Travelers create their own distinct global culture (with anthropologist Pegi Vail)

Deviate

00:00 / 01:00:32

“Travel expands time, because you’re not experiencing the everyday of what you normally do. It’s all about discovery, and experiencing that with other people.” —Pegi Vail

In this episode of Deviate, Rolf and Pegi talk about how she originally sought to depict a “visual ethnography” of world travelers, their global impacts, and their power as a “gentrifying” force (2:00); how the world of travel has (and hasn’t) changed since Pegi made her film ten years ago, and how immigrants and migrant workers also represent travel communities just like backpackers and expats (11:00); the ways the notion of “journey” can serve as a metaphor for non-travel experiences, and how travel can expand one’s sense of time (26:30); what stories travelers choose to tell about places, and how drug-scenes have fueled travel communitas over the years (31:00); the role digital photography now plays in travel, and the individualized notion of what an “explorer” is (39:30); and the importance of allowing yourself to get lost on that road, the “structured danger” of most adventure travel, and relying on your “personness” (rather than technology) as a traveler (49:00).

Pegi Vail is an anthropologist and filmmaker who directed the documentary Gringo Trails. She is also a sustainable-travel consultant whose academic work has focused on visual anthropology, Indigenous media, and the role of storytelling to the political economy of tourism in the developing world. She is the Co-Director of New York University’s Center for Media, Culture, and History. Vail is a founding member, curator, and featured storyteller of the popular not-for-profit storytelling collective, The Moth.

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