Used book – Journeys: Reasons and Practices, Christian Bataillou

If we agree with Jacques Meunier that "The watchwords: finding oneself, realizing oneself, discovering oneself in adventure, are nothing but illusions. It is never oneself that one discovers but an image of oneself, images of oneself that repeat themselves infinitely, it is a myth, it is a fiction," we must also accept that this fiction and this myth form the core of the traveler's motivations.

Beyond the socio-economic reality of tourism, this book aims to explain the meaning of the dreams, projects, imagination, myths and fictions of individuals who travel, based on an analysis of the different stages of the journey from conception, realization, the process of change and intercultural experience marked by tourist encounter, adaptation, understanding, or even abandonment of benchmarks, métissage or even statelessness until the return to the society of origin. These stages are constitutive of mobilities and transform the tourist more or less deeply in their relationship to everyday life, including in common practices such as clothing or eating habits, at home, at work, but also to themselves since they discover themselves as Other in the eyes of Others. Moreover, if travel appears as a social disinsertion, paradoxically, the return stage has today become a norm that participates in insertion and which, by extension, leads those who do not leave to marginalization, a stigmatization in relation to what can be considered a norm of mobility.