In the second of a series of articles looking at the ethics of travel, David Jobanputra argues that we need not worry about rights and wrongs so long as we are properly ‘immersed’. He goes on to suggest how we might engage in immersive travel experiences and why they can benefit both the traveller and their host. 

In last week’s piece, we began looking at the normative ethics of travel, or what I otherwise called ‘should questions’. ‘Should questions’ come in many shapes and sizes, from the trivial (e.g. ‘should I put the kettle on?’) to the profound (e.g. ‘should I pull the plug?’). In the context of travel, we find a similar spectrum; there are little ‘should questions’ (e.g. ‘should I take a towel?’) and big ‘should questions’ (e.g. ‘should I really be here?’). Previously, we looked at the question ‘where should we travel?’, which, I argued, is best answered with another question: ‘how should we travel?’. This brings us to the thrust of this week’s piece.

To recap briefly, it is important to remember that ‘should questions’ have no ultimate answer (outside organised religion that is); in making decisions, all we have are our own subjective scales of cost and gain, right and wrong. Now this can seem a little scary for a species obsessed with order, and for this reason most folk hold fast to normative ideas, going so far as to try to convince others of the rightness of their own perspectives. My aim here, however, is not to impose my own answers to the question ‘how should we travel?’ so as to appease my personal doubts. Instead, I invite you to move beyond the shoulds and should-nots to a land that is governed by instinct. Allow me to explain…

This morning, when you got up, showered, had breakfast or whatever, did you ask yourself: ‘how should I act today?’? Of course you didn’t. And the reason is that for the most part we are totally immersed in our day-to-day activities, such that much of what we do is instinctive. To put this another way, we don’t need to waste time with the question ‘how should I act today?’ – we know automatically – and the same can be said for ‘how should we travel?’; when we are properly immersed in any activity, there is no call for conscious strategy. Immersion, then, is key. It does not answer ‘should questions’ so much as makes them disappear. And so, for the rest of this article, I want to think about some possible paths to ‘immersive travel’.

To be immersed is to be wholly engaged or absorbed in one’s environment, to recognise unity. For the casual traveller, one way to achieve this level of engagement is to study something of their new setting; a language is an excellent place to start, but one might also consider music, dance or martial arts, to name but a few. In each case, the learning process brings one into contact with both culture (in an abstract, historical sense) and the bearers of that culture: the people themselves. Crucially, this contact is reciprocal not reactive, born of unity not difference. Through study, then, it is possible to achieve immersion; the more one learns, the deeper one goes.

Like learning, work can induce immersion. Now the idea of working whilst on holiday may seem horrendous to some, conjuring images of sun-loungers strewn with spreadsheets and sand in your Blackberry. But ‘work’, in a more general sense, refers simply to any task or undertaking in which, to co-opt its scientific definition, energy is transferred from one physical system to another. To work, then, is to invest energy in something, and travel affords us countless opportunities for this. Voluntourism, as it has come to be known, comprises a wide array of activities, from teaching and care work to construction and conservation. Providing the project is well-realised (unfortunately, there is no guarantee of this), voluntary work can lead to a special form of immersion, in which the individual shares not only a social space with others but also their methods and motives. Again, unity prevails.

The prospect of immersion is not limited to long-term travel. Even if there’s not enough time to study yoga or lend a hand in leper colony, one can still look to immerse oneself in this new social reality. Chatting with people, hanging out, sharing a cup of tea – these are all ways of breaking down the barrier between guest and host. And through this flows unity, immersing all around it. When we notice our common humanity, when our interactions are not merely instrumental but also empathetic, any question of how one should act dissolves in intuition. There are no abstract, antagonistic classes (i.e. ‘tourists’ vs. ‘other cultures’), there are simply people, other real people.

So, how should you travel?

Well, how did you act today?

About David Jobanputra

David Jobanputra is a writer and anthropologist specialising in development, cultural change and environmental ethics. He recently completed a PhD in Social Anthropology at University College London, which looked at grassroots advocacy and eco-development in the Aravalli mountains of Rajasthan, India.  In addition to living and working in the subcontinent, David has travelled extensively throughout Europe, Asia and Africa, including overland trips from Tibet to Scotland and Beijing to Java. David recently returned from 18 months living with a tribe in the Rajasthani desert.