Our Ancient Narrative

Excerpt from the Prologue of 'An Anthropology of Wandering'

Photo by Himesh Kumar Behera on Unsplash.

One month before departing for the Appalachian Trail in the early summer of 2014, Hilary and I began recording our thoughts on our upcoming journey and on the meaning of adventure in society for our blog Those Who Wander. Despite all the training and planning for our sojourn on the trail, we couldn’t help but feel restless as we tried to imagine what the coming months might have in store for us as we lugged our cumbersome backpacks ever so slowly across the eastern states. We were involuntarily assaulted by a storm of feelings from thrilling excitement to anxiety-ridden nervousness. These fluctuating moods continued to surge in our minds and churn our stomachs until we finally began our adventure and stepped onto the dirt corridor of the AT, ready to ascend Mt. Katahdin in Maine. Every novice wanderer who has set out on their own extensive and incomprehensible journey can surely relate to this cascade of emotions.

We had our reasons for wanting to embark on this adventure, but what I wanted to know about most is why other people sought after their adventures in the first place. What was the point of doing these sorts of things and taking unnecessary risks? Didn’t these people have better things to do than subject themselves to misery and apparent self-torture, walking over endless miles of mud, rocks, and roots?

The anthropologist in me has a strong sense that a wandering ethos—an inner urge or calling—to venture far and wide is a deeply embedded feature of our humanity and has likely played a vital role in our evolution and survival as a species. Much travel literature often describes adventurers’ reflections on their soon-to-be travels in similar poetic musings. The 14th-century traveler Ibn Battuta, upon departing for his initial 3,000-mile hajj, or pilgrimage, from his hometown of Tangier to Mecca, described his original yearning for the adventure to come as being “swayed by an overmastering impulse within me and a desire long-cherished in my bosom to visit these illustrious sanctuaries.” Battuta then continued to travel more than 70,000 miles throughout his life. What exactly is it that captures and has captured the minds of so many wayward travelers, nomads, pilgrims, and explorers throughout history?

Land and sea voyages of the 14th-century traveler Ibn-Battuta. Credit: Encyclopedia Brittanica.

As a social and cultural phenomenon, we’re incredibly attracted to and captivated by mythical tales and stories of adventure and the wanderers of each passing generation—from Odysseus to Robinson Crusoe, from Ibn Battuta and Marco Polo to Lewis and Clark, from Amelia Earhart to Yuri Gagarin. We’ve likely been entranced by such legendary figures since time immemorial—living as hunter-gatherers, nomadic herders, and agriculturalists. And although a vast number of our species now live in a sedentary industrial society, some of us still manage to pursue this wandering ethos in diverse and creative ways. Regrettably, this human behavioral trait and cultural expression of exploration or wandering is rarely a subject of modern anthropological discussion (even though it is the basis for why so many anthropologists get involved in the study of anthropology in the first place). Indeed, the motto of anthropology could very well be that we desire to see the world through another’s eyes.

We find the occasional commentary on the subject of adventure from classic ethnographies. The anthropologist Bronislaw Malinowski, writing over a century ago, famously observed and documented the Kula exchange system and impressive long-distance expeditions of the seafaring Trobriand peoples of Papua New Guinea in the southwestern Pacific Ocean. Malinowski commented on the motivation for adventure that the landscape and planning for such excursions surely inspired for centuries:

The open sea now lies before the fleet with the high, distant peaks of the d’Entrecasteaux mountains floating above the haze. In very clear weather the nearer Ampheletts can be seen—small steep rocks, scattered over the horizon, misty, but more material against the faint blue of the distant land. These far-off views must have inspired generation after generation of Kiriwinian sailors with zest for adventure, wonder and desire to see the much-praised marvels of foreign lands, with awe and with superstitious fear. Mixed with it all—associated in the native mind with the allurement of the distant koya (mountains)—there was the ambition to return with plenty of vaygu’a (valuables). In myths, in traditional legends, in real stories and in songs, Kula expeditions were and are described and praised and there is a definite complex of Kula tradition and mythology, governed perhaps by two dominating emotions: the desire to obtain the vaygu’a and the dread of the dangers to be encountered.

This deep restless yearning to toss ourselves into the wild unknown certainly must have found cultural expression long before such adventurous tales as the Epic of Gilgamesh and the Iliad and the Odyssey were written down. The way some of the earliest poems were written and echoed by bards draped in himations (Romans invented the true toga) hints at a much longer tradition of remembering and transmitting stories orally. We’re naturally intrigued and perplexed by those who seem to willingly place themselves at risk for the mere sake of it. Why leave the comfortable abode of our homes? What could possibly be gained from throwing yourself so aimlessly into bizarre, uncomfortable, and unknown situations?

A sensible starting point for studying adventure in anthropology can begin with a reflection on human origins, more specifically human movement, i.e., migration and settlement, across the globe. Our ancient narrative as a species is perhaps the grandest tale of adventure. In highly condensed form, it goes something like this: From parched African soils various groups of former hominins gradually ventured over many years across vast open landscapes. We found our way into the depths of wintry fire-lit caves and rock shelters, crossed scorching wind-torn deserts, set our sights on soaring and endless snow-draped mountain ranges, and followed endless stretches of roaring waters that plummetted into deathly canyons and winded through thickly humid tropics. Some of us eventually settled along the fertile veins of Mesopotamia, Egypt, the Indus Valley, and China due to the attractive and plentiful game, soil, and water found there. We diverged and pushed, through the millennia, to greater distances, back and forth like an undulating pendulum along the Eurasian steppes, up into Siberia, and outward toward Australia and Oceania.

Onward we trudged into the Americas over the now-submerged land known as Beringia that once connected Asia to America. We found our way into ever more intoxicating forests, deserts, mountains, plains, woodlands, and marshlands. Through corridors of ice and down limitless rocky, sandy coasts we made our way to the southern tip of South America, the “land of fire,” an enduring namesake for the many campsites aglow along the coast from native fires spotted by the 16th-century Portuguese explorer Ferdinand Magellan and crew as they circumnavigated the globe: a unifying moment of exploration’s vast and often enigmatic history.

Restless and insatiable–as though our appetites seemed only to have thrived for the voyage–we couldn’t help but move and explore. During the deep time when numerous divergent hominins shared a vast tract of space, adventure and life seemed inextricably intertwined. The concept of ‘adventure’ was not just a recreation, as it has become in our modern world, but a way of life. Defiant, though keenly aware, of the hazards and perils of the journey ahead, we humans couldn’t help but move, explore, and let the mind blossom with an endless labyrinth of myths and tales of the world beyond the horizons and the stars.

With continents continually being traversed and trade networks coming into and out of existence, small vessels, and ships were crafted and forged to sail to those islands barely visible over the horizon, sprinkled like irresistible sugar-laced breadcrumbs across a still inconceivable planet. Ceaseless movements of human activity and interaction gave way to crossing oceans, building empires, unearthing minerals, and forging metals. We devised industries to continue that motion and to seal once firmly beaten dirt paths with concrete and steel which remains to be beaten and pounded by the occasional modern tramps that buck our trend in stale sedentism and continue the peripatetic spirit of our wandering forebears.

Due to our industriousness and restlessness, we’ve now stamped human feet into the surface of the moon, preserved not unlike the 3.7-million-year-old hominin footprints preserved in volcanic ash at the archaeological site of Laetoli in Tanzania; footprints that serve as powerful symbols that urge us, again and again, to reflect on time, space, and the thrill to go, to move, to be!

Thanks for being a fellow traveler with me through this read. Much more to follow.

Cheers! 

-JSB