REL 209 - Travel and Transformation

FDR: HU
Credits: 4
Planned Offering: Spring 2012 and alternate years.

This course approaches the subject of “travel” through a historically and culturally diverse set of readings: classics of world literature such as Gilgamesh and Ramayana, pilgrimage in three religious traditions, 19th-century travel accounts of the privileged and the oppressed, shamanic soul-travel, bad trips in modern literature, travelers’ tales of “new spirituality,” and great contemporary travel writing. Along the way, we study a range of academic interpretations of travel: phenomenological analysis of travel experience, advice on seeing one’s surroundings, a philosophy of encountering “the Other,” and sociological and anthropological theories of tourism, especially “religious” and “heritage” tourism. Our main questions: What is “travel,” how does travel transform people (for good or ill), and when can we call those changes “religious”? Class is discussion-centered. An experiential component includes brief individual and group travel experiments, travel “through” film, panels of travelers, and various journal assignments. Written assignments include the journal, individual research on a travel book, and midterm and final essays. Marks.