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Penn Humanities Forum on Travel
2006–2007
Topic Director: Karen Detlefsen
Assistant Professor of Philosophy, Penn
Travel is a phenomenon full of
contradictions. A major factor in world economy, it also stimulates
intense personal experience. It both fans the frantic pace of contemporary
existence and provides an escape from it into a world free of schedules
and deadlines. Travelers form a motley group. Chaucer's Canterbury
pilgrims, Marco Polo, Jack Kerouac, and Condoleezza Rice have all
spent significant time 'On the Road,' and many a plot has turned
on encounters between 'Strangers on a Train.' Wanderlust, pilgrimage,
quest, crusade, Grand Tour, exile, diaspora: the language of travel
is numinous with history, adventure, and struggle. Yet U. S. Customs
boils it all down to 'Business or pleasure'?—a perplexing choice
after the fruitful ambiguities of time spent away from home.
For millennia—at least since the epic of Gilgamesh—travel has been
understood as a unique opportunity for education and self-transformation.
The Grand Tour of the Enlightenment finds its echo still in the
study-abroad programs of our day. Travel is 'broadening,' the wisdom
goes, shaking us out of our most deeply held convictions, including
the conviction that our peculiar habits, beliefs, and values are
universal. 'Culture shock,' a by-product of travel, typically occurs
twice: once when we go abroad and again when we return to a home
our altered eyes hardly recognize.
Travel is a major determinant in the history of the arts. Not only
is the journey an archetypal theme in literature, photography, and
film, but the influence of foreign cultures on travelers has profoundly
altered the course of these arts, as well as music, architecture,
design, fashion, and cuisine. Would Cubism have existed if Picasso
had not happened upon African masks on a trip to Spain? Would Joyce's
Ulysses have been written without the storm-tossed wanderings of
Homer's Odyssey?
Travel creates encounters. Pidgin and creole are the linguistic
corollaries of displaced peoples; traffic languages, such as English,
are the linguistic corollaries of displaced power. Discrepancies
in wealth and power between the traveler and the host have spawned
such abuses as slavery and colonialism, and the treatment of people
as objects of curiosity, study, and exploitation has fostered racism.
The postcolonial concepts of hybridization and mongrelization reflect
travel's impact on ideology. Travel is a way of taking advantage
of cultural difference, for good or ill. In our day, eco- and moral-tourism
have arisen, but so have sex- and disaster tourism. Among the lasting
legacies of the advance of empire has been the eroticizing and exoticizing
of the Other, and certainly travel is still inextricably tied to
the idea of glamour. These problems affect not only the host population
but also the visitor, as we see in the special challenges faced
by women travelers.
Travel and science have significantly shaped each other, both inspired
by the spirit of discovery and exploration. Science has developed
ever faster, more comfortable modes of transport. Early journeys
led to increased knowledge of living beings and thus to new systems
of classification, ultimately to the theory of evolution itself.
The science of cartography both encouraged travel and benefited
from it. And science fiction has anticipated the possibility of
time travel, intergalactic exploration, and journeys into the inner
space of oceans and the earth's core.
Whatever else compelled him, Marco Polo traveled in order to trade,
and business travel is still thriving. Goods and capital travel,
as do the people who move them. But often their freedom in crossing
borders is not equal. Moreover, economically motivated travel is
not always a matter of choice for the nomad, the itinerant, the
traveling salesman, the war correspondent, the circus performer.
Control and choice change the very character of travel, distinguishing
the exile from the expatriate, the soldier from the soldier of fortune.
According to the United Nations, one of the fundamental human rights
is freedom of movement, but respecting that freedom in the post
9/11 world is one of the great challenges of contemporary government
and law enforcement.
The Penn Humanities Forum invites the academy and the community
to join us in this dialogue.
April, 2005
Karen Detlefsen, Topic Director
Wendy Steiner, Director, Penn Humanities Forum
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