The Mantle of Culture

The tourist has an agenda, a preconceived notion of the experiences she wants to have while in a new setting, an itinerary, a purpose to escape the commonplace without leaving behind the known (Schriber 19). This frame of mind is appealing when one desires to find comfort in the surroundings, a sense of belonging and mutual understanding between other tourists and those who serve them. The setting is chosen to fulfill the tourist's expectations. It should be easy to sleep, easy to eat, and easy to converse with others. It is a retreat more than a movement forward, one that allows the tourist to shelter herself from uncertainty, disappointment, and the unknown.

A traveler desires a "mantle of cultural and intellectual superiority" by being immersed in difference and extricating its value, willing to experience ambiguity and renegotiate characterizations of people and places (Schriber 19). The "superiority," then is not that of a dominion over Others but over the complacent masses in his own country, the people who remain sheltered, fearful, and largely ignorant of rich diversity and undeserved cultural hegemony over less powerful peoples. Instead, the traveler desires to know "the older, inherited ways of doing things" and values an age without capitalistic depreciation of culture (Spurr 129). The traveler seeks adventure, too, and is willing to risk physical discomfort to rediscover his talent for appropriation and appreciation. And the traveler is open to stories of others who challenge his conception of reality and otherness and sameness. Through these stories, Leiris' myth of social integrity is affirmed. As cultural groups have dispersed and emerged over time, we have become a part of each other (Spurr 139). Our stories are more similar than different, and our acceptance of this historical interference helps us see that different cultures exist "by virtue of continual negotiation." Culture is "an ongoing phenomenon in human relations" (Spurr 140).

This is the modus operandi of my husband. "We're going to Belgium because we can. We could have gone to Japan or Cuba or Guam, but we got lucky," he says. A pragmatist, he doesn't have the intention to comingle his story with others, but "it's all about giving. We're not going to spread the American Dream. We want to find common ground" but also find the best in another culture to enrich our own lives. He acknowledges that we don't know any "stories" about Belgium; we lack preconceived notions. Although, we do have concerns about displaced minorities and extremists because we are Americans and potential targets of violence. Even that is mitigated by knowing our neighbors, the locals. A close-knit neighborhood is what he knew growing up in Dimondale, Michigan, on the outskirts of Lansing. It afforded opportunities that are uncommon in a place where people don't know each other and don't trust those whom they don't know. Jumping fences, cutting across yards, building forts in a farmer's cornfield were acceptable to the natives who were born and raised in the same homes as their ancestors. He left this small town, this iconic American childhood, to attend a community college and then a university in-state. Afterwards, he traveled to Texas and South Dakota, where he met me, and stepped onto a path that would take him, next month, to a different country.

He insists, "it's not important to go elsewhere; what's important is that you're offered the opportunity to learn other ways, other cultures, other religions. It might improve your family's way of doing things, but it might not." In any case, the risk is affordable. He believes that people have a responsibility to reach out. "That's part of higher learning--to give other cultures value." But he admits that "it's not up to the masses; it's up to the individual. Who wants to explore? Who wants to take care of the farm? Both have credibility. But having the opportunity, the freedom...respect is earned by the knowledge of" (Holland and Huggan 4). Leaving his hometown is not so different from leaving his country; both are, after all, rooted in land and people. He says that "they have a culture, a government, a history that have more value to humanity than many aspects of our culture" (i.e., consumerism, entertainment, sports), but like his homegrown roots, he recognizes that "passed down knowledge is valuable to the world, or at least to the individual who wants to seek it out."

We are those seekers, always have been. We left college for an initiation to the workforce and then moved to a small town and started a small business, moved to a ski town and started over, moved to a reservation and became a minority, moved to a religious enclave and became outcasts, moved to Virginia and joined the melting pot, and now we move abroad.

My husband wants to be "invisible." He doesn't want to be labeled. We will learn the language to be treated as equals, deserving of mutual respect. For us and for our neighbors, this will be an education, and education creates divergence. "Literature, geography, and sociology," my husband states, "give us our ideas about people who live differently." But he remembers the joy of being in 7th grade and diving into an encyclopedia in the library. The information opened an illicit world of difference, and he recognizes that we "have to be encouraged, at least allowed, to be exposed to other stories than what your community believes or the stories don't diverge. Kids won't be any different than their parents. There are a lot of people who don't want their children to be any different." But he knows from experience that those people "are afraid of other stories..., so the fear of the unknown is passed down."

Well, we're not going down; we're going up, up in latitude, up languages learned and people known and places been. "Travel is one of the greatest doors to human freedom" and we're stepping across the threshold to fulfill a human duty, raising the mantle of culture (Holland and Huggan 4).

Sources:  

Holland, Patrick, and Graham Huggan. "Tourists with Typewriters: Critical Reflections on Contemporary Travel Writing." University of Michigan Press, Ann Arbor, 1998.

Schriber, Mary Suzanne. "Mapping the Territory: The Who, When, Where, and Why of Women's Travel." Writing Home: American Women Abroad, 1830-1920, University Press of Virginia, Charlottesville, 1997.

Spurr, David. "Idealization: Strangers in Paradise." The Rhetoric of Empire: Colonial Discourse in Journalism, Travel Writing, and Imperial Administration, Duke University Press, 1993.