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I still consider myself a narrativist in the romantic sense: one who is truly fascinated with how people conjure up and create realms of being through storytelling; how people convey the deepest recesses of their lives through stories, by and by re-creating selves for themselves. The stories that mesmerized me at the onset of this research lay at the very core of romanticism—stories of travel and adventure. Indeed, it was my initial fascination with travel that had moved me to backpack extensively in Asia some fifteen years ago, similar to the backpackers whose excited stories I heard later. The profound stories I first heard and later recounted were the phenomenological dynamo that stirred me to undertake another kind of travel, an academic one, of which this book is a travelogue. Along the route of academic socialization I had transformed from a traveler to a researcher, from a romanticist to a modernist—and perhaps even to a postmodernist (Noy 2003b). For one thing, I had come to realize that the structure of the travel narratives was profoundly related to their content—to the literally wonderful sights and scenes of the trip. The skyscraping peaks of the Annapurna Mountains in Nepal, the brilliantly colorful lagoons of the Torres Del Paine reserve in Peru, the Indian Ganges at dawn—all required, but also afforded, the use of unique vernacular and forms of expression. Spellbound by the diversity of genres of human narrative imagination, I became absorbed with the social production of the stories, in which form and content fuse to become a moving performance. Years of sobering academic socialization ITINERARY vii So we decided on playing this game. The truth is we invented it on the spot, but I’m sure it was also invented before us. Meirav In this combination of elements—the mountain, the mind, and society— exists a circumstance, an option, a fantasy which is ancient. Michael Tobias Itinerary viii have framed and tamed my romanticist fascination and have directed my attention away from the story to its performance. Thus, I began to inquire into how such performances were socially produced, what their intended effects were, how they implicated their audience, what ideologies they promoted in a specific discursive sociocultural context, and what role the particular texts (the travel narratives) played in these performances. Although I did not completely forsake my fascination with incredible scenes of soaring peaks, titanic glaciers, and roaring avalanches, I gradually began to concentrate on the communicative and constitutive aspects of these breath-capturing stories—on the storytelling occasions themselves in their capacity as communal rituals that dialogically facilitated negotiation and construction of meaning, authority, and identity. In other words, becoming a “social scientist” meant foregrounding the social and cultural aspects of the backpacking narrative community, thus construing the dramatic mountainous scenery as the backdrop against which a social drama developed. I came to view the haunting texts that captured heightened touristic scenes as resources that made the performances so subtly compelling. Another vital aspect of the transition from romanticism to (late) modernity concerns the highly institutional context of contemporary travel. Addressing backpackers ’ stories comprehensively entails acknowledging the institutional setting in which and through which their trips take place. Since the global tourism industry has successfully monopolized both the material aspects and the semiotics of travel, a “thick” inquiry into the experiences and stories of backpackers offers insights into tourism in general (as a forerunner of the late modern condition) and into the language and performance of tourists in particular. In addition, since it has been charged that tourism research lacks a systematic theoretical framework, by attending to tourists’ words, stories, and performances in light of current sociolinguistic theories of interaction, this book aims to rectify this situation and to provide a much-needed contribution to the particularities of the language(s) of tourists, focusing on what is unique in their descriptions of their (touristic) experiences. At the core of this book’s inquiry lie the performance of quotations, the dialogues constructed by these quotations, and the social voices they convey—all of which play a crucial role, linking the backpackers’ stories intertextually. Serving as interpersonal anchors, the voices of others persuasively web the individual into a tightly knit tourist community, endowing those participating in the “great journey,” as it is called, with communal authority and with a sought-after sense of shared communal experience and belonging. The opening section of this volume (site I) provides a sociocultural account of...

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