Nomads from Affluence: Notes on the Phenomenon of Drifter-Tourism

Abstract

Describes the emergence of the international drifter in the 1960s out of the "outcasts or marginal groups" such as hobos, tramps, tinkers, voyagers at sea, and slummers; continuous with the German Wandervogel. He identifies three major causal forces driving the explosion of international drifters in the 60s: drug culture, relative affluence, and political dissent. Gradually the trips were standardized, he argues, into a set of classic routes centered on Iran and India, organized by the Encounter Overland Expedition, the German Aalto-Touren, or the Minitrek Company. The "guidebook of counter-culture" then emerged. At this point, he shows, the countercultural traveler also developed a blindness characteristic of other tourists: "a loss of interest and involvement with the local people, customs and landscape, and a growing orientation to the in-group: other drifters in our case, members of the group in the case of the collectivc mass-tourist." 99