Whether or not you’ve read the novel or watched the movie, Jules Verne’s Around the World in 80 Days is so embedded in Western culture that just about everyone knows the basic plot premise: wealthy and reticent Englishman Phileas Fogg makes gentlemanly bet with his chums that he can travel around the world in 80 days and then sets off with his temperamental French servant to do just that.
The idea for the story came from the actual journey of eccentric Bostonian George Francis Train. (Who liked to refer to himself as “Citizen Train” – check out the NYTimes article from the day he finished his trip in Tacoma, WA.)
What I hadn’t expected of Verne’s novel is that it is such a blatant reminder of how far we’ve come in the last 135 years since colonialist superiority was treated as unquestioned fact.
The steamer passed along near the shores, but the savage Papuans, who are in the lowest scale of humanity, but are not, as has been asserted, cannibals, did not make their appearance.
Similar descriptions applied to Punjabis, Chinese, and Native Americans are littered throughout the book. It’s also clear that, at the time of writing the novel, Verne was an unabashed Anglophile. Not only is the book a celebration of the British empire at its peak, but Verne is constantly praising Fogg’s alleged English qualities (honor, stoicism, courage) and jabbing at his servent Passepartout’s Frenchness (temperamental, impetuous, chatty).
What I found fascinating about Around the World in 80 Days has nothing to do with the book itself, but rather how Jules Verne wrote it. When he was a young boy, according to accounts of relatives, he ran away from home and attempted to sail out to sea to follow the adventures of Robinson Crusoe. Having failed, he promised his mother that “henceforth I will travel only in dream.” For the rest of his writing career Verne rarely traveled. Rather he would surround himself with books and research the landscapes of his novels without ever setting foot there himself.
In the words of Ethan, Jules Verne might be what you consider an OG bridgeblogger. If you have even the most remote interest in African issues then you probably follow Ethan’s blog. He is incredibly talented at consuming and digesting large volumes of information about a complicated topic and then presenting that information in an easy-to-follow narrative that doesn’t simplify its complexity. But in all my years of following Ethan’s blog I think he’s only traveled to Africa for two short conference-related trips.
The obvious difference between Ethan and Jules (apart from the fact that Ethan is both nicer and more empathetic) is the number of research and communication tools that we now have at our disposal. Verne had his local library, letters, and the telegraph. Today, apart from being able to glimpse the front pages of hundreds of newspapers from around the world at the Newseum, we are also able to learn about the world around us in real time thanks to Global Voices, Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, and Google Earth. What’s more, we can – and often do – develop real and meaningful friendships from our interactions on those sites.
Still, there is something about being on the ground, there in person, that allows you to soak in and understand new lands, cultures, and customs in a way that even the most advanced virtual worlds could never rival. I doubt that Ethan would be such an impassioned Africaphile were it not for his time spent in Ghana. And Joi is right, if he really wants to understand the Middle East, the best thing to do is move there. (Though mentioning United Arab Emirates’ tax benefits would have been a brave gesture of sincerity.)
I do understand that increased international travel is neither good for our environment nor our budgets. But, done responsibly, it is good for humanity. The more we experience other cultures the more we understand about ourselves and our place in the world. Which is why I wholly support initiatives like Abby Falik’s Global Citizen Year fellowship program (which hopefully won’t be bogged down by the bureaucracy, legacy, and politics of Peace Corps).
As Michael Naimark notes in a smart essay on the 80plus1 website, Verne’s novel celebrated the technological advances of the industrial era. Thanks to the steam engine, railways, and global colonialism, it was possible for the first time to circumnavigate the globe in just 80 days. Today we’re still at the dawn of a new era of technological advances: pervasive networked and structured data. These tools will lead to a new era of exploration. There are no longer new lands, tribes, and cities to discover. Just by starting up Google Earth we can cast our eyes on every hidden corner of the world. The curiosity that inspires exploration, however, remains. Something keeps Matt traveling and dancing around the world and keeps Nicholas daydreaming about his next trip to Guyana or Venezuela or Argentina. Something inspired this Chinese blogger to travel around the world in 800 days. But exploration today isn’t about discovering the so-called undiscovered. It’s about understanding what has been there all along.
Nice post, Oso. As always.
But there is a flipside to the international bridge building, that I saw on a recent trip to Botswana.
See, there, it’s not uncommon for volunteers to show up, live in the community with a Motswana family while having their great African adventure, and then head home, full of all the benefits that you outline above.
If the people left behind are lucky, they just have to nurse the sadness that comes from losing a friend. But it’s pretty common that nine months later, there’s a little bundle of joy to remind mama and her extended family of the nice young man who came to stay for 6 months while digging a trench. Sometimes the dads know about the kids, sometimes they don’t. Sometimes the moms think the kid will be their ticket to the USA/Canada/Europe, but it hardly ever works out that way. All the kid knows is that she looks different from all her friends.
The problem is, expectations between the visitors and the hosts are often very different. Travellers may be doing good and helping out and building understanding, that I will always acknowledge. But I saw a 6 year old telling a Danish volunteer who has been paying his school fees that now his mom wanted money for a generator. That’s not understanding, that’s some kind of weird backwards colonialism, and it made me very uncomfortable.
I’m not sure where I’m going with this. But I think what I’m trying to say is that for every visitor who gains understanding, there are also locals whose lives are touched, and the flow of benefits isn’t always both ways.
Bekka, you make one great provocation consultant. You’re very right to bring up the often negative impact of international travel and volunteerism.
However, I think that the complex dynamic is completely related to power and has little to do with nationality and/or ethnicity except for how those two things relate to power. If I travel to Botswana and become romantically involved with a Black Botswanan woman with an MBA from Harvard, a $100k annual salary, and a 10-year travel visa to the United States, then I don’t think that many people would question the nature of the relationship.
On the other hand, if I become romantically involved with a young White prostitute from an impoverished family in Los Angeles, then just about everyone would wonder about my intentions. The assumption would be that I find something exotic and adventurous about the relationship while she is merely interested in getting out of the ghetto and increasing her social capital.
The thing is, in the United States, it is probably more rare for middle- and upper-class kids to interact with their peers from Watts or the Bronx than it is for them to interact with working class kids from Guatemala or Botswana. The power dynamic is played out here in the US along the fault lines of gentrification, but you’re right to point out that here you can’t hop on a transatlantic flight and forget about everything.
Despite all these complexities, I don’t think I’ll ever draw the conclusion that we should each stay in our separate worlds divided by class, ethnicity, nationality, and ideology. What we need are more people like you pointing out the ethical dilemmas of how we interact with each other across the boundaries that separate us. I’m going to send this post to Abby. My assumption is that she has already thought about all of this and that it is built into the training of Global Citizen Year.
Finally, I think it’s interesting that you only brought up the scenario of the male volunteer who gets involved with a local girl. I’ve found far more examples of women volunteers who get involved in relationships with local young men, which is always somehow more acceptable. (I think that, generally, women tend to volunteer more than men.) Again, it’s all related to power, and to the fact that “nine months later” it is women who give birth to and are responsible for the child. What a different world we’d live in if it were the other way around.
Oops, you got me on the gender thing. Good point.
I agree that women do tend to volunteer more than men. And I do think that there is a kind of gender-hypocrisy that makes it more acceptable for them to get involved in relationships with locals. But I think it’s important to note that in these cases, women do tend to be more “liberated” (ugh, what a horrible word) than their local counterparts. They’re likely to be better educated, with access to contraceptives and different ideas about gender relations – all of these are contributing factors.
Not that I wan to pick nits with you on this, of course. I think we generally agree.
I also agree about the power dynamics. And I think an understanding of these dynamics are what make the difference between volunteers who go somewhere for the right reason and do meaningful work, and kids on a gap year who are looking for cheap beer and sunshine for a couple of months.
I hate to sound cynical about this, becuase I see the need and the good than can be done (and is being done) by volunteers every day. But I think there is a cynical industry that’s growing around volunteerism, a kind of adventure tourism that’s based on people’s needs.
It’s a complex issue, as you point out, and one never wants to advocate that people stay put and stick to their own kind, or be so overly sensitive that you just end up paralyzed, wringing your hands. There is a balance, and most people get it.
Oh, and by the way, I think Around the World in 80 Days is wicked fun, if you just skip over the wonky ethnic bits.
interesting discussion. for your next reading–sociologically–check out a very readable book, Joane Nagel’s Race, Ethnicity, and Sexuality. she describes patterns of travel, adventures, settlers-sojourners in colonization, war, and tourism and sexuality-ethnicity…
also your discussion is also heteronormative b/c growing lit-blogs-sites on glbt travelers and their assorted sojourns, for example, jeremy seabrook, researchers on transnational female sexual desire, and hijras have now become transgendered via conferences y websites. glbt folks also volunteer as well and find glbt communities in host nations albeit with their own cultures and histories as well as acronyms such as MSMs..
nonetheless i will juxtapose verner’s book with nagel’s.