ABSTRACT
Travel seems to generate consistently ambivalent or contradictory representations. Why is it that Levi-Strauss opens his travel autobiography Tristes Tropiques, which brought him such fame, by declaring that he hates traveling and travelers (111: 15)? Why do so many tourists claim that they are not tourists themselves and that they dislike and avoid other tourists (115: 10): is this some modern cultural form of self loathing? In The Innocents Abroad Mark Twain asserts that "travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry and narrowmindedness ..." (198, Vol. 2: 407) and yet goes on, page after page, about the daily torture and anxiety involved in foreign travel. Fatigue and the constant annoyance of beggars and guides "fill one with bitter prejudice" (198, Vol. 1: 253), he comments. "Another beggar approaches. I will go out and destroy him and then come back and write another chapter of vituperation" (198, Vol. 1: 269). Unlike Malinowski's mythologizing record of participant observation in his profes sional works, with embarrassing confessions, ambivalence, and hostility confined to his diary (118),Twain serves up the negative, positive,and contradictoryin a single work.
