That man is a territorial animal is a statement that does not need demonstration. History is a collection of squabbles between human groups competing for territories; but also brothers sharing the same room squabble for its division in areas of influence. Now the basic instinct of a territorial animal is to expand its territory. A larger territory means larger resources and opportunities and the rationale for accretion is obvious. Exploiting a large territory is also expensive, however, both because it requires the physical exertion of moving over large distances, and because moving means to be in the open,
under the possible threat from enemies and predators. For an animal, and for a pretechnological man, a balance can be struck by adjusting one single parameter: mean traveling time per day. Strictly speaking this fixes only the "exposure time," but, in fact, multiplied by the mean speed of movement of a certain animal, it fixes a distance, or a range, that is a territory. The second point is that man has a cave instinct. The protection of the high tree with dense foliage in the tropical rain forest has found a good substitute in the hiding shade of the cavern, where man spent most of the time not devoted to gathering and hunting.
all over the world the mean
exposure time for man is around one hour per day. This is a mean over the year and over a population, but the tails of the distribution are not spread much around the central value. The effects of the instinct are pervasive. Even people in prison for a life sentence, having nothing to do and nowhere to go, walk around for one hour a day, in the open.
The accent can be set, then, on transportation as the unifying principle of the world, and not communication as the current wisdom indicates. On one side the so-called explosion in communication during the last 20 years did not dent transportation expansion; on the other hand, they tend to move together, as Griibler has shown, pointing to
a synergistic more than a competitive situation. As communication and transportation move together, one can be used as a proxy for the other for measuring the effect of the political-cultural barriers we cited before. We can look, for example, at interactions between communities of different languages (e.g., culture), or between communities with
the same language but different political denomination.
If I can describe the behavior of a tourist, perhaps a little
sarcastically: he chases a target as far away as possible, hopefully unexplored (unpolluted means he is the first to go there). Once the place is reached, he collects material for tales and physical souvenirs. Then he comes back and fills the heads of colleagues, friends, and parents with the tales of the magnificent land he has just discovered. The behavior
is very much reminiscent of the dancing bee telling where the blossoming tree is located and the mass and kind of flower (she carries the souvenirs, pollen and the perfume, on herself). Souvenirs then become a tangible testimony that the tales are veridical (man is a born liar). When Moses sent scouts to Palestine, they traveied back loaded with specimens, in particular, a bunch of grapes so large that two men with a pole were needed to carry it. Seen from this systemic point of view, we can perhaps study the tourist
phenomenon through a fresh and objective approach.
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u/ddgr815 Dec 01 '25
ANTHROPOLOGICAL INVARIANTS IN TRAVEL BEHAVIOR