Global Abode

Home and Mobility in Narratives of

Round-the-World Travel

Jennie Germann Molz

College of the Holy Cross

This article explores the way home is redefined within the context of new patterns of corporeal and
mediated travel by examining the complex intersection of mobility, home, and belonging from the
perspective of long-term world travelers. Through an examination of the stories these round-
the-world travelers tell online and in interviews, the article suggests that travelers imagine them-
selves as world citizens who are able to feel at home anywhere and everywhere. The article proposes
the notion of “global abode” to capture the interplay between mobility and home, as well as the
particularly cosmopolitan attitude these travelers express in terms of feeling at home in the world.
Contrary to descriptions of the cosmopolitan as a detached mobile subject, however, the findings
suggest that these travelers make themselves at home in the world through embodied, embedded,
and localized acts of habitability.

Keywords: home; mobility; cosmopolitanism; belonging; travel Websites; round-the-world travel;

Internet

Home is apparently one of the casualties of our mobile era. Physical migration and
international travel, virtual and mediated mobilities, and the global distribution of
capital and commodities threaten to undermine the geographical boundedness and
emotional groundedness that we tend to associate with home. Even the large majority of
people who remain relatively sedentary in this mobile world find themselves launched
into virtual motion when the Internet or satellite television reaches into their living
rooms (Morley, 2000; Tomlinson, 1999). The result, Bauman (1998) argues, is a breath-
less sense of mobility that defies our ability to feel at home:

space and culture vol. 11 no. 4, november 2008 325-342

DOI: 10.1177/1206331207308333
© 2008 Sage Publications
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Nowadays we are all on the move. Many of us change places—moving homes or travel-
ing to and from places which are not our homes. Some of us do not need to go out to
travel: we can dash or scurry or flit through the Web, netting and mixing on the computer
screen messages born in opposite corners of the globe. But most of us are on the move
even if physically, bodily, we stay put. When, as is our habit, we are glued to our chairs and
zap the cable or satellite channels on and off the TV screen—jumping in and out of for-
eign spaces with a speed much beyond the capacity of supersonic jets and cosmic rockets,
but nowhere staying long enough to be more than visitors, to feel chez soi. (p. 77)

The emblematic figures of a world where being at home has become impossible are
those of peripatetic homelessness; the exile, nomad, traveler, alien, or global soul best
reflect the postmodern inability to find one’s way home or to feel chez soi in a world of
unrelenting physical and virtual movement (Braidotti, 1994; Chambers, 1994; Deleuze
& Guattari, 1988; Iyer, 2000; Kristeva, 1986; Wolff, 1995; cf. Kaplan, 1996).
Yet, even in its impossibility, home continues to orient these discourses of mobility
and globalization as a kind of “uninterrogated anchor or alter ego of all this hyper-
mobility” (Morley, 2000, p. 2). Home is always an absent presence in narratives of
travel and mobility. Ethnographic studies and interviews with migrants and travelers
indicate that home remains materially and emotionally significant, even (perhaps espe-
cially) to people on the move (see Ahmed, 2000; Brah, 1996; Castles & Davidson, 2000;
Duval, 2004; Hage, 1997; Rapport & Dawson, 1998; White & White 2005). Many peo-
ple, whether they are physically on the move, find themselves living their daily lives at
the increasingly complicated intersection between home and mobility, negotiating
movement through a prism of attachment and affect while negotiating belonging
through various intersecting mobilities of people, technologies, cultures, images and
objects. In a world where home can no longer be assumed to be a static, fixed
location—if it ever was such a thing—dwelling is thought to “involve complex rela-
tionships between belongingness and traveling. . . . People can indeed be said to dwell
in various mobilities” (Urry, 2000, p. 157). The question, then, is not whether home
matters anymore amidst all this mobility, but rather how home matters. How can we
understand the ongoing significance of home in people’s material and emotional lives,
even as the concept of home is being destabilized and redefined by new patterns of
international travel, transnational migration, global media, and mobile communica-
tion technologies? What does it mean to dwell in flux and movement? And what are
the social and political implications of these new ways of thinking about, performing,
and making ourselves at home in a mobile world?
In this article I explore the complex intersection of mobility, home, and belonging
from the perspective of long-term world travelers, considering the specific ways trav-
elers reconfigure this relationship in the context of the constant movement of a round-
the-world journey.2 The research material I discuss here is drawn from the travel
journals travelers publish online while traveling and the stories they recount in inter-
views.3 Positioned at the intersection between technology and global mobility, online
travel narratives constitute a rich empirical site through which to examine the connec-
tions, discourses, technologies, and patterns of movement that constitute a particular
way of knowing and being in the world for these round-the-world travelers.4 The over-
lapping themes of world travel and electronic connectivity that emerge in these narra-
tives highlight particular concerns around home, belonging, technology, and mobility.
For example, examining travelers’ Websites and online journals, including
the way they use the Internet and e-mail to stay in touch with friends and family
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“back home,” further complicates questions about what constitutes home in this era of
hyperconnection (see, for example, White & White, 2005).
Drawing on Clifford’s (1997) metaphor of “dwelling-in-traveling,” I suggest that
travelers dwell-in-traveling by interweaving new forms of electronic connectivity with
embodied routines and emotional attachments to make themselves at home in mobil-
ity. Furthermore, I argue that travelers bring a cosmopolitan sensibility to their negoti-
ation between home and mobility, translating an ability to feel at home in mobility into
a sense of being at home in the world. Thus, home becomes a signifier not only for the
normative stability of a particular place or for the transportable sentiments of comfort,
security, familiarity, and control, but also for a way of being and belonging in the world
as a whole. My objective in describing the way travelers make themselves at home on the
move, then, is partly to offer an empirical account of a particular practice of dwelling-
in-traveling, but also to suggest that we think of this intersection between dwelling and
traveling as a cosmopolitical terrain. To this end, I propose the notion of global abode as
a metaphor for such a cosmopolitics of home-on-the-move.

The Cosmopolitics of Home and Mobility

Abode has two meanings: (1) sojourn: a temporary stay; and (2) home: the place
where one abides. In its dual meaning as both sojourn and home, abode allows us to
think of home as emplaced and stationary yet simultaneously in flux and temporary.
With the notion of global abode, I aim to contribute to theoretical attempts to under-
stand home as fluid, mobile, and plural as well as a site of attachment and grounding.
By referring to a global abode, I also intend to highlight the way an understanding of
home as fluid and plural underpins a particular cosmopolitan claim to feeling at home
in the world as a whole.
The metaphor of global abode is inspired by the growing body of theoretical work
that rejects the associations of mobility with rootlessness and of home with stasis, fix-
ity, and nostalgia, and aims instead to provide a more textured and nuanced account
of the way home is inflected by mobility and, at the same time, the way mobility is
inflected by gestures of attachment (Ahmed, Castañeda, Fortier, & Sheller, 2003; Brah,
1996; Cresswell, 2001; Gilroy, 1993; Hannam, Sheller, & Urry, 2006; Kaplan, 1996;
Massey, 1999; Szerszynski & Urry, 2002). Sara Ahmed (2000), for example, insists that
movement is always already implicated in the formation of homes themselves as “com-
plex and contingent spaces of inhabitance” (Ahmed 2000, p. 88). If we consider geog-
rapher Doreen Massey’s argument that places “are not so much bounded areas as open
and porous networks of social relations” (Massey, 1994, p. 121), we can think of home
as a mobile place, that is “implicated within complex networks by which ‘hosts, guests,
buildings, objects and machines’ are contingently brought together to produce certain
performances in certain places at certain times” (Hannam et al., 2006, p. 13). In per-
forming a sense of home, these networks and social relations often negotiate between
movement and rest and between detachment and attachment. Like Treadwell’s (2005)
metaphor of the motel as a site of movement and temporary arrest, abode allows us to
think of mobility and immobility as coconstituting features of home.
The notion of “global abode” also emphasizes a cosmopolitan dimension to this inter-
section between dwelling and traveling. If home is defined across several spatial registers,
such as the domestic space, neighborhood, or nation, as Morley (2000) suggests, round-
the-world travelers extend this geography of home to the globe itself, making a kind of
328 s p a c e a n d c u l t u r e / n o v e m b e r 2 0 0 8

cosmopolitan claim to the world as a home. In referring to the cosmopolitan sensibility

involved in making oneself at home in the world, I draw on notions of cosmopolitanism
as an aesthetic and affective orientation toward the world as a whole rather than on polit-
ical formulations of cosmopolitanism in terms of world democracy or global citizenship.
Ulf Hannerz (1990) describes the cosmopolitan as a cultural figure, a traveler who is
always searching for new experiences, who is open to difference, and who moves compe-
tently in and out of various cultural contexts. For Urry (1995), such travelers reflect an
“aesthetic cosmopolitanism,” delighting in cultural contrasts and fulfilling their (pre-
dominantly Western) desire for the novel by consuming foreign cultures and places.
In this sense, cosmopolitan claims to the world as home are imagined through a cultural
or aesthetic disposition toward difference—a sense of tolerance, flexibility, desire, and
openness toward a plurality of cultures.
In many ways, the round-the-world traveler is emblematic of this cosmopolitan
figure: mobile and detached, delighting in encounters with difference, and open to
experiencing other cultures, but always just passing through. Contrary to common
understandings of cosmopolitanism in terms of mobile detachment, however, global
abode refers instead to a kind of mobile attachment, highlighting the way travelers per-
form affective and physical attachments and acts of habitability through their everyday
practices while on the road. Thus, the cosmopolitan sensibility I describe here is not
just aesthetic, it is also affective, an example of “feeling global” by “feeling at home” (see
Robbins, 1998, 1999). For Robbins, feeling global is part of the political project he
refers to as cosmopolitics. In his description of cosmopolitics, Robbins suggests that
cosmopolitanism is not merely a “luxuriously free-floating view from above” but
rather it is embedded in “habits of thought and feeling that . . . are socially and geo-
graphically situated” (Robbins, 1998, pp. 1-2). “Instead of an ideal of detachment,” he
writes, “actually existing cosmopolitanism is a reality of (re)attachment, multiple
attachment, or attachments at a distance,” a “style of residence on the earth” that
involves “complex and multiple belonging” (Robbins, 1998, p. 3). Central to Robbins’
argument is the idea that cosmopolitanism is indelibly situated in what Paul Rabinow
describes as “the inescapabilities and particularities of places, characters, historical tra-
jectories, and fates” (cited in Robbins, 1998, p. 1). Part of the cosmopolitical project
that Robbins proposes, then, involves charting these specific geographies and histories,
along with the everyday thoughts, habits, and feelings that constitute “actually lived
cosmopolitanism.” In arguing that the global abode is a cosmopolitical terrain, there-
fore, my analysis of travelers’ narratives about home-on-the-move subscribes to
Robbins’ agenda in two ways: first, by providing a detailed empirical account of the
way round-the-world travelers “actually live” a cosmopolitan orientation toward the
world as home through multiple attachments as well as detachments; and second, by
paying close attention to the context and conditions under which these travelers are
able to make themselves at home in mobility and in the world. In this sense, I under-
stand cosmopolitics as a call to point out the varied conditions under which some peo-
ple’s mobilities and acts of habitability count as cosmopolitan, often at the expense of
others. As Bell and Hollows (2007) remind us, “one person’s cosmopolitanism depends
on the constitution of someone else as local” (p. 30). By shedding light on the very spe-
cific ways in which a fairly privileged group of round-the-world travelers inhabit the
world, I suggest that it is not only the “discrepant cosmopolitanisms” of the nonelite
that need to be specified. Just as important to the cosmopolitical project are the spe-
cific, material and embodied strategies that reproduce privileged access to mobility, the
aesthetic consumption of places, and a kind of flexible attachment to people and
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places. As we will see, not only is the mobility of some predicated on the immobility of
others, but so too is the ability to feel at home for some predicated on the incarcera-
tion or exclusion of others.
We can set out some of these conditions from the start, particularly by contrasting
the round-the-world travel experience with diasporic and migrant mobilities, as a
provocative counterpoint that highlights the political stakes of feeling at home in terms
of the privileged and voluntary nature of round-the-world travel.5 In this study, round-
the-world travel refers to the practice of taking time off from study or work to travel
around the world, usually for a period of several months or years. Though some
round-the-world travelers may take up odd jobs while traveling, they are primarily
leisure travelers, usually backpackers or budget independent travelers. This means that
the displacement that round-the-world travelers experience is temporary and volun-
tary. Most round-the-world travelers have a definitive date, and usually an airline
ticket, for returning home. Unlike diasporic subjects who desire to return to an imag-
ined homeland (cf. Brah, 1996), travelers do not just wish to go home; for the most
part they know that they will return home at the end of their journey. As well, the vol-
untary nature of round-the-world travel places these travelers in a position of privilege
and control regarding their own standards and itineraries of mobility. Unlike many
migrants and refugees who are displaced under conditions of political, religious, or
economic oppression, travelers become “homeless” voluntarily. Thus, their efforts at
feeling at home may not be fraught with the same sense of urgency or constrained by
the same obstacles as other mobile groups.6 Finally, and perhaps most significantly,
round-the-world travelers do not necessarily express a desire to settle in the places they
visit. In other words, unlike a migrant “homing desire” that seeks to put down roots
and carve out spaces of belonging in a new home country (Brah, 1996), travelers enact
a kind of mobile attachment that allows them to feel at home in many places. For
round-the-world travelers, finding home in mobility is not about “home-making” or
“place-building” elsewhere (Castles & Davidson, 2000, p. 131), but rather about engag-
ing such strategies to feel at home anywhere and everywhere.
As with migrant groups, however, travelers’ efforts at feeling at home anywhere con-
tinue to revolve around some of the fundamental attributes of home identified by Castles
and Davidson (2000): familiarity, security, and community, as well as continuity and
control. Behind such connotations, we can detect associations of home with stasis. That
is, something generally becomes familiar, secure, and continuous by staying still or by not
changing. However, travelers challenge this association by mobilizing these attributes of
familiarity, security, comfort, and continuity, transporting and enacting them through
various embodied practices, rituals, and material objects while on the road.

Performing Home Online and on the Road

In the “home stories” that travelers recount online and in interviews, home is evoked
as both a material and metaphorical construct in multiple and occasionally contradic-
tory ways, as travelers leave, desire, perform, and return to home(s). The classic travel
narrative is generally light on the theme of home, focusing instead on vivid descriptions
of the foreign, of encounters with otherness, and of coping with the pains and pleasures
of displacement. Home is relegated to the margins as a kind of metaphorical bracket
around the trip, with the “stifling home” figuring as “the place from which the voyage
begins and to which, in the end, it returns,” as Meaghan Morris puts it (cited in Morley,
330 s p a c e a n d c u l t u r e / n o v e m b e r 2 0 0 8

2000, p. 68). In other words, home is the point of departure and return, but rarely the
point of the story. True to form, many of the narratives travelers publish online do fix
home “back home” in this way. However, in many of the stories that travelers publish
on their Websites, home refers not just to a place left behind, but also to the collection
of portable practices, objects, rituals, and emotions that make “feeling at home” a trans-
portable form of attachment and belonging. In other words, home is not just a place,
but also a process of regular patterns and social connections that may be performed and
reiterated even while traveling (Douglas, 1993; Miller, 2001). Rather than becoming
impossible in the midst of movement, home continues to matter as a physical and emo-
tional site of belonging to the extent that travel “becomes an escape for home, not just
from home” (Crouch, 1994, p. 96, italics added). Thus, in the interstices of the classic
dialectic between home (established through narratives of leaving and returning to a
relatively stable home) and away (described in terms of the disorientation and discom-
fort of traveling abroad), we find narratives that reconfigure mobility as home. Home
features much more broadly in these round-the-world narratives as travelers tell stories
about making themselves at home on the road, laying claim to virtual spaces and mobile
vehicles as homes-away-from-home, and engaging embodied rituals and familiar
objects as strategies for dwelling in mobility.

A HOME PAGE AWAY FROM HOME

The diffusion of the Internet into people’s everyday lives has complicated the social
significance of home across a series of registers (Star, 2000), including the case of global
travel. Even the most remote places, such as the villages leading up to Mt. Everest, and
certainly highly touristed areas, such as Koh San Road in Bangkok, are equipped with
Internet cafés, as are travel and transit spaces such as airports and hotels that often offer
wired or wireless Internet connection. This is not to say that the availability, quality, or
reliability of Internet access around the globe is universal by any means, but the increas-
ing availability of Internet access means that travelers can—and are often expected to—
stay in touch with friends and family “back home” to an unprecedented extent while
traveling.
Travelers often see their Website as an online home that provides them with a sta-
ble address where they can always be contacted—so they are never lost, even when they
are off the beaten track—and where they can stay in regular touch with friends and
family (see White & White, 2005). We might even think of the Web as a new—and far
more immediate and interactive—poste restante, a network of places where missives
from home manage to find the traveler wherever he or she is in the world. But with this
newfound site of familial and familiar interaction across space, travelers also find that
they must negotiate certain anxieties about staying in constant touch with home while
traveling. Having an online presence and being beholden to a distant and dispersed
audience of friends and family can be both comforting and oppressive. For some trav-
elers, this level of connection and familiarity makes it difficult to actually leave home
behind to achieve a sense of critical distance or personal growth. In reference to the
tendency of young British holiday workers in Australia to stay in constant touch with
home via the Internet and mobile phones, Clarke (2004) cites an article in The Sydney
Morning Herald that asks, “How can you find the real you when you’re talking to your
parents as much as you did at home?” Although this kind of question refixes home as
that which must be left behind, it also points to the way the Internet can be used as
a tool for mobilizing home and creating more fluid and flexible homey spaces and
connections.
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For Sarah and Gerard, two travelers from the U.S., the Internet played an important
role as a “homing” site during their trip. Before leaving, they quit their jobs, sold their
home, and their pet died. In the following interview extract, Sarah and Gerard describe
how they used the Internet to feel connected and grounded once all of these points of
reference were gone.

Sarah: Well, once I quit my job . . . and then the dog died too . . . we had sort of cut all bonds.
And the only obligation we had anymore was the Web site. And the only contact was
through e-mail, pretty much. And, so that gave us a sense of continuity.
Gerard: Yeah, I think it’s continuity and connectedness that the Internet or our computer was
strictly a plug to, not only our family and friends, but to the rest of the world. It really con-
nected us, in ways that, in previous efforts at traveling, in ways that I had never seen so
completely. . .
Sarah: And I think not having anything to go back to, no jobs, no home, no cat, no dog, no
car even, um that that was incredibly freeing. It was kind of like being a kite and the
Internet was the string. It kept us connected, but we cut ourselves free enough to float.
(personal communication, March 7, 2003; Sarah and Gerard are pseudonyms)

For Sarah and Gerard, the continuity and connectedness implied by their use of the
Internet provides them with a sense of hominess amidst their otherwise homeless sta-
tus as world travelers. They are not necessarily expressing a “homing desire” in the
sense of wanting to settle in a new place; on the contrary, they revel in their freedom.
Yet their comments also reflect an enduring longing for the homey traits of connection
and continuity.
As Gerard states, this connectedness is envisioned not just in terms of staying in
touch with friends and family back home, but with the rest of the world. Web site titles
such as 2GoGlobal (2004) and Wired2theWorld (2004) suggest that travelers see their
home pages, along with their global mobility, as connecting them to the world as a
whole. A sense of belonging in this global context is derived through “homesteading” in
cyberspace (see Rheingold, 1994). Whereas round-the-world travelers move through
many destinations during the course of their trip, their Web site address remains a fixed
point. Insofar as the Web constitutes a kind of virtual home, travelers can feel at home
anywhere as long as they can get online. In contrast to common evocations of the
Internet as a metaphor for flux and mobility in a global world, the home page becomes
relatively immobile vis-à-vis the travelers’ corporeal mobility. Here, we see how home is
evoked through the interplay between movement and stasis: the website’s immobility, a
place where the traveler can be located and contacted, becomes a condition of the trav-
eler’s mobile connectivity.
As powerful as such connectivity may be, the metaphorical sense of home that these
connections produce must be understood against the materiality of home. Star (2000)
explores in detail the uneasy relationship between a physical home and a home online.
As with a physical home, she argues that the ability to feel at home on the Internet is
predicated on certain resources. In the case of the physical home, Star notes that these
resources include, among other things, an ordered supply of food and clothes and the
ability to eat, sleep, and go to the bathroom without risk of arrest, resources that are lack-
ing in many cases of forced homelessness. Star goes on to argue that the ability to make
a home online also relies on certain resources, not least of all the money to buy a com-
puter, or the use of a computer, and network service, access to experts to answer ques-
tions and maintain the system, the ability to read and write, free time to spend online and
a similarly electronically connected social network with whom to communicate. The
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ability to be at home online is conditioned by access to certain material resources,

resources that round-the-world travelers have in ample supply—portable laptops,
money to rent accommodation with a phone line or to buy access time at Internet cafés,
and a similarly privileged social network of linked-up friends and family with whom
they can communicate online. As Star’s lists remind us, despite the increasing prevalence
of Internet access across the world, the ability to be homed in cyberspace derives from a
certain amount of privilege, a point to which I will return repeatedly as I describe the way
travelers make themselves at home in the global abode.

MOBILE HOMES

Home pages are figurative homes, but travelers also make themselves at home in
mobility in a more literal sense by feeling at home in various vehicles. Campers and
mobile homes in particular serve as apt examples of abodes that both home and move
travelers. Travelers also tend to make themselves at home on trains and ships, especially
during long-haul trips. Scott and Carlos, two travelers from California, describe the
way they make themselves at home in their train cabin during the week-long journey
aboard the Trans-Mongolian railway:

Right out of Better Homes and Gardens we arranged our prison cell, we mean compart-
ment, into distinct areas, sleeping quarter, living room, pantry, entertainment area, and
cleaning supplies. We are ready to go. (WatchUsWander, 2005)

Scott and Carlos make themselves at home by marking out the space of their train
compartment into homey areas for sleeping, living, and entertaining. Their compart-
ment becomes a moving apartment, slowly making its way toward China. In a similar
way, Marie, a traveler from New York, comes to regard the ship she travels aboard from
California to New Zealand as “home.” After a brief shore leave at the ship’s first port-
of-call in New Zealand, Marie writes:

I was happy to be back on board. The “Direct Kiwi” was starting to feel like home, and I
told the Second Engineer this. “Mare-ee,” said Oleg as if I were the silly rabbit in a Trix
cereal commercial, “ship is not home. Ship is prison.” (Marie’s World Tour, 2005)

In Marie’s case, it is the familiarity after three weeks aboard the Direct Kiwi, and the
fact that she will soon leave the comfort and safety of the ship to travel alone overland,
that makes the ship feel like home.
There is another theme that troubles our sense of home in both these extracts: the
notion of home as prison. Scott and Carlos refer ironically to their train compartment
as their “prison cell,” and Oleg, the Russian engineer on the Direct Kiwi, reminds Marie
that the ship is not a home but a prison for him. By drawing the line between freedom
and confinement in places of mobile dwelling, these travelers disrupt the dichotomous
equation of home with confinement and mobility with freedom. In other words, even
while traveling, freedoms are curtailed and contained. Again, home is evoked in
between movement and stasis, with the fine edge between home and prison tenuously
held in place by the conditions under which these travelers move. Oleg’s remark serves
as an important reminder of the structures of power and privilege that allow some peo-
ple to make themselves at home in mobility, whereas others may find themselves
imprisoned in it. Travelers like Marie, Scott, and Carlos have the financial, cultural, and
physical capital to make themselves at home on the road. For others, such as Oleg,
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whose Russian passport limits his movement on land, the global mobility of the ship is
more confining than it is liberating.7 As we see from the complex way home and prison
are evoked along with mobile dwellingness, the ability to make home in mobility
requires certain resources and skills.

HOMEY OBJECTS AND THE EMBODIMENT OF HOME

To a large extent, the resources and skills that travelers need to feel at home while
on the road are embodied, either in the travelers themselves or in the rituals and famil-
iar objects they carry with them. Berger (1984) argues that home is best understood
not as a stable physical entity, but rather as something that can be taken anywhere in
the form of embodied gestures, routine practices, social habits, and small daily rituals.
If home is embedded in the traveler’s bodily enactments, then it can be moved along
with the traveler’s body. Even when a traveler leaves home, home does not leave the
traveler. On a daily basis, we may not even be consciously aware of the various ways we
embody and carry home with us—for example, in our gestures, postures, and daily
routines such as brushing our teeth. Traveling across different environments and cul-
tures, however, can bring such embodied assumptions into stark relief (see de Botton,
2002). As travelers are constantly called on to physically perform the unaccustomed—
to eat strange foods, mouth foreign words, or use unfamiliar toilets—they become cog-
nizant of the way certain rituals make them feel more at home.
For George and Salli, a couple from Alaska who traveled around the world with
their two young daughters, homey rituals become an important way of coping with
homesickness and travel fatigue. Salli writes:

To maintain our sanity during this year long “walkabout” we’ve made it a point to do a few
of the same things in each country we’ve visited. These have included having one meal in a
McDonalds, checking out local television, and going to at least one movie. (WorldHop, 2004)

By engaging in some of the same routines they might do at home, this traveling
family creates a sense of continuity in the context of displacement and estrangement.
Coping with homesickness in this way is neither a literal return to home, nor a figura-
tive building of a “new” home, but rather an appeal to repetition and continuity as a
way of achieving the feelings of competence or predictability associated with home. If
home is evoked through feelings of familiarity, then performing the same rituals, albeit
in different places, allows this family to feel at home while on the road.
For some travelers, this sense of hominess constitutes a kind of “comfort zone,” as
Myrna, a traveler from Kansas, describes in her advice to other travelers:

Even if you are only in a place for a few days, find a little local spot to have your morning
coffee or evening glass of wine. It is great to have a “comfort zone” while you’re away, and
you will be surprised how quickly you become a “regular.” (GoGlobalGirl, 2002)

The consistency of routines—whether practiced over a few brief days or through-

out the trip—are strategies of familiarity and comfort that help travelers feel at home,
not just in mobility, but wherever they are.
Rituals are also materialized in mobile objects that generate a sense of home. Much
of the literature on the material culture of travel and tourism focuses on souvenirs
(Graburn, 1976; MacCannell, 1976; Stewart, 1993; Hitchcock & Teague, 2000). Such
objects are certainly significant for considering the way travelers transform their homes
334 s p a c e a n d c u l t u r e / n o v e m b e r 2 0 0 8

with representations of their own worldly mobility—a kind of traveling-in-dwelling.

However, in addition to souvenirs as objects of travel that dwell, we might also consider
the material objects of dwelling that travel (see Lury, 1997). In other words, how do the
objects travelers carry with them enable them to create homey spaces and sentiments
abroad? Objects and possessions can be material symbols of home whether one travels
or not, but for round-the-world travelers, certain objects can act specifically as signifiers
of familiarity and continuity through which homely feelings are evoked. For example,
Marie takes instant oatmeal, a stainless steel mug and her own coffee and coffee-
making equipment everywhere she goes,even on safari in Africa, so that she can per-
form her daily morning ritual of eating breakfast. For her, starting her day in this famil-
iar, ritualistic manner is a strategy for coping with the unpredictability of life on the road.
By embodying particular rituals, establishing small routines and carrying certain
familiar items with them, travelers are able to quickly make themselves at home in a
variety of environments. Cities, towns, villages, hotels, and guesthouses soon become
the traveler’s “homes away from home.” As one traveler comments, “We always say our
home is where our hotel is” (personal communication, July 30, 2001). Hotels, motels,
youth hostels, guesthouses, campsites—these homes away from home embody the
“mobility and temporary arrest” that Treadwell (2005, p. 214) associates with the motel,
an emblem that both disrupts “constructions of home seen as a linear progress” and yet
repeats a kind of homing in place. As Treadwell notes, the motel is “multiple and reoc-
curring . . . a repetitious home that travels, demanding only a fleeting allegiance: it is a
space where the fixed and mobile converge” (p. 216). Though for Treadwell, the motel
is often conjured up as a worn and weary site of violence, deviance, and repressive con-
tainment, she also identifies its promise, suggesting that motels “might also be seen
more positively as an imagining of everyday life without routine, without closure”
(p. 215). Contrary to Treadwell’s reading of the motel as emblematic of a kind of
domesticity without routines, however, the backpacker guesthouse often reinscribes
domesticity into the round-the-world journey precisely through mundane routines of
home and housekeeping. For example, in many guesthouses and youth hostels, travel-
ers are required to help with the chores of cooking and cleaning as part of the price for
their room and board. And unlike the motel, which Treadwell describes as lacking in
spaces for communal interaction, youth hostels and guesthouses are frequently organ-
ized around shared spaces—communal kitchens, bathrooms, television lounges, and
laundry rooms where travelers often hang out and reenact domestic activities together.
In this regard, there is a kind of formulaic structure to the spaces and daily routines in
many of the hostels on the backpacker circuit across the world that makes even these
temporary accommodations seem familiar and home-like.
The backpack itself is also a significant symbol of home for travelers. Many travelers
refer to “living out of ” their backpacks as if they are portable homes. Marc and Karin,
two travelers from Florida, indicate on their Web site that they carry their “homes” with
them everywhere they go: “We are like homeless turtles—all we own is on our backs!”
(Round-the-WorldTravelGuide, 2002). As this image of a “homeless turtle” suggests,
however, the backpack also symbolizes homelessness. The material object of the suit-
case, like the backpack in these examples, has been widely associated with nomadism
and displacement (see Ankori, 2003). Morley (2000) suggests that for migrants, the suit-
case functions as “a synecdoche for the unreachable lost home” (p. 44), an emblem that
doubly inscribes home, as Irit Rogoff explains, with both “concrete material belongings
and of travel and movement away from the materialised anchorings of those belongings”
(cited in Morley, 2000, p. 45). Morley also quotes Edward Said who, in an interview,
confessed to a “tendency to overpack for any journey, because he is always plagued by a
 N a r r a t i v e s o f R o u n d - t h e - W o r l d T r a v e l 335

‘panic about not coming back’” (p. 45). The suitcase is thus “a distinctive characteriza-
tion of the contemporary nomad, a figure who carries all his belongings with him, per-
haps as a result of his non-belonging to a fixed environment” (Shapira, 1991, cited in
Ankori, 2003, p. 85). Yet, in the case of round-the-world travelers, the backpack is not a
signifier of nonbelonging, but of the ability to belong anywhere. Unlike the migrant
who, in these descriptions, lives under the constant shadow of the “unstable potential
for further movement” (Morley, 2000, p. 45), the traveler revels in the ever-onward
movement that the portable backpack makes possible. The round-the-world traveler’s
backpack is a talisman of “aesthetic cosmopolitanism” (Urry, 1995), standing for flexi-
bility, curiosity, and readiness, as opposed to the migrant’s suitcase, which can stand for
panic, unease, and dislocation.
In a similar performance of aesthetic cosmopolitanism, travelers also come to regard
many of their destinations as “home.” Such feelings of being at home are usually forged
remarkably quickly, in a matter of days or weeks. Travelers note a common tendency
among long-haul travelers and backpackers to forge brief but intimate friendships with
other travelers. A similar thing happens with places. Travelers attach quickly and ardently
to places, establishing a homey routine in a matter of days, becoming a “regular” with
only a few appearances, and then inevitably leaving with pangs of nostalgia to move on
to the next place where they will make themselves at home and then leave again. Whether
we read this as travelers making themselves at home in mobility, or at home in haste, it
is evident that travelers are practicing a kind of mobile attachment through the familiar-
ity and continuity of travel itself.
Scott, a traveler from California who circumnavigated the globe with his friend
Carlos, tells a story that indicates how he came to think of traveling as his home. In the
middle of his trip around the world, Scott left Carlos in Greece and returned to the
United States to attend a friend’s wedding.8 As the following extract from his Web site
describes, Scott left Greece, flew to New York for the wedding, and then returned to
Santorini:

I started off the long trek back to Greece with a cab ride through New York to JFK. Then
3 flights and bam, back in Greece. I am pretty sure at this point you could say I was suf-
fering from Jet lag. Who knows what time it was or when I was supposed to sleep. Oh well,
at least I was back home on the road. (WatchUsWander, 2005)

Here, Scott expresses the sense of feeling at “home on the road.” Even after going
“home” to the United States to be with his friends, he considers his current home to be
not in the United States, or even in Greece where he picks up his journey, but rather on
the road—in the very act of traveling. Travelers’ efforts at turning the Internet and vehi-
cles of transportation into homey spaces and carrying home with them in the form of
rituals and objects reflect Rapport and Dawson’s (1998) observation that “not only can
one be at home in movement, but that movement can be one’s very home” (p. 27).

Global Abode: At Home in Mobility, at Home in the World

So far, I have focused on the details of how round-the-world travelers perform a

sense of home through various forms of electronic, embodied, and emotional connec-
tions to people and places. I have also sought to intersperse this discussion with a cri-
tique of the specific conditions under which these round-the-world travelers are able to
make themselves at home in mobility, mindful to chart out what Clifford (1997) refers
336 s p a c e a n d c u l t u r e / n o v e m b e r 2 0 0 8

to as “the political stakes in claiming (or sometimes being relegated to) a ‘home’”
(p. 36). What my analyses have uncovered is that these travelers are in the privileged posi-
tion of being able to make themselves at home in multiple virtual and mobile places and
that they are able to remain flexible in their attachments to people, places, and routines
without feeling suffocated or imprisoned by these attachments. My question now is, how
does feeling at home in mobility allow travelers to imagine the whole world as a home?
In this section, I examine the way these embodied and localized strategies of feeling at
home in movement translate into a broader claim of feeling chez soi in the world.
There is an interesting tendency among round-the-world travelers to make them-
selves at home in the world by acting as hosts rather than guests while on the road. As
if to underscore the sense that “on the road” is indeed the traveler’s very home, many of
the round-the-world travelers in this study “hosted” visitors during their travels. For
example, Scott and Carlos, the two travelers from California who published the Web site
Watch Us Wander, encouraged their friends and family members to literally wander
with them. They posted an open invitation on their Web site for anyone to join them
for various legs of their round-the-world itinerary and they hosted nearly 20 visitors in
various destinations along their route. Many travelers posted similar invitations on their
Web sites and then “received guests” throughout their trip. In these cases, travelers shift
the space of hospitality from home-as-place to home-as-mobility. This form of mobile
hospitality can be read as a kind of role reversal where the traveler becomes the host
rather than the guest, but even the most generous acts of hospitality express sovereignty
and mastery over the home (Germann Molz & Gibson, 2007). To act as host is a way of
claiming a space as already one’s home. As Derrida (2000) observes, the act of opening
up or offering hospitality inevitably reaffirms: “this is mine, I am at home, you are wel-
come in my home” (p. 14). Thus, the welcoming gesture of hosting, also, if unwittingly,
recalls the violent histories of colonial relations that turned “guests” into “hosts” and
natives into guests (Ahmed, 2000, p. 190, note 3). Indeed, these travelers’ claim to
mobility-as-home and to the world-as-home is heavily inflected with colonial overtones
of access, entitlement, and appropriation of places and cultures.
In a related way, travelers express this entitlement to feel at home in the world by
making themselves comfortable in a series of local places and through localized habits.
The way travelers imagine and perform home in mobility is, as I have suggested, less
about settling or building home in a new place than it is about finding ways of feeling
at home wherever they are. As one traveler notes, “travelers get good at making each
new place feel like home” (GoGlobalGirl, 2002). In contrast, the preceding examples
from travelers’ Web sites illustrate the desire to feel at home anywhere. This desire does
not emphasize returning to a fixed and circumscribed space of home—although the
senses of familiarity, comfort, or continuity through which they evoke home may rely
on a broader idea of home as static—but rather expands the possibilities for the kinds
of places and practices that can count as home. Home is not just a place, but a feeling,
and a transportable one at that.
Global abode thus captures not only the interplay between mobility, home, and
feeling at home in travelers’ stories, but also the particularly cosmopolitan attitude
these travelers express in terms of feeling at home in the world. By making themselves
at home on the road, travelers imagine themselves as world citizens who, by virtue of
not being attached to any place in particular, are able to belong anywhere and every-
where. On returning home to Poland after five years hitchhiking around the world,
Kinga writes on her website:
 N a r r a t i v e s o f R o u n d - t h e - W o r l d T r a v e l 337

So how is it to be back home after five years away? Many people were predicting we’d have
trouble fitting in, settling down. But—have we ever had trouble fitting in? We felt at home
in so many places, countries and cultures of the planet, that we became quite good at it :-)
(Hitch-hikeTheWorld, 2005)

The ability to fit in and feel at home that travelers carry internally or in their back-
packs expands the possible locales of home—anywhere the traveler can go is a place
the traveler can call home.
If conventional definitions conceive of home as an individual’s fixed place in the
world, then notions of home as transportable serve as affective—and in some cases
even proprietary—points of orientation through which the mobile subject can forge
belonging on global grounds. For round-the-world travelers, the ability to feel at home
in the world constitutes a form of cosmopolitan capital (see Hage, 1997). It reproduces
a certain kind of White, middle class, heterosexual social privilege, inflected with a
colonial sense of appropriation toward the world as a whole, and derived from volun-
tary displacement, the ability to be mobile and to cross borders, and the ability to “fit
in” by adapting bodily to different places and environments. Leaving home does not
necessarily make one “rootless,” but instead opens up for the traveler new territories
and practices in which to feel at home. Home continues to matter, orienting the trav-
elers’ movements through the world in terms of both movement and (re)attachment
(see Fortier, 2000). As in the metaphor of the kite and string cited earlier, travelers are
able to float and yet stay connected.

Conclusion

As Clifford (1997) suggests, analysis of the tensions between dwelling and traveling
must account for “specific histories, tactics and everyday practices of dwelling and trav-
eling” (p. 24). Thus my analysis has sought to uncover the “little tactics of the habitat”
(Foucault, 1980, p. 149)—those small acts, embodied practices, and familiar routines
that travelers use to make themselves at home online, on the road, and in the world as
a whole. The notion of global abode refers to a cosmopolitan sensibility that envisions
the world as habitable precisely through mobility. However, contrary to vague descrip-
tions of the cosmopolitan as a nomadic, mobile, detached subject, the way these round-
the-world travelers make themselves at home in the world is very much embodied and
embedded in everyday practices while on the road. Travelers enact home at this global
register precisely through small, localized acts of habitability such as Myrna’s practice of
stopping in at the same restaurant for a glass of wine, George and Salli’s routine of going
to McDonald’s or going to see a movie, Marie’s habit of carrying a special mug and eat-
ing oatmeal every morning, and so on. For round-the-world travelers, these practices
make the world a fairly easily habitable place.
This is not to suggest, however, that a more mobile or fluid notion of home is auto-
matically progressive or liberating (Clifford, 1998). Even progressive moves toward
mobilizing home or mobilizing ourselves beyond the home often rely on recursive moves
that fix some people or some power structures in place (see Bell & Hollows, 2007). For
example, we have seen how some of the discursive strategies travelers use to feel at home
in the world reproduce colonial attitudes of entitlement toward being in the world. Not
all mobilities are cosmopolitan, nor is cosmopolitanism necessarily mobile. What I have
highlighted, instead, is a more nuanced and material relationship between mobility and
cosmopolitanism as it is negotiated through notions of home. Feeling at home in the
338 s p a c e a n d c u l t u r e / n o v e m b e r 2 0 0 8

world does not come naturally or even easily to all mobile subjects. For example, thanks
to the global proliferation of Western consumer goods (including McDonald’s and
Hollywood movies), it is far easier for most first world travelers to find intimations of
home abroad. Furthermore, these travelers view mobility as a right and freedom rather
than as an enforced chore, a source of panic, or a form of incarceration.
As the notion of global abode suggests, travelers’ ability to be at home in mobility
allows them to be at home in the world, but under very specific conditions that invoke
and reproduce a privileged cosmopolitan appropriation of the world. Just as people
move around the world under vastly different conditions, so too do they enact home
and hominess in different ways. Several critics have suggested that metaphors of travel,
exile, and displacement refer to movement as a universal human condition and thus
tend to overlook the lived realities that give rise to such metaphors in the first place
(Bauman, 1998; Kaplan, 1996; Pels, 1999). In contrast, these critics call for a more spe-
cific accounting of the different historical processes, conditions, and subjectivities
involved in travel. As Brah (1992) suggests, “The question is not simply about who trav-
els, but when, how, and under what circumstances?” (p. 182).
I propose that we think of the global abode as what James Clifford (1998, p. 369) calls
a “cosmopolitical contact zone”—a way of being at home in the world that is already
“traversed by new social movements and global corporations, tribal activists and cul-
tural tourists, migrant worker remittances and e-mail” (p. 369). But in addition to iden-
tifying the specific conditions of mobility within the global abode, we must also account
for the specific social, material, and historical conditions under which some people are
able to feel at home in this mobility, whereas others remain displaced, excluded, or
imprisoned in it. If modes and conditions of movement must be specified and histori-
cally differentiated, so too must conditions of home and homelessness. For example, we
can paraphrase Brah’s (1992) question above and ask: Who gets to make home while
they travel, and under what circumstances? Puar suggests that just as mobility is differ-
ent for different bodies, so too is the expense of making home:

What becomes clear is that a fixed notion of home = warmth, security, intimacy, and
Truth is closely tied to identity . . . This home is expensive and relies on a pursuit of safe
places, as if there were one safe place. It is worth reiterating that for many of us, there are
no safe places, only safer ones. (Puar, 1994, p. 85)

As Puar notes, not all mobile subjects have access to home; not everyone can assume
home. The ability to feel at home requires a certain set of skills and resources that are not
necessarily available to everyone in the same ways. Along with their backpacks, for exam-
ple, White travelers carry their White privilege, as Peggy McIntosh (1992) describes it,
“like an invisible weightless knapsack of special provisions, assurances, tools, maps,
guides, codebooks, passports, visas, clothes, compass, emergency gear, and blank checks”
(p. 71). The tools and resources McIntosh mentions aid wealthy White travelers not only
in being mobile, but also in their ability to feel at home in that mobility, or indeed any-
where in the world. Other markers of privilege, such as being male, able-bodied, or het-
erosexual, or being from a first-world nation or traveling for fun rather than desperation,
carry similarly weightless, invisible resources that help certain travelers to feel at home
on the road and in the world.
The capacity to feel at home in movement reiterates the fact that, as Ahmed (2000,p. 83)
suggests, “the world is already constituted as . . . home” for these voluntary travelers. By
making themselves at home in mobility, by being present online and connecting elec-
tronically to a dispersed social network, by embodying and practicing familiar
 N a r r a t i v e s o f R o u n d - t h e - W o r l d T r a v e l 339

rituals wherever they are, and by carrying objects that invoke intimations of home
around the world, travelers make the world a habitable place on a daily basis and in a
variety of places. For them, the world is a global abode, a place of belonging constituted
by privileged access to both mobility and stability. By making themselves chez soi in this
global abode, travelers enact a form of mutual belonging in which they belong to the
world and the world belongs to them. Thus, rather than becoming an impossibility in
the midst of mobility, home is, for these privileged travelers, reconfigured precisely as the
nexus between belonging and mobility.

Notes

1. This article was prepared with support from an ESRC-funded postdoctoral research fel-
lowship held at the Centre for Mobilities Research at Lancaster University. The author wishes to
express her thanks to Anne-Marie Fortier, Jonas Larsen, Mimi Sheller, and John Urry, as well as
the three anonymous reviewers, for their insightful comments on earlier drafts of this article. A
version of this article was also presented at the “End of Tourism?” conference at the University
of Brighton at Eastbourne in June 2005 and the author is grateful to the conference organizers
and session participants for their engaging questions and suggestions.
2. This article draws on a larger research project on round-the-world travel and the Internet.
Round-the-world travelers identify themselves as such and travel with the intention of circum-
navigating the globe, usually over the span of a few months or even years. It is also worth point-
ing out that research respondents refer to themselves as travelers; hence, I use the term traveler
rather than tourist throughout this article. Though I do not have the space to fully develop the
argument here, this symbolic distinction between travelers and tourists is not unrelated to ques-
tions of home and travel. For example, Daniel Boorstin (1961) argues that tourists are distin-
guished from travelers by their desire to remain in their “tourist bubble” with all the comforts of
home. In a similar vein, Hannerz (1990, p. 241) sorts travelers into “cosmopolitans” and “locals”
by assessing their willingness to orient away from home and toward the unpredictability of a for-
eign culture. Those who travel “for the purpose of ‘home plus’—Spain is home plus sunshine,
India is home plus servants.” are not cosmopolitans according to Hannerz’s criteria.
3. The research material I examine in this section consists of travel stories gathered from
round-the-world travel Web sites and from interviews with authors of these sites from 2001 to
2003. The project surveyed more than 200 of these personal travel Web sites and analyzed in
detail a sample of 40 Web sites and interviews with 19 Web author/travelers. In addition to ana-
lyzing the journal entries in the Web site, I systematically followed 10 of these websites as they
were being published, interacting with and interviewing the author/travelers while they were on
the road. The 40 Web sites in the sample represent 80 travelers, comprising 45 male and 35
female travelers. 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 travelers are White, middle class, and are
from the United States, Australia, Canada, Britain, and Europe.
4. Precursors to the increasingly popular travel blog, the Web sites examined here are prima-
rily personal home pages where independent travelers chronicle the ongoing events of their
trips. At the heart of these Web sites are regularly updated journal entries and photographs
detailing the travelers’ experiences on the road. For many of these travelers, maintaining and
publishing a Web site was an integral part of their travel experience.
5. The distinctions I identify between travelers and immigrants are blurred by the fact that
several of the travelers in this study are second- or third-generation immigrants or members of
diaspora groups such as Overseas Chinese. In some instances, these travelers coordinate their
itineraries to include visits to a “homeland” where they reunite with relatives or look up the
houses or villages where their ancestors lived. Generally speaking, however, there are qualitative
differences between diasporic dispersal or migration and leisure travel.
340 s p a c e a n d c u l t u r e / n o v e m b e r 2 0 0 8

6. Bauman (1998) uses the figures of the “Tourist” and the “Vagabond” to highlight the dis-
tinction between different experiences of mobility and of homelessness. “Tourists” are voluntary
travelers whose privileged social status guarantees free mobility across borders. “Vagabonds,” in
contrast, are forced to move; they are not allowed to “stay put” (p. 92).
7. Minh-ha (1994) also reminds us that for other travelers, still, such as refugees and immi-
grants, the distinction between home and prison is tenuous. “Home, as it is repeatedly reminded,
is not a jail. It is a place where one is compelled to find stability and happiness. One is made to
understand that if one has been temporarily kept within specific boundaries, it is mainly for
one’s own good” (p. 13).
8. Going “home” for weddings was a surprisingly common practice among the round-
the-world travelers I studied. In addition, one of the traveling couples in the study got married
while on the road. To some extent, the recurrence of weddings in the travel narratives may be
coincidental given the age group of the travelers. Travelers’ ability to fly home for a few days also
speaks to the increasing ease and decreasing cost of jet travel. But in light of the theme of this arti-
cle, the emphasis on weddings may also be suggestive of a kind of normative home-making and
the reproduction of familial domesticity in spite of, or within the context of, travel and mobility.

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Jennie Germann Molz is an assistant professor in the Department of Sociology and Anthro-
pology at the College of the Holy Cross in Worcester, Massachusetts. Her research interests revolve
around questions of travel, technology, mobility, globalization, and belonging.