We travel to transform ourselves

I grew up in Quebec during the time of the two solitudes, when the French rarely spoke to the English and anglophones could live and work in the province for decades without having to learn a word of French.

- By Wade Davis

My family had settled in Pointe-Claire, a staid, largely English suburb of Montreal, plunked like a carbuncle on the back of a Québécois village from the early eighteenth century.

Dividing the two worlds was Avenue Cartier, at a corner of which was a small neighbourhood grocery where I would buy milk or cigarettes for my mother. It was owned by an elderly couple, and I would often sit on their porch, looking across the street, knowing that on the other side was another language, another religion, another way of life. Even as a young boy, I yearned to cross that road, and in a sense, I've been doing so all of my life.

Anthropologists are sometimes accused of loving every culture except their own. Perhaps there is a sliver of truth to this critique, at least for my generation, which was raised in the tumult of the 1960s. I was drawn to anthropology and travel because I hungered for raw and authentic experiences. Like many of my peers, I suffered from French poet Charles Baudelaire's malady— the "horror of home." We sought to escape from a monochromatic world of monotony in the hope of finding a polychromatic realm of diversity in some distant land, where we might rediscover and celebrate the enchantment of being human and alive.