Krzysztof Podemski, Socjologia podróży, Wydawnictwo Naukowe Uniwersytetu im. Adama Mickiewicza, Poznan, 2004, ISBN 83-232-1362-3, ISSN 0554-8225 SUMMARY The Sociology of Travel (Socjologia podróży) is trying to provide an answer to a question whether travel can become a focus of attention of sociology. Travel is understood here as spatial mobility of human beings which results in a change of the current social and geographic environment and, very often, also the cultural and natural environment. As a result of the relocation we find ourselves in other - the same yet not the same - world. But travel may also get us to a different meaning not the same - world. The distinction between otherness and difference is, to a high extent a matter of individual perception, definition, sensitivity and cultural competencies. The presented work encompasses three parts: theoretical, quantitative empirical and qualitative empirical. Modern humanistic, particularly sociological, reflection on the phenomenon of travel is critically reviewed in the first part of the of the work, entitled Theoretical Approaches to Travel in Social Sciences. A review of the most popular and interesting travel theories allows for the formulation of a range of theses regarding the phenomenon of travel. 1. Travel is a physical and actual relocation in space, a movement or passage from one place to another. Without the actual movement and actual contact with otherness, there is no travel. Traveling in time, dream traveling or web traveling are only metaphorical expressions. Such mental journeys though, may occur and influence the traveler s behavior before and during the travel, as well as afterwards, in the form of reminiscences. 2. The mobility involves a need to leave home, understood as an everyday environment. 3. The departure from home results in finding oneself in other, unusual environment (geographic, social, natural and cultural). 4. The traveler, by definition, intends to return home emigration is not a travel but finding a new home. Also a vagabond is not a traveler, as he has no home or the road is his home. 5. This other environment in which the traveler finds himself/ herself is also strange and incomprehensible, exceeding the range of the traveler s routine behaviors and surpassing his/her perception of the world.
6. The traveler activates various, internal psychological or external physical procedures of familiarization of strangeness. He/she might try to reduce the feeling of strangeness by looking for customs or aesthetic patterns similar to those found in the native culture or may try to isolate himself/ herself from contacts with the new culture by, for example, resorting to environmental bubbles such as, for instance, an air conditioning system or fast-food chains. 7. Traveling is a relatively new invention in the history of mankind. Until the advent of railways, and with the exception of nomadic tribes, attachment to the place of birth was a common practice. Of course, travels were known from the origin of mankind, but their scope was highly limited, both in the social and geographic sense. The majority of travelers were forced to leave home due to wars or persecutions. For ages, the only voluntary form of mass travel was a pilgrimage. 8. The traveler is a stranger, an Other, a stranger in some way, however, not a classical stranger as G. Simmel s permanent outsider nor a stranger according to A. Schutz, i.e. a newcomer, an aspirant or a candidate. The traveler is a specific stranger, and his/her special status results from the fact that a traveling person may only be a stranger for a short period of time. What the traveler and the stranger have in common, is that both fall victim to the questioning of the obviousness of the social reality. The traveler is more of R. Merton s non-member as long as he/ she does not aspire in any way to become the member of a new society. Being the Merton s non-member, the traveler sometimes becomes a stranger in the meaning assigned to this term by F. Znaniecki. It is the case only, when a conflict of meanings takes place. Such a conflict arises, for example, when the traveler goes beyond the limits within which the natives are ready to tolerate him/ her. 9. The traveler, especially one that spent a long time away from home, becomes a stranger in his/her own environment upon returning home, since the natural interactive continuity enabling the routine understanding of the reality is broken. 10. The traveler may, as a rule, develop only a limited relationship with the natives. Different languages, different cultural competences, absence of social bonds and a material nature of contacts with the cultural brokers are the main barriers encountered by the traveler. 11. Nevertheless, traveling is a cognitive process whose important aspects include looking at other people, staring, peeking and observing. The gaze is sometimes closer to a participative observation by an ethnographer and, on other occasions, to a flâneur s voyeurism. 12. There are a number of goals, motivations, types, roles and gazes of the travelers.
13. Tourism, the most popular form of traveling in our times, is distinguished from other types of travel by its commercialized and commodified nature. Tourism is a travel for sale, a product. 14. In its broad sense, tourism is mostly sightseeing, visual consumption, a semiotic activity and an attempt at interpreting someone else s meanings. Tourism understood in this way is inseparably connected with travel, as in this sense, you can be a tourist even in your own town. On the other hand, the tourist does not necessarily have do the sightseeing. He/ she may only visit (meet people) or participate. In general, however, travel triggers sightseeing. 15. Both the observation and visual consumption are affected by other communications channels, especially the mass media, but also the literature, education and verbal accounts of the friends. The knowledge possessed before the travel and gained in a particular environment, has a tremendous impact on both what you see and how you see it. 16. On the other hand, tourism may not be reduced to visual perception only. Both in the case of traveling, and its commercialized variety, tourism, the opportunity for perceiving the reality using other senses, such as smell, touch or taste, plays a great role. The multisensual experience is what distinguishes a real travel from an imaginary or virtual journey. 17. Tourism as travel for sale always incorporates an element of theatricality, a performance prepared by actors behind the scenes to entertain the tourist audience. In an extreme case, the tourist is entirely submerged in a world of tourist attractions created specially for him/her. 18. Even a commercialized travel, a tourist trip, is in some ways sacred and surrounded by a special aura. This peculiar feeling, in some cases perceived almost as a metaphysical experience may be attributed to a special sense of time, perceived prestige, a temporary escape from the existing social structures, presence in an exotic environment or, as in the case of former COMECON countries, crossing the barrier between the political systems. 19. Travel for sale is becoming an increasingly important sphere of economy, culture and human life. 20. As all other spheres of life, including even the spiritual and intimate ones (like religion or sex), tourism is becoming progressively commercialized, reflecting the typical phenomena of our times. On the one hand, tourism is subject to standardization, selling uniform products at the lowest possible prices, on the other hand, it is affected by the post-fordist phenomenon of diversification, searching for niche target groups and addressing them with customized offers.
21. The mass nature of tourism involves elements of auto-destruction. Searching for wildlife areas untouched by human hand and unaffected by the commercialization of cultural diversity leads to destruction of both. 22. Contrary to the globalization theses, both travel and its commercial variety, tourism, are still practiced by a clear minority, not only in relation to the global population but also to the societies of Western Europe and the US. One of the key statements of the postmodernists that we are all tourists turns out to be empirically untrue. Most people never leave their homes. Part Two, Travels of Poles Between 1954 and 2002, based on quantitative analyses of data aggregated from different sources, including some research done by the author, aims at depicting foreign travels of Poles in the last fifty years or so and is essentially of descriptive nature. It shows how, at the time when in the Western Europe and the US foreign tourism began to emerge as a mass phenomenon, Poland, situated behind the iron curtain was gradually opening its borders. Based on the results of research conducted by the Centre of Public Opinion Research and the author, a map of foreign destinations of contemporary Poles, social and demographic characteristics of traveling and non-traveling Poles and the first-hand knowledge of other countries are discussed in this section. The findings are that on the eve of Poland s EU accession, 40% of Poles have never crossed the country borders. Of those who have left the country, majority visited the neighboring countries for less than 24 hours. Almost 50% of people in Poland, a country which will soon become an EU member, have never visited any country of the new Europe, not even mentioning the old Europe. Even fewer people (less than 2%) have ever visited other continents and, if so, it was usually the US. Direct contact with civilizations other than the western one is an exceptionally rare experience. Part Three, Familiarization of Strangeness. Travel to India As a Form of Intercivilization Contact, attempts at analyzing the phenomenon of travel from the point of view of intercivilization contacts, based on the author s survey of tourists from the western world in India and an analysis of the accounts of Polish travelers visiting India from the end of 16 th century to date. This section tries to appreciate the phenomenon of travel by referring to the experience of the travelers, their interpretation of the travel, understanding of intracivilization contact and awareness of strangeness and familiarity. Traveling is always a cognitive experience in some way, even if it is just checking off new sights, visual consumption or collecting new sensual experiences. But travel is often more
than that. It is a reflective activity. The majority of analyzed accounts, as different as a letter of a Polish nobleman sent from Goa in 1596 and a dramatized diary of a young, contemporary Polish journalist include a whole range of reflections, comments and interpretations triggered by what they have experienced, perceived, seen and felt. Viscount Karol Lanckoroński, one of the travelers, declared in the introduction to his journal of the travel around the world, that he would present the world as he saw it with his inner and outer eye. This dissertation attempts at identifying, describing and naming such an inner eye. The names offered in the past would either be based on the viewer s beliefs (a liberal-democratic, nationalist-conservative, ethnocentric or anti-colonial view), on the object of reflection (ethnographic, philosophical or historical view), or on the intrinsic characteristic of the subject (female, missionary, military view). In the past, first-hand accounts were the only source of knowledge about other countries and continents. The conducted analysis shows that the experience of otherness is and was common among Polish travelers to India and is a significant aspect of the reflective part of their accounts. The feeling of otherness evolves. Already the first travelers perceive otherness very strongly. The otherness is approached from a common-sense and naturalistic point of view. The experience of otherness includes the climate, the flora and the fauna. Cultural otherness is not perceived until scientific approaches to culture and history of other civilizations emerged in Europe. There are also elements which used to be familiar and become strange to a visitor from Europe only at the beginning of the 20th century. The recurrent theme of dirt, odor and poverty, so frequent in the accounts of contemporary travelers to India, were unnoticed when the hygiene standards in European cities were not much different than those encountered in India. Strangeness has many dimensions to travelers. First of all, strangeness is otherness. Travelers come across other landscapes, other anthropological characteristics and other customs compared to their homeland. The reality explored is simply different because every country has its rules. The second aspect of strangeness is that travelers finds it difficult to put up with the different world. The climate and food are not good for them and the music is irritating. The place of birth, upbringing and habits determine what is familiar and what is strange. Thirdly, this other world is sometimes found incomprehensible and unacceptable. It is treated as a kind of deviation and abnormality. The fourth dimension of strangeness is the perceived loneliness and alienation, being alone among other people. It is the feeling of helplessness and lack of protection. The awareness of being excluded from the community of meanings clear only to the natives. The fifth aspect of strangeness is the time dimension. Many travelers feel as if they traveled in time to a different epoch in the past, the Renaissance,
Middle Ages or even the Antiquity. Finally, some travelers influenced by the contact with other world begin to perceive certain familiar elements of everyday life, such as social rituals or attachment to tangible property, as redundant, trivial or unimportant. The experience of strangeness is a challenge to travelers. They try to familiarize the strange world. The methods of such familiarization mentioned in the literature include isolation from the strange, containment in environmental bubbles or resorting to cultural brokers. But travelers also do other things. A method worth mentioning is making contact with those natives who are defined as less strange than others. Familiarization is also achieved by finding a less strange religion. Another method of acquainting oneself with the strange is to look for similarities between the strange and the familiar. And finally, a previously unknown practice observed in contemporary travelers is to vulgarize, turn into jokes and ridicule anything that is strange, incomprehensible or shocking. Strangeness does not have to be familiarized. Sometimes a different religion and customs become more understandable if they are presented as totally strange, out of this world, a product of mass insanity. Social sciences begin to recognize travel and travelers in the fifties. In 1970s, sociology of tourism becomes institutionalized as a sub-discipline. In the nineties, the interest of social sciences in the tourist enjoys an exponential growth. To the representatives of postmodernism, the tourist becomes a catchy metaphor of our era. Social sciences which only recently turned their eye on the travel ceased to deal equally soon. Despite exploring the variety of traveling patterns, they focused on one, very specific type of traveler, which is the mass tourist, the one who buys a consumer product from a travel agency, a package tour. The tourist as a sociological category is very close to the stereotype of a tourist: a man with a camera, getting of a bus to see another cathedral recommended as a place to see by a guidebook bought in a supermarket.