Anthropology and Travel: Practice and Text

INTRODUCTION In spite of Levi-Strauss’s grumpy protesting against travelling and explorers, not even he could deny that anthropology and travel are intrinsically connected. Since the ‘prehistory’ of the development of field research and even since the emergence of its modern variant, Malinowski’s stay on Trobriand Islands14, which has changed and framed the selfconceptualization of Western anthropology, travel (to the field, from the field and return to the field), has been inseparable from anthropological practice. Furthermore, anthropological theory and gathering of ethnographic data have long depended on travelers, missionaries and merchants, with whom they have even shared the guidelines and queries for the collection of ethnographic data.15