Reflections on Travel

Anthony Cruz Pantojas

Associate University Chaplain and Director of Humanist Life and Africana Spiritual Life 

Social media is replete with curated images of bespoke destination getaways and people enraptured by the thrills of commercialized wanderlust. I am often tempted by the suggestion that I will somehow “find myself,” encounter some esoteric insight, or experience pure contentment while I sit on a white-sand beach seemingly extricated from our imperiled world. As a self-proclaimed ethnographer of quotidian life, I have been increasingly interested in the motivation to travel: What are we looking to find or escape from? What identity do we assume when we travel?

I spent most of my life in the Caribbean, a place often packaged as exactly that white sand retreat, and I know what it is to live inside someone else’s getaway. With this self-awareness, I am preparing to travel to South America for the first time in a few months. I resonate with travel writer Pico Iyer’s insistence on paying attention to our inner and outer worlds.¹ Part of my commitment on this trip is to remain vigilant against cultural voyeurism and to remember the extractivism that is the backdrop of tourism. I find that preparing for my trip is ostensibly preparing me for an ethics of bewildered attention and relation.

Taking bewilderment and attention seriously is a form of care; I take cues from the queer theorist Jack Halberstam’s conception of bewilderment as “an enchantment that follows a complete collapse of reference and reconcilability.”² I find this to be an invitation to think, be, and relate “otherwise.” The otherwise presents opportunities to transgress the comfortable and familiar to engage in the world, hopefully in more capacious, creative, and ethical ways. In being keenly attuned to reality I observe across spaces, I also acknowledge that there may be nothing to “gain.” In many ways, this is a shift in ontological orientation.

The anthropologist Marisol de la Cadena articulates this shift. In her conversations with Mariano and Nazario Turpo in the Peruvian Andes, the mountain Ausangate is not only a mountain, but an earth-being, a presence with whom people live in relation.³ In her framing, it is not only what a visitor’s preconceptions or categories allow it to be. Tourism often flattens such beings into scenery for photo-ops, and for the self-discovery we have been promised. Bewildered attention asks something different and perhaps something more difficult: that I let a place exceed my frame of reference, without rushing to translate it into something I can assimilate into my own understanding, consume, or take home.

So, perhaps I will not find myself on any beach. What I hope to bring instead to my trip is a willingness to be “undone” by what I do not or cannot understand, and to remember what I learned growing up inside someone else’s getaway; that every place I visit is already someone’s home and someone’s world.

¹ Iyer, Pico. The Half-Known Life: In Search of Paradise. New York: Riverhead Books, 2023.

² Halberstam, Jack. Wild Things: The Disorder of Desire. Durham: Duke University Press, 2020.

³ de la Cadena, Marisol. Earth Beings: Ecologies of Practice across Andean Worlds. Durham: Duke University Press, 2015.