Sustainable Travel Series #2 — Positionality And Reflexivity
Since moving abroad…. and then moving back into my childhood home, I’ve reflected upon the interplay between place, emotion, and mentality. Lately, my levels of comfort, restlessness, peace, and fulfillment seem to depend upon the context in which I am immersed. I’ve had to ask myself how my hometown makes me feel and how re-inhabiting my childhood bedroom has influenced my emotions as a 23-year-old postgrad. Being home has essentially made me confront why I feel the way I do in a complicatedly familiar place, exercising a degree of reflection that never surfaced over sparse holiday interludes. Eight+ months of living at home for the first time since high school has brought me back into a space I associate with a set time in my life, and now that I’ve re-inhabited it, I’ve had to reconcile who I am now with a place grounded in my past.
This quarantine-induced thought process has made me reconsider the ways in which I’ve traveled and how prolonged periods of time spent in one place have affected my spatial understandings. Since acknowledging my ever-evolving relationship with my suburban hometown, I’ve started to re-evaluate the ways in which upending my routine to visit a new place has affected my understanding of it. At the forefront of the emotions place elicits are the concepts of positionality— personal context that drives our identities, ideas, and values — and reflexivity: the subjectivity of our opinions and the biases we bestow upon our experiences. These forms of self-imposition inherently influence the manner in which we interact with a place.
In considering sustainable tourism and the future of travel, I believe the most significant, often-overlooked silver lining to a long stay in one location is the time it gives tourists to acknowledge their biases —acknowledgments with the potential to elevate the tourist to something beyond “tourist.”
By this I mean that long term travel exposes the differences between day-to-day comfort and actual comfort living in a place. The former is a physiological comfort while the latter doesn’t necessarily equate to feeling comfortable. In Palermo, I achieved a baseline comfort after a few weeks; I grasped the city’s surface well enough to navigate through it, interact with people with different customs, and learn the social norms that allowed met to blend in.
Yet the second type of comfort — the ability to understand and move through Palermo without allowing my personal gaze and Americanized standards to conclusively define the city — took longer. Palermo, for all its castles and palaces, gelato and riceballs, is not a city that allows tourists to understand it, mostly because it doesn’t allow tourists to feel comfortable; Palermo is not cute, quaint Italy but a run-down, impoverished city with beggars sleeping in front of antiquated monuments, vegetable vendors making ends meet on a broccoli-to-broccoli basis, and garbage leaning against the walls of no-longer maintained buildings that have housed the same inhabitants for generations.
These facets of the city’s landscape are unavoidable. Everyone I know who’s seen Palermo was perplexed that I would want to spend time there, while friends who visited made comments about the ways in which Palermo wasn’t quite what they expected. I can’t say I blame them; Palermo is no Paris, and for someone with an American bias — namely, modern standards for aesthetics, efficiency, and culture — it is challenging to immediately fall in love with the Sicilian capital. Due to the fast, consumeristic nature of tourism, visitors can easily dismiss Palermo based on a few days of surface level interactions, leaving the city with a bad rap and no chance to improve upon it.
I suppose what I’m trying to say here is obvious — it takes time to know a place beyond a first impression. But perhaps less obvious is the idea that knowing a city is intertwined with knowing yourself and your particular outlook. Because we experience a new city and culture through the lenses of the ones we already know, pre-existing judgments unavoidably frame our opinions. It is natural to compare and contrast, so I believe practicing sustainable travel by spending a longer time in one place necessary to limit personal biases.
These biases change over time because tourism depends on short-term distraction. When you visit a city with a set number of vacation days, you rush to fill an itinerary, leaving few gaps in your schedule. In doing so, you see churches and castles and cathedrals but leave little time to actively reflect and consider how you feel, what you think, and why that space has had such an effect. Granted, fast tourism permits some degree of reflection, but without pausing in the moment to exercise a mindful form of travel, a large chunk of what makes a city special is replaced by a guidebook definition of what you believe the city should be.
When I was in Palermo, I quickly ran out of touristic activities, especially as I lived there during the off-season. After two weeks of museums and bucket list thrills, I developed my own routine based on what actual Sicilians do. My time abroad became defined by passaggiate through the city — walks that made me uncomfortable because they were so different from what my positionality claimed as the standard for efficiency and worthwhile pacing — day-long cafe writing stretches where I drank my coffee amongst Sicilians on their lunch breaks — Sicilians I initially dismissed as lazy but later came to realize simply enjoyed life’s leisure — the twelve mile walks I took to my church instead of paying for cab rides too expensive for locals — walks that brought me through the city’s poor neighborhoods where I quite literally had to confront why I felt the way I did. Uncomfortable, anxious, disheartened, fearful when away from the city’s gates.
Each of these experiences, among countless others, has made me deeply uncomfortable. But in acknowledging the reasons why I’m uncomfortable and the correlation between space and headspace, I’ve come to understand something deeper about how Palermo operates as a city and a culture.
Still, I’m not going to pretend that my three months in Palermo have made me an expert on the city, its inhabitants, and their lifestyles. It would take years for me to have the authority to speak for the space, just as it would take the same amount of time for me to truly feel comfortable living there. I’m also not going to pretend that my privilege didn’t put me at an advantage. I’m a white, Italian-American with funding that let me live comfortably and an appearance that let me go unnoticed. I understand that having the time and money to travel for a longer period of time is not a privilege that everyone can afford, either. Yet I do believe that this kind of reflexive self-monitoring applies to any and all spaces we inhabit — whether a plane ride away or in our hometowns.
While I’ve had to check my emotions with my pre-existing biases, I also know that I couldn’t have experienced Palermo from the vantage point of anyone else’s perspective; no matter how much time I spend there, I will always display some degree of subjectivity in what I find interesting, compelling, and disheartening about the city. Engaging with the things that have made me uncomfortable, confused, and perplexed has forced me to both acknowledge my biases and work to overcome them, creating a slightly more gilded but even more authentic understanding of a constantly and historically misunderstood city.