The Cool Thing About Travel Narratives

March 8, 2007

The archeological reconstruction of material culture is comparatively easy in comparison with the archeological reconstruction of the perceived world. It is historically unusual for writers to describe in a close manner their cognitive response to what surrounds them on a daily basis. Travel, however, results in a spike of novel situations, pushing the traveler to note a higher level of incident. I can think of three specific ways that travel narratives let us catch a glimpse of a human consciousness:

Identity commitments. A useful text in discussing this question is A Shi'ite Pilgrimage to Mecca, 1885-1886 by Mirza Mohammed Hosayn Farahani.. a Persian. Farahani experienced the Hijaz as Shi'ite and Persian. He was concerned to describe Shi'ite sites and worship, but nationalistic Persian concerns were never far from his mind. It would have been more accurate to title this book A Persian Pilgrimage to Mecca. A reader could diagram by means of circles of varying size the constellation of identity commitments held by the author.. and this could be accomplished by noting the types of places he describes and the places he passes over without comment. Such identity commitments are one way to distinguish authors of different time periods. A common fallacy is to ready contemporary identity commitments back into time. So for example the American preoccupation with race can be read backwards into people whose identity commitments did not include that one.

Sources of Perception. People see the world in terms of what they already know. Reading the account of the hajj by Malcolm X, I came across a passage where he describes the rich and colorful cultural traditions that confronted him upon his arrival at Mecca.. and then he describes this as a scene right out of National Geographic. That comparison comes and goes.. and would be easy to miss.. but it is a clue as to what formed Malcolm X's perception of this new world.. and it turns out to be a magazine that has a central place in constructing American views of the outside world.

Guiding Metaphors. George Lakoff has written about how our cognitive world is governed by a set of underlying metaphors. We can talk about our interior world only because we have learned to describe it in terms of the physical world. Meaning is constructed as concrete events and actions are mapped onto a metaphor. What does the hajj mean? Well, perhaps like Pilgrim's Progress it is a journey that symbolizes life. Or perhaps each of the rituals of the hajj can be mapped onto physical death and standing before God to await judgment. Or maybe the rituals can be likened to the internal movement of meditation. Or perhaps there is a complete absence of metaphoric meaning.. and all a person experiences is a legal concern to meet God's requirements. These are ways to understand the hajj. The goal of the scholar when reading an historic travel narrative is to watch for the ways that actions get mapped onto meaningful metaphors.

These are three partial windows into the cognitive world of a person who lives in the past.. and has left a record of his/her experiences when in a foreign place. In each case the danger is to assume a constant cognitive make-up.. which is actually something that is always changing through time.