Backpack Ambassadors by Richard Ivan Jobs

Author:Richard Ivan Jobs [Jobs, Richard Ivan]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: History, General, Europe, Modern, 20th Century, Travel, Political Science, International Relations
ISBN: 9780226439020
Google: L6-hDgAAQBAJ
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Published: 2017-05-23T00:28:12+00:00

Narrativity of Self and Rites of Passage

By the mid-twentieth century, vacation time had come to mean a time apart, a time away in a space where patterns of behavior were disrupted, where fantasy and desire could be expressed through a consumerist culture of distraction during a delimited, often quite brief, period of time.199 Independent youth travel was a step beyond a beach holiday or family vacation in duration, itinerary, and motivation. The prolonged improvisational nature of independent youth travel helped to emphasize the continuity of self amid the ongoing contextual flux of people and place. As Cees Nooteboom observed, “Traveling . . . is something you have to learn. It is a constant transaction with others in the course of which you are simultaneously alone.”200 The individual trajectory of arrivals and departures, of movements and passages, of circulations and flows, of encounters and exchanges, produced individualized narratives generated within a loose associative collective. Novelties, souvenirs, photographs, journals, diaries, postcards, and patches or national flags on backpacks all convey personal narratives while emphasizing the social position of the traveler. An individual’s vacation narratives serve to legitimize and make sense of experience and define the self.201 Such individual understandings of experience interact with the prescriptive narratives of novels, memoirs, guidebooks, journalism, films, and music that did so much to set the terms that had defined youth travel. Though backpackers might move toward or with the crowd, their experiences were mediated individually. Backpacking was a means of detachment and attachment; it created individuals as it created communities.

As Orsborn indicated in her 1972 article, telling stories about one’s travels, which might include sexual experiences, was common. For all the ways in which this form of travel was about the self, it was premised on sociability, on sharing the experience, however temporarily, with others. Very often this sharing with others took the form of autobiographical storytelling in hostels, in cars, on trains, or while waiting for transport, when one might share where one had been and what one had done, or make recommendations and issue warnings. Such storytelling is most directly demonstrated by the published work of Jack Kerouac, Nicolas Bouvier, Jan Cremer, Bernward Vesper, Philippe Gloaguen, Matteo Guarnaccia, Richard Neville, and Cees Nooteboom, American, Swiss, Dutch, German, French, Italian, and Anglo-Australian men. The lack of published female equivalents from the era speaks to how the story of independent youth travel, if western and transnational, was gendered male.

The narrativity of self has been studied among contemporary Israeli backpackers and in how they envision their treks—before, during, and after—as personal development negotiated within gendered norms. Among middle-class Israelis, backpacking to Asia or South America has become a self-imposed and socially sanctioned rite of passage following obligatory military service for both men and women. One of the main motivations for Israeli backpacking is to play with identity construction, to test and perhaps transform the self through personal experience, before returning home as an adult, ready for work and family.202 The completion of the journey is associated with the completion of the self.

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