A Narrative Community: Voices of Israeli Backpackers

Epilogue

I have praised and singled out unapologetically what I particularly cherish. These are merely opinions, rooted at times to certain footnotes, but rootless in the end—searching out along the horizons, compulsive, yearnful, remembering , looking forward. Michael Tobias This book embodies a discursive travel. Like the backpackers’ itinerary, the book commences with an inquiry into the dialogics of persuasive narration that govern pretrip storytelling occasions between accomplished and novice backpackers (see chapter 2). The aim achieved by narrative performances extends beyond the pleasure of a well-told story. Covertly—veiled by the heightened atmosphere of the interaction and by the enthusiasm typical of tourist talk—the narrations promote action to be taken by the audience. Although they at first appear to be descriptive, the stories are in fact prescriptive: they amount to literally moving performances, propelling the listener to embark on her or his own backpacking rite of passage. In this sense, the stories frame the great journey: they suggest and demonstrate how backpacking leads to narrative capital and to the assumption of a new identity and a new sense of communal belonging. They afford a “visa,” as suggested by one of the backpackers, not only to other countries but to sociocultural collectives in Israel as well. The book concludes by framing the trip retrospectively as a (trans)formative experience. The lively travel narratives compellingly attest to and create in the performance a sense of profound self-change (see chapter 9). This experience is accomplished intersubjectively (Young 1987): the narrators first draw the audience into the adventurous and exciting taleworld and then, by establishing the interaction as a symbolic-ritualistic site in and of itself, the beginning of the audience’s travel narrative is inaugurated. The social identity of the audience covertly and uncannily shifts during the interaction from an “unmarked” audience to a yet-to-be backpacker, a potential “candidate” of the rite of passage. Thus, the transformatory experience emerges not only with regard to the trip but also with regard to the interview meeting (we have called it a “second-order” or “contagious” type of transformation). The dialogic genres of persuasion and self-transformation are both effective in a complementary way in the interaction (Noy 2004a). Epilogue 195 Epilogue 196 Indicating that the trip supplies the backpackers with a formative experience and that they consequently change in the course of traveling highlights the effect of this particular tourist practice on the lives of the participants. As noted by Tim Edensor: Tourists’ narratives are often used biographically to mark episodes in personal life stories. The moment of travel may thus be incorporated into a self-reflexive, serialized account of an individual’s development. This is most obvious in particularly symbolic forms of tourism . . . where certain symbolic sites are constructed as worthy of a “once-in-a-lifetime-visit” . . . tourists’ sites are important locations where people attempt to make sense of themselves and the world in which they live, where they situate themselves in relation to the symbolic qualities associated with the site. (1998, 70) Clearly, backpacking is a “symbolic form of tourism,” viewed by the backpackers as a precious “once-in-a-lifetime” experience (see the introduction; the exception is “trampoline” backpackers who undergo this “once-in-a-lifetime” experience repeatedly [Noy and Cohen 2005a, 19]). Yet beyond the observation Edensor makes concerning personal biography, the trip also serves to position the backpackers in a collective social biography: Israeli backpackers of the 1980s differ from the backpackers of the 1990s; those who traveled to Asia view themselves differently from those who traveled to South America, and so on—and all of these travelers view themselves differently from those who have not traveled. Between the rhetoric of persuasion and self-change lies the “actual” rite—the great journey, with all that it encompasses. The bulk of this book is dedicated to (voiced) representations of this phase. The book dwells—as backpackers do—within the scenes of which they narrate, within the many quotations, voices, and dialogues that enliven and authenticate the compelling taleworld of which they speak and in which they protagonize. In this sense, the book is not centrally concerned with the tourists’ biographical stories: with their individual life biographies, with their travel biographies, or even with the narratives of the great journey itself. Rather, the main impression conveyed by their multiple voices—an impression that the process of transcription could not moderate—was the intense intertextual network of humming voices and...