Two weeks ago, we analyzed during my university seminar’s classes the topic of the opposition between travellers and tourists. Usually, the first one is seen as a representation of everything good: risky, willing to relate to natives, someone who sleeps at place with very basic lodging conditions, who visits destinations independently of what the industry says, who manages time outside from the slavery of tours, etc. The second one, the tourist, is simply a mobile version of the tv viewer: he’s a perfect idiot who is taken from here to there by the industry, by the media, by tours organisers, someone who can only sleep in hotels that provide all the services, and who usually prefers not to establish major contact with natives. I have already widely criticized, for considering it too simplist and not associated to the real practices that people carry on when they travel -for instance, here. Let’s go a little further.

In the first place, if something is important in social sciences it’s to reproduce the vision of the world of the analyzed people. Why, then, should we accept as it is an interested vision of the world, that positions “travellers” as superior to “tourists”? Why take as legitimate only the descriptions they make, and that enhaces the differences rather than the similarities?

As Natalia Delfino and German Pikas emphasize in their grade thesis -in process of final revision, which I’m carrying on these days as their paper tutor- the tourism field has always been interested in naturalizing the idea that travel is a space of freedom, away from quotidian life. Assuming this vision and reivindicating it is a mistake. First, because travel exists since social and economic processes have allowed for its existence, for example under the form of paid vacations. And at the same time it reivindicates as a space of freedom, the tourism field tells travelling people not only what places to visit, but also what parts of the cities to know -the famous enclave- and in some cases even what sensations to experiment. While this form of coopting the touristic space is limited by the practices and reflexive capacities of travelling people, it’s no doubt that they have an organising effect on them, which in good part contradicts the idea of common sense that tends to conceive travel as outside of everyday life’s limitations.

Of course, I’m not saying that all forms of travel are the same. There are quite different strategies to know a destination; the person that stays in a small hut in the middle of the forest and that one who travels only to be locked up in the all-inclusive enclave cannot be the same thing, since their practices differ. But we have to reject some common senses. Travel is not a “space of freedom”; its practices are usually strongly conditioned by the tensions in the field. And in good part it exists because the quotidian life it supposedly opposes allows its development.