My guide in the jungles of Siberut Island was a Mentawai fellow named Agus, who was a walking example of how cultures everywhere creatively adapt to a globalized word. Agus wore Western garb, had a university linguistics degree from the Sumatran mainland, and spoke great English (his fourth language, after Mentawai, Bahasa, and Minangkabau) –…
This post isn’t about the dragonfly pictured here; it’s about the joys (and challenges) of trying to take a shit in the jungles of Siberut Island. One would have to be extremely self-conscious to take a selfie while voiding one’s bowels in the jungle; hence the photo of this dragonfly, which I spotted while looking…
At some point in the past five years I realized that listening to podcasts has replaced watching TV or movies for me. Though I still watch the occasional video entertainment, usually via streaming on Netflix or Amazon Prime, I more often turn to podcasts for amusement and edification when the workday is done. My relationship…
One of the best things about trekking into the jungles of Siberut Island was the opportunity it afforded me to become completely, refreshingly bored. Experiencing this kind of boredom – and coming to terms with it in an attentive, creative away – is, in fact, one of the time-honored gifts of travel. The rise of…
When I trekked into the jungles of Siberut Island off the western coast of Sumatra last winter, my guide, Agus, kept me busy with activities that gave me a peek into the local Mentawai culture. No doubt Agus has, in the years since he began taking travelers into the jungle, learned to balance an accurate…
1) On the tendency of early anthropologists to see tourists as intruders So long as the idea of culture remained bound in place and time and the interest of anthropologists was focused on the discrete nature of particular “cultures,” phenomena such as tourism could rarely be viewed as more than an unwelcome intrusion upon the…
This is what I packed for my three-month journey across Asia last year: A handful of clothes, books, and toiletries that fit into a 35L Tortuga Setout pack. Sometimes, during multi-day jungle or motorcycle treks, I stowed the Setout in guesthouse storage and traveled with the smaller, ultralight Outbreaker daypack. Looking at these items now,…
When I was in Kandy, Sri Lanka last year I mailed nearly 50 postcards to Deviate podcast listeners, as part of an informal Season One promo, while I was on a round-the-world AirTreks itinerary across Asia. Writing 50 or so postcards was good fun, but it made me realize how rare it has become for…
1) Your true writer’s voice is rarely an expression of intention When I was 21 I wanted to write like Kafka. But, unfortunately for me, I wrote like a script editor for The Simpsons who’d briefly joined a religious cult and then discovered Foucault. –Zadie Smith, “This is how it feels to me,” The Guardian,…
Two decades on, it’s difficult to remember how obsessively the media was fixated with the 1999-to-2000 New Year (and, in particular, “Y2K glitch” worries about computer data). I was writing my “Vagabonding” column for Salon Travel at the time, and the editor there requested that all regular contributors write a short meditation on where they…
1) On the origins of campus “political correctness” discourse Throughout the 1980s, conservative pundits warned of a multiculturalist crusade to reshape the campus. …Speech codes and sexual-harassment policies targeted those who did not display the proper sensitivities to minorities and women. The professors of the academic left underwrote these developments by unmasking the ideal of…
