[ This is an essay written for a sociology of tourism class. i've decided to post it here because it expresses some unorthodox ideas about travel, in particular as it pertains to midd students. i encourage others to likewise consider posting schoolwork to the blog. ]
i attend a college where i am a minority because (1) i do not study a foreign language, and (2) i choose not to study abroad. This raises several questions. Why does a school like Middlebury College place such emphasis on its language and study abroad programs? What objectives does it believe these avenues access? Where do they actually arrive? What is my relation to these directions and destinations as someone who digresses from the trodden path? Why do i digress?
In seeking to understand the act and rhetoric of studying abroad, it is helpful to draw on the field of tourism studies to investigate how modern humans relate to travel. For Dean MacCannell, the tourist industry represents the proffered solution to modern feelings of alienation (from work, from family, from community, from self) which run rampant in urban and suburban populations. By engaging with the authenticity of others, we are supposedly afforded a dose of reality that makes the unreality of the everyday life tolerable (paradoxically). John Urry’s approach to tourism pursues a similar idea, where modern beings make a temporary departure from the “regulated spheres” of routine life to “engage with a set of stimuli that contrast with the everyday and mundane”. To these understandings Nelson H.H. Graburn adds the dimension of rituality, which invokes discourse about the sacred and profane and about the structure surrounding ritual activities. Moreover, Erik Cohen complicates things by pointing out that escape from alienation is not necessarily the root of all tourist activities, but that a more nuanced “interest in or appreciation of that which is different” spurs variations of “movement away from the spiritual, cultural or even religious centre of one’s ‘world’ into its periphery, towards the centres of other societies”.
Since Middlebury has made no official statement regarding the purpose of its study abroad programs, i turn instead to the college’s mission statement under the assumption that study abroad operates along similar guidelines. From the mission statement:
“We strive to engage students' capacity for rigorous analysis and independent thought within a wide range of disciplines and endeavors, and to cultivate the intellectual, creative, physical, ethical, and social qualities essential for leadership in a rapidly changing global community. Through the pursuit of knowledge unconstrained by national or disciplinary boundaries, students who come to Middlebury learn to engage the world.”
What we can glean from this is that Middlebury exports its students to build this cherished “knowledge unconstrained by national boundaries” for the production of global community leaders. The emphasis here is on intellectual and professional cultivation. To expedite these processes the college implements a standard of language proficiency as the touchstone for immersion. By putting students in close touch with unfamiliar cultures, the college aims to foster the tenets of “universal sympathy” and “international responsibility” that underlie to global citizenship.
These objectives draw on Cohen’s appreciation of difference, but with undertones of cultural relativism that reject MacCannell and Urry’s arguments. i, however, would contest that this portrayal represents the reality for many students. For a considerable number of Middkids, studying abroad is an escape from Urry’s regulated spheres of everyday life, from the mundane of the Middlebury bubble wherein inauthenticity is endemic. In step with Gmelch, i would also point to the function of studying abroad as a rite of passage into adulthood. The conventional rite of passage, college itself, does not always develop adaptability and self-confidence as advertised, due to an array of factors including the proliferation of easy and inexpensive means by which to maintain rigorous contact with parents, and the nurturing nature of the institution itself which feeds and houses and employs; thus studying abroad supplants or supplements this ritual. Other travel motives for Middlebury students include diversion (have fun!), experimentation (imagine yourself as a Tanzanian/Tralfamadorian), and existentialism (Western life is meaningless, i'm bustin’ out to the real world: the third world). These personal and institutional objectives of course intertwine within the student to structure his/her experience abroad. Lofgren writes about the role of narratives in producing experiences, how tourists make use of preprogrammed interpretive methods to make sense of their travels. If we can consider the objectives explicated above as narratives, we can explore to what degree they shape the Middlebury student’s study abroad experience (and to what degree they align with an objective reality, if there is one).
Graburn tells us that rituals of preparation/anticipation and of nostalgia/recollection create meaning in and around the ritual itself. Given this, the daydreaming and fantasies that a student engages prior to and following their travels are part of the study abroad experience. The Middlebury community constructs substantial hype around studying abroad; on the one hand, this sets the stage for disappointment. However, it is more than probable that a Pygmalion effect is at large, causing students to realize their journey as a “life-changing experience” precisely because they expect it as such. Moreover, upon reentry they employ those preprogrammed interpretive methods to recall the experience as transformative. The frame of the rite of passage narrative is perhaps also self-fulfilling prophecy in this way. Students hoping to achieve adaptability and self-confidence are prone to do so. Of course, there is room for skepticism—can we trust students’ evaluations of their experience? Is it possible to truly achieve maturation or independence through a program that is highly regulated by the college? When students report their elation at engaging with genuine cultures, shouldn’t we be cynical of a staged authenticity carefully constructed, packaged, and sold by the schools? Do the students exhibit any measurable changes in thought or behavior upon return (other than an exponential growth of annoyingness)? Does any of this matter so long as the students, parents and trustees are satisfied?
Middlebury College, via its liberal liberal arts education, already installs and hones qualities of global citizenship prior to the student’s study abroad experience. Studying abroad merely reinforces those attitudes by exercising them in a more “authentic” setting than the classroom. Just as Graburn’s tourist seeks specific reversals to “come back refreshed as better versions of their same old selves,” or as Cohen’s tourist who “adheres to the ‘spiritual centre’ of his own society or culture, prefers its life-ways and thought-patterns,” the Middlebury student rarely experience a complete upheaval of their world. Instead, he/she uses the study abroad experience to fortify their preexisting ideas about international responsibility and cultural relativity. To this extent, the hypothetical “immersion” which the program touts is infrequently achieved (and to a degree, might even be detrimental to its aims—they want their Middkiddos to stay loyal after all). In fact, traveling as part of an academic agenda decisively colors the experience; every act or thought abroad is weighed down by the Middlebury anchor. This gives rise to a particular sort of deformation of experience, where students extract relevant or utile aspects from the context of their travels, reinterpret them, and reintegrate them into a larger, disparate fabric of understanding. This process also transpires within the average tourist, but for the Middlebury study abroad student it is regulated by the college to fitan its objective of professionalization. As Lofgren writes, “We neither have nor can be given experiences. We make them in a highly personal way of taking in impressions, but in this process we use a great deal of established and shared cultural knowledge and frames”. In our case, the frames are determined by both broader understandings of study abroad programs and by the specific trajectory proposed by Middlebury.
This predeterministic, professionalizing pastiche of immersion is precisely what repels me from the program. The commodification of foreign (and often fragile) cultures for the purpose of further sophisticating Middlebury students seems unfair to both sides. Also, i have serious doubts about the academic value of studying abroad—it has nearly become an excuse to take a year off from college, reap the sensual pleasures of a nation, and get scholastic credit for it. If i am to travel abroad one day, it will be on a morning when Middlebury College is no longer the gum under my shoes. It will be without premises of growth, without engines of despair, and it will be a one way ticket.
These sentiments stem from a particular aversion to hackneyed touristic practices. Trust me, if you’ve seen one basilica you’ve seen all basilicas. Besides, i think that the imagination of oneself as a tourist everyday is by far a more invigorating exercise. In a segment of their “The Trouble With Tourism and Travel Theory?” article, Franklin & Crang suggest that the modern acceleration of global flows yields a constant state of flexible reconstitution of culture. They write, “We casually take in these flows, never fully in possession of their extent or their temporality, never expecting them to be complete or finalized as a knowable cultural landscape around us”. This brand of perpetual uncertainty resonates with my personal modus operandi. i already feel fairly adept at standing outside of American culture—everything is foreign to me all the time. Moreover, the pursuit of authenticity is, in my eyes, a rather pointless one, since performative modes of existence have come to saturate just about every corner of this globe. “Touristic culture is more than the physical travel, it is the preparation of people to see other places as objects of tourism, and the preparation of those people and places to be seen,” says Franklin & Crang, but i believe that the majority of the moments of our lives are invented in preparation to be seen. And evermore, especially in the West, we feel the impetus to invent ourselves as highly individualized or different, which permits all onlookers to conceive of us as living curios. If we buy MacCannell’s anatomy of the attraction where the reproductions and markers of a sight create the aura and construct a sight’s importance, we might consider that every reproduction of every person, place or thing, and the information that circulates around it, constitute an attraction. A fitting example of this is the Facebook page, which reproduces images of an individual and provides markers of information about them (Facebook is a huge guidebook to the world!). Approaching everyone and everything as an attraction may seem bizarre and distancing, but i find it profitable. After all, the tourist gaze supposedly invokes a “greater sensitivity”, and touristic practices as rituals frame sacredness and produce meaning. As such i don’t feel the need to hop across the planet to find stimuli that contrast the mundane everyday; the elegance of water suspended on webs, the way some people just can’t dance, the endless stretches of suburbia’s cement, the strangeness of kind acts—these things are attractive, these things are attractions, for me.
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