Annals of Tourism Research, Vol. 27, No. 1, pp.

203±224, 2000
Pergamon # 1999 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved
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THE SELF AND THE OTHER

Traveler, Ethnographer, Tourist

Vasiliki Galani-Mouta®
University of the Aegean, Greece

Abstract: This paper, by presenting examples from the areas of ethnographic practice,
tourism discourse, and travel narrative, sheds light on the process of self-discovery and self-
representation which results from the gazing into the elsewhere and the Other. In this
regard, it highlights certain differences between modernity and postmodernity. A key
question asked is how similar or different are encounters of travelers, ethnographers and
tourists with the Other, their lived experience of travel and their representations of the self
and the Other. All three cross geographical and cultural boundaries but tourists and
travelers may not achieve the type of self-consciousness that anthropologists working within
a self-re¯exive paradigm attain when gazing at the Other. Keywords: self, other, ethnogra-
phy, tourism, travel, experience, modernity, postmodernity. # 1999 Elsevier Science Ltd. All
rights reserved.

Re Âsume Â: Le moi et l'autre: voyageur, ethnographe, touriste. Cet article, en preÂsentant des
exemples des domaines de pratique ethnographique, de discours de tourisme et de narration
de voyage, Âeclaire le processus de la deÂcouverte et de la repreÂsentation de soi-meÃme qui
reÂsulte de la contemplation de l'ailleurs et de l'autre. A Á cet reÂgard, l'article souligne
certaines diffeÂrences entre modernite et postmoderniteÂ. On pose une question cleÂ: si les
rencontres des voyageurs, des ethnographes et des touristes avec l'autre, ainsi que leurs
expeÂriences veÂcues des voyages et leurs repreÂsentations du moi et de l'autre, sont similaires
ou diffeÂrentes. Tous les trois traversent des frontieÁres geÂographiques et culturelles, mais il
est possible que les touristes et les voyageurs n'atteignent pas le meÃme type de conscience
de soi que les anthropologues qui travaillent en partant d'un paradigme de re¯exion de soi
et en regardant vers l'autre. Mots-cle Âs: le moi, l'autre, ethnographie, tourisme, voyage, ex-
peÂrience, moderniteÂ, postmoderniteÂ. # 1999 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.

INTRODUCTION
This paper presents examples from the areas of travel narrative,
ethnographic practices, and tourism discourse in order to shed light
on the process of self-discovery and self-representation which results
from the gazing into the elsewhere and the Other. It asks how simi-
lar or dissimilar are encounters of such groups as ethnographers,
travelers and tourists with the so-called Other in terms of how they
live their experience of travel and how they create representations

Vasiliki Galani-Mouta® is Assistant Professor in the Department of Social Anthropology,

University of the Aegean (Karantoni 17, Mytilene 81100, Greece. Email < v.mouta®@sa.ae-
gean.gr >). She has done anthropological research on the impact of tourism on marriage,
dowry, and women's status in a community of the Aegean island of Samos. Her work has
appeared in the Journal of Modern Greek Studies.

203
204 SELF AND OTHER

of themselves and the Other. All three journey beyond their geo-
graphical and cultural boundaries but the practices and images of
tourists and travelers suggest that they do not necessarily achieve
the type of self-consciousness attained by anthropologists who work
within a self-re¯exive paradigm as they gaze at the Other.
Passing through different locations and crossing personal and cul-
tural boundaries, explorers, missionaries, colonial of®cers, military
personnel, migrants, emigrants, exiles, domestic servants, anthro-
pologists, and tourists have their own travel histories. Yet, despite
certain exceptions, especially in the area of pilgrimage, the status of
traveler has been assigned predominantly to the economically well-
off, white, European male who has embarked on voyages motivated
by heroic, educational, scienti®c, and recreational purposes. In the
Western discourse, the spatial practices of migrant workers, dom-
estic servants, and refugees have not quali®ed as travel for reasons
related to race and class (Clifford 1997:32±33). Among the non-
whites and the white lower class men and women, the changing of
localities has been treated as denoting a basically involuntary sort
of displacement; an experience marked by dependence and suppo-
sedly lacking in adventure, learning, exploring, and self-indulgence.
The experiences of individuals from such social categories have
been neglected or misunderstood because they have not produced
diaries, books, travelogues nor been represented adequately in the
literature of the social sciences. Yet, regardless of how it is con-
ceived, travel has historically involved both the materially privileged
and the oppressed; what is at issue are the different cultural, politi-
cal, and economic compulsions that move people away from home.
In the history of the Western world there have been many
reasons why people traveled: searching for a religious experience
through pilgrimage, seeking adventure as well as economic and
social advancementÐboth in the context of colonial expansion and
emigrationÐfor reasons related to the expansion of commerce or
the practice of certain trades, or for seeking refuge, in exile, from
persecution. Along with adventurers and wanderers, early travelers
have been characterized as proto-anthropologists and proto-tourists
(Crick 1985:76) for reasons concerning the prehistory and the early
history of anthropology and also because of the relation linking the
anthropologist to the tourist. They both share common origins,
which can be traced to the explorer, the missionary, the merchant,
and the traveler. Comparing the latter, the anthropologist, and the
tourist on the basis of the diverse qualities of their experiences, it is
possible to highlight the conditions under which the journey may or
may not allow for the challenge of one's distinctions between self
and Other. This paper focuses on the similarities and differences
among the three with reference to the lived experience of travel,
the encounter with the Other, the relationship of self to the latter,
and the production (presentation) of the self in the context of travel
discourse.
It can be argued that the journey has the potential to facilitate a
re-setting of boundaries as the traveling self, besides moving from
 VASILIKI GALANI-MOUTAFI 205

one place to another, may embark in an additional journeying prac-

tice, having constantly to negotiate between the familiar and the
unknown, between a here, a there, and an elsewhere (Minh-ha
1994:9). Furthermore, considering that travelers can acquire experi-
ences and undergo transformations, the journey may be seen as a
type of passage in time. The interlocking dimensions of time and
space make the journey a potent metaphor that symbolizes the sim-
ultaneous discovery of self and the Other. It is precisely this ca-
pacity for mirroring the inner and the outer dimensions that makes
possible the ``inward voyage'', whereby a movement through geo-
graphical space is transformed into an analogue for the process of
introspection. As Clifford states, ``a journey makes sense as a com-
ing to consciousness'' (1988:167). Through their descriptions which
structure and give meaning to their experiences in the process of
narration, travelers can re¯ect upon their journeys in ways that pro-
duce images of self and identity (Neuman 1992:177±178). This
paper presents examples from the areas of travel, ethnography, and
tourism, in an effort to shed light on the narrations of the self
which give rise to identities.
The issue of people going places is important because it relates to
notions of boundary, inside and outside, distance and difference, all
of which enter into the construction and renegotiation of the self. It
is commonplace that identities are constructed in relation to differ-
ence and not outside of it. That is, only in the context of the re-
lation with the OtherÐconcerning what it is not or what it
precisely lacksÐcan ``identity'' be produced and conceptualized
(Butler 1993; Derrida 1981; Laclau 1990). In fact, to speak in psy-
choanalytic terms, and on the basis of Lacan's problematic, the self
is constructed through the image of the Other. One reaches a self-
realization in view of that from whom he/she differs. Identity is con-
structed in a way which is analogous to languageÐas is, according
to Lacan, the unconsciousÐin that, the assignment of meaning
takes place within relations of similarity and difference between the
words of a language code. Philosophers of language, like Derrida,
argue that the speaker cannot produce a ®rm and unchanging
meaningÐincluding the meaning of identityÐbecause, by its
nature, conceptualization is something changeable: it seeks stability
and integration (of identity) but it is continuously ruptured and
transformed (because of the difference). Overall, the process of
identity construction is subject to the ``game'' of difference and pre-
supposes the drawing of symbolic boundaries.

TRAVEL IN THE MODERN AND POSTMODERN AGE

In the age of modernity, travel practices, and the changes they
underwent can be traced in various contexts: in anthropology's rep-
resentations of the exotic and the primitive prior to the emergence
of the on-the-ground professional researcher; in the accounts writ-
ten by travelers visiting areas of the Mediterranean (such as
Greece) during the Victorian era; in the images of destination
206 SELF AND OTHER

places and of the traveling self arising from mass tourism; and in
the information disclosed by ethnographies about the anthropolo-
gist's journeys and their quality of exploration.

Victorian Travel and Anthropological Evolutionism

The construction of otherness and the formation of the self com-
prise the quintessential of anthropological practice, which centers
on ®eldwork. In the world of ®eldwork, ethnography is the product
of the encounterÐinterpersonal and interculturalÐwith the Other.
However, as a scienti®c ®eld which was built upon the historically
constructed distinction between the West and the non-Western
world, anthropology has been primarily the study of the non-
Western Other by the Western self. Upon its establishment, in the
late 19th century, anthropology sought to cover the space of the
``savage'', within a wider thematic ®eld, taking on a role which until
then had been played by philosophy, literature, and the written
works of Victorian travelers and missionaries. Richard Burton,
David Livingstone, and Henry Stanley were a few of those promi-
nent authors who represented the Victorian travel book. For
example, Livingstone's popular work Missionary Travels and Researches
in South Africa (1857) was largely devoted to a 4-year period wander-
ing in southern Africa. Anthropology's early attempt to represent
the primitive Other was later taken over largely by the mass media
and tourism advertising, which sought to conquer the ethnographic
present, a discursive space which was lost to colonialism and aban-
doned by ethnography.
Within the Western tradition of travel, explorers, missionaries,
colonial of®cers, and natural scienti®c researchers preceded the
emergence of the on-the-ground anthropological professional.
However, many of these produced works that in¯uenced the think-
ing of the armchair anthropologists in the latter part of the last
century. Victorian travelers and Christian missionaries were non-
professional observers who journeyed to distant lands not only for
reasons imposed by various activities (such as commercial ones) but
also to acquire the experience of ®rst hand encounters with people
in unknown places. This experience has a de®nite romantic dimen-
sion from both a historical and a sentimental perspective. In the
tradition of these non-professional observers belonged the producers
of the ®rst ethnographic accounts which came to be used by metro-
politan scholars like Edward Tylor, Lewis Morgan, James Frazer,
and others.
The ``of®cial'' (academic) audience addressed by many of that
period's writers of ethnographic studies (as, i.e., the missionaries
Robert Moffat, David Livingstone, and Henry Callaway) represent
the ``main trend'' of evolutionism that coincides with the establish-
ment of anthropology as a scienti®c ®eld (Thornton 1983:504).
Regarding the method, there prevailed a division of labor between
the producers of information (the ``on site'' observers) and the
metropolitan analysts. The former presented their written accounts
 VASILIKI GALANI-MOUTAFI 207

as ``scienti®c'' because they addressed scholars in the academic

world. Thus, while the content of their texts was a product of the
unique and non-reproduceable experience of observation and
encounter with the Other, it was nevertheless presented as part of a
universal and apparently objective ``science''. In this way, ethnogra-
phy became academic. What was not revealed were the conditions
under which each ethnography was created, particularly, the invol-
vement and attitudeÐintersubjective, moral and politicalÐof its
writer (Thornton 1983:517).
In Victorian Europe, the morally informed anxieties of the mis-
sionaries and the colonialists found a perfect ®t next to evolution-
ism, which thrived during the 19th century and provided the logic
for a moral classi®cation of society. Yet, for the theologians and the
supporters of Darwinism, more important proved the non-scienti®c,
moral and atemporal classi®cation that was implied by the bible or
social Darwinism, and which not only provided the Europeans with
an identity but justi®ed their actions as well. For the Western intel-
lectuals of the time, the Other provided evidence of a living speci-
men with all the defects of a distant past, which the course of
evolution had cured in Western societies (Tyler 1986:127±128). The
armchair anthropologists viewed the primitive and without ``his-
tory'' Other through the lens of a unilineal model that predicated
the classi®cation of societies along a hierarchical scale de®ned in
terms of time and morality (McGrane 1989:93). Primitive societies
were used as a time machine through which one could travel back
to the Western world's distant past and return, thereby, to the
childhood age of humanity. Thus, in anthropological evolutionism,
the Other was encountered both through representatives and out-
side of time. Furthermore, the understanding of otherness was not
the result of travel but, rather, travel itself presupposed an already
constructed image of the Other (Fabian 1983:121). Finally, in the
18th century and during the period of anthropological evolutionism,
travel also led to the appropriation and collection of the Other. Of
course, the collecting activities and this appropriation were not lim-
ited to the primitive world since they also prevailed in the area of
the Mediterranean associated with classical antiquity. In this case,
what is particularly interesting is the way travelers in the past
approached antiquity in order to locate the not-so-distant Others,
their ancestors.

The World of Greek Classical Antiquity

Within the Western European traveling tradition, the
Mediterranean region served as a mirror into which the traveler
could seek his/her own roots, even though it was also marked off by
a distinctive otherness. Regarding Greece, the ambiguity of its sta-
tus, re¯ected in the views of Europeans writing travel accounts in
the 19th century, stemmed from its location ``on the margins'' of
Europe (Herzfeld 1987). The narrative accounts of many of the tra-
velers who visited Greece during the 18th and 19th centuries pre-
208 SELF AND OTHER

sent a highly ambiguous conception of the distinction between the

``familiar'' and the ``foreign'', reveal a possessive obsession with
archaeological treasures, and shed light on the self-Other relation,
showing how the journey can facilitate self-understanding and the
construction of identity. This allowed most of these travelers to link
the academic (classical) hellenism with its places of origin and, by
abolishing time, to experience in the present the grandeur of an
imagined past. This type of attitude is captured in the following pas-
sage from the writings of the French diplomat Marie-Gabriel de
Choiseul-Gouf®er who traveled to Greece in the latter part of the
18th century:
When I was leaving Paris to visit Greece, I only wanted to satisfy
the passion of my youth for the most celebrated places of anti-
quity . . . I was tasting in advance the pleasure of going over this
beautiful and illustrious region, a Homer and a Herodotus in
hand, of feeling more vividly the rich beauties depicted in the
Poet's images (Augustinos 1994:163).
Marking and describing various phenomena which he encounters in
his journey, the traveler can present a much more encompassing
picture of the self than any autobiography. Thus, for example, in his
work Itineraire de Paris Áa Jerusalem et de Jerusalem Áa Paris (1811), which
describes a 10-month voyage that took him around the shores of the
Mediterranean, Francois Chateaubriand writes that he ``. . . was
going to visit the Parthenon and Jerusalem as an offspring of
Pindus and a crusader of Jerusalem'' (Augustinos 1994:185). In this
particular work, the writer's identity is constructed through a
dynamic relationship between the external world and the inner self
in which one stimulated the other. In his attempt to portray the
self, Chateaubriand used the journey as a metaphor, a source of
symbols imprinted on the landscape, that stirred in memory es-
pecially meaningful legendary and historical events. He saw his voy-
age to the East in terms of representations of pilgrimages and
missions of his compatriots and lived mentally their passion and
belief. Referring to his visit to the Holy Places, he wrote:
I was going to touch these shores which the Godefrois, the
Richards, the Joinvilles, and the Cousis had visited like me.
Obscure pilgrim that I am, will I dare to trample a soil conse-
crated by so many illustrious pilgrims? At least I too have faith
and honor: and by virtue of these qualities I would still be recog-
nized by the ancient crusaders (Augustinos 1994:216).
Of course, Chateaubriand was not a religious pilgrim, but a literary
one, and his voyage to the Orient was above all a personal explora-
tion. It was a more inward and less external adventure as well as a
negation of the present and an immersion into a utopia of the past.
He sought a restitution of the past in his own consciousness and
memory and, in this effort, the physical world provided for him the
necessary medium for self-expansion. For this reason,
Chateaubriand's focal points were mainly the historical sites and
monuments that had engraved on them the marks of the past,
 VASILIKI GALANI-MOUTAFI 209

while the moden Greeks entered only in the periphery of his inter-
ests. From works such as that of Chateaubriand it can deduced that
part of what the voyage promised in the past was the possibility for
the traveler to live and develop self-awareness in new ways.
In general, the narratives of travelers who visited Greece prior to
the advent of mass tourism, produced images of the self that reveal
endurance, resistance, perseverance but also haughtiness, arro-
gance, and egocentrism as well as a possessive passion for the
achaeological treasures. In these accounts one also notes a reversal
of the basic contrast ``familiar±foreign''. The world of antiquity was
not the unknown but the familiar, which led the traveler to return
to his youth. Thus, antiquity was revealed as one's spiritual home-
land, the past which one carried within himself/herself. But the re-
lationship between present and past was also reversed. The
immersion into the memory of the past required the non-recog-
nition of the present, especially since it was a present that could not
be identi®ed with the ``us''. For example, Johann Bachofen, in his
Greek Voyage, a work published in 1851 and imbued with romanti-
cism, saw a continuity with ancient Greece in certain unconsciously
inherited characteristics which the modern Greeks exhibited; at the
same time, however, he saw a break with the ancient past both in
the way of thinking and in the consciousness of modern Greeks
(Andonopoulou 1997:35±36). The shocking antithesis between the
idea and the reality of Greece had also disillusioned Gouf®er, who
reported to have obtained some pleasure only from the contempla-
tion of scenes reminiscent of antiquity. A gathering of old men on
the island of Siphnos eagerly asking the foreign visitors for news of
the outside world evoked for Gouf®er scenes of antiquity:
I thought I was transported to the fair days of Greece; these porti-
coes, this popular assembly of old men to whom one listened with
respectful silence, their faces, their clothes, their language, every-
thing reminded me of Athens or Corinth (Augustinos 1994:166).

The above examples suggest that the traveler recognized a (Greek)

present only in those cases where he/she did not see threads of con-
tinuity in the relationship between ancient and modern Greece;
that present, he/she incorporated it in the category of ``foreign'' (as
unpredictable, odd and undesirable) and maintained it at a distance
from the category ``us''. It could be argued that the travel narrative
exposes the writer to the Other and allows, thereby, for the discov-
ery of the self; thus, it informs primarily about the traveling hero
rather than about those he encounters. The latter appear only
through the writer's experienceÐnot as individuals in and of them-
selves. As for the term ``foreign'', its meaning is associated with the
construction of boundaries and it is mobilized for purposes of exclu-
sion. The characterization ``foreign'' is a way of excluding the Other
from whatever one wishes to safeguard as his/her ownÐa way of
de®ning one's own self. By the 20th century, the ``foreign'' is con-
structed and projected by the international communication and
advertising media in order to be availed to tourists as a commodity.
210 SELF AND OTHER

Tourist Travel
The late 19th century is considered the period when travel
declined, with the rise of mass tourism; it is the period when the
processes of democratization and commercialization of tourism
began (Boorstin 1964). In the context of the conceptual distinction
established in the literature between travel and tourism, the tourist
is presented as unadventurous and lacking initiative and discrimi-
nation, whereas the traveler is associated with the values of discern-
ment, respect, and taste. While travel is seen as a resource in the
endeavor of self-realization, tourism is considered to actually con-
®rm one's view of the world rather than transforming it (Rojek
1993:175). Undoubtedly, most tourists visiting Greece today do not
combine, in their experiences, tourism and culture, as was the case
for travelers in past centuries. Such tourists are bent on having fun
and do not ``read'' the contemporary Greeks' cultural ways through
the lens of Western classical imagery. As they basically seek the
aesthetically appealing, and turn away from ``serious'' images, tour-
ists end up with a conception of Greece that is not so much associ-
ated with a classical past but with the stimulation of the senses.
The separation of popular pleasure from high culture is a character-
istic of modernity, which has tended to insist on distinct social prac-
tices and rules of divisionÐsuch as between public and private life,
home and abroad, art and life (Rojek and Urry 1997:3). Given that
the tourist gaze is constructed through signs, the portrait of modern
Greece in the tourist literature is a mixture of sandy beaches, bot-
tles of retsina (resinated wine) and ouzo (alcholic drink), bouzouki
(sort of mandoline) players and dancers of syrtaki (type of dance),
and the symbol of the Parthenon. This type of gaze, ``authorized''
mainly by the discourse of play and pleasure, can be contrasted to
the gaze of travelers like Chateaubriand, which was embedded in
the discourse of education (the latter meant to yield a heightened
experience of self-realization).
It could also be argued, following Urry (1990:86±87), that the
Victorian traveler to Greece represented the ``romantic'' gaze
whose ``solitary'' appreciation of the ancient sites and the magni®-
cent landscapes required cultural capital, whereas the mass tourist
visiting the country today represents the ``collective'' tourist gaze.
The latter is oriented towards popular pleasures, discourages an eli-
tist, private-type of contemplation, and aims at high levels of popu-
lar participation. It is exemplary of postmodern culture's tendency
to affect the audience through its immediate, pleasure-inducing
impact, and not through formal aesthetic properties. It is also inter-
esting that some of the signs making up Greece's tourism image
are often used by non-tourist discourses as well; they serve the pur-
pose of marketing programs or commodities which are generated
outside Greece but are either located or carried out within the
country. Thus, information supplied through the web page of the
Internet on an American-sponsored College Semester Abroad pro-
gram in Greece begins with the following passage:
 VASILIKI GALANI-MOUTAFI 211

GreeceÐor Hellas as it has been known since ancient timesÐis a

spectacular country that speaks to all of our senses. Ancient tem-
ples built overlooking the clear-blue waters of the Aegean Sea . . .
Feta (white cheese) and tomatoes draped with pure olive oil . . .
Bouzoukis, violins, and lyres accompanying dancers in the air . . .
Wild goats perched on top of rugged mountains. These are only a
few of the precious images from the unique cultural and natural
landscape of the islands of Greece (http://www.worldlearning.org/
csa/europe/greece_pom.html)
The particular program exempli®es the breakdown of the boundary
between education and tourism, spheres of activity which have been
kept distinct under the culture of modernity. The idea behind the
program's philosophy and marketing rhetoric is that education (and
the type of ``work'' it entails) can take place in non-conventional set-
tings and situations (while traveling and living with host families in
a foreign country), and that it can also allow for ``leisurely'' experi-
ences; this underlying orientation provides evidence of the de-differ-
entiation of spaces and functions, one of the key characteristics of
postmodernity (Rojek 1993:188).
Tourists embark on their journeys with already formed images,
largely the product of popular cultural representations and of tour-
istic discourse; they also expect to be entertained and exposed to
performances whichÐwithout violating their aestheticsÐare differ-
ent from those of their familiar world. A place is transformed into a
tourism site through a system of symbolic and structural processes
which follow the direction marked by the dominant discourse. The
latter in¯uences the way tourists ``read'', ``appropriate'', and
``exploit'' the areas they visit. For a place to be considered suitable
for aesthetic appropriation, it must be distinguished from everyday
life on account of its natural, historical, or cultural extraordinari-
ness. As the dominant narration exerts a control over such a place,
it turns it into a tourist object. What follows is an example of how
the tourist industry presents sights, and how advertising seeks to
entice tourists with evocations of `'exotic'' worlds. This passage,
obtained from a Greek travel magazine, introduces a narrative
which presents Cuba under the caption ``Cuba, cigars, rum, and sur-
realism''.
It [Cuba] believes deeply in Fidel Castro and takes steps towards
economic reform. It dreams and makes you dream. Between its
aged past, which is prevalent everywhere, and its thirst for life, it
seduces you with a cocktail of rhumba rhythms and salsa. With
bicycles running everywhereÐdue to a shortage of gasolineÐand
its fascinating religious rituals which captivate you, the Cuba of
Che Guevara and Hemingway gives lessons in courage and hope
(Cosmos Travel 1996).
In the presentation, the country's distinctive otherness is marked
®rst of all by a key national symbol, its leader Castro, whose name
conjures up images of resistance, heroism, and unsurpassable
endurance. The tourist is then enticed with evocations of a place
that offers what is missing from one's ordinary/everyday existence
212 SELF AND OTHER

(at ``home'')Ðthe dream. Dreaming amounts to an imaginative

journey which only the unfamiliar, the ``alien'', can bring about.
The references to rhumba and salsa, which also play an important
role in the dreaming, evoke a stimulation of the senses either in
ways foreign to one's sociocultural routine or at a level higher than
the ordinary. As for the revolutionary ®gure, Che Guevara, and the
famous American novelist, Hemingway, they are used in an attempt
to link Cuba to world symbols that embody the unique or the ideal
in thought and action. Further, the religious rituals are mentioned
because of an association with Latin exuberance, color, sensuality,
and mysticism.
In the same magazine, a presentation of the Aegean island of Kos
begins with the title ``From the Philosophy of Hippocrates to Night
Entertainment''. It reads:
As the ship enters the harbor, you are welcomed by the magni®-
cent castle of the Knights of Saint John, which predisposes you for
the Italian taste of the island's architecture . . . Hippocrates gives
you a tour of the Asclepium, and initiates you into the secrets of
herbs. And you, yourself, travel, on a bicycle, from the past to the
present and plot your personal itinerary to discover the place that
was declared ``City of Europe'' for ``96'' (Cosmos Travel 1996:126±
127).
In this passage, the advertising discourse seeks to ``exoticize'' an
Aegean island and make it ``distant'', symbolically, for Greek tour-
ists. This is accomplished through references to both the Castle's
bearing architectural traces of an Italian past, and to the presence
of Hippocrates who leads the tourist to nature's ``mysteries''. The
®rst reference emphasizes the island's history while the second
identi®es the place with practices imbued with the qualities of
myth. Indeed, in urging the tourist to pass from the past to the pre-
sent, the narrative assigns to this person the status of time traveler
who goes somewhere ``historic''. But the marketing strategy does
not end here. The impression created is that present-day Kos is
equally important as ancient (mythical) Kos because it meets the
standards of a powerful ``foreign'' entity, the European Union. The
association with Europe is not only meant to be ¯attering but also
to create high expectations in comparison with what one is used to
at ``home''.
Despite the claims made often by the advertising industry that
travel has the capacity to transform the tourist's self (Bruner
1991:241±242), the experience cannot be interpreted in terms of the
quest for authenticity (MacCannell 1989). This is partly because tel-
evisual culture blurs the distinction between the ordinary and the
extraordinary. Representational codesÐsigns, images and sym-
bolsÐrooted in televisual culture, make a sight accessible in every-
day life. In speaking of the process of indexing of representations,
Rojek (1997:70±71) refers to tourist perceptions drawing on a series
of visual, textual and symbolic representations to the original object
(in guide books, movies, television shows, and travelers' tales). The
concept of indexing refers to a range of representations. Therefore,
 VASILIKI GALANI-MOUTAFI 213

tourist perceptions consist of a mixture of elements. Because such

elements draw on representations which appear largely in movies
and television shows, the sights are often anti-climatic experiences
(in the sense that one feels that his/her expectations are not met).
Further, sights have no single or original meanings, since one might
frame the sight by indexing cultural items from cinema, television,
and literary works. Because electronically derived images are so
powerful in framing one's perception of a place, the tourist does not
resist this version of reality. The indexing of representations
involved in perceptions means that the quest for authenticity cannot
serve as a force of motivation for tourists. Rojek argues that the
pleasure and excitement felt by them while traveling is in part as-
sociated with the switching of routines (1997:55±56). It is the con-
stant need for new distractions, rather than the authenticity of
sights, that prompts tourists to travel.

Ethnographic Travel
Unlike tourism, which emphasizes mainly the visual dimension of
the intercultural encounter, ethnography relies mostly on its discur-
sive side. If the tourist who travels in groups tends to surrender the
control of his/her journey to others, the ethnographer is in constant
struggle to attain a deep insight into another culture. Given
Dubisch's argument (1995:33) that anthropologists experience
things during their research journeys that do not occur at homeÐ
and this, by implication, differentiates them from touristsÐwhat
new awareness of himself/herself can the anthropologist attain
because of ethnographic travel? Malinowski's travel practice in the
20s marked the onset of a new paradigm of knowledge which
requires the active engagement of the anthropologist in the society
of the Other. In this sense, ethnographic travel came to be ident-
i®ed with a new form of exploration, ®eldwork, which has become
the critical point in the research process and in the anthropologist's
career. Malinowski's pioneering example has shown that ethno-
graphic research reveals hidden or unknown aspects of the investi-
gator him/herself and, the reverse, that autobiography can shed
light on ethnography (Stocking 1983); in other words, ®eldwork con-
nects an important personal experience with a general ®eld of
knowledge (Hastrup 1992). To understand the distinct quality of
exploration that ethnographic travel entails, one must examine how
the relationship with the Other is experienced and revealed, how
experience is transformed into authority in the ethnographic text,
and how the anthropologist, as writer, constructs the self and the
Other.
The ethnographies of the 20s and 30s share many similarities
with travel writing. This is evident in the emphasis attributed by
the writer to his/her journey to another place to experience the
Other, as well as in the role of travel in romantic imagination. In
his work Argonauts of the Western Paci®c (1922), Malinowski invites the
reader to join him on a journey which would reveal to him/her the
214 SELF AND OTHER

native's adventures in the Melanesian archipelago. This work can

be seen as a story of adventure involved in travel, but also as an
allegorical journey from the European macrocosm to the microcosm
of the Trobrianders. The Argonauts could be characterized as a meta-
phorical journey into human nature, a heroic attempt of immersion
into another culture with the prospect of achieving a deeper under-
standing of human nature (Thornton 1985:8).
In dealing with the experience of travel, Malinowski approached
the ideal of the participant observer by introducing a self-image de-
riving from the annals of travel writing. In the Argonauts' famous
opening lines, he writes:
Imagine yourself suddenly set down surrounded by your gear,
alone on a tropical beach close to a native village, while the launch
or dinghy which has brought you sails away out of sight (1922:4).

The image of the castaway is suggestive of a utopian model for the

ethnographer, considering that castaways, whose condition is
characterized by innocence, approach in certain ways the ideal of
participant observer. Many classical ethnographies include the
stereotypical ``myth of encounter'' which explains how the ethnogra-
pher was elevated to the status of ``recognized'' participant obser-
ver. Such a myth usually begins by depicting the ethnographer's
initial ignorance, given that he/she has no contacts, ®nds himself/
herself in a state of confusion, and is inevitably led to misinterpreta-
tions. In other words, metaphorically, his/her situation can be por-
trayed as a childlike state. With time, however, the confusion and
innocence are replaced by a mature, sound, and infallible knowl-
edge. Such ``transformative'' myths create the impression of a deep
immersion in the local societyÐand, consequently, an insight from
withinÐwhich allows the writer to appear in the rest of his ethno-
graphic work as a well informed interpreter and representative of
the society he/she has studied (Clifford 1988:39±40).
Modern ethnography's textual production has been in¯uenced lar-
gely by the positivist history of social anthropology, which extolled
the neutral, non-personal, and scienti®c character of the endeavor.
As a result, it has tended to reveal the ``personal'' only to the extent
that the researcher's experience could function as a unifying source
of authority. In the past, anthropologists would introduce the ®rst
person, I, in key points of their ethnographic monographs, in order
to simply give validity to their work and to their role as interpreters
(Clifford 1986; Pratt 1986; Rosaldo 1986); otherwise, the self was
absent from their written works. Furthermore, in the descriptions of
arrivals, the I did not derive as much from the practice of ®eldwork
as from the Western tradition of travel writing. The separation of
the self and personal narratives from ``objective'' observations and
descriptions was dictated by the long established tradition in
Western social sciences of assigning the personal (emotional) to the
area of the ``just anecdote'' or the trivial (Okely 1992:6). However,
despite the curbing of autobiographic narratives, the anthropologi-
cal self often found escape either in literature, where it was trans-
 VASILIKI GALANI-MOUTAFI 215

formed into a product of imagination, or in the secret information

of diaries.
The diary was used by Malinowski as a space where the self could
be separated from the aspiring scientist and be able to express its
anxiety, anger, confusion, and even its most secret fantasies. It was
for this reason that its publication caused serious objections con-
cerning anthropology's public image. Yet, the everyday and the
inter-subjective condition, in conjunction with the revelation of the
personal, comprise those exact elements that give special value to
Malinowski's diary (A Diary in the Strict Sense of the Term, 1967). The
detailed examination of both the Diary and the Argonauts, as
examples of writing, allows one to understand that the personal/
emotional and the theoretical cannot be easily separated from each
other nor from the entire cognitive/intellectual process. As Clifford
(1988:102±104) argues, the writing of ethnography, and particularly
the construction of the myth of culture, functioned for Malinowski
as a way of attaining the unity of the self. In his ethnographic
works, the constructed wholes of self and cultureÐthe latter result-
ing from the functionalist analytical approachÐcan be viewed as
interdependent allegories of identity.
In the decades of the 60s and 70s a series of ethnographic works
were published which examined the anthropologist's relationship to
his/her own self as participant observer and interpreter. Yet, the
personal descriptions associated with ®eldwork were usually incor-
porated in volumes separate from those of the ``formal'' ethnogra-
phies. This separation reveals a dual approach consisting of public/
private, objective/subjective spheres of experience. Colin Turnbull,
for example, ®rst published a descriptive account (1961), written in
the ®rst person, of his ®eldwork among the Pygmies of the Congo,
and published 5 years later on the same theme, his more ``objec-
tive'' monograph (1965). Things started to change in the 80s, with
the emergence of narrative ethnography which focused on the eth-
nographic dialogue or the encounter with the cultural Other. It also
became understood that the researcher is not a politically impartial
observer nor a stable, monolithic, or uni®ed self but a product of a
historical period, of a speci®c analytical perspective within the ®eld,
and of his/her personal experiences.
Both anthropology and tourism have produced representations of
the Other which provided a context for the mediation of the experi-
ence of modernity. Symbolizing the elsewhere and the exotic, the
Other has functioned as a vehicle that allowed for an inverse image
of home, place, self, and power. As it has been argued, the concerns
and interests that spurred travel during the modern age are to be
located in the discursive space created by the quest for and impo-
sition of control and order. In the process of the ``appropriation'' of
the Other, anthropological and travel practices have tended to con-
®rm rather than question already established images of the self and
the Other. This issue touches on the question of self-identity, which
cannot be understood unless related to particular power structures
within speci®c historical contexts. For anthropologists, the task of
216 SELF AND OTHER

decoding diverse cultural realities has led them to producing a sup-

posedly ``real'' view of the Other, while assigning people's own ideo-
logical models to the realm of representation; this authoritative
vantage point is especially revealing of the political function of the
anthropologist's professional identity. It also aligns directly with
anthropology's concern with becoming an objective ``science'' which
left practically no possibilities for acknowledging the researcher's
travel experience as part and parcel of his/her interpretative endea-
vor. This same concern prevented anthropologists from considering
the issue of similarities between themselves and tourists.
In the case of tourism, its course of development in the age of
modernity shows an eroding of the monopolistic, elitist ``reading'' of
diverse cultural landscapes. This qualitative transformation is one
reason tourism has quali®ed as a predecessor to postmodernism.
The postmodern age is marked by the spread of images and symbols
and, with the mass media facilitating the viewing of typical objects
by the tourist gaze, tourism has entered into every home. The
actual expression of the ``traditional'' distinctiveness of the tourist
practice and its separation from the rest of society is no longer a
likelihood, and this development has opened the way for the ``cul-
turalization'' of tourist practices. Urry's argument (1990) concern-
ing tourism in the postmodern age is that the sign comprises a
substitute of the gaze and the latter cannot exist without the for-
mer. The signs which invoke the idea of travel are today mass pro-
duced by the culture industry, as a result of the decline of internal
distinctions between the concepts of home and abroad, work and
travel, authentic and contrived; this development re¯ects, in turn, a
popular (mass) domination of representations.

Travel in Postmodernity
The written works of an ethnographer, an author-traveler, and a
poetess may now be examined in order to look for stories of self-
presentation and self-transformation they might contain. The fact
that, beyond gazing, these three travelers have sought close contact
and interaction with the landscapes and the cultures they visited,
constitutes a common ground for comparing the stories of the self
they narrate. Furthermore, a comparison of the spatial and textual
practices of ``independent'' travel with those of ethnography can
shed light on the traveler-ethnographer relationship.
Unlike in the past when the habitus of ®eldwork was de®ned
against that of travel, today, for reasons related to the postmodern
concern with the dissolving of boundariesÐbetween the personal
and the professional, self and other, theory and experienceÐthe
boundary between literary travel and academic ®eldwork, as well as
between academic analysis and travel narrative, is renegotiated. It
is acknowledged that both travel and ®eldwork-as-travel have had to
grapple with many similar problems like strangeness, privilege, mis-
comprehension, and stereotyping. Overall, as the postmodern
worldÐbecause of travel and mobilityÐis undergoing a continuous
 VASILIKI GALANI-MOUTAFI 217

readjustment of cultural geographies, the formerly stable distinc-

tions between the familiar and the foreign, the self and Other, as
well as the conventional views about the ``®eld'' where anthropologi-
cal research takes place, have been undermined. A reaction to these
conditions is an increasing reorientation of the ethnographer's gaze
towards the self, as the appropriate place for interpreting cultural
experience.
Recognizing ®eld research as an ethnographic journey of self-dis-
covery, Dubisch reports on the identities she carried into the ®eld,
on how her research came about, what she learned about herself,
and if her experience of ®eldwork colored the way she has come to
view the world. Her work, In a Different Place: Pilgrimage, Gender, and
Politics at a Greek Island Shrine (1995), is a good example of postmo-
dern re¯exivity. Having done her original ®eldwork on the Aegean
island of Tinos in 1969±70, Dubisch had returned to do research on
the island's popular shrine in the summer of 1986. At that time, a
serious back problem, causing her psychic and physical pain,
enabled her to understand why suffering led people to seek healing
at the shrine (1995:33). Behind this understanding lies the self-
re¯exive process Dubisch underwent in the context of experiencing
her ®eldwork. Through the pilgrims, she became conscious of her
own suffering in ways that enabled her to attain a new awareness of
herself. By re¯ecting back on her ®rst journey to the ®eld and her
crossing of cultural boundaries, Dubisch also challenged several pre-
vious assumptions that had informed her concerns and emotional
responses (1995:216±217). Insofar as a re¯exive anthropology has
come to critique the emotional/objective boundary and accept the
®eldwork's functioning as an inner journey, the anthropologist is
obliged to recognize his/her experience as well as the emotional re-
sponses to what he/she experiences (Rosaldo 1989). Dubisch's
inward journey encompassed an understanding of her previously
negative attitude toward Orthodox worship and, hence, it became
constitutive of a process of self-search and self-awareness.
Dubisch discusses several moments, during ®eldwork, when she
experienced feelings unknown to her, re¯ected upon her own cul-
ture, and questioned her identity. Furthermore, having faced situ-
ations when she felt that she crossed the dividing line between the
categories of outsider and insider, or observer and participant,
Dubisch came to understand the incompatibility of the two com-
ponents of ®eld researchÐobservation and participation. The ®rst
implies a certain distance, similar to a tourist's stance, while the
second suggests emotion-inducing involvement, hence not separ-
ation, not observing (1995:116). Dubisch sought to solve this
dilemma by turning her emotions into a vehicle towards under-
standing, and by seeing the categories of self and Other as inter-
related rather than as distinct and separate. By the same token, she
allowed for a conceptual blurring of the boundary between tourist,
anthropologist, and pilgrim, depending on how people positioned
herÐrelationally and situationallyÐand how she positioned herself
by her own biography and experience.
218 SELF AND OTHER

In his work The Pillars of Hercules: A Grand Tour of the Mediterranean

(1995), the author-traveler Theroux is, above all, explicit about his
disdain for tourists and their behavior. Indeed, to set himself apart
from them, he stresses the solitary nature of his traveling enter-
prise, while also elaborating on various measures he took to safe-
guard his sense of freedom and the novelty of his experience, such
as traveling in the off-season and choosing not to ¯y (1995:489).
What heightened Theroux's expectations of his travels was his seek-
ing embodied experiences. As he recognized, traveling engaged all
of his senses and raised in him a mixture of feelings. This point
gives additional support to the argument about the distinction
between travelers and tourists, given that the latter's experience is
mainly visual.
Despite the fundamental disassociation Theroux makes with the
opposite of travelÐi.e., tourismÐhe does not hide the dilemma he
faced concerning the ambiguity of his identity as a traveler
(1995:47±48). This issue of identity relates to the self-indulgent
nature of his endeavorsÐthe fact that in Theroux's consciousness,
moving freely from one place to another did not qualify as work or
as part of the productive and family routines of life. It was only the
systematic observing, along with the writing, that legitimized what
otherwise appeared as a feeble and empty of meaning exercise.
Thus, Theroux's solution to his identity-related dilemma lies in his
convincing himself that being there was not an end in itself but
served the task of making systematic observations and writing them
down. It could be argued that the formation of his identity as a tra-
vel writer is mediated by the creation of narrative accounts based
on a mode of solitary travel which involves crossing a variety of sites
and encounters. One can also discern the use of ``the essential trope
of life as a journey'' (Fussell 1980:210) when Theroux reports he
spent a lifetime traveling. Travel had served as a fundamental
means for his reaching adulthood and maturity; however, the object
of his quest had been the unknown, what was conceived as the dis-
tant in the sense of representing a back in time. The known, the
Mediterranean, represented the future, a time marked by change.
It can be deduced from Theroux's sentiments (1995:6±7) that the
maturity he obtained from his travels to the periphery had enabled
him to ®nd novelty in the familiar Mediterranean as well as to sus-
tain both his awareness and his dreams.
The literary history of the Mediterranean provided for Theroux
the major guidelines regarding the places he chose to visit. These
were places that had become famous because foreign writers discov-
ered and wrote about them or also lived in them. What Theroux
found mysterious, fascinating, or disturbing, in experiencing the
places he visited, is important not so much for its revelations about
the condition of an external reality but for what it reveals about the
travel experience itself. At times he highlights certain aspects of
the lives of people he encountered because he found them exemp-
lary of patterns of human interaction in a premodern, agrarian
world (1995:186±187). At other times, when describing well-known
 VASILIKI GALANI-MOUTAFI 219

tourism destinations, he makes no effort to hide his disgust, cyni-

cism, and outright disappointment (Theroux 1995:35). In these
cases Theroux echoes Fussell (1980) who relegates locations visited
by tourists to a place outside of reality.
As still another situation, Patricia Storace is an American poetess
who lived for a year in Greece, in the early 90s, and recorded her
impressions in a book, Dinner With Persephone (1996). Although early
in her book she states that her desire to understand Greece stems
largely from her need to understand herself, Storace's journeys of
self-discovery cannot be heard in an autobiographical sense. She
rarely reveals to the reader how direct experience incited in her a
type of self-re¯exivity. Moreover, the latter does not result in a self-
transformation but rather kindles Storace's awareness of her vulner-
ability, along with a concomitant af®rmation of her self-con®dence.
Overall, Storace avoids exploring her inner experiences, reveals very
little about her emotional investments in Greece, and limits her
reactions to dispensing judgments on those who bare themselves to
her.
What gives a tone of self-re¯exivity and even self-questioning to
her work, is Storace's reference to mirrors (1996:123), which appear
to register a rather uncertain image of herself; the use of this device
conveys perhaps an ideology concerning identity in the age of post-
modernity. Today many thinkers agree that there is an acceptance
of multiple and subject to change identities compared to the earlier
age of modernity, when identities appeared to be more stable
(Bauman 1996; Kellner 1992:174). However, while some mirrors
re¯ect a fragmented and shifting self-image of Storace, some others
are straightforward and leave no room for questioning the images
they project. Thus, Storace's tendency to view television as a mirror
of Greek society, and her friends as a mirror of all the Greeks,
betrays her inability to avoid the trap of generalizing and homogen-
izing the Other. Indeed, she attributes heterogeneity only to her
own ``we'' category (the Americans), while homogenizing the ``they''
category (the Greeks) (1996:172±173).
The self-image Storace projects is that of a well-informed trave-
ler, who displays con®dence in herself and in her interpretations of
the Greek reality and seeks to satisfy an intellectual interest cen-
tered on cultural understanding. Unlike Dubisch, who acknowledges
the importance of both the interior and the exterior journey of her
ethnographic research endeavors, Storace gives the impression of
not being touchedÐat the level of inner experienceÐby her travels'
spatial and temporal dimension. Whereas Theroux also makes a
point to distance himself from tourists (Dann 1999:172±173),
Storace does not appear to be concerned with this issue. She delib-
erately seeks to engage herself with local people, at least at the
level of socializing with friends and acquaintances, unlike Theroux
whose encounters with the Other are limited to impromptu conver-
sations in public places; indeed, he appears to experience more
meaning in the lives of fellow travelers and writers, whom he goes
out of his way to encounter, rather than of the people through
220 SELF AND OTHER

whose space he traverses. The self-image Theroux gives is one of a

``real'' traveler who does not need cushions or comforts while travel-
ing but, instead, stoically endures uncomfortable and unpleasant ex-
periences. Undoubtedly, Theroux and Storace experience different
ways of seeing because of their distinct biographies and gendered
identities; yet, both fall into the trap of generalizing the Other and
using stereotypes (often negative ones) to mark off a distinctive
otherness. Generally, their actions are largely those of sightseers
and they cannot be said to have gone through occasions when they
held the position of insider, as Dubisch has. Finally, unlike Dubisch,
neither Theroux nor Storace appear to be aware that they made
sense of the places they journeyed to by drawing attention to the
dialectical relationship of such places with the places from which
they came.

CONCLUSION
Travelers, anthropologists and tourists can be considered obser-
vers who gaze into the elsewhere and the Other, while looking for
their own re¯ection. Their storytellings and written works suggest
that they look in the worlds of Others as a means of laying claim to
their own. The oppositions of civilized and primitive, modern and
traditional, familiar and exotic, and self and Other have dominated
the realm of discourse in Western societies since the age of explora-
tions. Both in ethnographic writing and in the travel literature, the
representations of the Other have been mediating the experience of
modernity. Ethnographic works re¯ect an effort by anthropologists
to reconcile, through textual production, the ``exoticness'' with the
world of modernity, which is trapped in the tension between pro-
gress and nostalgia. The latter, according to Graburn (1995:166), is
also a driving force in many types of tourism and is particularly sub-
ject to commercial and political manipulation. Like the traveler, the
ethnographer has sought the (exotic) Other because it promised an
opportunity for adventure as well as for challenges (physical and
intellectual) inherent in differenceÐqualities he/she has not been
able to ®nd in the modern world. However, the experience of the
self through the Other has ultimately proven to be a quest for and
imposition of control and order. In the course of history, colonial-
ism, religious missions, ethnographic research, and tourism have
provided ample outlets for the quest for self-representation; in the
face of modernity's inherent qualities of individualism, mobility and
fragmentation, such a quest has been motivated by a nostalgia for
ideal, integral communities. The end result of this process has been
the objecti®cation of cultures, societies, and geographies.
In the last several years, the metaphors of mobility have proven
useful for deconstructing anthropology's ®xed and ethnocentric cat-
egoriesÐsuch as those of self and Other, the familiar and the exo-
tic. More important, the advance of self-re¯exive anthropologies,
which involve an awareness of oneself and of the importance of giv-
ing due credit to the voice of the Other, lies in their contributing to
 VASILIKI GALANI-MOUTAFI 221

reduce the problems of subjectivity in participant observation. As

part of the self-re¯exive trend, some ®eldworkers have reported a
transformation through the research experience, while others have
experienced their research as a journey of self-discovery (Reinhartz
1992). Anthropologists interested in the creative use of autobiogra-
phy have recognized ®rst that the identities the ethnographer car-
ries into the ®eld must not be subsumed or hidden under the
overarching rubric of ethnographer or scholar and second, that his/
her entrance into another society or ethnic group is accompanied by
the crossing of a boundary of self-de®nition (Okely 1996).
As in anthropology, attempts have also been made in the study of
tourism and travel to deconstruct certain well-established cat-
egories. In the literature, the term tourism has been de®ned in con-
trast to opposite Others, like travel. This dichotomy makes the
de®nition problematic in the sense that tourism and its opposite
Others are perceived as distinct and separate with no possibility of
converging or even forming a continuum. The effort to deconstruct
tourism has essentially begun from a critique of the structural per-
spective. A corollary of this critique is the view that tourism be,
instead, approached as process (Abram and Waldren 1997:2±3). The
advantage of this analytical viewpoint is that it can highlight the
diverse qualities of touristic experience, while it can also allow for
the tracing of changes, through time, in the orientations of people
who travel. Overall, the notion of tourism as process is predicated
on the understanding that tourist identities are neither static nor
invariable. Thus, one can hypothesize that those tourists who keep
returning to the same place year after year are likely to develop a
different sense of the place and even discover that it ®lls for them
experiential vacancies. For such tourists, abroad would most likely
be a place they feel part of, where they dwell and not just go
through. In their perception, what marks their regularly visited
place is perhaps their sharing time and experiences with the Other.
By the same token, even though travel writers, like Theroux, view
their real enemy to be the tourist, and assign themselves to the cat-
egory of traveler, they may deny themselves shared time and experi-
ences with the Other, insofar as they chase after the vestiges of a
vanished reality. Travelers sense the external world by relying heav-
ily on literary texts and other travelers' accounts, rather than on
tour operators and the advertising discourse; this suggests that the
textual genre can still compete successfully with the visual postmo-
dern media, like television and the Internet, which focus upon the
gaze (Dann 1999:161). However, through the works they produce,
travelers generate new images, which are added to the repertoire of
signs that tourists in turn consume. In this sense, both Theroux and
Storace provide additional elements that allow tourists to look for
signs of Greekness, typical Italian behavior, typical attitudes of the
Turks and Greeks towards one another and towards strangers, etc.
In contrast to this type of practice, often encountered in travelers,
anthropologists demonstrate the distinctiveness of the communities
they study and, without applying a reductionist logic, look for associ-
222 SELF AND OTHER

ations between the local and national levels. In this sense, anthro-
pologists have challenged the notion of self-contained communities
travelers look for.
Finally, regarding the issue of re¯exivity, it can provide an insight
into the ethnographers' and the travelers' analysis of themselves in
the context of their engagedness with Others. Re¯exivity is an
aftermath of experience and refers to the conscious use of the self
as a resource for making sense of others. Of the examples examined
in this paper, only Dubisch's ethnographic account provides evi-
dence of the creative use of self-re¯exivity; it shows how the anthro-
pologist can activate various dimensions of self and reveals how the
Other becomes a backdrop that re¯ects the conditions of her own
situation back home. It appears that authors-travelers who pass
through places in the periphery looking for foreignness, may be
aware of the inner dimension of travel but not in a self-re¯exive
way. They may seek, like Theroux, to basically set themselves apart
from the tourist and this concern may be an essential element of
their sense of identity. Others, like Storace, may wish to project pri-
marily the writer self who transforms one's observations of a linguis-
tic, social, and cultural nature into an interpretive (authorized)
account, while hiding his/her autobiographical role in the process.
Such writers-travelers, unlike anthropologists, are not self-conscious
that the images and stories they produce about Others are directly
linked to their own identities and interests which lie in their home
culture.&

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Submitted 5 May 1998. Resubmitted 18 March 1999. Resubmitted 22 April 1999. Accepted 6
May 1999. Final version 2 June 1999. Refereed anonymously. Coordinating Editor: Jeremy F.
Boissevain