The desire to relate to each other is nothing new for a species of social primates like us who depend on being contributing members of a community for social, mental, and physical health; but the impact of social media as a means of judging ourselves and others in our relatability has established a version of relatability as a key to social capital. Not only do people try to relate to one another as a means of finding their place in a given community, but corporations have joined the fold by attempting to humanize themselves by attempting to relate to general audiences. While this can frequently be a good thing- appealing to a larger group is the heart of democratic decision-making after all- it can also lead to the dismissal of marginalized voices or personal growth.
American anthropology is based on anthropologists' ability to connect audiences with their subjects and to make the lives of those who may seem strange familiar. The problem comes from the commodification of that phenomenon in which that translation becomes generic in order to maximize its reach- or easy to understand consume- which impacts its relation to consumers themselves and how they make sense of the world around them. The way we make sense of the world around us is being recontextualized through a lens of relatability; of what we understand, but also what we agree with. Part of the problem with the ways in which most of these campaigns run are in the shallowness of comparisons between groups of people without delving into the complexities of their characters or their place within the world. It is a surface level relatability that retains a willful ignorance of any greater context- and uses shallow relatability as a form of comfort and complacency in which individuals can validate their beliefs and feelings without actually having to examine or confront them in any meaningful way.
Within the tourism industry, tour packages to places like the Caribbean often deliver travelers to tropical destinations while keeping them on resorts where they can engage with the geography of an exotic destination without ever having to engage with the larger culture- denying them engagement with the true character of a culture- causing us to ask if a foreign culture aligns with our personal morals and values or to be in conflict with those values enough for us to call them morally broken. That process holds us back from growing to see the world through a more complicated lens in which we question our beliefs and values and have conversations about culture, morality, and humanity to create a viewpoint from which we increasingly refuse to see things from another culture's perspectives or minimize entire cultures to how relatable we find them to be.
Anthropology's slogan of "make the strange familiar and the familiar strange" does not mean to find some means of relating to other cultures and to see our own culture's strange habits; but to make meaningful attempts at understanding those unrelatable aspects of a different culture and to accept them as human regardless of the unrelatable traits we may never share- in addition to seeing the ways in which our own cultures' means of establishing comfort in both individual and communal identity make our own cultures unrelatable. Travel was never meant to be a means for reinforcing our own beliefs, but to challenge them- not to relate with our perspectives, but to contradict them.
Those who travel with Anthro Tours for any of our expeditions can expect to meet communities and cultures with perspectives that challenge their own and- in many cases- are entirely unrelatable; even uncomfortable. That is why each of out tours is carefully constructed to not be a simply consumed tour like other companies plan, but instead to establish an itinerary designed to showcase the complexity of cultures and their histories across the globe to display the often uncomfortable history. At its core, there is something ineligible and unrelatable about the human condition which cannot be summarized into easily understandable facts That is what makes travel so important; as it forces us to engage with our unrelatabilities and forces each one of us to make honest and intimate examinations of ourselves which in the end does not result in the comfortable reinforcement of our beliefs, but in personal growth, empathy, and meaningful change.
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