Introduction
You want to experience the world beyond your borders, yet you often find yourself trapped between the desire for genuine cultural immersion and the comforting habits of the tourist. This tension leaves you questioning your motives, your privilege, and your ability to truly understand foreign cultures without exploiting them.
Alden Jones argues in The Blind Masseur that travel is an ongoing negotiation between the self-indulgent tourist and the immersive traveler, shaped by cultural blindness and the search for authentic connection. You navigate this psychological terrain through a series of personal encounters and reflections across diverse landscapes.
The book examines your movement through exoticism, culture shock, political turmoil, cruise ship luxury, and photographic detachment. How do your cultural biases shape the way you see foreign societies? Can you ever escape the role of the privileged outsider, and what do your attempts at connection reveal about your own identity?
1. Exoticism and the Tourist Mindset
Exoticism is the psychological thrill and buzzing head-rush experienced when encountering the bizarre or unfamiliar. It is driven by a split in cultural perspective. You intentionally seek out discomfort and difference because your brain resists the realness of what it sees. This resistance produces sparks of excitement.
Exoticism drives you to seek out discomfort and difference, while your internal voice remains divided between the tourist craving home comforts and the traveler demanding immersion.
The Charm of the Unfamiliar
You pursue unfamiliar climates, languages, and social behaviors. While walking home in pitch darkness in La Victoria, Costa Rica, the author bumped her belly against a cow resting in the middle of the dirt road. This moment produced temporary total bewilderment.
Lard and Local Staples
The mindset of a person abroad is often divided into two opposing internal voices. The tourist voice urges escape from discomfort, craving familiar food, media, and pleasant hotels. The traveler voice pushes for total cultural immersion, local transportation, and shedding gringo privileges.
While lying sleepless in La Victoria, the author's internal tourist whispered to watch ER in the States. The traveler scolded her to accept local hardships and eat the lard-laden food. Dietary staples in developing regions often originate from historical economic limitations and government nutritional interventions.
Because meat was unaffordable for most Costa Ricans and traditional rice and beans lacked fats, the government advised citizens to use vegetable shortening to supply necessary dietary fats. The author's director Dave explained that manteca became an entrenched staple of the Costa Rican diet for this exact reason. This history led locals to believe lard was universally good for you.
2. Culture Shock and Coca Politics
Returning home exposes you to overwhelming consumer choices, while traveling in politically volatile regions drives you to seek comfort in symbols like Coca-Cola.
Returning to Consumer Society
Life in a minimalist rural community where resources are scarce creates an adjustment shock when confronted with endless commercial options and fast-paced individualism in a home metropolis. Reverse culture shock triggers alienation and bewilderment over excessive consumer choice.
Upon moving back to New York City and visiting a local supermarket, the author was deeply puzzled by why a single grocery store needed to carry seven different brands of cheddar cheese. Some college friends in New York paid six hundred dollars for a pair of pants.
Traditional corporate career paths can induce existential dread when an individual realizes that an office lifestyle involves repeating the exact same view and tasks for decades. While entry-level corporate jobs provide intellectual company and structural purpose, the prospect of remaining in the same office hierarchy for fifty weeks a year triggers a desire to escape back into transient freedom. The author realized she was not built for a standard forty-hour corporate routine when her boss forbade her from leaving the office for coffee breaks, mirroring his own multi-year stagnation.
The Conflicts of Bolivia
Travelers in unfamiliar or hostile foreign environments often instinctively retreat to the most powerful symbols of their home culture when experiencing physical illness or cultural displacement. You might travel with the goal of deliberate not knowing, arriving blind to a country's history and current events to embrace early confusion.
The author travelled to Bolivia with only practical research on climate and altitude sickness, remaining largely ignorant of the water wars and coca conflicts until she physically stumbled into them. Despite her efforts to blend in and respect local customs among cholitas, getting sick and facing the hostility of the Cochabamba Water Wars drove her straight to Coca-Cola, an icon of American culture she usually avoided.
In Bolivia, while dodging protests and facing hostility over water shortages and coca politics, the author repeatedly sought out and consumed Coca-Cola for comfort despite knowing its corporate and chemical drawbacks. A standard small glass of Coca-Cola in Bolivia measured 250 milliliters.
American foreign policy regarding local agricultural staples can create profound economic disruption and violent political backlash in developing nations. The US Drug Enforcement Administration targeted coca cultivation in Bolivia to combat cocaine in the US, ignoring that local farmers depended on the plant for survival and that Bolivians did not share the US cocaine crisis.
Bolivian farmers faced intense crackdowns, imprisonment, and violence under Law 1008 as the US threatened to cut funding if coca production continued, fueling widespread rebellion and anti-American sentiment. This conflict ultimately paved the way for Evo Morales, who was elected president of Bolivia in 2006.
3. Blind Masseur and Cultural Biases
Your deep-seated cultural biases persist despite long-term immersion, mirroring how societies globally integrate the blind into specialized vocational roles.
Massage as Community Service
In various societies around the world, massage therapy serves as a vital vocational and community service career path for individuals with visual impairments. Historically and globally, the blind have been valued for the enhanced sensitivity of their other senses. Certain countries legally reserve medical massage for the blind to elevate them out of poverty.
In South Korea, only the blind were legally allowed to practice medical massage. This protection led to intense protests when the government threatened to open the industry to sighted practitioners. In 2008, South Korean blind masseurs protested on a bridge against these legal changes.
Carrying Bias Abroad
Travelers carry an unshakeable arsenal of cultural biases and preconceived notions that inevitably shape how they perceive and interact with foreign cultures, regardless of their immersion. Despite long-term stays, friendships, and attempts to assimilate into local cultures like Costa Rica's, you remain handicapped by deep-seated stereotypes about wealth, race, gender roles, and societal ease.
You might navigate a foreign country through familiar economic tiers, knowing the difference between a six-dollar hotel and a twenty-dollar hotel which is considered a safe hotel price bet. You might spend four weeks sleeping on a concrete floor in El Silencio leading a volunteer group, yet still view your surroundings through an outsider's lens. You might even use local terms like tica, gringa, or visit a local pulpería, but your worldview remains unchanged.
During a massage at a luxury Marriott hotel in Costa Rica, a blind masseur named Juan Carlos casually reinforced local beauty standards by praising blond hair and blue eyes. This moment demonstrates how deeply ingrained cultural values persist across different walks of life.
4. Revolution and Emigration in Nicaragua and Cuba
Personal escapism leads you into regions scarred by xenophobia and political trauma, where local populations struggle against bureaucratic entrapment and war legacies.
Faced with turning twenty-seven, societal pressures to settle down, and messy romantic breakups involving colleagues, you repeatedly escape your life by booking impromptu trips to foreign countries where you can immerse yourself in others' high-drama realities. After a painful breakup with a college resident advisor named Sarah, you immediately use the internet to book plane tickets to Nicaragua.
Nicaraguan Stigmas
Nicaraguan immigrants in Costa Rica face severe xenophobia and class-based discrimination. Locals and even liberal students in Costa Rica often express intense hostility toward Nicaraguans, viewing them as violent, criminal, and socially inferior. Upper-class Nicaraguans who fled the Sandinistas also experience contempt and alienation abroad, creating a complex web of regional prejudice.
Andrés, a friend in Costa Rica, revealed with amazement and shame at the end of the year that his stepfather, who sat in silence on the couch giving everyone the finger, was Nica.
The city of León carries a resilient spirit symbolized by its local motto despite histories of conflict and poverty. León has a long history as a left-wing, revolutionary stronghold with murals of Sandino and Che Guevara, contrasting with more conservative cities. The local environment is parched and dusty, yet the population maintains endurance through political shifts and economic hardships.
The city's slogan "León survives" serves as a constant reminder that the local population carries on regardless of historical trauma and political upheaval, which includes surviving the 1972 year of the earthquake that leveled Managua.
The Burdens of Cuban Soldiers
Americans in the early 2000s could legally bypass the anti-Castro travel ban by participating in educational programs licensed by the US Treasury. Organizations like Putney Student Travel utilized education as a legal mechanism to send high school students and teachers to Cuba, enabling travelers to experience the country despite broader political restrictions.
Tim, codirector of Putney Student Travel, finagled a license from the US Treasury and hired you to teach writing and literature in Cuba for three consecutive summers during the five weeks duration of the program.
Cuban soldiers sent to fight in foreign proxy wars experienced profound psychological and physical devastation that left them permanently altered. Cuban youths were recruited under false pretenses or ideological fervor to fight in the Angolan civil war, enduring years in the jungle clearing land mines, losing friends, and witnessing senseless violence, which created lifelong trauma and bitterness.
Darwin, a Cuban tour guide and former soldier, was sent to Angola at age nineteen after being told he was returning to Havana; out of over three hundred men in his training group, only 175 survived after two years. This conflict lasted through the twenty-five years total duration of the war in Angola, contributing to half a million people killed in the Angolan war, while locals navigating the Special Period became known as jineteros during a forty-five minutes flight time across Cuba.
Cuban citizens attempting to emigrate often face systemic bureaucratic obstruction and harassment from officials who control exit paperwork. Locals working illegally in tourism must navigate a labyrinth of government restrictions, uncooperative officials, and family informants. Even when marrying foreign nationals to secure residency abroad, applicants are subjected to indefinite delays and bureaucratic paralysis.
Darwin married a Spanish woman named Chus to secure a way out of Cuba, but government officials constantly stalled his paperwork and demanded bribes or loyalty, continuing even two months since Darwin married his Spanish wife when discussed.
5. The Cruise Voyage and Theories of Travel
Studying exoticism on a luxury ship highlights the ethical dilemmas of tourism, forcing you to weigh ethnocentrism against humanism.
The Floating Campus
You travel around the world on the MV Explorer, a ship that accommodates 550 students and sixty teachers and staff. The vessel measures 590 feet long, weighs 24,300 tons, and travels at a top speed of twenty-eight knots. This floating campus operates on a one hundred-day itinerary, spending five days each in ten ports.
Your experience creates an internal conflict between the self-indulgent tourist and the critical traveler. You enjoy luxury amenities such as a cabin with a porthole, a king-sized bed, marble bathroom floors, and a cabin steward named Edwin who provides ice buckets and cleans twice a day.
Tzvetan Todorov provides a theoretical framework that categorizes your approaches to foreign cultures into three distinct attitudes:
- ethnocentrism, the belief that your own culture is superior;
- primitivism, fleeing to a supposedly superior culture that lives in harmony with nature;
- humanism, a nonethnocentric universalist stance that logically weighs what is good or bad in both cultures.
Exoticism in art and literature involves the representation of one culture for consumption by another. You study works like Paul Gauguin's paintings of Tahiti and his book Noa, Noa, which illustrate how artists exaggerate primitiveness to cater to an audience back home.
Ethical Dilemmas in Restricted Nations
Unpredictable natural disasters at sea can abruptly alter your itinerary and strand you in heavy weather. When the eye of Typhoon Shanshan shifted toward Japan, the MV Explorer skipped Qingdao, China, and headed straight to Hong Kong while distributing Meclizine pills as a third of the seats in your Exoticism class sat empty during severe turbulence.
Commercialized cultural centers often present staged, inauthentic representations of indigenous traditions. At the Polynesian Cultural Center in Hawaii, fake islands surrounded a fake lake featured chemically dyed feather headdresses, factory-made spears, and tourists participating in a staged pig-slaying ritual on Astroturf.
Visiting nations ruled by brutal military juntas creates an ethical dilemma regarding whether tourism financially supports oppression. While human rights activists called for boycotts due to forced labor, a fellow faculty member organized a student boycott of the alumni drive due to Desmond Tutu's influence regarding Burma, leading to Burma being indefinitely eliminated from future voyages, leaving thirty-five Exoticism students where only three felt you shouldn't have gone.
Developing nations draw you into intense bartering and overwhelming shopping sprees. In Ho Chi Minh City, you bought an ankle-length red dress, a black dress with red tubing, a yellow side-button top, and three silk scarves for thirty-eight dollars total, alongside items like a tea set for ten dollars, a silk bag for four dollars, and a seven dollar lighter for a Gucci knockoff purse.
Organized educational tours into marginalized communities can temporarily bridge cultural divides and evoke deep emotional solidarity. During an overnight stay in a Dalit village called Nalloor, guide Henry distributed oil lamps, and students sang We Shall Overcome with tears in their eyes while confronting the reality of the untouchables.
6. Photography, Atrocity, and Return
Your camera acts as a protective shield that distances you from human suffering, while returning to past places reveals the unvarnished reality of aging and change.
The Camera as a Shield
Carrying an advanced camera in foreign countries acts as an antitourist device and a protective shield that isolates you from direct human connection. You view a Nikon D200 as a love object and a flashy tool that lets you turn down the volume of language. You substitute true engagement with mechanical framing and experience reality through a lens rather than firsthand.
Susan Sontag notes that all photographers function as super-tourists who colonize people and places by turning them into flat, motionless images. Taking pictures in exotic locales is fundamentally about displaying access to things outside the standard grid, reducing living humans to objects of curiosity.
During her trip to Cambodia, the author uses her heavy camera to approach strangers or distances herself from locals by framing them as exotic photo opportunities.
Because the author struggled with camera focus settings while shooting through grimy bus windows in Burma, her resulting photographs were soft and blurry, creating a hazy filter over reality. She turns her flawed pictures into a gallery show in Boston titled Burmese Dreams, where the blurriness serves as a tourist's shield hiding the true suffering of the local population. The show was hung at Ula Café on May 2, 2008.
Natural disasters devastate vulnerable regions shortly after tourist visits, wiping out the landscapes and lives previously captured on film. The day after she hung her Burmese Dreams photo show in Boston, Cyclone Nargis struck Burma, leaving 100 thousand people killed and 2 million people left hungry and homeless, rendering many of her subjects' fates tragically unknown.
Realism and Family Travel
Gustave Flaubert went to Egypt at age twenty-seven, experienced grueling physical conditions and illnesses, and later abandoned his overwritten manuscript for Saint Anthony to focus on quotidian life. Witnessing harsh realities stripped away his hyperbolic, romantic prose style and transformed him into the realist author who could write Madame Bovary. Flaubert died at age fifty-eight from complications of sexually transmitted diseases.
True travel requires leaving and returning to appreciate the unfamiliar through nostalgia, whereas staying permanently means going native and finding normalcy in the foreign. The author's friend Dave moved to Costa Rica permanently, married a local woman, works in a local office, and speaks only Spanish, treating rainforests and monkeys as completely normal.
Returning to a former living place long after departure reveals how deeply human lives and local communities change over time. When visiting her past village in Costa Rica after ten years away, the author finds her former students grown into young adults with their own families. During her three days at the artist compound in Ciudad Colón, she reconnects with her former student Berta Elena, now a young adult, and learns about the difficult paths faced by villagers like Karol and Ana, whose son Jason became an evangelical convert at age seventeen, and Damaris's young son Enrique, who was five years old.
10 Key Ideas
- Exoticism drives you to seek out discomfort and difference, while your internal voice remains divided between the tourist craving home comforts and the traveler demanding immersion.
- Returning home exposes you to overwhelming consumer choices, while traveling in politically volatile regions drives you to seek comfort in symbols like Coca-Cola.
- Your deep-seated cultural biases persist despite long-term immersion, mirroring how societies globally integrate the blind into specialized vocational roles.
- Personal escapism leads you into regions scarred by xenophobia and political trauma, where local populations struggle against bureaucratic entrapment and war legacies.
- Studying exoticism on a luxury ship highlights the ethical dilemmas of tourism, forcing you to weigh ethnocentrism against humanism.
- Your camera acts as a protective shield that distances you from human suffering, while returning to past places reveals the unvarnished reality of aging and change.
- Dietary staples in developing regions often originate from historical economic limitations and government nutritional interventions.
- American foreign policy regarding local agricultural staples can create profound economic disruption and violent political backlash in developing nations.
- Nicaraguan immigrants in Costa Rica face severe xenophobia and class-based discrimination from locals and liberal students alike.
- Cuban soldiers sent to fight in foreign proxy wars experienced profound psychological and physical devastation that left them permanently altered.