"BACKPACK": THE ART OF “THE SELF” FOR A LEISURE PRACTICE

Abstract

This article presents a look at the backpackers and backpacking trips as a practice of leisure in contemporary society that provides the emergence of the subject in its singularity. Understood as subjects traveling independently, cheaper and intend the encounter with the other (either the other of himself), unveiled by the survey, that besides an alternative way to travel guided by the hegemonic model tours, "backpacking" is a lifestyle. In commuting discontinuous time/space provided by travel and persecuted by backpackers by otherness experience that causes a double estrangement in being different from yourself and the other, the meaning of this practice is evident. The sense of "backpacking" points out that the relational aspects, the different learning and self-knowledge generated by this form of travel represent the constitutive aspects to be a backpacker.