Global Slummers

Looking back on the book This is Not Civilization, NJ Kpopper came across this review, which contains this interesting bit:

"At times it seems that Rosenberg uses his ethnic (for a lack of a better word) characters as nothing more than foil to demonstrate the stupidity and arrogance of white American middle class travelers and global slummers. This is a chronic trapping of this section of American society that travels, reflects upon their lack of cultural sensitivity with borderline obsession and ironically elevates themselves to a higher degree of pretension by becoming the self-effacing, self-aware middle class American who is chronically attune to his inability to really get anything."

The "global slummer" is a memorable shorthand for something that I think most travellers consciously or subconsciously fear becoming.  Better to be a "tourist of the mind" and continue to reconfigure one's own mental landscape until traditional boundaries are broken apart.  And better to make new culture than be defined by the old.