Exploring Travel and Transformation

DRAFT CHAPTER: Travel and Transformation, edited by Garth Lean, Russell Staiff and Emma Waterton, Farnham: Ashgate. Expected Publication Date: July 2014 Publishers Website: http://www.ashgate.com/isbn/9781409467632 Please cite and reference the published version: Lean, G., Staiff, R. and Waterton, E. 2014. Exploring Travel and Transformation, in Travel and Transformation, edited by G. Lean, R. Staiff and E. Waterton. Farnham: Ashgate, 11–25. Chapter 1 Exploring Travel and Transformation Garth Lean, Russell Staiff and Emma Waterton Travel has a long association with the idea of transformation, both in terms of the self and social collectives. Some of the earliest surviving works of literature, such as The Epic of Gilgamesh ([eighteenth–tenth century BCE] 1972) and Homer’s The Odyssey ([eighth century BCE] 2004), tell tales of individuals heading off on ‘heroic’ quests that would strip them of their worldly possessions, status and relationships, bringing them to the bare essentials of being and, consequently, transforming their thinking and behaviours. One need only scan the back-cover blurbs of the travel books at their local book store to see that this trope is still alive and well. Even if we consider pre-recorded history, archaeology and genetic science locate the origin of the human species in East Africa, our ancestors rising to their feet, spreading across the globe and forming diverse social structures and cultures in relationship with the unique contexts in which they found themselves. Physical mobility enabled these social groups to move, and interact, in various ways around the world – to varying degrees of distance, through different modes of travel and with divergent intentions – exploring, ‘salvaging’, ‘saving’, invading, pillaging, exploiting, conscripting, conquering, colonising, converting, forming alliances with, studying, learning from, ‘educating’, ‘reeducating’, ‘enlightening’, and spreading diseases, languages, beliefs, flora, fauna, genes, cultures, practices, objects (to name only a few limited and vague labels) across, and between, continents in processes that were undeniably transformative for both ‘visitor’ and ‘visited’. Beyond individuals, these collective movements acted to alter and mark spaces, places, landscapes and ecosystems. And of course these places, in all their various stages of alteration, acted upon the individuals, collectives, minds, bodies, life-forms and objects moving through, engaging with and relocating to them, along with those inhabiting (whether ‘temporarily’ or ‘permanently’), in varying ways. As such, our present selves, and social, cultural and ecological landscapes, are indelibly marked by, and entwined in, this complex history of human mobility. Transformation in the context of contemporary corporeal travel is arguably even more complex. Some commentaries have argued that the world in which we travel offers few of the opportunities for novelty and discovery that were available in past travels; the world has been ‘discovered’ – it is ‘known’ and does not afford the same possibility for transformation. It has been contended that people no longer need to travel corporeally and can experience places through literature, visual and Internet media. For others, this itself is a problematic argument because it detracts from the richness of the physical travel experience; the embodied, sensual performances that take place, the unique psychological and physiological reactions triggered by physical, carnal encounter, the altered performances that travel away from familiarity seems to permit and the effects of the plethora of random happenings that may unfold – varying degrees of encounter with mobile, fluid and transforming spaces, places, landscapes, people/s and objects at unique moments in time. Recent research by one of the editors supports this, arguing that anyone can be transformed by corporeal travel, a phenomenon influenced by a complex array of processes taking place ‘before’, ‘during’ and ‘after’ any given physical travel experience (see Lean 2012a, forthcoming). Drawing upon a movement to position geographical, sociological and cultural thinking within a mobilities paradigm (see Bauman 2000, 2005, Urry 2000, 2007), this work argues that one does not simply move from one physical location to another, varying in discernible degrees of difference to their own, with an eventual return to the place of origin. Instead, one travels as an emotional and sensual being that has been travelling (albeit to varying degrees) physically, virtually, imaginatively and communicatively since, before any particular corporeal travel experience. These travels endue an individual with unique, and complex, subjectivities that may be triggered (or not) in all manner of ways throughout a journey. What is more, a traveller is not a static body moving through space. Just as ‘before’ a journey, they continue to travel in ways that stretch well beyond physical movement, and all of these mobilities feed into a continually changing ‘self’, shifting in different moments and spaces. Unprecedented physical mobility, and a greater diversity of cultures on the move than ever before (not to mention non-physical mobilities), has not only increased the likelihood of familiarity, but also the possibility of the ‘exotic’, both at ‘home’ and abroad. The ways in which individuals encounter and interact (or do not) with these elements, and the manner in which these various individuals and collectives mark and shape – and are marked and shaped by – the environments and places through which they move, vary ad infinitum. Thus, we would argue that an increasingly mobile and fluid world does not limit the potential for transformation through physical travel; rather, it makes it a far more complex, multifaceted and intricate phenomenon to explore. Given the common association of transformation with travel, it is somewhat surprising that it has remained relatively underexplored and unchallenged, with little in the way of a balanced corpus of academic material surrounding such themes. Instead, much of the literature remains focused upon describing and categorising travel and tourism experiences from a supply-side perspective, and taxonomising travellers on the basis of their level of involvement and interest, often using problematic, and uncritical, assumptions. Occasional forays into theory have generated some important milestone contributions (see Bruner 1991 for example), but there have been few new attempts at a rigorous re-theorisation of the issues. Thus, while threads of research have emerged that take ‘transformation’ seriously, these have tended to focus upon particular niches – study abroad (see for example: Creamer 2004, Fordham 2005, Stephenson 1999), backpacking (see for example: Matthews 2007, Noy 2004a, 2004b), volunteer tourism (see for example: Broad 2003, Matthews 2008, Wearing et al. 2008), nature-based recreation (see for example: Beaumont 2001, Charters 1996, Ross and Wall 1999) and so forth. Among many other things, research looking at these themes has argued that travel can promote learning (for example, of languages, cultures, history, religions and places; see for example: Forgues 2005, Immetman and Schneider 1998, Roberson 2002, 2003), cross-cultural understanding and peace (see for example: Blanchard and Higgins-Desbiolles 2013, D’Amore 1988a, 1988b, Litvin 1998, 2003, Moufakkir and Kelly 2010, Pizam 1996, Pizam et al. 1991, Var and Ap 2001), an awareness of various global issues (for example, poverty, conflicts, migration, trade and power imbalances; see for example: Butcher and Smith 2010, Palacios 2010, Salazar 2002, 2004), environmental consciousness and sustainability ideals (see for example: Beaumont 2001, Charters 1996, Lean 2009, Ross and Wall 1999) and wellness (see for example: Kottler 1997, 2002, 2003, Kottler and Montgomery 2000). It is also argued that these momentary insights can have long-term attitudinal and behavioural implications (Kottler 1997, Lean 2009, 2012b). Much of the scholarship conducted on this topic to date presents tourism and travel in an overly positive light. In fact, Pritchard et al. (2011: 941–2) write that the position taken by scholars purporting to the transformative benefits of tourism, which ‘combines cotransformative learning and action’, represents the emergence of an ‘academy of hope’ (this article was subsequently reworked as the introduction for Reisinger (2013)). It is important to acknowledge, however, that this ‘positive vision’ is contested. Some argue that travel simply reinforces an existing way of seeing and acting in (and on) the world, supporting prejudices, misguided/‘false’ representations and, in the case of travel from developed to less developed nations, the continuation of colonial relations (Bruner 1991, 2005, Hall and Tucker 2004, Tucker and Akama 2009). Research and anecdotes also suggest that any ‘positive’ effects that may be delivered by tourism and travel are often only temporary, falling by the wayside as more pertinent concerns capture one’s attention upon return (Lean 2009, Salazar 2002, 2004). This overemphasis on the benefits of tourism/travel arises from a failure to adequately acknowledge the negative impacts, the power imbalances between those who benefit, and those who do not, including other facets like who has the right to access tourism/travel and who determines what constitutes a ‘positive’ transformation. There is also a reluctance to look at the broader landscape of non-leisurely physical mobilities (working abroad, migration, refugees, forced migration) and their intersections and commonalities with tourism. There is a significant risk that comes with framing tourism as a panacea – and this has been explored extensively over the last two decades, and should not be forgotten. Given the arguments presented above, this volume calls for an extensive reinvigoration of the scholarship examining transformation through physical travel, with the aim of developing a new, wide ranging canon of work investigating travel and transformation. This is a key theme in the conceptualisation of tourism, travel and mobilities, and it is important that a body of scholarship is developed that explores it in its full complexity. We know that travel can be transformative: as highlighted above, the belief that it can act as an agent of change which broadens the mind, among other transformative qualities, stretches back to the earliest recorded stories and literature (Leed 1991). Yet, there seems to be a number of problematic assumptions embedded within that belief, especially those concerning who can be transformed, the circumstances in which transformation/change can, or cannot, occur, the types of transformation that can, and cannot, be brought about and what constitutes the very nature of travel itself. Many of these assumptions abide by an outdated paradigm of tourism/travel research that has a modernist fascination with developing typologies and conceptualising travel as movement between static, unchanging locations in a formulaic and predictable manner. In addition, it often frames tourism and travel as a process that is the antithesis to one’s ‘everyday existence’ (see Lean 2012a: 153; see also Mavrič and Urry 2009). With this in mind, we see it as important that the academy begins to draw upon new and emerging debates not only within tourism studies, but cognate fields such as geography, heritage studies and cultural studies, to name but a few, in order to adequately explore not only travel and transformation but travel and tourism more broadly (see Franklin 2007, Franklin and Crang 2001, Robinson and Jamal 2009). For example, the importation of a Mobilities paradigm into the field has helped to highlight the redundancy of many earlier attempts at touristic enquiry. Now, more than ever, we are aware of the richness and complexity of such a state of continual travel – the ways in which people move and do not move, separate from and continue connections, the ways in which travel and transformation are represented and storied, and subsequently distributed, the ways in which spaces, places, individuals, minds and bodies are marked and transformed, and continue to be shifted through ongoing mobilities, and the relationship of the transformations brought by physical travel to other mobilities. It is the intention of this volume to build upon emerging work looking at transformative travel in order to provide a catalyst for a multi- and interdisciplinary cohort of scholars to explore travel and transformation in a contemporary context. While the volume itself is not a comprehensive exploration of these issues (this would be impossible to achieve), we hope it whets the appetite and provides a springboard for exciting, colourful and creative new avenues of enquiry under the banner of travel and transformation. The Gravitational Pull of Modernity and (Late/Post) Modernism in a Mobile World All movement transforms: spaces, places, people and environments. All movement is transformative whether we move from our bed to the garden, from our abode to the local market, from remote village to bustling town or city, from New York to Phnom Penh, from Kabul to Sydney. Movement is what we are; movement is what makes everything – the universe, planets, galaxies and all life forms. Movement is everywhere and everything. No movement, because of time and the endless fluidity of place, is repeated and so each movement through time/place transforms, changes, creates and destroys. Movement defines things, gives them shape, identities, chronologies and trajectories. And conversely, there is no stasis, ever. Thus, in the widest sense, this ‘truth’ of the universe, of the nature of all things, visible and invisible, animates the chapters in this volume. Unsurprisingly, given the rubric of the book when we called for contributions, a theme that permeates the chapters is movement/mobility/travel, all of which are inextricably interconnected with transformation/change/identities. Not cause and effect, but interchangeable because all movement changes. A second theme is an analytic that we would want to describe as an ongoing dance between modernity and modernism but perhaps with a re-imagined choreography, a culturally inscribed analytic born of particular history/ies and particular knowledge practices (that are, in these chapters, Western ways of seeing, knowing and representing). How do we think movement and transformation? Most of the writers occupy a potent space that exists in, around and between coexisting nodes (that are themselves never stable or static): social analysis and poetics; Western modernities and advanced/post modernisms; observing/feeling/being and recording these; understanding/rationality and affect/aesthetics. What is remarkable is that the writers not only investigate movement/transformation, but also create writings that themselves are full of dynamism, fissures, loops, portals, speculations, open-endedness as though resolutions, destinations and certainties would deny the subject being thought. For the writers in this volume transformation is never complete and never entirely fulfilled, teleology is denied; destinations are provisional, just temporary moorings at most. Significantly, in these writings, the horizon is always receding, always being re-calibrated even when the subjects/travellers set out to purposely change their lives in some way, whether through walking, migrating to a new country, backpacking, cosmetic surgery, as exiles, as pilgrims and so on. On one level, despite the common subject matter – travel and transformation – quite tenuous threads hold these chapters together. Both ‘travel and ‘transformation’ are simultaneously nebulous, elastic and porous concepts that are co-produced by particular circumstances and, when put together, they become even more so for most of the contributors. But this lack of any easy idea of consensus or commonality gives way, on another level, to something that is symptomatic of the collection. Born of modernity and modernism, travel and transformation as a description is beholden to the historical conditions that make it visible and intelligible and the post- (or late-) modern circumstances that enable the investigation of travel and transformation to be a form of critical engagement that reverberates beyond the ‘travel and transformation’ tag. Despite historical antecedents (St Paul, the Buddha, Lao-Tsu), transformative travel is a modern post-Enlightenment conception (as are almost all ideas about contemporary travel), a phenomenon grounded in modernity and therefore propelled by the traits associated with ‘modern life’: disenchantment, alienation, migration, the urban condition, industrialisation and commodification, fractured identities, liberation, notions of the ‘individual’ and of ‘freedom’, loss, displacement, exile, memory, powerlessness, marginalisation, survival, struggle, escape, creativity, post-colonialism, existential angst, secularism, globalisation, cosmopolitanism, sectarianism and so forth. The reign of Western modernity has produced both the phenomenon and our understanding of that phenomenon, both the means to be ever more mobile and the deep ambivalence about a life of perpetual motion, the desire and the willingness to move with our faces turned, almost by compulsion, towards tomorrow, or the future (however conceived) and yet with a deep-rooted critique of the conditions that enable travel and transformation with its implicit (partial) denial of the past, of previous states of being except in memory, as a measure of our movement, as a marker of pre- and posttravel/transformation, perhaps as nostalgia, as a scar, an imprint of loss. How is it that we are alert to the pain of the exile, the yearnings of the dispossessed, the liminal experiences of backpackers and overseas volunteers, the anguish of forced migration, the desire to change our bodies, the quest for self-knowledge, the journeys of outsiders, artists and poets, the need for transcendence, the search for ‘wholeness’ in places/worlds deemed fractured, splintered and empty of meaning? The visibility, the understanding and the emotional resonances – often powerfully evoked and felt – by individual subjects that we meet in this collection are, in turn, dependent on our ability as readers to not just empathise but recognise and know. What makes this possible? Modernity and modernism haunt this collection. They are the twin enablers that provide the crucial portal into our seeing, knowing and feeling. Travel and transformation, as explored, interrogated, ruminated upon, thought and written in the forthcoming chapters vibrates and gains traction within us as readers through the language and the analytic we have come to associate with modernism. Modernism is, of course, a difficult word but in its many manifestations across time and space it reveals itself by the many who profess on its behalf and who produce its oeuvre. This collection of chapters reminds us of the genealogy of Western modernism and asks us to consider travel and transformation as its love child. We encounter in these studies selfdefinition and loneliness; the life of an exile or a migrant, or life as constant mobility; there is perpetual loss and a perpetual search; denied or fractured identities and created (or recreated) identities; subjects always en route rather than being rooted (and if the latter how tenuous and ambiguous rootedness is); dispossession in various guises, the question of belonging, of ‘out of placeness’, displacement and, simultaneously, the continuous transformation of place; the attempts to connect to others on whatever journey is being considered and the joy and relief such connection (real or imagined) brings; alienation, tearing apart and remaking; consumer capitalism as enabler and destroyer with its ‘dark realities’ of inequality, conflict, poverty, ecological disaster and the spectre of apocalyptic or dystopian futures; the radical rupture with the past and the hope of a reconfigured ‘new’ self and even, perhaps, ‘new’ futures; the ambiguities of technology and ‘progress’, technology as a resource and a source of empowerment, as an embodied reality, but simultaneously the creator of menace, conformity, surveillance and entrapment, both perspectives symptomatic of ‘modern life’; the primacy of experience self-knowledge and ‘freedom’ and its complex and difficult, sometimes cryptic, relationship to belief, transcendence, spirituality and religion; the question of what it is to be ‘modern’ in a perpetually mobile world. The landscape of modernity/modernism conjured and explored in the chapters in this volume is expansive and multi-directional, a restless and critical evocation of some of Western modernism’s most famous epithets, ‘all that is solid melts into air’ (Karl Marx); ‘things fall apart, the centre cannot hold’ (William Butler Yeats) and ‘we shall not cease from exploration /and the end of all our exploring /will be to arrive where we started /and know the place for the first time’ (T.S. Eliot). The literature about modernism is vast (for recent overviews see Butler 2010, Levenson 2011, Tew and Murray 2009). However, if we suggest, as we do, that the chapters are subject to the gravitational pull of modernism and are couched in a recognisable language of modernism (whether late- or post- is not the point), what are we referring to? We are certainly not suggesting that the chapters are reinhabiting the modernism of the twentieth century in some sort of recuperative project. Rather, the chapters indicate that despite the significance and the lasting achievements of post-modernity in the last 40 years, modernism has not been entirely left behind, something indicated, of course, by the ‘post’ in postmodernism. The powerful impact of modernism continues to influence how we think and how we consider our thoughts and actions, even subliminally, given the deep cultural resonances modernist discourse and modernist work has had since the early decades of the twentieth century (and earlier). As Levenson (2011: 2) has put it so well, ‘we are still learning how not to be Modernists’. The ongoing impacts and effects of modernism should not, therefore, be a surprise. There is much from the modernist project that arouses in us a way of being and an intellectual charge. We remain discontents. The vast landscape of modernism (now incorporating perspectives from across all continents and regions of the world) with all its contrary motions and paradoxes still produces expressiveness, still animates the profound issues of our times, still informs us, for better or ill, we are estranged from the past, from tradition, from convention, from continuity (even as these are newly asserted by so many). The ‘new’, the ‘immediate’, the ‘creative act’, the ‘unconscious’, the ‘disturbing’, the ‘irrational’, the ‘sceptical’, the ‘innovative’ still enthral. And so too the critique we mount when modernism tackles and harshly confronts ‘the modern’ or ‘being modern’ by exposing the many permutations that forge modernity whether economic, political, social, cultural or personal. We still perceive ourselves as living in a world in crisis. We still face scenarios of human-engineered apocalypse. We still believe in the ingenuity of the individual and the creative will of the self. And, at the same time, we still despair and feel alienated, disempowered and absurd. The idea of being transformed by travel resides in this messy amalgam of modernist thinking. Chapter Summaries Before reaching our own Introduction, readers of the volume will have encountered the powerful narrative composed by Janice Baker, ‘flensed’ – our prelude –, which evocatively charts the creativity and emergence of travel. In a manner reminiscent of Eve Sedgwick’s (1997) ‘weak theory’ or the ethnographic writings of Kathleen Stewart (2007), this is a narrative that points to the rhythms, imaginings, nuances, differences and ruptures of travel. Though distinct in genre to other contributions to the volume – it is no hard analytical piece, after all – it nonetheless has teeth, impact: and it pulls at our senses. We see in it transformations which erupt, forcefully, out of the textual residues of Baker’s recollections of far more bodily experiences at Whale World, Albany (an industrial museum in Australia) and her wanderings through Berlin. And through those recollections, we are invited to participate with her as she pieces together new modes of understanding her movements, right there in the cut and thrust of everyday life. There, we see and feel her transformations. In allowing us such, Baker is simultaneously offering an important entry point into the volume itself; an entry point that manages to pick up more textures and densities as the volume moves from her own reflections, into and across each part and subsequent chapters. In order to provide some semblance of an organisational structure, we have divided the volume into four parts: ‘Transformation Speculations’ (Part I), ‘Transformation, Representation, Story’ (Part II), ‘Transformation in Motion’ (Part III) and ‘Marking Transformation’ (Part IV). The first part commences with a contribution by Jon Anderson and Kathyrn Erskine (Chapter 2), which explores the relationship between identity, place and travel as articulated through the experiences of ‘lifestyle travellers’. Much of the chapter revolves around identity realisation, pursued through that contact zone that emerges in the tensions between external mobility and internal reconciliation, prompted here by a love or quest for change, to be moved and emerge with a new ‘selfhood’ that has been thrown together in experience. This is a narrative of hope and possibility, movement rather than stillness, almost as if our identities could only really be snapped into place whilst in motion. The participant voices at the heart of the chapter are motivated by a hopefulness that emerges out of the unexpected: being in something different allowing them to feel more coherent, less comfortable, yet more comforted. In stark distinction, Drew Ninnis commences his evocative and powerful contribution (Chapter 3) by questioning what he sees as the potentially illusory nature of transformation through travel. Here, travel becomes ‘a disappointed promise’, borne of the need to return, to stop, to draw back and retreat into the structures of our everyday lives. These are not the hopeful lines of escape we are used to finding in the tourism literature. Yet though his commentary is far less forgiving of the notion of ‘change’ than others in the volume, he nonetheless traces moments of transformation, or ‘forms of being otherwise’, through reflections on the writings of Colin Thubron and his journey into the Tibetan mountains using the analytical import of Foucauldian logic, particularly Foucault’s notion of heterotopia. Kailas, Tibet, provides the backdrop for much of the chapter. There, he traces acute realisations of travel as opening up the ‘very possibility of critique’, leading to transformations that might affect not only the constitution of an individual ‘self’, but of space, too. The final chapter (Chapter 4) making up Part I, offered by Fiona Allon and Maria Koleth, emerges out of the intellectual itinerary provided by contemporary philosopher Rosi Braidotti, particularly her concept of ‘transpositions’ and her attempts to capture and represent the conditions of being human. Like Anderson and Erskine in Chapter 2, this is an analysis that targets a specific segment of the tourism economy, volunteer tourism, and draws on interview material gathered from Australian volunteer tourists in a bid to examine processes of self-transformation through what the authors call ‘instrumentalised travel’. Like other contributions to the volume, Allon and Koleth draw upon notions of liminality, posthumanism and the mobilities paradigm, but what sets their analysis apart is their attention to the newly emerging experience economy, which is viewed through the concept of transposition, or that ‘in-between space’, which allows for a moving away from what Braidotti (2005: 269) refers to as the ‘fantasy of unity, totality and one-ness’. Part II, ‘Transformation, Representation, Story’, begins with a chapter authored by Bianca Leggett (Chapter 5), who provides an exploration of pilgrimage literature and the attendant possibilities for a form of travel that might have the capacity to realise dreams of transcendence. To make her case, Leggett draws on the excruciating tensions and charged desires that characterise the work of Geoff Dyer and his Jeff in Venice/Death in Varanasi (2009). This is a narrative that is full of tales about the efforts of life, foregrounding the effects of a breakdown, estrangement and existing on the periphery, all of which amount to a strident articulation of transformation. Much is made of the paradoxes of travel in Leggett’s exposition, borne no doubt from the playfulness of Dyer’s own text, which provides a series of moments or accrued layers through which Leggett is able to explore issues of power, authenticity, injustice, poverty and that stalwart of tourism conundrums, the apparent contradiction between ‘the real’ and ‘the fake’. No clearer illustration of the complexity of these concepts is offered than by her reflections on the sale of a coke can. Leggett’s chapter is followed by a contribution by Rehnuma Sazzad (Chapter 6), who takes as her focus the Palestinian author Mahmond Darwish – who is at once an exile, traveller and poet – and his narratives of dispossession, myth, longing and history. In some ways, this is a chapter that harks back to Allon and Koleth’s attempts to get at the human condition, though Sazzard’s is an illustration of transformation as achieved through the lenses of exile. The touch point of this contribution is its singular attention to the ongoing as opposed to those transformations that emerge, almost in regimental fashion, from an epiphany, a particular experience, person or place. Instead, what distinguishes this chapter is that Sazzard’s reflections are perceived in retrospect and by a third party – never are they personal. Yet, her reflections on political exile, cut with extracts from the poetry of Darwish, also offer a sort of homecoming that is not in a different register to those expressions of an immigrant’s journey articulated in Mannik’s chapter (Chapter 9). Part II is closed with a contribution from Shannon Walsh (Chapter 7), who introduces us to four distinct voices less often associated with the literature explicitly focused on travel and transformation: the nomad, the refugee, the developer and the migrant. This is a contribution that takes the reader to Johannesburg, South Africa and, like Ninnis, pushes us to think differently about the spaces of a city, particularly those spaces unsettled by the constancy of reminders of political disruption. Based on the project Jeppe on a Friday, a film shot over one day in March 2012, this chapter speaks about physical movement through a city newly marked with mobility after a recent history of almost precisely the opposite. Walsh’s reporting on the ways in which each protagonist moves through the city is again reminiscent of the work of Kathleen Stewart (2008: 71) and her attention to the ‘textures, rhythms, trajectories, and nodes of attunement, attachment and composition’ that afford affective potency to any space as we move through it. Our third part, ‘Transformation in Motion’, begins with a chapter by Leila Dawney (Chapter 8) who returns us to themes already familiar, such as pilgrimage, selfhood and movement, which she addresses with the aid of Michel Foucault’s concept of hupomnemata, or self-writing. In terms of geographical space, this contribution whisks us to the walking trails of the South West Coast Path National Trail in England, where the perfectly ordinary practice of walking is rearticulated as a way of working on, and attending to, the self – re- knowing, re-relating – through physical movement. The ‘self’, here, is far from essentialised, however, as Dawney is entirely cognisant of the possibility for those half-knowns that emerge and solidify into ways of knowing within the spaces of leisure to work on double or multiple ‘selves’ simultaneously. Though continuing with a theme of physical movement, the following chapter (Chapter 9) provided by Lynda Mannik focuses upon a specific vehicle of transformation by relating events of the forced transformation of a small group of Estonian refugees in 1948 as they crossed the Atlantic from Sweden to Canada aboard the HMS Walnut, an old British minesweeper. We see in this analysis, again, the presence and influence of Michel Foucault and his concept of heterotopia. Here, it is used to make sense of the recollections of 30 passengers, whose narratives are used to represent so vividly – and with considerable analytical aplomb – a series of physical and symbolic transformations, all of which are pieced together through the concept of liminal space. These are experiences of transformation by boat, as refugee, which inevitably sew together a rich tapestry of memory, emotion and trauma, along with the constructions of self-identity that erupt within the spaces in between. The net result is a complex weaving together of both individual and collective memories of transformation that are, in essence, about positive change in spite of adversity. The third chapter in Part III, written by Amie Matthews (Chapter 10), offers a reinvigorated sociological perspective on ritual and transformation. Like Ninnis in Chapter 3, Matthews’ contribution offers an acute interrogation of the possibilities for transformation, though this time through a focus on the often cited trope of ‘rites of passage’, particularly as articulated by Victor Turner. Once again, we as readers are returned to the concept of liminality, though this time it is the liminoid spaces of travel – encountered and experienced by Australian backpacker tourists – that are the focus of attention. For Matthews, while it may be the individual backpacker that stands up as the quintessential traveller in search of that endlessly fascinating rite of passage, it is simultaneously those spaces of commonality, or communitias, forged in and between backpackers, that are transformative, especially when you really lean into them. It is in those spaces, for example, that permission is granted – in the absence of home and the structures of behaviour that ordinarily monitor our behaviour – for newly changed identities, directions, aspirations, forms, behaviours, attitudes and opinions to emerge. Sarah Rodigari’s contribution (Chapter 11), which draws Part III to a close, continues the analytical work of Matthews by offering another layer of attention to both physical and metaphorical movement. Returning, too, to the concept of ‘walking’, Rodigari explores the potential for transformation through a six-week performative walk between Melbourne and Sydney. Analytically, Rodigari introduces the concept of ‘sympathetic magic’, coined by James Frazer, as well as the concepts of empathy and affective contagion. Drawing on a sense of empathy as afforded by the affective spaces of performative art, Rodigari is able to speak not only to her own sense of transformation, but to those participants who engaged with her performance alongside her. Our final part of the volume, Part IV, ‘Marking Transformation’, commences with a chapter (Chapter 12) written by Meredith Jones, David Bell, Ruth Holliday, Elspeth Probyn and Jacqueline Sanchez Taylor, detailing their explorations of cosmetic surgery and medical tourism. Nowhere in the volume is ‘transformation’ more starkly and radically understood as the literal changing of a body through surgery. As with other contributions, the chapter is unflinching in its adoption of a post-essentialist approach to the female body and insists upon an acceptance of the inter-subjectivity of such practices. This is an image of an everyday life charged with the need to change – and to plan for it – brought into assemblage with the many networks of a particular cultural practice, including other patients, surgeons, hospitals, procedures, insurance, family members and so forth. In addition to narrating literal, physical transformation, the chapter also points to practices of transformation that occur in tandem, online, where a sense of community is drawn upon to facilitate that physical transformation with an emotional journey that is both validated and supported by a community of others who have ‘been there, done that’, united almost entirely by their shared desire to change their bodies. The final chapter in Part IV, contributed by Kimberley Peters (Chapter 13), focuses on ‘home’ spaces, but without recourse to any rigid separation implied between ‘home’ and ‘away’. Instead, Peter’s reflections are far more fluid, processual and relational, and articulate what she refers to as a ‘third space’, another in between, within which the lives of souvenirs, amongst other things, can be better understood as nuanced and changing. Adopting a biographical approach, Peter’s explores the ways in which those things we bring home from travel, our souvenirs, reminders, are also seen to transform and take on new meanings/new roles once relocated in the home. Finally, we draw the volume to a close with some of our reflections: things we have gleaned along the way, from our own experiences of travel and, indeed, working on this volume. Much of what we have to say in these closing pages is infused with our everyday lives, though punctuated by certain moments that, for us at least, have worked to crack open something to transformation – our ‘selves’, our routines, our knowledge, our friends, our families, our homes, our jobs. 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