1.
“I hate travels and travelers. I doubted if in telling details about such verisimilitude of senseless happenings and meaningless events makes any sense at all”(1). That is how Claude Lévi-Strauss commences his, acknowledged “Tristes Tropiques”. He attentively juxtaposes himself to various adventure-seekers. “Ethnographer’s profession does not imply adventures: they emerge and burden his direct job with weight of weeks and months spent traveling … and with weight of thousands of troubles which devour days without any reward and turn the dangerous life in the heart of selva to a kind of military service”(2).
The distinguished traveler and ethnographer par excellence, Lévi-Strauss does not protest against travel as such. Rather, skipping any sentimentality, he tries to imagine his travels as pure functional, inescapable “attachments” to his job. These are spatial movements in from a working position to another position (from “field” to “field”, as any ethnographer or geographer would say). He does not care for the spatial remoteness of these “fields” comparably with their typological differences that actually do justify the travel expenses. “The truths we seek for, going so far, disclose their importance only after cleansing from these leftovers. Surely it is worthy to spend six months of exhausting way… to get an unknown myth, a new marital order of a full list of clan names (the very job would take only several day, sometimes even several hours), but…” (3)
The very word, “travel”, sounds romantic. As rejected by “true travels” like Lévi-Strauss, nobody may totally exhaust this romantic. Even a natural apologetic tradition may emerge around the “travel” (for which, the Soviet 60ties’ cult of “ideal geologists” certainly would be a good example). For us, more interesting is another aspect of “travel”: travel as creative job, as a specific research method. Thus, let us discuss travel as a research technique that potentially may be presented as professional humanitarian practice.
The "travel", taken as a researcher’s professional methodology, absolutely is not a “tripe” (that is, a spatial movement caused by necessity to move one’s own body physically into a place, where someone should present to fulfill a job; this is a way Lévi-Strauss explained his journeys). The traveler is not a “migrant” as well. The travel should be distinguished from “tourism” which is resembles so much. A tourist looks for “remarkable” (nice and/or interesting) matters – for certain more or less wide-known and expectable visual and touchable impressions, observing her internal states meanwhile.
The tourist is busy with her self-investigation, while movements in various spaces and emotional exoticisms, including possible meetings with “local inhabitants” should only provide recourses for such self-investigation. The extent of the space has another meaning for a traveler than for a tourist or a “wanderer”, that certainly makes traveler a paradoxical figure. The traveler makes herself a tool for exploration of Other . She or he penetrates and enters the special co-organization of other’s life. She is a “traveler” only as far as this penetration may happen only immediately: “exploration” here means “percolation” (or even “intrusion”), getting inside. The penetration always happens on the level of material, physical bodies. To do it, one should arrive, sail or fly. “Otherness” is more valued than “remoteness”.
The “traveler” interests herself/himself only indirectly, as a kind of participant of observation and presence. This mode of self-attitude seems, at least, more honest in comparison with “tourist’s: The travel is not a self-discovery: it makes no sense to fetishize the “far lands” as privileged sites of self-investigation, and one should not value oneself too high, crossing these “far lands”. Moreover, the concentration on self definitely may distort one’s work: multupositionality(4) is crucially important for the journey’s fulfillment. The clear self-consciousness, i.e. metapositional reflectivity, should be carefully kept all the time .
This reflectivity is an obvious juxtaposition to the tourist’s self-concentration and certainly makes the traveler similar to a spy, special agent. It is clear, at least, that the professional training of the spy and the traveler alike –if only any professional training of a traveler is possible – the main attention should be paid to development of ability to collect information (by seeing, hearing etc.) and ability to find the options to collect in the best possible ways. The most important thing to be provisioned is the training of traveler’s organism and body.
2.
“Traveling” is a special style or method of humanitarian research, which more than any other similar method depends on personal body’s specific features. This method produces special requirements for this body, so the future results of it method are directly subdued to the physical and mental qualifications of the person who travels. This dependence on these physical features of the performer of the travel, this humanitarian research method may be compared only to a dance.
Inhabited terrains, cultural landscapes get their symbolic form, name and conceptual characteristics by means of travelers’s work, literally through him. The traveler narrates about that she has seen and found to others – firstly, to colleagues, but next to “all whom it may concern.” Her/his ability to distinguish different spaces (places, topoi ), refined by reflection of the interspace movements’ experience, enables her/him to make a substantial description of these spaces disclosing presumed specificity, differences and uniqueness of them. Thus, the spaces of human residence get their distinctive sense via correlation with other places (that may be similar on non-similar). It means that the function of the traveler is a kind of final formation, fulfillment of a certain place.
She/he becomes exactly that semiotically desired component of inhabited place, which creates meaningful difference of this “topos” from other. Thereby she draws symbolic boarding line, and fulfills the symbolic “center” of the place simultaneously. The traveler is the person who is competent in the “essence” of a certain place. Distinctions and peculiarities of visited and observed places she accepts and reproduces literally by her own body.
Contemporary humanitarian technologies, which are often discussed in our Journal, deal with transformation of human’s life spatial conditions, whatever it may be – museum creation, communal planning, development of culturally specified and specially marked in their environment “places” – preserved areas, historical complexes and so on. The traveler, as the crucial “addressee” and receiver of their efforts’ results, they may imply. She is also the person who – it is important- can tell about these “peculiarity” of created topos the way it should be told.
3.
The traveler is a strange subject. Too much depends on her or his body abilities, possibilities and experience. Factually, a general history of “travelers” is not written yet. Herodotus, who created “history” as explanation of the world order studied by travel, factually founded this humanitarian practice. Any contemporary history of travelers should include Boudelard-Benjamin’s flaneaur and situationists’ “drift” (5). Next, do not forget social and cultural anthropologists’ crossings of the social space, which are possibly the most complicated and intriguing method of contemporary travels (spaces, physically close, may be extremely distant in political, cultural, social coordinates…)
Is a specialized education of travelers’ possible? What does it mean to be a “professional traveler” (without being a geologist or a sociologist first of all)? How does the experience published by travelers relate to that experience of acting in the same space that are necessarily programmed, say, by the cultural practitioners, cultural managers and other professionals of that kind? The main question: what status do the “travels”, travelers’ skill and written traveler’s experience have in our humanitarian culture? The topic seemingly has not been discussed properly yet. It must be strange especially in Russia, where “geography is the destiny”.
Two texts presened in this issue(6) are devoted to the space and the view, or, their theme is method of a person’s committed existence in a landscape . We would find completely different approaches and objectives of authors’ investigation. The texts represent two positions.
The first author, “a philologist” involves the visited place into the run of his life, passionately taking the local features, their connotations and references alike, while the second author, who is “a sociologist”, visiting academician, unsatisfied by his own commitment, observes and described with considerable alienation.
Which manner of view, and observation strategy should become the point of reference for those who create the cultural landscape today?
References
1 Lévi-Strauss C. Pechalnye tropiki (Tristes Tropiques) /transl. by G. Sergeev. Lviv: Iniciativa, M.: AST. 1999, p. 7.
2 Ibid., p.7.
3 Ibid., p. 7-8.
4 Kagansky V. Polevoe Issledovanie (The Field Study) - www.russ.ru/culture/200500207_kag.html.
5 “What is to be done?” 2004, n. 7, special issue: “Drift – Narvskaya Zastava.”
6 Vdovin G. In memory of the Yasnaya Polyana hemisphere: Fruit of Traveling (only in Russian) – ibid., p. 12-23; Kosmarsky A. Pilgrimage and Fieldwork: an Essay on Contemporary Academic Geopolitics - ibid., p. 28-33.
