This analysis of young adult backpacker experiences around Lake Atitlán, Guatemala examines the potential of travel for individual and social transformation. Although engaged in a highly patterned style of travel, backpackers’ exploration permits a discursive and experiential process of agentive self-definition that not only reproduces, but may also challenge dominant paradigms of spirituality and complementary and alternative medicine. Travel exposes people to novel ways of experiencing, making sense of, and practicing spirituality and wellness. These, in turn, contribute to processes of identity-making that shape future choices. Factors that make travel a particularly likely place for transformation include the fact of traveling as middle-class youth from the global North and the presence of a crisis of health care combined with openness to spiritual exploration in countries of origin. Analysis of formal and informal interview narratives provides the basis for this investigation. These findings are significant because they suggest that travel is not epiphenomenal, but rather is central to social and cultural processes. More specifically, this analysis synthesizes scholarly insights into how travel and spirituality impact individual and social transformation, considering the processes through which changes occur.
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Lisa L. Gezon (2017) studied this question.