The Anthropologist and the Travel Writer
Anthropology is a discipline concerned with all the aspects of the way people live, their everyday activities as well as their rituals and ceremonies. It is also concerned to be comparative to see how behavior and beliefs vary or have close parallels in different culture. Further, it attempts to put the insights gained to practical use, for example, by helping people from very different cultural backgrounds to work together especially on developmental projects. ()
Social anthropology is concerned with the whole of life. The study of this discipline encourages us to have a new kind of consciousness of life. Moreover, it is a way of looking at the world; thus a way of living. Many people are brought into this discipline as a result of travel, reading accounts of other cultures or meeting with anthropologists who express the excitement of trying to understand the many ways in which humanity is expressed. ()
Travel writing, on the other hand, is a literary genre related to the essay and to the guidebook characterized by a narrator, usually though not exclusively identified with the real-life author, who moves about through some selected piece of geography. It provides commentary, either about the scenes the writer sees during the travel or on some other topic suggested by a triggering experience. ( 2006)
Travel writing gives information or a piece of imaginative prose by itself. It has its own stroke in addition to the feeling of the author as he journeys from place to place. The writer shares his travel experience with the reader; thus letting the readers partakes as it were in that experience. (2003)
Anthropologists and travel writers are people of different discipline but share common aspect of their field-the strangeness. Both travel to do their purpose and their work. They visit different places to gather information and data about their discipline. Both find their selves in different social, natural and cultural environment. They are temporary strangers and experiences strangeness around.
There are similarities and differences that exist between the relationship of an anthropologist to his subject of study and the relationship of a travel writer to the people and their culture.
Both are interested to find out and discover the uniqueness of that people and the culture itself. The anthropologist and the travel writer both seek to know the unusual thing of the people, the customs, dress, jewelry and the culture that they are trying to experience. However, the two have different treatment in doing their purpose as well as in dealing and studying the people and the culture as their subject.
In the past, travel writer tends to establish the people of the distant and exotic land whom they encountered as different and therefore worthy of close attention in the travel accounts. We could see the attention paid to these peoples in travel writing accounts as asking the questions; “can you believe this? Or isn’t this strange?” (1850-1950)
However, since the people are no longer entirely new to the travel writer because of the access to all the past accounts that outline the character of the native such as attention to dress, rituals, ceremony, religion and the culture itself, the writer turns away from the portrayal of newness and instead see the attention vary according to the individual travelers personality or his motives for travel. ( 1850-1950)
The scientists and naturalists as a travel writers view people as a mere extension of the natural world and therefore worthy of very little direct attention in their account. They focus more on issues of land and how the natural world fits into their research. ( 1850-1950)
Further, contemporary travel writers focus more on the people as individuals rather than as part of mass identification. Thus, this turn towards individual recognition that mirrors the emergence of the more contemporary idea of travel writing. In this case, the writer does not only travel for the traditional motives of traveling such as the economic, religious and scientific reasons but because they wanted to. Thus, the more contemporary travel writers traveled because they wanted to see the world. ( 1850-1950)
Travel writers shift their attention away from the conventional methods of description of people. But they still write about what the native wear, what they eat and their customs as somewhat foreign since they understand that the readers want to know what is different or fascinating about the natives and the culture itself. ( 1850-1950)
Anthropologists, on the other hand, turn their attention to a more sincere and complete categorization of people. Their attentions fuse both the classification system of sciences with the more personal observations of travel writers. They turn more to the understanding of the people customs as a way of better understanding the differences between different peoples as compare to the traditional focus of travel writers on the quick stereotypes based on biological or religious ideas about the people. ( 1850-1950)
To understand what they do, we have to imagine for a moment what would happen if we were suddenly transported to a very different culture far from our own. We would probably feel somewhat bewildered, unable to understand the language spoken, eat the food without longing for home cooking, or enter someone’s home without unwittingly doing something that appeared rude to your hosts. But, after a few months, we would begin to understand how to avoid social pitfalls and after a year we might even be able to speak the language with a certain degree of fluency. Gradually, mutual understanding and trust would develop and we would begin to experience the world through the medium of another culture. (.)
This process of familiarization is similar to the experience of many anthropologists who go abroad to study another culture. Thus, unlike travel writers, anthropologists immerse themselves in the people and culture they are studying. (.)
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