Afterword

One of the most common icons of the global age is not surprisingly the globe itself. Travel in its terrestrial and extra-terrestrial forms has indeed accustomed us to familiar snaps of a planetary home. From the shots of the blue planet suspended over abyssal darkness, courtesy of the Apollo space missions, to the sketchy outline of earth on notices encouraging hotel customers to re-use their towels, the images of the planet are increasingly common in the contemporary imaginary. Seeing things from a distance is as much a matter of subjection as observation. Occupying a superior vantage point from which one can look down on a subject people or a conquered land is a staple of colonial travel narratives.¹ There is a further dimension to the question of distance described by Tim Ingold, who draws a distinction between perceiving the environment as a 'sphere' or as a 'globe'. For centuries, the classic description of the heavens was of the earth as a sphere with lines running from the human observer to the cosmos above. As geocentric cosmology fell into discredit and heliocentric cosmology came into the ascendant, the image of the sphere gave way to that of the globe. If the sphere presupposed a world experienced and engaged with from within, the globe represented a world perceived from without. Thus, in Ingold's words, 'the movement from spherical to global imagery is also one in which "the world", as we are taught it exists, is drawn ever further from the matrix of our lived experience'.²

In the movement towards the modern, a practical sensory engagement with the world underpinned by the spherical paradigm is supplanted by a regimen of detachment and control. As the images of the globe proliferate, often ironically to mobilize ecological awareness, the danger is that these images themselves distort our relationship to our physical and cultural environment by continually situating us at a distance, by abstracting and subtracting us from our local attachments and responsibilities. However, it is precisely such an ability that is often construed as a basic requirement for both national and more latterly global citizenship. It is the capacity to look beyond the immediate interests of the clan or village or ethnic grouping that creates the conditions for a broader definition of belonging at a national or indeed global level. Bronislaw Szerszynski and John Urry argue, for example, that '"banal globalism"', the almost unnoticed symbols of globality that crowd our daily lives, might, 'be helping to create a sensibility conducive to the cosmopolitan rights and duties of being a "global citizen", by generating a greater sense of both global diversity and global interconnectedness and belonging'.³ The promise of such citizenship is an almost axiomatic contemporary defence of why anyone should bother to travel. If travel is said to broaden the mind and the study of travel to broaden it even further then arguably this is because leaving the village or the suburb is a precondition for any wider sense of belonging. However, Szerszynski and Urry ask the following questions: 'Is this abstraction from the local and particular fully compatible with dwelling in a locality? Could it be that the development of a more cosmopolitan, citizenly perception of place is at the expense of other modes of appreciating and caring for local environments and contexts?'.⁴

In opposition to the figure of the citizen we find the notion of the 'denizen' which has been propagated notably by the non-governmental organisation Common Ground, where a denizen is deemed to be a person who dwells in a particular place and who can move through and knowingly inhabit that place. Therefore, Common Ground dedicates itself to encouraging the proliferation of vernacular, ideographic and connotative descriptions of local places that can take the form of place myths, stories, personal associations and celebrations of various kinds.⁵ The importance of the concept of denizenship for the study of travel lies in three areas that will be discussed in turn: tourism, real estate and migration.

An inevitable consequence of banal globalism is the tyranny of the gaze. Martin Heidegger's claim that the 'fundamental act of the modern...