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9 Self-identity for us forms a trajectory across the different institutional settings of modernity over the durée of what used to be called the “life-cycle.” Anthony Giddens One does not simply see more of the world . . . one also accepts the invitation to become a better person. Chris Rojek and John Urry In the travel narratives they tell, backpackers re-create themselves as changed persons . The great journey, they enthusiastically admit, supplies more than mere recreation and even more than a profound experience per se: rather, it is downright transformative. Upon performing their travel experiences, the backpacking narrators establish a heightened dialogical context that facilitates powerful claims of selfchange . Admittedly, these claims were not apparent from the start; it was well into the research that their salience struck me. This was probably due to the neatly seamless fashion in which they were incorporated in the narration as well as to the obvious (“naturalized”) state identity claims have in the discourse of contemporary tourism in general. All in all, twenty-eight (approximately 70 percent) interviewees mentioned self-change spontaneously (as did all the others upon specific questioning). While discussing the backpackers’ claims of profound self-change and the intricate way they were tacitly woven into our conversations will be explored at length later, I wish to begin by first attending in general terms to the theme of self-change within personal narratives and second by exploring the relationship between contemporary tourism discourses and identity. A pervasive genre by means of which individuals articulate identity focuses on the theme of self-change, in which narrators describe a dramatic moment or episode in their biography, one that generated a major and enduring self-change. In such cases, a substantial deflection from the expected life trajectory is depicted, a pivotal moment in which the narrator’s identity is altered. Though the raison d’être for the change is rooted in the past, the theme of self-change powerfully engages the present and carries futuristic prospects as well (Langellier 1999; Ochs 1997; Ochs Self-Transformation 173 Chapter 9 174 and Capps 1996). In particular, such claims of personal change constitute, by their generic definition, a clear instance of projection into the present and the future, as they performatively carry experiences from past to present. After all, if the change that is depicted is indeed an enduring one and its meaningfulness does not cease, it should only naturally be enacted and displayed in the act of narration. Although self-change is commonly (and commonsensically) construed as a theme within narratives of personal identity, it is challenging to conceptualize it differently: rather than constituting a pivotal moment across some preassumed progressive trajectory, it is proposed here that the self-change theme may, in fact, be the only or the primary instance of identity. If, as suggested by Giddens in the epigraph above, identity is to be thought of as a trajectory, then it is possible that the themes encompassing transformative experiences are the hallmark of late modern times. For if people are continually (trajectorily) becoming, then the pervasive and constitutive means by which people can relate to, articulate, and experience their selfhood is through the mechanism of self-change. This, indeed, sits well with the exponential growth of international tourism over the last decades. Tourism acts as both a consequence of and an aid to the Western enterprise of engaging in a “panoply of going concerns” (Gubrium and Holstein 2000, 102) that supply the discursive conditions for self-realization. Note that since tourism is commonly perceived as a haven, a recess, from the burdens and constraints of everyday modernized life, and not as additional institutional engagement , it is (uncannily) located in the moments in peoples’ lives that are thought of as not “tangled” in discourse, wherein narratives of identity are susceptible to the effects of (trans)formative institutional discourses. In line with Giddens’s observation above, recently we have come to acknowledge the crucial interrelationship that exists between institutions—and the institutional discourses and practices they embody—and identities. Various modern institutions bear a fundamental influence on whom we are continually telling ourselves and others that we have become. As Gubrium and Holstein (2000, 97) appealingly argue, the self is currently “big business, the stock-in-trade of a world of self-constituting institutions, which increasingly compete with each other for discerning and designating identities.” This state of affairs is arguably one of the hallmarks of late...

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