Eric J. Leed
From ,The Epic of Gilgamesh, to the age of mass tourism, travel has profoundly altered our sense of ourselves and our sense of the world. ,The Mind of the Traveler, is a panoramic excursion through these "transformations of passage." Eric Leed explores the great travel traditions of the West: "heroic travel," as in the adventures of Odysseus and the chivalric exploits of medieval knights; "sacred travel," as in the holy pilgrimages of penance and purification; and "philosophic travel" in search of knowledge, wether social, as in Marco Polo's itineraries of the East, or scientific, as in Darwin's discoveries aboard the ,Beagle,.,Leed vividly depicts the life of "traveling societies" - from nomads to modern-day tour groups - and demonstrates how the great voyages of discovery to the New World fostered a revolutionary new Euro-centric view of humanity and transformed "European" into "modern" culture. He demonstrates how industrialization transformed travel and led to the rise of mechanized mass tourism.,In a brilliant concluding section, Leed delves into the social consequences of travel. He considers the ways in which mobility alters identity, charting the successive images of the heroic traveler as a male archetype and chronicling the way sex and gender operate in travel literature and experience. Finally, he argues that the modern industrial world is a society of travelers and shows how travel has changed from an expression of necessity and fate into one of freedom and liberty.
Travel,Anthropology
The Mind of the Traveler: From Gilgamesh to Global Tourism