[From the Archives] Why Don’t Anthropologists Study Adventure?
A Brief Overview of Adventure in the Social Sciences and Humanities
Greetings fellow wanderers,
Today I am republishing another post from the archives. As Those Who Wander has now breached 450 subscribers and is gaining momentum, I realize the bulk of new subscribers may not have access to some of my initial writings and with 78 posts in the archive now, I want to give some exposure to these paywalled posts.
That said, if you are enjoying these ramblings on travel, adventure, and anthropology, please consider supporting my writing which grants you full access to everything I’ve written on Substack. In addition, the proceeds will go toward publishing and promoting my forthcoming book ‘An Anthropology of Wandering: How Adventure Can Alleviate a Fearful Culture’. The book is a first-person account of backpacking the Appalachian Trail that dives into anthropology, travel, fear, and the meaning of adventure in culture and society.
Thank you to everyone who has subscribed and supported my work thus far. Cheers! -JSB
Anthropologists rarely study adventure. This is odd given that adventure is one of its main selling points in attracting people to the discipline in the first place. Fortune and fame are not in the secret recruiting sauce of what captures aspiring young anthropologists. The desire to cultivate a cosmopolitan outlook and become enthralled with different people and places across the globe has drawn countless anthropologists to join such academic communities as anthropology and archaeology. Whether or not contemporary anthropology professors seeking out eager graduate students to be their minions want to admit it, the romance of adventure is largely what they capitalize on to bring people into the fold. The promise of adventure is certainly what initially hooked me.
Many of the classic ethnographies including those of Frank Cushing, Franz Boas, Margaret Mead, Ruth Benedict, Bronislaw Malinowski, A.R. Radcliffe-Brown, Julian Steward, E.E. Evans-Pritchard, and Edmund Leach were situated in diverse geographic and cultural settings. Their work was spoken about and written in mesmerizing, adventurous undertones that captivated and inspired generations of anthropologists and the public alike.
What makes today’s lack of attention to adventure more puzzling is that adventure is arguably one of our oldest behavioral traits and might explain why humans are a global species, as I argue in my upcoming book. Global exploration has likely been central to our survival. Other species confined to a single ecological niche stand a greater chance of extinction. Humans, by gradually spreading further across the landscape, ensured they were not putting all their eggs in one basket and unwittingly enhanced our survival. Perhaps this helps explain why we will one day be on our way to becoming a multi-planetary species (pending Elon Musk’s attempts to migrate us to the rather uninspiring and desolate Red Planet, starting at $200,000 per person). Whether this expansion of our species across the globe had anything to do with possessing an urge to adventure, remains open for debate.
Many biological anthropologists, archaeologists, and linguists have indeed studied human migration. Their work attempts to explain the where, when, and hows of human movement across the globe, dating from nearly 8 million years up to the present. For example, a persistent and long-running debate in biological anthropology has been attempting to track when and how humans first migrated out of Africa and populated the rest of the planet by investigating population genetics and attempting to model our biological evolution. Perhaps one of the more beautifully written and fascinating looks into human migration, from an archaeological and linguistic perspective, is David W. Anthony’s The Horse, The Wheel, and Language: How Bronze-Age Riders from the Eurasian Steppes Shaped the Modern World.
To be fair, it’s not completely accurate to say no one in the humanities and social sciences has investigated adventure. The German sociologist and philosopher Georg Simmel wrote a series of essays in the early 20th century related to adventure. For instance, he examines the unique social role of strangers, wanderers, and outsiders in his essay The Stranger. Simmel’s examination of adventure aligns with my analysis of adventure in his 1911 essay Das Abenteuer (translated as The Adventure or The Adventurer) which views adventure as a form of experiencing that has to do with our internal conscious state of mind rather than a set of particular external events.
Similarly, the topic of adventure is addressed in philosophical and religious studies along the lines of phenomenology—the study of what direct experience of consciousness is like in a given activity. For example, the existential philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre examines the meaning of adventure and whether or not adventure is an illusion in his novel Nausea. The French philosopher, social theorist, and feminist scholar Simone de Beauvoir importantly pointed out in her book The Second Sex that adventure is not necessarily accessible to everyone and that structures of inequality and power imbalances, which run along class, gender, and socioeconomic lines, can limit people’s ability to experience adventure.
Speaking directly to the field of anthropology, there is at least one anthology published in recent years that has attempted to tackle adventure in an anthropological framework, that being the book Tarzan was an Eco-tourist...and Other Tales in the Anthropology of Adventure by Luis A. Vivanco and Robert J. Gordon. I will return to this work momentarily. Nevertheless, the question stands: Why has the anthropology of adventure not fully developed in the way other anthropological subjects have, such as the extensive studies surrounding religion, kinship, technology, language, politics, and economics and why have anthropologists been reluctant to study it? We’ll explore two hypotheses for now.
To begin, the literature on the anthropology of adventure remains sparse and the majority of the commentary on adventure from past anthropologists has been negative. The journal articles and studies that do exist are primarily in service to targeting consumer behavior for promoting outdoor commercialized experiences in the adventure tourism industry rather than for academic or intellectual pursuits of understanding the meaning of adventure within and across cultures. Some contemporary anthropologists have pointed out that the reluctance of the discipline to study adventure and adventurers is related to “a longstanding conviction...that science kills adventure, our claims to fieldwork and forms of writing are meant to distance us from the self-referential pursuits of adventurers.”
One of the most well-known anthropologists of the 20th century, Claude Lévi-Strauss opens his famous memoir Tristes Tropiques by stating,
“Travel and travelers are two things I loathe—and yet, here I am all set to tell the story of my expeditions.”
He later remarks that “adventure has no place in the anthropologist’s profession; it is merely one of those unavoidable drawbacks, which detract from his effective work.” This is peculiar and ironic coming from someone supposedly interested in the structure of the human mind given that the mental processing and planning behind adventure is quite an odd and fundamentally unique conscious state and behavior.
Why wouldn’t this phenomenon be worth investigating as an anthropological focal point? Doesn’t having a sentient creature ruminating, planning, and stepping into the social role of Simmel’s ‘wanderer’ or ‘stranger’ demand some theory, participant observation, and cross-cultural analysis? As far as we know, adventuring is a distinct trait of humans. But who knows? Perhaps our dogs spend their idle days lamenting the trade-off they made becoming pets and contemplate running back into the wild to be graciously “welcomed” into the pack of their wolf cousins. Nevertheless, why can’t adventure be a part of the anthropologist’s “effective work”?
Even if all the other theories that try to explain why humans spread about the globe are true, (e.g., milder climatic periods allowing for easier travel, the following of animal migrations for food, depletion of local resources, or the search for other sex partners) isn’t it also plausible that the excitement to venture elsewhere drew people to explore the world? Don’t you ever get restless and bored staying in one place for very long? We often itch to go and do something different from time to time. Where does that feeling come from and why aren’t we all content to just sit on the couch all day?
One would think that the thrill of exploration—signified by an excitatory thumping of the heart, broadening of the pupils, and adrenaline surging in the veins as the mind contemplated the quest ahead—certainly had to be a compelling force thrown into the mix of the impetus to move beyond mountains, plains, deserts, and oceans. We can imagine centuries-old oral stories being told around campfires under the stars in our long nomadic hunter-gatherer days of revered adventurers who led the group to greener pastures after returning from some month-long absence. Perhaps they immortalized these adventurous legends and tales in cave paintings that remain indecipherable to us today.
But this is merely speculation. Science needs more than that.
This leads us to one possible explanation as to why adventure has been disregarded: Adventure is subjective and is open to wide interpretation as to what an “adventure” is and who qualifies as an adventurer.
The term “adventure” is often highly packaged and vague. Take Google’s definition of adventure, “an unusual and exciting, typically hazardous, experience or activity.” Pretty vague. By that measure, just about anything can be deemed an adventure, be it consuming meth, having sex with strangers, or throwing bricks through someone’s shop window for an amorphous political cause. So then are the dope fiends, nymphomaniacs, and self-righteous anarchists all considered “adventurers”? I’ll let you decide.
Adventure isn’t something you can quantify. It’s more akin to love and beauty; it’s something you know when you see it. And maybe it’s on a broad spectrum too. Those like the man who recently finished a solo trek across Antarctica or the journalist Paul Salopek who’s retracing humanities steps across the world on a decade-long 21,000-mile journey from Ethiopia to Tierra del Fuego we would, without question, consider adventurers. But what about a grandmother terrified of flying, finally facing her fear, and taking her first trip to a state she’s never visited to see some long-lost family members? I say “Sure, that is an adventure! Why not?”
How about taking the kids camping in the backyard? From their perspective, definitely. From yours, maybe not so much. And yet again, maybe so. To trample the cliche a bit more, adventure is in the eye of the beholder. As Georg Simmel describes it in The Adventure, adventure is not about the content or sequence of events but a “form of experiencing” and what is going on experientially within our minds.
Okay. So adventure is subjective and difficult to define or quantify scientifically. Why else might anthropologists be neglecting this puzzling behavior?
Is adventure merely a cultural fabrication of “Western” society?
Some background needs to be established before explaining this second hypothesis.
The highly packaged version of what one learns in anthropology as an undergraduate and graduate student goes something like this: The last half of the 19th century is the context in which the modern discipline of anthropology was born. Rampant nationalism and imperialism were in vogue among many Western societies at the time. They were all vying to carve out their plotted territories across the globe in the “less civilized” parts of the world. Many anthropologists followed on the heels of colonial powers to catch a glimpse and study the “barbaric”, “savage”, and “primitive” ways of the newly discovered local inhabitants. These were wondrous, adventurous times for Westerners eager to explore the “otherness” of exotic cultures.
Thus, this narrative is central to the postcolonial lens which many anthropologists apply to their social theory. For instance, in the aforementioned book, Tarzan was an Eco-tourist...and Other Tales in the Anthropology of Adventure, the contributors help elucidate several glaring reasons why anthropologists might be either uneasy studying the subject of adventure or at the very least assume it to be unworthy or even impossible to study. The authors select the character of Tarzan from Edgar Rice Burroughs’ famous novels as a symbol to represent as they call it “the consummate colonial-era adventurer: a white man whose noble civility enabled him to communicate with and control savage peoples and animals.” By contrast, they argue, our current perspective of adventure has now shifted in more recent times toward being a modern “eco-tourist: a cosmopolitan striving to live in harmony with nature, using appropriate technology, and helpful to the natives who cannot seem to solve their own problems.” In other words, we have seen, and in a lot of ways still view, adventure almost exclusively from the perspective of our own culture with little regard to how other cultures might view it.
Eventually, it came to be thought that, due to such a prolonged period of Western powers having an outsized influence and control over many of the world’s countries, it is now nearly impossible to figure out whether certain ideas, cultural traits, and behaviors are a holdover from a time before the convergence of Western and non-Western societies or are a by-product of the mixing of those ideas, traits, and behaviors. Anthropologists threw their hands up and declared that there were no such things as “cultures” per se, just culture.
Thus, in studying the history of colonialism it becomes all too apparent that our most recent centuries have witnessed a lot of privileged Westerners looking to far-off places to get their adventurous kicks, whether it be to swindle natives out of resources and land, impose their political and economic will, or simply to lavish themselves with fine cigars and cocktails under servants mechanically maneuvering palm fronds.
The image of a character like Theodore Roosevelt and his brash imperialistic tendencies that were in vogue at the time comes to mind. After the United States acquired the Philippines in 1898 in the aftermath of the Spanish-American War, Roosevelt pushed strongly for suppressing the revolts taking place there and holding the natives’ hands in an act of paternalism that would model their government after the United States rather than let it devolve “into a welter of bloody anarchy.” Many felt they were doing good by taking it upon themselves to bring democracy and prosperity to other corners of the world.
In today’s world, we should certainly confront the unseemly history of Western power dynamics and colonial domination and question how adventure may be a fabrication of our own culture. In addition, with warnings of impending climate crises, we are further challenged with a moral dilemma to adopt an ecological mindset that considers our impact on the environment on which we depend for long-term sustainability and survival. The hard question every responsible modern traveler must face is: Is it ethical to use our limited and polluting fossil fuels to carry us into the homelands of others just for the sake of having an adventure?
In this context then, it does seem like there are far more pressing issues to study and understand than the seemingly trivial adventure and adventurers that are ostensibly creations of our own social construction.
But then again…maybe this is not entirely true and there’s perhaps more nuance to be unpacked. Maybe this assumption that “Western” culture has entirely and single-handedly dissolved the origins of certain ideas and cultural influences like sugar into water is a bit near-sighted and trite. After all “Western society” isn’t a single homogeneous thing on further examination but contains many sub-cultures that have blended their ideas over time in irretrievable ways. Even in the most unequal of power relations, cultural exchange and change still find a way to happen. Anyone who’s read deeply into history realizes that humans have been interacting and exchanging everything from food, exotic items, slaves, and mates to ideas and varied ways of thinking and operating in the world for millennia. Even a static idea such as “Western” is actually remarkably fluid and intractable on closer inspection.
The anthropologist Eric Wolf’s seminal work Europe and the People Without History demonstrates the interconnectedness of the non-European economies and cultures via their networked trade routes in an already globalized world long before the rise of European powers in the early 15th century. The great 14th-century traveler Ibn Battuta, who first journeyed 3,000 miles on his hajj or pilgrimage from his hometown of Tangier to Mecca and then went on to travel another 70,000 miles across much of northern Africa, the Middle East, and Asia, described a world of incredible interconnection and interaction.
Even further back the work of Thucydides’ History of the Peloponnesian War or Herodutus’ The Histories recounts not just moments of war and hostilities between ancient peoples throughout the Mediterranean world, but their cultural interactions. And even further back, in what is called the Late Archaic period in North America (around 3,500 years ago) there was a monumental mound construction known as Poverty Point located in northeastern Lousiana with literal tons of exotic artifacts that came from thousands of miles in numerous directions indicating that native peoples were interacting and exchanging items and ideas over vast distances.
All this is to say that what we think of as “Western” or “American” or any other specific “culture” is much more like layers of metaphoric rock than a pure diamond. Cultures are conglomerates that can borrow, steal, and exchange bits of information and decide whether to incorporate, reject, or modify ideas. Though debatable, very few of the world’s cultures for at least the last five to ten thousand years were likely to be isolated for very long. However, there are still several indigenous groups in voluntary isolation around the world today and cultural isolation was probably much more the case when population densities were low throughout our history. Nevertheless, it’s extremely difficult or impossible to define an archaeological “culture” and to what degree they engaged with a purely separate “culture” remains enigmatic. Thus, most cultures are more likely to be iterative processes made up of many distinct and overlapping groups of human minds that have been fused and inseparably entangled thus masking their “origins” for all time.
There remain many anthropological questions left for us to contemplate surrounding adventure. For instance, at what point in time did the spark to venture out beyond the horizon arise in human consciousness? Did Homo ergaster or Homo erectus—archaic forms of humans known as hominins living in the middle Pleistocene some 1.5-2 million years ago—share the same restive urge for adventure as us? Were they too compelled to see just how far the land goes? What exactly is this sense of adventure that drives us to move and explore our environment? Is this not another plausible hypothesis to explain why our human presence is now global?
Nearly all species of the earth with the ability to locomote, explore their environment for a variety of reasons. But at what point in our human lineage did we gain the capacity to wonder about wandering to foreign and distant places? Who among our early hominin kin was granted the first dream of journeying beyond their immediate environment? Were certain individuals in our nomadic hunter-gatherer days selected to search for new source materials for their tools or find other groups to trade with, all based on their eagerness for adventure? Would they have then been rewarded more among their group and given greater privileges and status? Could that have had a role to play in our evolution? These questions are almost certainly beyond proper scientific hypothesis testing, yet they are still worth pondering nonetheless, are they not?
These are just a few plausible explanations as to why anthropologists haven’t spent much time studying adventure: Adventures are subjective, scientifically unquantifiable, and arguably a romanticized product of “Western” culture. Nevertheless, I still maintain that adventure and adventurers should be looked at far more by anthropologists because it is not a frivolous subject matter as past anthropologists once assumed and I do not think it is purely a “Western” fabrication or “colonialist” mindset. To that I would respond: All humans throughout time and space have indulged in adventure and those adventures have manifested themselves in many cultural expressions that warrant anthropological attention.
Despite all this hair-splitting over definitions and what stuffy academics think or don’t think about adventure, what matters more to me is that adventure has far more pragmatic significance for all of us today than many of us realize. And as important as it is to reflect on the environmental and ethical implications of travel, it is still imperative that we come to understand the individual and societal benefits of adventure.
I dedicate two chapters in my forthcoming book that address these important questions on the pros and cons or tradeoffs of adventuring during a time of seeming environmental, social, political, and economic instability. Suffice it to say, that adventure has an entire toolkit of benefits to offer us individually and collectively. Adventures:
● offer increased physical and psychological well-being
● provide therapy to those suffering from the many tragedies of life
● enable us to become more prosocial and find community
● grant us a renewed sense of identity
● allow us to realize just how adaptable and resilient we are
● enrich our lives with purpose and meaning
I know many of these things to be true because I witnessed it taking place within myself and many others we encountered during the months spent on the Appalachian Trail and I know many others have witnessed these truths on their own adventures.
Thanks for being a fellow traveler and supporter of my writing! Much more to follow.
Cheers!
-JSB
What a great question! It's true, seems that they would go hand in glove. Something to ponder for sure. Also, love that book title: Tarzan was an Eco-Tourist! Made me laugh!
Fascinating read. 🙂 In particular, your discussion of adventure as subjective strikes me as not only interesting but also actionable - helps us to see things from others’ perspectives!