Lifestyle travellers: Backpacking as a Way of Life

Scholarship on backpackers speculates some individuals may extend backpacking to a way of life. This article empirically explores this proposition using lifestyle consumption as its framing concept and conceptualises individuals who style their lives around the enduring practice of backpacking as ‘lifestyle travellers’. Ethnographic interviews with lifestyle travellers in India and Thailand offer an emic account of the practices, ideologies and social identity that characterise lifestyle travel as a distinctive subtype within backpacking. Departing from the drifter construct, which (re)constitutes this identity as socially deviant, the concept of lifestyle allows for a contemporary appraisal of these individuals’ patterns of meaningful consumption and wider insights into how ongoing mobility can lead to different ways of understanding identities and relating to place.

Research highlights► Conceptualises individuals who backpack as a way of life as ‘lifestyle travellers’. ► Departs from social deviance implicit in ‘drifter’ identification. ► Move from episodic backpacking involvement into assemblage as a mobile lifestyle. ► Interviews with lifestyle travellers in India and Thailand offer emic accounts. ► Ongoing mobility challenges understandings of identities and relationships to place.