Michael O'Regan

Hypermobility in backpacker lifestyles: the emergence of the internet café.

Mobility, an inherent quality of globalization, is characterized by movement and is arguably an integral part of modern travel. A particular category of mobility can be associated with the travel lives of budget travellers (backpackers, vagabonds, gap year travellers), falling within the realm of extreme mobility as they move from location to location. Internet cafes play a vital function in traveller mobility networks and are a symbol of their mobility. While all tourist places are mobility places, Internet cafes are a particular and growing type of tourist activity place – a place of hypermobility, where travellers can manage and facilitate their multiple mobilities, fully embracing a hypermobile lifestyle. This chapter will argue that Internet cafes materialize by necessity (market forces) in specific places like traveller enclaves and within hostels but are not fully embedded in the place. A cafe then isn’t just defined by its fixity and physically bounded location but also by the multiple mobilities of today’s travellers; not just from their increased numbers and diversity but also from the technology they bring and use. By using mobility studies as a conceptual base for this chapter, we can learn something about what it means to live and consume in the age of globalization and ask how globalization processes such as hypermobility (and how travellers have to manage and facilitate it) mesh with countercultures like backpacking.

A backpacker habitus: the body and dress, embodiment and the self

ABSTRACT As all cultures ‘dress’ the body through clothing, tattooing and other forms of body adornment such as cosmetics, dress offers a useful lens through which to explore the ways in which identities are constituted in modern leisure and tourism cultures. An analysis of the dress and embodied subjectivity of western backpackers in Nepal finds that dress is constitutive of self-identity and the ways backpackers imagine themselves. This study argues that dress remains an important aspect of a secondary socialization that, in an evolving process, leads to specific (western) backpacker habitus. The use of Pierre Bourdieu as a theoretical resource unravels the relationship between body and dress, embodiment and the self and shows how dress embellishes the body by adding an array of meanings within backpacking culture.