Cosmopolitan Bodies Fit To Travel and TR

Body & Society
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Cosmopolitan Bodies: Fit to Travel and Travelling to Fit

Jennie Germann Molz
Body Society 2006; 12; 1
DOI: 10.1177/1357034X06067153
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Cosmopolitan Bodies: Fit to Travel and

Travelling to Fit
JENNIE GERMANN MOLZ
Introduction
In the quest to come to terms with new subjectivities and new forms of belong-
ing in a global and mobile world, scholars from various disciplines have recuper-
ated the concept of cosmopolitanism as a theoretical framework to address the
intersecting transnational mobilities and affiliations that increasingly organize
global social and political relations. Deriving from the Greek word kosmopolites,
‘cosmopolitan’ literally means ‘citizen of the world’. How might we think of this
world citizen, not just as a political or cultural figure of global allegiance, but also
as an embodied subject with a corporeal disposition toward the world as a whole?
Within political theory, the cosmopolitan figure has been deployed to debate
the current status of the nation-state, the relevance of national patriotism, and the
feasibility of Kant’s utopian projects of world democracy and global citizenship
(Archibugi and Held, 1995; Boli and Thomas, 1999; Delanty, 2000; Grande, 2006;
Heater, 2002; Held, 1995; Nussbaum, 1994; Nussbaum and Cohen, 1996). At the
same time, the cosmopolitan has been imagined as a cultural figure who, for
better or for worse, epitomizes the contemporary climate of unfettered mobility,
urban sophistication, privileged detachment and transnational interconnection,
but who is also uniquely adapted to appreciate the plurality of cultures made
Body & Society © 2006 SAGE Publications (London, Thousand Oaks and New Delhi),
Vol. 12(3): 1–21
DOI: 10.1177/1357034X06067153
www.sagepublications.com
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2 ■ Body & Society Vol. 12 No. 3
inevitable by globalization (Featherstone, 2002; Hannerz, 1990, 1996; Tomlinson,

1999; Urry, 1995). In this sense, cosmopolitan claims to world citizenship are
imagined through a cultural or aesthetic disposition toward difference – a sense
of tolerance, flexibility and openness toward otherness that characterizes an
ethics of social relations in an interconnected world.
The foregoing discourses envision cosmopolitanism as a primarily philosophi-
cal, moral or cultural perspective; however, critics have recently called for a more
material analysis of the way cosmopolitanism is performed in people’s everyday
lives. In this article, I aim to respond to such calls by ‘fleshing out’ cosmo-
politanism as an embodied way of being in and moving through the world.
Drawing on empirical research material from the websites on which round-
the-world travellers write about their journeys, I argue that these mobile indi-
viduals perform a kind of cosmopolitanism that is as much an embodied as
intellectual or cultural disposition toward the world as a whole. Before moving
on to the extracts from this research, however, it will be useful to highlight the
way that scholars are increasingly seeking to materialize cosmopolitanism.
Materializing Cosmopolitanism
As a political and cultural figure, the cosmopolitan has been typified as the
detached, de-situated and disembodied idealization of the global citizen. Though
most commonly associated with white Euro-American elite mobility, the cosmo-
politan subject appears to emerge fully formed and unattached to any particular
history, geography or culture. To some extent the critical potential and utopian
appeal of cosmopolitanism lies precisely in this detached universality. Robbins
notes that proponents of cosmopolitanism have ‘felt obliged to keep it unlocated
in order to preserve its sharp critical edge, as well as its privileges . . . [T]here is
always some seductiveness in calls for transnational altruism, however disembod-
ied and unworldly they may sound’ (1998: 2). However, critics claim that such
‘disembodied and unworldly’ notions of an overarching cosmopolitanism and of
a floating cosmopolitan figure are vague to the point of meaningless abstraction.
This ‘thin’ cosmopolitanism, as some refer to it (Erskine, 2002; MacIntyre, 1981;
Walzer, 1994), is seen as too abstract to ground any kind of social analysis, too
removed from political, historical and geographical contexts to account for the
emergence of multiple cosmopolitanisms, and too vague to provide a theoretical
explanation of the way cosmopolitanism is enacted and experienced in people’s
everyday lives (Rabinow, 1996; Robbins, 1998; Skrbis et al., 2004).
In contrast to universal and abstract formulations of cosmopolitanism, these
critics call for pluralized and particularized accounts of what Robbins (1998)

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Cosmopolitan Bodies ■ 3
refers to as ‘actually existing cosmopolitanisms’. He argues that cosmopolitanism

is not just an abstract notion, but rather that it exists in ‘habits of thought and
feeling . . . that are socially and geographically situated’ (1998: 2). Robbins under-
takes a project of specifying how multiple cosmopolitanisms may be located and
embodied without stripping away the concept’s critical and normative power.
Following in this direction, several writers have provided accounts of cosmopoli-
tanisms that are geographically grounded, historically situated, and embedded in
material everyday practices. Abstract versions of cosmopolitanism are brought
back down to earth through analysis of the way people practise and perform
cosmopolitanism in their daily lives. For example, Nava (2002) identifies a
‘vernacular cosmopolitanism’ by considering the way a cosmopolitan conscious-
ness was expressed in the popular consumer culture of early 20th-century
England. Hebdige (1990: 20) refers to a ‘mundane cosmopolitanism’, noting that
because world travel is so widely available, either physically or via the television
(or now via the internet), everybody is now ‘more or less cosmopolitan’. Simi-
larly, Beck (2002) identifies how a ‘banal cosmopolitanism’ connects individuals
to the global community through everyday practices such as shopping or eating
imported foods. What these examples illustrate is a kind of ‘embedded cosmo-
politanism’ that envisions cosmopolitanism not as an abstract philosophical
stance, but rather as entrenched in people’s everyday interactions and activities.
Similar to these descriptions of embedded cosmopolitanism is the notion of
‘rooted cosmopolitanism’, which recognizes that the cosmopolitan is not a free-
floating autonomous subject, but rather is integrated through his or her member-
ship in the community, territory or nation (see Cohn, 1995; Erskine, 2002; Heater,
2002; Walzer, 1994). Rooted cosmopolitanism underscores the enduring signifi-
cance of connections to places and cultures, even in mobility. For example, in their
research on perceptions of local landscapes in the North of England, Szerszynski
and Urry (2006) identified a cosmopolitan perspective that rested on a complex
tension between the particularity of local place and dwelling on the one hand, and
universalistic dispositions on the other. Similarly, Ong’s (1999) discussion of
flexible citizenship, which describes a form of Chinese cosmopolitanism, or
Appiah’s (1998) description of his father’s distinctively Ghanaian version of
cosmopolitanism, show how a cosmopolitan orientation is embedded in particu-
lar forms of national identity. Also, following Clifford’s (1997) description of non-
elite ‘discrepant cosmopolitanisms’, many theorists have identified and situated
various subaltern, transatlantic or tropical cosmopolitanisms within the particular
power structures and historical, political, economic and cultural contexts through
which they emerge (see for example Appiah, 1998; Aravamudan, 1999; Gilroy,
1993; Pollock et al., 2000). For Appiah, cosmopolitan thought must

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. . . entertain the possibility of a world in which everyone is a rooted cosmopolitan, attached

to a home of his or her own, with its own cultural particularities, but taking pleasure from the
presence of other, different places that are home to other, different people. (1998: 91, emphasis
in original)
Thus actually existing cosmopolitanisms might also be understood through the

formulation of ‘roots’ and ‘routes’ that Gilroy (1993) uses to describe diasporic
affiliations. The ‘rooted/routed cosmopolitan’ appreciates and is open to differ-
ence, and yet continues to be situated in one or more specific political, social or
cultural spheres.
In contrast to the non-specificity of abstract and universal discourses of
cosmopolitanism, these writers elaborate a ‘critical cosmopolitanism’ that recog-
nizes ‘the inescapabilities and particularities of places, characters, historical
trajectories and fate’ (Rabinow, 1996: 56). For example, Beck and Sznaider (2006:
9) argue for more systematic attention to the ‘cosmopolitan condition of real
people’ that moves cosmopolitanism sociology beyond normative ideals and
toward empirical accounts of banal cosmopolitanism. While these interventions
and others like them imbue the notion of cosmopolitanism with a rich texture of
national, geographical, cultural material and historical specificity, few writers
have directly addressed the way a cosmopolitan orientation to the world might
be literally embodied (see Clark, 2000). In one sense, this apparent omission of
the body from contemporary discussions of cosmopolitanism reflects the persist-
ence of a nature/culture binary that harks back to Kantian formulations of
cosmopolitan philosophy. As Cheah (1998a) explains, Kant envisions cosmo-
politanism precisely as the transcendence of culture over nature and as the ability
of human rationality to establish a degree of freedom from nature. For Kant,
‘cosmopolitical culture is precisely the realm in which humanity is able to free
itself from the given’ (Cheah, 1998a: 304). Here, ‘the given’ is understood as
nature, including ‘the passions and sensuous inclinations that subject human
beings to nature’ (Cheah, 1998a: 304). Though such a ‘culture-concept’ is, as
Cheah argues, problematic in its equation of culture with mobility and nature
with stasis, Kant’s legacy in this regard may nevertheless help to explain why
theorists have generally attended to the ethical, aesthetic or intellectual aspects of
cosmopolitanism rather than seeing cosmopolitanism as manifested ‘in the flesh’.
This is not to say that the body is completely absent from scholarly discussions
of cosmopolitanism. In fact, for some advocates of the cosmopolitan paradigm, the
body serves as a useful symbol for reconciling the tension between the universal-
ity of a global community or civil society and the individual member-citizens of
such a community. For example, Milstein (2002) elaborates the notion of the ‘body
cosmopolitic’, an adaptation of Kant’s ‘body politic’, in order to think through a

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global society consisting of multiple differently ordered societies. In her provoca-

tive essay on patriotism and cosmopolitanism, Nussbaum (1994: 6) employs a
similar rhetorical strategy in her description of a cosmopolitan conception ‘of the
entire world of human beings as a single body, its many people as so many limbs’.
As Nussbaum explains, this form of thinking allows for both the separateness and
interconnectedness of all persons, which in turn underpins an ethical and empa-
thetic stance between the members of a global society. Turner (2002) also identi-
fies the body as the foundation of a cosmopolitan virtue. He argues that the
cosmopolitan argument can be made more convincingly ‘through the argument
that the vulnerability of the human body provides the starting point for an account
of human commonality as the basis for a cosmopolitan ethic’ (2002: 56).
These descriptions of the body are largely metaphorical and in their appeals
to the universality of cosmopolitanism tend to overlook the specificity of
embodied experiences of or exclusions from this cosmopolitan ideal. For
example, appeals to a body of humanity or to the commonality of human vulner-
ability suggest a symmetry of experience based on an equal participation in, or
access to, a global society. However, a more complicated and contingent account
of the body’s role in performing cosmopolitanism emerges when we consider
empirical accounts of actually existing and actually embodied cosmopolitanisms.
In this article, I attempt to contribute to the call for accounts of critical and
actually existing cosmopolitanisms by considering the way the cosmopolitan
sensibilities of flexibility, adaptability, tolerance and openness to difference are
literally embodied by a specific group of mobile subjects.
I address these themes by referring to a study of round-the-world travellers
and the websites they publish while travelling the world. The round-the-world
travellers in this study are primarily backpackers and independent travellers who
journeyed around the world, some for as brief a time as two months and others
for as long as five years. With a few notable exceptions, these travellers are white,
middle-class citizens of the developed world who have taken time off from their
studies or careers to circumnavigate the globe. In many ways, the round-
the-world traveller is emblematic of the cosmopolitan figure: a mobile, detached
flâneur who delights in encounters with difference, displays a willingness to risk
and a stance of openness toward other cultures, but is always just passing
through (see Hannerz, 1990, 1996; Urry, 1995). What interests me here is the way
round-the-world travellers embody these characteristics of mobility, tolerance
and openness to difference not just as a cultural disposition, but also as a physical
orientation toward the world as a whole.
The research material I examine consists of travel stories gathered from
round-the-world travel websites and from interviews with authors of these sites

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from 2001 to 2003.1 Precursors to the increasingly popular travel blog,2 these
websites are primarily personal home pages where independent travellers chron-
icle the ongoing events of their trips. At the heart of these websites are regularly
updated journal entries and photographs detailing the traveller’s experiences on
the road. Most websites also include detailed information about the travellers and
the trip, including biographical information, maps and itineraries, travel budgets,
packing lists, health advice and links to relevant sites. Though travellers often
describe their websites as sites of virtual travel, their online journals are replete
with ‘body stories’. Travellers transport their readers via vivid accounts of intesti-
nal illnesses, uncomfortably crowded bus rides, unbearably filthy toilets, suffo-
cating humidity, delicious food and incredible views that provide the reader with
vicarious access to the traveller’s world.
In the following analysis of these body stories, I explore the various ways
travellers embody cosmopolitanism through the concept of ‘fit’. In one sense of
the word, ‘fit’ refers to the traveller’s physical condition. How do travellers
prepare themselves physically to travel around the world? And in making their
bodies physically ‘fit’ for travel, how do they embody a sense of tolerance and
openness toward the world? In another sense, ‘fit’ connotes propriety or suit-
ability and refers to the traveller’s ability to blend in and navigate through a
variety of geographical and cultural environments. How do travellers ‘fit in’
across an array of such environments as they move around the world? Finally,
how is access to this kind of round-the-world mobility enabled by physical
markers of cosmopolitanism and how, in turn, do these mobility practices consti-
tute a flexible, adaptable and cosmopolitan body?
Fit to Travel
Round-the-world travellers often refer to their journeys as ‘going global’. Unlike
travellers who take short holidays to one country or region, round-the-world
travellers usually spend a relatively long period of time on the road and move
through a series of places, each with its respective altitudes, languages, cuisines,
climates, physical challenges and health risks. In order to cope with the constant
movement through ever-changing environments that going global entails, the
round-the-world traveller’s body has to be made ‘global ready’ and fit to travel.
Being global ready is in part about being in good physical condition, but it is
primarily about being physically ready for anything. Travellers recount on their
websites the various ways they get fit to travel: by working out, buying and
packing clothing and equipment for various environments, assembling first aid
kits and packing protective items such as sunscreen or insect repellent, and, as I

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will discuss in more detail later, getting immunized against a variety of diseases.
The consumption of exercise, clothing, equipment, travel products, and vaccines
is central to the performance of a corporeal fitness that reworks the body as
flexible and adaptable in the face of global risks and experiences. As we will see,
preparing the body to encounter the world in this way involves consuming
certain commodities, resulting in a hybrid interface between bodies and objects.
Thus fitness also involves what McCormack (1999: 156) refers to as ‘the
metaphorical sense of how diverse “things” come to fit together’.
To a large extent, the way travellers work on their bodies prior to and during
their trips can be understood within a broader Western attitude toward the body
as flexible and contingent. Over the past several decades, shifting social roles and
meanings of the body have been reflected in the changing significance of the body
in social research. The Women’s Movement and Civil Rights Movement of the
1960s, which claimed the body as a politically, socially and theoretically
contested site, were key factors in this shift. For one thing, feminist and anti-
racist critics argued against essentialist definitions of the body, demonstrating
that embodied differences such as gender, sexuality and race are materially
produced rather than naturally given biological identities. Following this anti-
essentialist conceptualization of the body, social theorists began to envision the
body as a fluid, open and malleable entity (Turner, 1996). Especially in consumer
culture, the body has consistently been presented as something that can be
adorned, improved and worked upon. Thus, many theorists have argued that
working on the body constitutes a ‘project of the self’ that characterizes the role
of the body in society and the relationship between the body and identity (Falk,
1994; Featherstone, 1982; Shilling, 1993). For travellers, work on the body consti-
tutes not only a project of the self, but also a project of the global. In preparing
their bodies to go global, travellers perform a ‘global’ body that is flexible, adapt-
able and literally open to the world, though also constrained in particular ways.
Global readiness is not something that is ever actually achieved. Rather, the
body is always in the process of becoming global ready, even during the trip. To
some extent, the travelling body becomes fit to travel by travelling. Travellers
exercise and try to get into shape prior to their trips, but they often find that it is
travel itself – the increased walking and trekking, carrying a weighty backpack, or
participating in physical activities such as biking, swimming or surfing that helps
them to become physically fit for travel. However, illness, injuries or lazy days at
beach destinations can wear them down again. By the same token, travellers also
find that it is impossible to pack everything they will need for a long-term trip
around the world. They regularly have to regroup and resupply, buying new
clothes as needed and stocking up again on medicine for first aid kits. Vaccinations

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also quite often have to be taken during the trip, not just before departure. Some
vaccinations are administered over several months and many travellers have to
arrange for their booster injections while they are already on the road. The trav-
eller’s physical fitness is always precarious, always in the process of being main-
tained. Thus global readiness is always being (re)made and consumed.
These descriptions of the way travellers prepare their bodies to go global
signal the increasingly commodified nature of both the presentation of the trav-
eller’s body and embodied experiences of world travel. As travel experiences
become more commodified, the traveller’s body is increasingly seen as the
stylized representation of certain travel performances. For example, in their
analysis of the commodification of mountain tourism, Johnston and Edwards
(1994) argue that the growing availability of consumer goods and services allows
holidaymakers to buy into an ethic of adventure tourism, regardless of their level
of experience, physical fitness or commitment to the sport of mountaineering.
They note that the commodified fantasy of a mountain experience has produced
‘many more well-equipped, stylishly dressed holiday consumers traveling to
mountain regions’ (Johnston and Edwards, 1994: 468). Round-the-world travellers
are similarly well-equipped with necessary travel products and clothing for any
environment or eventuality. Whereas the tourists in Johnston and Edwards’
study were consuming an ethic of outdoor adventure and alpine ecotourism,
round-the-world travellers’ consumer practices revolve around the cosmopolitan
principles of flexibility, openness and adaptability through the commodified ideal
of the ‘backpacker’ as a world traveller ready for anything.
Physical adaptability is embodied in several ways, not least through the
backpack and the various travel commodities that round-the-world travellers
buy to prepare and equip their bodies. The backpack, for example, is a commod-
ity that symbolizes a certain rough-and-ready sensibility that allows travellers to
pick up and go or to settle in with equal ease. Furthermore, what is in the
backpack attests to the way ‘readiness’ can be purchased off the shelf. Travellers
pack commodities such as bug repellent, guidebooks, sunscreen, and rain gear,
imagining that these items will come in useful somewhere along their journey. It
becomes evident, however, that the kind of commodification involved in travel
preparation goes beyond utilitarian consumption. Certainly travellers justify the
inclusion of each item in their backpack on the basis of its usefulness, but the
packing inventories travellers post on their websites reveal a performance of
symbolic consumption.
The way these travellers perform ‘global readiness’ through consumption
practices is, as Riley (1995: 634) argues, related to the need to engage in an ‘ideal
rather than utilitarian consumption’ that is as much about symbolic qualities such

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as prestige, flexibility or competence as it is about the practicalities of travel. In

other words, what appears to be a form of utilitarian consumption can also be
seen as symbolic consumption – in purchasing and packing precisely what might
be useful in any given situation, these round-the-world travellers perform a kind
of stylized consumption of readiness, flexibility and adaptability. Likewise, trav-
ellers display a cosmopolitan competence in knowing how to consume the right
commodities, places, or cultures in the right way. In knowing what to buy and
how to use it, they display an aptitude for life on the road.
Consumption of certain goods translates into a commodification of cosmo-
politan flexibility as these commodities take on a symbolic value beyond their
usefulness as mere objects. Travellers may buy and pack a whole range of useful
consumer goods, but what they are really purchasing is the quality of flexibility.
As Martin (1994: xvii) notes, flexibility has become a hot commodity:
Arising as a trait to be cherished and cultivated, from corporations and city governments to
credit cards and shoes, flexibility is an object of desire for nearly everyone’s personality, body,
and organization. Flexibility has also become a powerful commodity, something scarce and
highly valued.
How does the body figure in this economy of flexibility? For McCormack (1999),
physical flexibility is precisely a commodified representation that connects
physiological fitness to an emotional stance of openness to new experiences.
Drawing on Bauman’s (1995) reflections on the concept of fitness, McCormack
considers fitness
. . . as a highly commodified ‘art of living’, a ‘meta effort, the effort to stay fit to make efforts’.
From this perspective then, fitness stands for the individual’s bodily and spiritual capacity to
absorb, and creatively respond to, a growing volume of new experience. (1999: 162)
Indeed, travellers aim to make their bodies fit to travel precisely in order to
become physically open and emotionally responsive to the new experiences and
adventures that world travel presents.
However, as McCormack goes on to argue, this relationship between fitness
and flexibility must be understood against the backdrop of embodied risk:
The risks, real or imagined, associated with what we do or do not do with our bodies, with
whom, with what objects, commodities and technologies appear as increasingly important,
contested and commodifiable issues. These risks are tied up with . . . corporeal flexibility.
(1999: 161)
For round-the-world travellers, flexibility and global readiness are always bound
up in discourses of risk. Making the body global ready is about maintaining and
monitoring the body and its environment in order to apply the proper levels of
prevention, protection and care in a risky world.

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Beck (1992) argues that we are moving toward a risk society in which threats
to the environment and to human health are increasingly realized at a global
rather than local level. For round-the-world travellers, risk is certainly a central
concern and, in some cases, is actually the desired outcome of global travel. To
put the body at risk is to participate in one of the fundamental narratives of travel
discourse. As Elsrud (2001: 598) suggests, travel to places that are described as
‘primitive’ or ‘underdeveloped’ is made meaningful precisely within a dominant
grand narrative of travel that sees such challenging travel as both risky and
rewarding. In his analysis of adventure tourism in Queensland, New Zealand,
Cater (2006: 320) observes, ‘risk is entrenched in discourses surrounding the
practices of adventure’. He argues, however, that even though adventure experi-
ences such as bungy jumping are understood within a discourse of risk, adven-
ture tourists have no desire to actually be harmed. Instead, Cater suggests,
tourists are attracted by the unpredictability of what the experience will feel like.
He argues that ‘the prime motivation for the practice of adventure is thrill and
excitement, both of which are inherently embodied characteristics’ (Cater, 2006:
321). Like the realm of adventure sports in which risk is commodified through
embodied experiences of thrill and excitement, the risk involved in round-the-
world travel is also commodified through embodied experience. In this case,
however, it is the physical characteristics of flexibility and adaptability that are
contextualized within a spatialized imagination of the world as a risky place.
As Beck points out, there is a difference between personal risks, which are
often connoted in terms of bravery and adventure, and global dangers, which
threaten all life on Earth. When narrating risk, travellers tend to concentrate on
risk as bravado and pay less attention to the impact of their travelling practices
in terms of pollution and environmental or cultural degradation. However, when
considering the risk to their bodies, personal risks and global risks merge.
Making the body ‘global ready’ produces the traveller’s body as vulnerable and
the world as risky. This formulation is especially clear in the stories travellers tell
about getting vaccinations before and during their trips.
Vaccination stories recur with varying tones of drama throughout travellers’
websites. Getting immunized is described as a dreaded, painful and costly but
necessary process that travellers endure in order to make their bodies fit for
travel. While some travellers recount their trips to the travel clinic with macabre
hyperbole, Kelly and Rich, two travellers from Atlanta, discuss planning and
getting their vaccinations pragmatically. In their website, 2GoGlobal, they
provide the following advice:

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No trip is worth sacrificing, or compromising upon, your health or safety. Fortunately, with
careful research and preparation . . . going to far-away lands does not have to involve unrea-
sonable risk to your health.
This is not to say that traveling, let us say, in India will present the same risks to our health
as does traveling here in the United States. Clearly, we are more apt to get sick in India (perhaps
Delhi Belly, not unlike Mexico’s famed Montezuma’s Revenge). Rather, what can and must be
done by all travelers is to understand, on a country by country basis, the risks that will be
faced, the likely sources of such risks, and what can be done to minimize the possibility of
exposure to such risks. With that in mind, adequately preparing for this trip medically was, in
many respects, the most critical part of our pre-departure preparation. . . .
It is not possible to make educated decisions about particular vaccines in the absence of a
rough country and date itinerary, so putting together a rough outline of our proposed itinerary
was also critical. Where you’ll be going, and what time of year you’ll be there, inform the
decisions about what vaccinations are important. (2GoGlobal)
Kelly and Rich go on to list all of the injections they had (about a dozen in total),
along with the various medications they packed, and how each immunization or
medicine related to the risks they might encounter based on their itinerary.
In preparing the body to face such risks, travel is imagined as dangerous and
the global is articulated as generally and inevitably risky. For example, when
George, a traveller from Alaska, takes his family to the travel clinic for their
injections, he notices that ‘the walls were plastered with warnings about every
corner of the earth’ and he bemoans the fact that their itinerary happens to take
them ‘smack dab [into the] center of the world’s Petri dish of killer diseases’
(WorldHop). Beck’s (1992) account of the risk society indicates the way large-
scale risks such as global warming threaten the global environment with no
regard to nation-state boundaries. However, in travellers’ narratives, the gener-
alized notion that the world is a scary place actually breaks down into a far more
specific spatialization of risk and safety across the world, aligning health and
safety with western, developed countries and illness and risk with destinations in
the developing world. At the travel clinic, surrounded by a pile of vials and
syringes, and terrorized by warnings about deadly mosquitoes and worms and
children with AIDS, George fantasizes about forgoing the trip altogether and
spending a year watching travel videos in the safety of his own home. In stories
such as these, home is imagined as safe, while abroad, and especially the develop-
ing world, is imagined as perilous by comparison.
Different places pose different and specific risks to travellers’ bodies. Accord-
ing to travellers’ stories, Cambodia is a malaria zone, yellow fever is a threat in
many African countries, and travellers are likely to catch giardia in Nepal. Even
the names travellers give to various maladies associate particular illnesses with
specific places: Rajasthani Crud, Delhi Belly, Bali Belly, Montezuma’s Revenge,

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Buddha’s Revenge and Thailand Tummy imagine India, Indonesia, Mexico and
Thailand as danger zones for particular illnesses. As well, travellers describe the
many risks, also attached to specific places, for which there are no vaccines –
bungy jumping in Queenstown, landmines in Cambodia, thieves in Nairobi,
hungry lions in African safari parks, or suicide bombers in Israel. The risks are,
as Kelly and Rich note, laid out on a ‘country by country basis’.
Travellers embody this spatialized risk by taking the vaccines appropriate to
their intended destinations. In taking these injections, the global is literally
ingested as a series of specific risks while the traveller’s body is transformed from
a vulnerable entity to a tolerant one. After being injected with several vaccines,
George claims that his family is ‘happy to be so well protected. In fact, the upside
is we can now buy ground zero property in Chernobyl since we may be the only
living things that can survive there’ (WorldHop). As much as vaccinations signify
the riskiness of international travel, they also signify the possibility of mitigating
that risk through the proper management and preparation of the body. As
McCormack (1999: 162) notes, ‘the responsibility to respond to conditions of
risk and flexibility is vested more and more in the hands of individuals who must
become experts of themselves’. Within this ‘do-it-yourself’ moral landscape,
corporeal ‘responsibility, risk, flexibility and fitness are highly commodifiable
factors that can be mobilised in the manufacture and marketing of a whole range
of commodities’ (McCormack, 1999: 162). In the specific case of round-
the-world travel, the vaccine is just such a commodity, reworking the inoculated
body into an example of McCormack’s (1999: 169) notion of ‘hybrid fitness’.
The proper preparation of the body also involves a particular kind of surveil-
lance that positions the traveller’s well-being as precarious. In discussing the
spatiality of illness, Armstrong (1995) observes an historical shift from identify-
ing illness as inside the patient’s body to identifying illness, and more specifically
risk of illness, as ‘out there’ in the community. Vaccinations operate as part of
this new kind of ‘surveillance medicine’ that envisions the threat of illness as ‘out
there’, something against which the body must be vigilantly protected. The
answer to such external risks, however, is not ‘out there’ but rather internal, or
more accurately, ingested and injected into the traveller’s body in the form of
vaccines that train the body’s immune system to cope with the various germs,
viruses and bacteria that travellers encounter.
Inoculating the body effectively remakes the body’s boundaries, producing a
hybrid interface between the body and the vaccine. As Martin (1994) argues in
her ethnography of immunity, Western concepts of the immune system have
shifted from military metaphors of fortresses and stable protective walls to
metaphors of flexibility and permeability. In other words, the healthy body is an

01 067153 Molz (bc-t) 27/7/06 12:08 pm Page 13
adaptable body. Vaccines do not seal off the body; instead, they make the body
more tolerant, adaptable and safely open to the world it encounters. Vaccinating
the body makes it ‘fit’ for travel through a world composed of risky areas by
making it open and adaptable to the germs, water, and food in those areas. Thus
the traveller’s inoculated body becomes a cosmopolitan body that literally toler-
ates and is open to difference and danger. Mobility around the world requires the
body to ‘fit in’ in other ways as well. Vaccines may make the traveller’s body
more tolerant to risk, but travellers must also attend to their physical appearance
in order to fit in and travel inconspicuously through foreign environments.
Travelling to Fit
In many cases, travellers want to be like chameleons, adapting and blending as
best they can into the various environments they pass through. Sometimes this
entails blending in with local people. For example, some female travellers avoid
standing out in Muslim countries by wearing headscarves and shalwar qamiz, the
long, modest garments prescribed by the local culture. In other instances trav-
ellers do not necessarily try to blend in with the local population, but rather with
the more generic category of ‘traveller’. This is the case in the following journal
entry from Myrna, a traveller from Chicago who published her trip journals in
a website titled GoGlobalGirl. In the following entry about eating alone at a
restaurant on the beach in Koh Samui, Thailand, Myrna negotiates fitting in:
I am now sitting at a quiet restaurant on the beach, literally with my chair, table and bare feet
in the sand. . . . The barefoot waiters wear white smocks and black pants, though some have
on jeans too. I think one may recognize me; I’ve eaten here a few times in the last week or so.
I am alone for dinner tonight, enjoying the ocean breeze, fruity red wine, and solitude. My hair
is in cornrows, and when other girls in cornrows saunter by, we smile knowingly at each other;
we couldn’t resist the Thai women’s high-pitched voices all along the beach calling out one of
the few phrases they know: ‘You want hai’ beads? Bery nice for you.’ [sic] I am wearing a
sarong as a skirt, fitting in, if not with the locals, at least with other tourists. I haven’t seen
many people in jean-shorts here. (GoGlobalGirl)
As Myrna notes, she does not necessarily fit in with the Thai locals, though one
of the waiters recognizes her as a somewhat regular patron. By trading in her
typically American jean shorts for a sarong and hair beads, Myrna takes on a new
look that detaches her from her national identity and reattaches her to a new
identity as a world traveller. In her bare feet and sarong, she could be from
anywhere, or on her way to anywhere. This new look is not about passing as a
local, but rather it is about allowing the local place(s) to inscribe themselves
temporarily on the surface of her body, marking her as something of a global
nomad.

01 067153 Molz (bc-t) 27/7/06 12:08 pm Page 14
It is important to note that the nomadic detachment of world travellers is not

disembodied. On the contrary, belonging to this category is enacted in large part
through an embodied demeanour that allows travellers to perform and recognize
each other as world travellers. In his website WorldHop, George writes about
being able to identify – and be identified by – other travellers according to their
look:
It was easy for us to spot each other. Our ‘seasoned,’ slightly road-weary countenances, tired
clothes, worn single backpacks, torn ‘Lonely Planet’ guide books and open conversations were
a dead give away. (WorldHop)
The world-worn look of the traveller may not conjure up the glamour commonly
associated with cosmopolitanism, but it does indicate the way in which travellers
are marked by and embody global mobility. Their tired, world-weary appearance
signifies their movement through the world and their ability to be ready for
anything or to go anywhere at a moment’s notice.
For Marie, a traveller from New York, fitting in does not entail fitting in with
other travellers or with the locals, but rather taking on something of a ‘global’
look. While in Russia, Marie is pleased to find that she ‘fits in’ and she provides
a few tips for not standing out while travelling:
I fit in well in St. Petersburg, and attributed it . . . to my bike messenger bag and hair’s brown
roots. If you don’t want to look like a tourist, let your hair be unruly and don’t carry a
knapsack. Carry a bike messenger bag, like you would at home. Kids in Ulaan Bataar, Hong
Kong, and Hanoi carried bike messenger bags. . . . As for the roots, this was something that
seemed popular around the world as well. (Marie’sWorldTour)
In this case, Marie is not trying to fit in as a tourist or blend in by ‘going native’
in St Petersburg. Instead, she manages to achieve a transportable look, one that
is equally non-descript in Ulaan Bataar, Hong Kong or Hanoi. Fitting in requires
downplaying striking features and emphasizing a new physical identity as
someone who might go and fit in almost anywhere. At the same time, this global
flexibility is embedded in the materiality of local cultures as travellers consume
and adapt local styles to cosmopolitan purposes.
Travellers resist ‘going native’ by constantly moving on to another destina-
tion. In this sense, fitting in is not the same as ‘passing’. These travellers are
passing through, not passing. Fitting in is about adapting the traveller’s body to
its ever-changing environment and to life on the road. If travellers are trying to
pass, it is not as a particular identity, but rather as adaptable and global. They
aren’t trying to fit in somewhere but anywhere. Such attempts to blend in recall
Goffman’s (1968) analysis of bodily stigma and individuals’ efforts to ‘cover’
signs of stigma. For many of these travellers, provinciality is the stigma they
attempt to cover with a kind of unplaceable global sophistication. These travellers

01 067153 Molz (bc-t) 27/7/06 12:08 pm Page 15
perform detachment precisely through their bodies and their ‘look’. The cosmo-
politan ability to fit in anywhere and to adapt across a series of cultural environ-
ments is achieved, in part, by what these travellers consume and the way they
dress, wear their hair, or accessorize their bodies.
Fitting in is a complex and contingent process. What are the conditions under
which some travellers ‘fit’ while others find fitting in more difficult? Despite the
emphasis on the body’s surface and appearance in the above examples, it is
important to note that the traveller’s body is not a blank slate that can be infi-
nitely moulded to any environment. On the contrary, embodied subjects ‘are
always already marked by differences’ (Ahmed, 1998: 45) that constrain and
compel their ability to ‘fit’ in different ways. To be sure, most of the round-
the-world travellers in this study already embody the ideal of Western bourgeois
privilege. Originating primarily in First World regions of North America and
Western Europe, these travellers, with a few exceptions, tend to be young, white,
middle class, heterosexual, and able-bodied. Such physical markers of privilege
may, in some cases, make travelling and fitting in easier for some than for others.
No matter how ‘global ready’ travellers make their bodies, not all bodies are
equally fit to travel or able to fit in. Phenomenological experiences of travel are
different for different bodies, as Puar notes:
Whiteness travels well because of impressions of the West – because of perceptions of trav-
ellers’ homes. White travellers are generally treated ‘well,’ viewed favorably, and seen as inter-
esting, their company is sought after. . . . People of color – because they are not ‘as colorful’
anymore – may experience ‘bad apple’ status accorded to color. Suspended between familiar
and Other – for people of color cannot be hailed as Other (as blondes are) – they may experi-
ence an ambivalent ‘going home’; these slippages force other readings of travel to emerge.
Legitimacy is most always accorded to white experiences, while the experiences of people of
color are seen as anomalies. (1994: 91)
According to Puar’s assessment, bodies of colour find both mobility and fitting
in more problematic. On the one hand, they fit in more readily in non-Western
cultures where their Otherness is mitigated because they are ‘not “as colorful”
anymore’. For example, in The Global Soul (2000), travel writer Pico Iyer credits
his ability to move and fit in anywhere not with whiteness, but rather with his
nondescript, non-white skin colour and equally unplaceable name. Contingen-
cies of ‘fit’ can also be affected by gender, as female travellers are treated differ-
ently and with different expectations than male travellers. For women on the
road, especially alone, it may be more difficult to blend in to certain local
environments. As Wolff (1995) suggests, women cannot be invisible strangers.
Because women travelling alone are more likely to be sexually harassed while
travelling, Myrna suggests on her website that single women should wear fake
wedding bands and invent an imaginary husband to fend off potential harassers

01 067153 Molz (bc-t) 27/7/06 12:08 pm Page 16
(GoGlobalGirl). On Myrna’s and other women’s websites there are cautionary

stories about lone women who suffered harassment and more extreme sexual
assaults. Clearly, the ability to blend in and the kinds of risks involved in standing
out are different for some bodies than for other bodies. But this is not to say that
fitting in is the same for all women travellers in the same way. For example,
Myrna’s whiteness places her under the gaze (or even the leer) of border officials,
local people or other travellers differently than women travellers of colour.
Non-whiteness may also travel well, but under different conditions and differ-
ent assumptions of where and how such bodies fit. As Puar points out, being
suspended between the familiar and the Other can position the traveller of colour
as a misfit. For Chris D!, a traveller from California who calls himself the
‘Chocolate Nomad’ on his website of the same title, his ‘chocolate’ skin colour
becomes an integral part of his travelling body. His website and journal entries
remind us that travellers are not just travelling as bodies, but as racially marked
bodies for whom relating to and belonging to the world as a whole can take on
different meanings to white travellers. For example, Chris D! writes on his
website that he fits in and feels at home while travelling through Africa.
However, elsewhere he expresses his frustration at being hassled in Vienna and
Cairo by police who mistake him for a Nigerian immigrant. Only by showing
his US passport can he prove his entitlement to be in these places (Chocolate-
Nomad). Here, the passport serves as a ‘correction’ to the assumptions drawn
from Chris D!’s skin colour; being a US citizen entitles him to a mobility that
being black might otherwise foreclose.
Australian traveller Stu recounts similar experiences on his website UpOver-
DownUnder. Stu and his three travel companions, who refer to themselves as
ABC (Australian Born Chinese), constantly find themselves in situations where
they are assumed to speak Chinese or Japanese, but not their first language,
English. In some cases, this served as an advantage when Stu and his friends
received assistance or discounts from members of the Chinese diaspora.
However, as with Chris D!, their bodies are essentialized and their mobility is
positioned within assumptions related to diaspora and ethnicity (see Ang, 2002).
These travellers’ experiences resonate with Puar’s observation that:
Some bodies, bodies read as brown, black, yellow, female, differently abled, queer, and so on,
by necessity must always negotiate the discursive structures that render these bodies Other. . . .
[T]he body is always attempting translation, trying to reconcile the multiple and discrepant
demands upon it. (1994: 93)
It can be harder for travellers to move and harder for them to fit in when the
meaning of their bodies is being read off the surface, especially when the body’s
surface already tells another story about the traveller and when skin or gender or

01 067153 Molz (bc-t) 27/7/06 12:08 pm Page 17
sexuality already places the traveller as a misfit. Just as access to mobility is

secured for some bodies, made difficult for some bodies and altogether denied to
other bodies, so too is ‘fitting in’ contingent on the body. In particular, women,
travellers of colour, queer travellers and disabled travellers may find moving and
fitting a difficult affair.3
On the other hand, though, as Chris D!’s experiences in Africa, Stu’s inclusion
in various Chinese diaspora communities, or Pico Iyer’s experiences travelling
the world indicate, non-white skin can sometimes fit in even more easily, making
the traveller more safely inconspicuous in places where white skin stands out. As
these examples suggest, not all cosmopolitan bodies are cosmopolitan in the same
way. Even within this group of privileged round-the-world travellers who travel
voluntarily and encounter other cultures largely on their own terms, we witness
the way cosmopolitanisms are differentiated and differently embodied. Fitting in
involves complex negotiations between bodies, places and mobilities.
Conclusion
The cosmopolitan characteristics of flexibility, adaptability and openness to
difference and risk are not just cultural dispositions, but rather embodied
performances of fitness and fitting in. Travellers literally embody cosmo-
politanism. Vaccinations help travellers become physically tolerant to the differ-
ent environments they face along the way. As well, travellers’ efforts at fitting in
demonstrate how the body can become culturally flexible and able to move
through different places. However, as I have stressed, the ability for bodies to
adapt or fit emerges in negotiation with the commodities travellers consume and
the individual cultures and places these bodies move through. The cases
described here represent one version of embodied cosmopolitanism, namely a
specific and situated expression of privileged mobility. This is not to say that
cosmopolitanism is reserved for white, heterosexual middle-class, male travellers,
but rather to point out the way voluntary travel and the ability to fit in across a
variety of cultures are embodied practices. The particular kind of cosmo-
politanism I describe here is infused with questions of privilege and body
politics.
By focusing on the way cosmopolitanism is literally embodied, I hope to draw
attention to the notion that cosmopolitanism is not just an abstract, philosophi-
cal engagement with a world of difference, but rather a bodily and materially
iterated orientation to the world as a whole. Along with other scholars who
demonstrate the way cosmopolitanism is expressed in everyday material prac-
tices, I argue for a definition of cosmopolitanism that specifies the material and

01 067153 Molz (bc-t) 27/7/06 12:08 pm Page 18
embodied nature of cosmopolitan characteristics such as tolerance, flexibility and

openness to difference. This empirically detailed account of the way round-
the-world travellers embody cosmopolitanism is an example of an ‘actually
existing cosmopolitanism’ (Robbins, 1998). But what warrants such an emphasis
on embedded, embodied or ‘actually existing’ forms of cosmopolitanism?
Namely, by challenging normative accounts of cosmopolitanism as an abstract,
detached and disembodied perspective, actually existing cosmopolitanisms open
up a domain for political theory and action (Cheah and Robbins, 1998; Pollock
et al., 2000).
Attending to the historical, cultural, and material specificities of various
cosmopolitanisms sheds light on the way such cosmopolitan sensibilities are
framed through ethnicity, class, gender, race and sexuality. In addressing the way
cosmopolitanism is materially and physically constrained or enabled, empirical
accounts of cosmopolitanism retain the political currency of the concept of
cosmopolitanism without resorting to universal claims. Many examinations of
actually lived cosmopolitanisms reveal multiple ‘radical cosmopolitanisms from
below’ (Cheah, 1998b: 21) that contest the notion of cosmopolitanism as the
preserve of a white, middle-class and male mobile elite. As Clifford’s (1992, 1997)
notion of ‘discrepant cosmopolitanisms’, Aravamudan’s (1999) concept of the
‘tropicopolitan’, feminist and postcolonial models of anti-racist, transnational
solidarity (see Gilroy, 2000; Mohanty, 2003), and other elaborations of ‘opposi-
tional cosmopolitanisms’ (Schein, 1998) suggest, there are equally significant
subaltern versions of cosmopolitanism.
The round-the-world travellers described here have access to a rich store of
financial, physical, social and technological capital that allows them to be flexible
and adaptable, and to fit in across many different environments. This version of
cosmopolitanism seems a far cry from the radical, anti-racist, feminist and subal-
tern forms of discrepant cosmopolitanism mentioned earlier. It is, instead, an
expression of privilege. But, as Calhoun suggests:
The point is not simply privilege. It is that a sense of connection to the world as a whole, and
of being a competent actor on the scale of ‘global citizenship’ is not merely a matter of the
absence of more local ties. It has its own material and social conditions. Moreover, the cosmo-
politan elites are hardly culture free. (2003: 543–4)
In other words, even privileged or elite versions of cosmopolitanism must also

be specified, situated and differentiated within a particular matrix of materiality,
culture and politics. The danger is that elite versions of cosmopolitanism remain
so abstract that they slip into the status of the invisible norm against which other
forms of cosmopolitanism are described or opposed. As the examples presented
in this article remind us, even privileged forms of cosmopolitanism are embodied

01 067153 Molz (bc-t) 27/7/06 12:08 pm Page 19
in specific material ways. The empirical account offered here demonstrates how
privileged forms of cosmopolitan mobility are reproduced, not by appealing to an
abstract, universal application of cosmopolitanism, but by showing precisely how
a cosmopolitan orientation to the world is articulated through embodied practices.
Acknowledgements
The author wishes to thank Anne-Marie Fortier, Mimi Sheller and John Urry for reading earlier
versions of this article and the anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments. The final version of
this article was prepared with the support of funding by the Economic and Social Research Council.
Notes
1. The data presented in this article draw on a larger research project on round-the-world travel
and the internet. Round-the-world travel websites are classified as a subgenre of online travelogues.
The project surveyed over 200 round-the-world travel websites in general and analysed in detail a
sample of 40 websites and 15 interviews with web author/travellers. The 40 websites in the sample
represent 80 travellers, of whom 45 are male and 35 are female. They range in age from 7 to 60 at the
time of the trip, though most are in their early to mid-30s. With a few exceptions, most of the trav-
ellers are white, middle class, and are from the USA, Australia, Canada, Britain and Europe.
2. A ‘travel blog’ is a weblog that documents a traveller’s trip. Weblogs, or ‘blogs’ are web appli-
cations that contain entries in chronological order, usually with the most recent post first. They
function as online diaries or journals and usually contain a feature that allows readers to comment on
the entry, creating a kind of community of readers who respond not only to the blogger, but also to
each other. The websites I investigate here are similar to blogs in the sense that they publish ongoing
reports, often in reverse chronological order, based on the traveller’s experiences.
3. See Johnston (2001) and Puar (2002) on queer travellers, and Wolff (1995) on differentiated
access to mobility.
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Walzer, M. (1994) Thick and Thin: Moral Arguments at Home and Abroad. Notre Dame: University
of Notre Dame Press.
Wolff, J. (1995) Resident Alien. Cambridge: Polity.
WorldHop www.worldhop.com (consulted 15 July 2004).
Jennie Germann Molz is Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Centre for Mobilities Research,
Lancaster University. In addition to publishing articles on the topics of travel, consumption, tech-
nology and belonging in journals such as Citizenship Studies and Environment and Planning A, Jennie
has authored chapters in several edited collections, including Emotional Geographies (Ashgate, 2005),
Culinary Tourism (University of Kentucky Press, 2004) and Tourism Mobilities (Routledge, 2004).


Cosmopolitan Bodies Fit To Travel and TR

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Body & Society

Cosmopolitan Bodies: Fit to Travel and Travelling to Fit

The online version of this article can be found at:

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Citations (this article cites 24 articles hosted on the

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Cosmopolitan Bodies: Fit to Travel and

JENNIE GERMANN MOLZ

2 ■ Body & Society Vol. 12 No. 3

inevitable by globalization (Featherstone, 2002; Hannerz, 1990, 1996; Tomlinson,

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refers to as ‘actually existing cosmopolitanisms’. He argues that cosmopolitanism

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. . . entertain the possibility of a world in which everyone is a rooted cosmopolitan, attached

Thus actually existing cosmopolitanisms might also be understood through the

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global society consisting of multiple differently ordered societies. In her provoca-

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as prestige, flexibility or competence as it is about the practicalities of travel. In

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It is important to note that the nomadic detachment of world travellers is not

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(GoGlobalGirl). On Myrna’s and other women’s websites there are cautionary

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sexuality already places the traveller as a misfit. Just as access to mobility is

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embodied nature of cosmopolitan characteristics such as tolerance, flexibility and

In other words, even privileged or elite versions of cosmopolitanism must also

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MacIntyre, A. (1981) After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory. London: Duckworth.

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