dio gives a central place to travel as a device for framing narratives and arguments and for establishing his own persona and authority. Hutton further speculates that we should see Dios emphasis on travel as one of the motivating factors in the emergence of travel-themed literature in the centuries that followed. Maria Kostaridou employs the travel record, both travelogue and autobiography, of John F. Usko to raise similar questions of personal and national identity. A Prussian by birth who spent most of his formative years in the cosmopolitan Ottoman port city of Smyrna before settling in England in the early nineteenth century, Usko found himself caught within a political crisis that altered the balance of power in the Levant. Uskos story reveals the tension between his alliance to Great Britain and Europe and his personal identification with the culture of the East and the Ottoman world.

Vasiliki Galani-Moutafi draws from historical and ethnographic studies to provide insights on travel and tourism in Greece that focus on representations of and interactions with the other. She notes how certain classifications and boundaries in regard to this dynamic are derived from ideology and politics and ultimately the national Greek identity. Classical representations and images of the country and its people in the texts of travelers as early as the eighteenth century are the sources for understanding these identity ambiguities.