I recently wrote in this blog about the challenge of connecting with people of other cultures when traveling abroad, especially when going to poorer nations. Those thoughts were prompted by a trip to Egypt in October, 2025. In this post, I reflect more on the challenges of tourism, focusing especially on what it means to be a tourist and what we are seeking to accomplish when we travel abroad.
Often, First World travelers to Third World countries are smothered in luxury while surrounded by poverty. Some of us want to see the world and also contribute to the local economy, but are troubled by the model of the good life evidenced by the way tours are provisioned. Do we really need to be provided with accommodations much more lavish, truth be told, than the more-than-ample homes we left when we set out on our journeys? Do we need to be fed such large quantities of food, and have our tastes catered to as if our preferences were sovereign? Does it really benefit us to be surrounded by bellhops, clerks, concierges, guides, and the like who focus on keeping us from having to expend any physical or mental energy whatsoever? What does this style of travel teach us about the world around us and ourselves?
Another traveler on the Egypt tour was reading “The New Tourist” by Paige McClanahan (https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/199798115-the-new-tourist). I got to scan it. The author differentiates between Old Tourists, who confine their experiences to a preconceived story, and New Tourists, who are humbled by their travels and open to the vastness of history and humanity. New Tourists are learners who are always curious. Old Tourists want their prejudices confirmed. They objectify and commodify when they encounter other cultures.
McClanahan’s categories reminded me of the processes of assimilation and accommodation that psychologist Jean Piaget described as foundational to cognitive development. When infants or children encounter something unfamiliar, they either assimilate that new thing into a pre-existing category–a cup without handles is just another type of cup–or accommodate to what is different by modifying a mental category or creating a new one–a squirrel is not a puppy and calls for a different response.
The world that adults inhabit is mostly familiar rather than novel, so we don’t need to use either of these processes as often as children do. But travel is almost by definition a place of encountering the new, making it inevitable that we will either assimilate or accommodate while on the road. During the trip to Egypt, I did plenty of each. For example, we attended a church whose music I readily assimilated into my picture of Western contemporary worship music, even though the lyrics were in Arabic. We then ate at a local restaurant that specializes in Koshary, an Egyptian specialty, prompting me to accommodate by adding a new category of meal.
So I was first an Old Tourist fitting a new experience into a familiar category, then a New Tourist open to recognizing something beyond my previous understanding. All travelers are probably a combination of Old Tourists and New Tourists. But the proportions differ, probably dependent both on the personality of the traveler (Openness to Experience is one of the Big Five personality dimensions; see https://www.traitpath.com/blog/articles/openness-to-experience-big-five) and the nature of what is being encountered. Regarding the latter, McClanahan has a chapter on tourist traps. We tend to think of these as exploitative, but McClanahan thinks their central feature is that they present a dumbed down view of the unfamiliar that is not educational or evocative but instead is escapist. It’s a false view of reality. Theme parks are a good example of tourist traps; think of the sparse amount of cross-cultural exposure that occurs at Epcot World Showcase. A tourist trap makes it easy for the Old Tourist to project his preconceptions onto the weak simulacrum of culture that’s on offer.
Such tourism is structured so as to reinforce prejudices and prevent encounter with anything that is truly new. Most of us aren’t looking for that when we travel, though–at least we don’t think we are when we make our plans. If we only wanted to relax or be entertained, we could get that close to home. We travel to distant and unfamiliar places to experience something new, something that is for us out of the ordinary. We hope that we will find something we can appreciate, admire, or respect. Perhaps we are even interested in seeing the familiar in the light of new, gaining a different perspective on what had become commonplace to us. In this sense, we travel in order to be changed.
I would like to suggest that tours that take us to unfamiliar places are cultural liturgies in the sense described by James K.A. Smith ( see https://www.goodreads.com/series/196620-cultural-liturgies). He suggested that liturgies are not only the activities that take place during a worship service, but any rituals or practices designed to shape our desires and imaginations. We are participating in a liturgy when we shop at a mall, for example, or attend a sporting event. What’s the goal of the liturgy of tourism? What sort of person is being formed? Perhaps different tours have different aims. Tours that give a superficial, stereotyped exposure to a culture cater to the Old Tourist, shaping people who want their preconceptions confirmed and are comfortable with a shallow understanding of cultures and peoples, albeit one that for the frequent traveler may have a good deal of breadth. Tours that go beyond the superficial to provide a nuanced sense of the history, culture, and people of a place are producing New Tourists, people who in their encounter with the new are characterized by humility, curiosity, and openness. We are all at least a little of each kind of tourist. But we can each choose what sort of trips to take–what liturgies we’ll participate in–and with time these choices can make us more into the sort of traveler (and person) we would like to be.
Life Assays 