Backpackers: The next generation? - Scholarly Commons Home

Backpackers: The next generation?
Creating and refining the definitions
Cohen (2004b) first wrote of a new class of traveller that began to emerge in the
1960s and 1970s, young people travelling en masse due to cheap international
airfares. He formulated this analysis in 1972, differentiating between “typical”
tourists – mass tourists seeking standardised facilities and attractions – and
individualistic and non-institutionalised tourists whom he describes as explorers
and drifters. While explorers stray from the regular tourist paths, they still prefer
their comfortable accommodations and reliable transportation, and interact to a
limited extent with their host communities. Drifters, conversely, “seek the
excitement of complete strangeness and direct contact with new and different
people. …[The drifter] immerses himself in the life of the host society. The
drifter is, then, the true rebel of the tourist establishment and the complete
opposite of the mass tourist” (Cohen, 2004b, pp. 44-45).
The prototype drifter was based on a German whom Cohen met in 1968. The
man had travelled alone from the Atlantic coast of Brazil, via the Amazon, to the
high sierra of Peru: a truly resourceful, self-reliant, thrifty individual. As Cohen
(2003, p. 45) notes later, “The ‘original drifter’ may have been an ideal to which
many youths were attracted, but only a very few succeeded”.
Cohen (1973) referred to the antecedents of these earliest drifters as the well-
educated Victorian youths travelling on their Grand Tours for adventure and
education, German youth out touring nature en masse in the early twentieth
century, and those travelling on working holiday. Adler (1985) and McCullough
(1992) extend these early roots to include religious pilgrims, artisan journeymen
serving apprenticeships across Europe, and common tradesmen who “tramped”
between towns in a seasonal hunt for work. Adler (1985, p. 338) indicates that,
originally, “readiness to tramp was long regarded as a sign of readiness to
work”. But she notes that term later was degraded to “denote social marginality
and vagrancy” (1985, p. 341).
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