The Tao of Travel

Lévi-Strauss memorably opened his travel book, Tristes Tropiques, with the line "I hate traveling and explorers. Yet here I am proposing to tell the story of my expeditions." (An early translation of the book, with a variation of this opening, is A World on the Wane.) He was trained as a philosopher but was one of the great theorists of anthropology and linguistics, an explainer of mythologies, and a describer of structuralism. He began his travels in Brazil, made journeys in India and Pakistan, and taught in the United States. He was a member of the Académie Française and lived to over a hundred (he died in 2009). The following are excerpts from Tristes Tropiques.

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Travel is usually thought of as a displacement in space. This is an inadequate conception. A journey occurs simultaneously in space, in time, and in the social hierarchy. Each impression can be defined only by being jointly related to these three axes, and since space is in itself three-dimensional, five axes are necessary if we are to have an adequate representation of any journey.

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There was a time when traveling brought the traveler into contact with civilizations which were radically different from his own and impressed him in the first place by their strangeness. During the last few centuries such instances have become increasingly rare. Whether he is visiting India or America, the modern traveler is less surprised than he cares to admit.

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Perhaps, then, this was what traveling was, an exploration of the deserts of my mind rather than those surrounding me.

19. Perverse Pleasures of the Inhospitable

UNWELCOMING PLACES ARE A GIFT TO THE traveling writer. They have always been so, an early example being Ibn Battuta's arrival in Tunis in 1325, at the beginning of his global wandering. He "wept bitterly" because he met with utter indifference: "not a soul greeted me and no one there was known to me." The winter darkness and killing cold of Cherry-Garrard's Antarctica; the cannibals, disease, and general hostility in Stanley's Congo; the devout Muslims tormenting Charles Doughty with howls of "Nasrani!" ("Christian!") in Arabia Deserta—these inhospitable situations gave us great books. Heartwarming interludes, lovable locals, and delicious meals have informed the most tedious travel accounts—the blissful vacation is desirable but not a fit subject for a book.

The early travelers in Africa always kept in mind that the cannibal was a better subject than the missionary. Even the high-minded Mary Kingsley knew that, and spent much more time writing about (and exaggerating) the anthropophagous Fon people in Gabon than the pleasures of her botanizing of the jungle, which (so she said) was the whole point of her West African trip. You don't want to hear about the traveler's fun; what keeps you reading is the traveler's misery, outrage, and near-death experience. Either that or a well-phrased dismissal, as when the English traveler Peter Fleming took a close look at São Paulo and wrote, "São Paulo is like Reading, only much farther away."

"Looking for Trouble" might be the subtitle of the most readable, most memorable travel books. When Redmond O'Hanlon published In Trouble Again, my hand leaped to the shelf. No Mercy promised more horror, and another delightful read. So I begin with him.

Making a Deal with the Chief of Boha

In his right hand [the Chief] gripped a spear against the inside of his right thigh, its end on the ground and its winged blade high above his head. His left hand lay on his left thigh, and from his right shoulder there hung a large liana-twine bag full, I presumed, of the royal fetishes...

Twelve spearmen stood at intervals in a circle before him, enclosing a line of three chairs; an old man in a brown shirt, torn gray trousers and red plastic sandals, standing on the Chief's left, tilted his spear towards us and then at the waiting seats...

The Chief inclined his head to his left: the old man, his

porte-parole,

his word carrier, bent down until his right ear was close to the royal lips; the Chief spoke softly. The audience over, the old man straightened his back, held his spear upright, strode into the center of the circle, filled his lungs, and sang out a speech in Bomitaba...

At the end of the pronouncement there were shouts from some of the spear-men and from other warriors around the square...

"The white man will pay 75,000 francs to the Chief of Boha," [the old man] shouted in French, "and 20,000 francs to the Vice-President of the People's Committee. Then if the Government come with soldiers to take our Chief to prison in Epena they must take their Vice-President away too. The white man will keep faith with our Customary Rights."

"It's far too much!" I said.