One of the main themes of the story ‘Sisters’ is that when we travel, any insecurity that we fell at home can be amplified by the unknown cultural norms and values of the inhabitants of where we travel.

This actually raises the issue of how to react to a specific issue surrounding gender roles when we travel. There seems to be a general concensus that gender norms should not be imposed to tourist by locals or to locals by tourist. An example of this behaviour is the measure taken by the government of the Maldives (a small cluster of islands to the south-western coast of India) that states that tourist resorts should only be built on islands where there are no locals. The reason for this is that toursits are seen as a disruptive influence on the local muslim population. Specifically, the government was concerned on the clothing of tourists. To adress the problem of resorts already built on islands where there was a local population, the government issued strict clothing rules to be followed by everyone.

Anyways, all this to say that the impacts of a tourist’s gender roles can have a profound impact in a foreign country. In ‘Sisters’, the narrator obviously has a very strong impact on the community in which she is in, so much that she is even molested when she wears a dress.  How we as tourist react to how gender roles are different where we go is up to each individual. Then again, the one reaction that should be avoided at all cost, and that may be the most innate one, is to violently oppose oneself to the behavior and try to impose what we believe is right. The safest way to react might possibly be to, if we are in a situation where the way that both sexes treat each either one of them is simply intolerable for us, leave the location and regret not having known before that that would be part of an experience as a tourist.

In most cases, a traveler’s experience will be largely influenced by the culture of the local individuals that he or she will meet. The impacts of travel on the cultural landscapes of host countries are undeniable. Although the positive impacts such as the exchange of ideas and the increased tolerance of each culture is undeniable, we often see that travel can have other negative impacts as well. One of them is the ‘demonstrantion effect’, a phenomenon through which the locals can want to imitate the tourist and their habits. This happens specially in third world countries when the tourists are from a developed country. Apart from that, travel can also lead to some misunderstanding because of the lack of cultural knowledge of the tourists.

In the essay ‘Shakespear in the Bush’, this last element is clearly shown. although the anthropologist explains the story of Hamlet in a clear way, the Tiv understand it in a completely different way. This is because culture is often said to be the eyes through which we perceive other people’s acts, emotions or behaviours. Cultural relativism goes beyond just trying to understand a cultural behaviour in its own context: It can also go the other way around where the local people can use a cultural relativist approach to understand de logic behind the foreigner’s behavior. An example of this would’ve been if the Tiv would have understood why it is generally frowned upon that a widow re-marry so fast. Had the Tiv’s known that our western culture places such a strong emphasis on love as a feeling, as an ideal, maybe they would’ve agreed with the anthropologist that in that set of mind, her decision to re-marry so quickly is hard to justify.

In the end, the key element to get out of this is that one of the elements that could make travel a better experience for all is the widespread publicizing of cultural relativism as way of preventing the negative consequences of it.