Travel, Ethics, and Moral Distress in The Prophet’s Camel Bell

The ideological work of The Prophet’s Camel Bell as it is directed to Western readers highlights ethics as a concern and maps elements of an ethically informed response to questions of cultural difference. The memoir suggests that encounters with the foreign can become part of a reorientation toward other environments, which include people as well as natural and human-made affordances. This essay considers the foreign not as a static object or concept but as an embodied field in The Prophet’s Camel Bell, drawing on Tim Ingold’s environmentalist anthropology. Conceptualized in this way, ‘Somalia’ consists in a series of shifting environments rather than a singular, describable entity, paralleling Laurence’s own emergence within these spaces. At the same time, the text contains historically specific aesthetic strands that create political inconsistencies in the text that have puzzled Laurence’s critics. The essay argues for renewed critical attention to epistemological and ethical issues in a major work in the genre of Canadian travel writing.