Risk creation in traveling: Backpacker Adventure Narration

Abstract

This paper addresses, through examples from in-depth interviews with long-term budget travelers, how culturally and socially constructed narratives about risk and adventure are manifested by individuals in backpacker communities. Such manifestation is carried out through consumption of, for instance, experiences, places, food, medicine, and clothing. It is argued that tales and acts of “risk and adventure” work particularly well in individuals' efforts to “narrate identity”. The paper also addresses a need for more gender sensitive research, through suggesting that adventurous women may be caught in an intersection between two logical systems: the reflexive life project of “late modernity” open to both genders and the adventure as a historically founded masculine practice.