I already insisted many times in this point: when one proceeds as an analyst, one can never assume the point of view of the interviewed person. That they assume the world in a determined way and explain it a certain form is the start point of an analysis, not the whole work. As Bruno Latour puts it, as researchers we must never describe the tribe in the tribe’s language. Or as Bourdieu says: to recover the common senses of the agents is the first step, a necessary one, of any research, but in the second stage one should take distance frome these speeches, make them objective.

What’s the point with all of this? Let’s take an example: tourists, particularly travellers and backpackers, affirm they travel to see other people, other cultures. But as Natalia Delfino and German Pikas analyze in their about-to-be-delivered thesis, when interviewing tourists in a hotel in Buenos Aires, most of the travellers admitted they had barely spoken to any native people, except those who worked in the hotel or other services. In a way, the traveller affirmed he traveled to see other people, which whom they finally didn’t interact. This doesn’t mean they’re lying; representations about our practices, and our practices themselves, are not always easy to agree. Think here about what you’ve done the first time you visited a city. Except when you have a friend who lives there, usually the people we met are our hotel’s roomates. This changes, of course, in those cities we visit over and over, or the ones we stay at for work reasons.

But in Natalia and German’s work there is an “other”: the other tourists. In the middle of these unknown cities, travellers establish new relations, but usually with those who share their conditions. That is, since they’re moving around the city, trying to get to know it, they get used to fighting the difficulties of moving around unkown territories. Instead of the native, Natalia and German hypothetize, the other is, precisely, another tourist.

What’s exposed here is rather a series of hypothesis that work fine in the case of Natalia and German’s thesis, based on a field work and interviews in a Buenos Aires hotel. It’s interesting to see how much distance there is between what we think we’re doing -in this case, meeting new people- and the practice itself -that is, not meeting natives, but other tourists instead. It would be interesting to think how does this relate in such a complex field as tourism and how this kind of hypothesis can allow us to think about the structures of a field such as travel, which is always moving but also quite still at the same time.