Summer: everything slows down. Here is the second on the series on travelling cultures. The clip is related to the topic but is already thinking of Christmas. Blues.
When dealing with questions of traveling we are forced to rethink the very concept of “culture”. This opens the way for contesting certain naturalising and organic preconceptions conventionally linked to culture understood as ‘cultivation’ i.e., as a coherent and rooted organism that grows and lives according to the permanently ordered laws of nature. Traveling experiences convey the idea that notions of mobility, fluidity and process are more suitable than notions of stability, solidity and fixity to express the dynamic character of human cultural practice.
Anthropologist James Clifford is well known for studying this topic. According to Clifford (Traveling cultures,1992: pp. 99, 97), the notion of traveling is handled in two different ways within the field of anthropology. Firstly, the ethnographer moves in the literal sense to the extent that s/he must leave home in order to carry out research work:
Ethnographers, typically, are travelers who like to stay and dig in (for a time), who like to make a second home/workplace.
Secondly, at the epistemological level, the ethnographer finds the need to describe knowledge as contingent and partial:
Every focus excludes; there is no politically innocent methodology for intercultural interpretation.
When rethinking culture as travel the optimistic and positive elements of the traveling experience come to the fore, more often than not. For instance, travel is usually portrayed as a form of pleasurable evasion. In addition, the hedonistic experience of travel as exploration and escape brings about a variety of unexpected encounters enabling renewal, transformation and change. The idea of travelling in this sense relates to the expansion of the realms of freedom and possibility. Travel is the pursuit of pleasure. The possibilities of travel are kaleidoscopic, that is, changeable, fluctuating, mutable, complex, varied, colourful etc.
However, many images conventionally related to such overly rejoicing notions of travel as pleasure and unrestrained fluidity often fall into mere mystification. Trendy “nomads”, cosmopolitans and ethnographers aside, an overwhelming form of the travelling experience nowadays is that of the anonymous migrants and exiles. Perhaps more paradoxical than all, moreover, prisoners also have access to traveling. In “The heuristic power of art” (Becker, C. (ed), The Subversive Imagination: Artists, Society” and Social Representation, New York, London:Routledge, 35-54). Puerto Rican artist and pro-independence militant Elizam Escobar wrote this during his stay in several State penitentiaries in the USA
Any individual or group of individuals who dares to challenge this order of things will be submitted to extremely hostile treatment and systematic harassment, or transferred to another institution for “security reasons” or “program needs” (…). You may end up travelling around the country from prison to prison with no definite destination (p 45)
In these extremely exciting times of global wars against terror and the like, the kaleidoscopic possibilities of travel for fundamentalist prisoner monsters knows no national boundaries. As a consequence, the pursuit of the traveling experience expands into changeable, fluctuating, mutable, complex, varied and colourful experiences. It expands not only into and through a variety and unexpected geopolitical destinations, from Afghanistan to Guantanamo via a whole array of fantasmatic European airports. It also allows encounters with a whole variety of secret agents more or less civilized depending on whether they outsource or not well-known torture techniques ranging from water-boarding to electrotherapy.
Clifford (p.96) was absolutely right when saying that the airport is both a “launching point for strange and wonderful voyages (…) a place of collection, juxtaposition and passionate encounter” and “somewhere you pass through, where the encounters are fleeting, arbitrary (…).
