Budget Travel in South Asia: Searching for the Real

Abstract

Over the past two decades extended budget travel (BT) has become a significant way for large numbers of people from the West to experience the world outside of their national borders. Once considered a fringe activity, BT has seen its cultural and social acceptance rise and it is today attracting more people from more walks of life than ever before. Further attesting to its popularity is the wide assortment of ancillary industries and medias that nurture and support it. This thesis will examine how BT is used as a means to satisfy the desires of people in the West for a ?realness? which is no longer found in their alienated, post-modern, post-industrial home societies, and how BTravelers use the markers of realness found in the BT experience to construct their own identities. I will conclude, however, that BT is itself, due to its very form and the conditions that produce it, a commodified experience that, rather than being a liberation from the alienated life, is itself an alienated form of action that reproduces and extends the same conditions that at its core it aims to transcend.