Every sign, linguistic or nonlinguistic, spoken or written . . .
can be cited, put between quotation marks.
(Derrida, 1988:12)

Reported speech is regarded by the speaker as an utterance belonging to
someone else . . . The mechanism of this process is located, not in the
individual soul, but in society.
(Voloshinov, 1973:116-117.)

In the following, which is a brief and condensed draft of a chapter on the same subject in a book about Israeli backpackers and the stories they repeatedly tell, I will inquire into the variety of voices represented in the stories. These stories of personal experience, both describe and constitute a rite of passage common among Israeli youth. After their mandatory service in the military, many young Israelis depart on the "Great Journey," which lasts between a few months and a couple of years, on average, and takes place in "Third World" destinations (most commonly in Asia and South America). In their stories and accounts the extended travel, which has been carried out for over three decades in a backpackers' fashion, came to represent rites of passage and separation that lay between the twelve years of mandatory schooling, topped with two or three years of mandatory service in the military, on the one hand, and higher education, career and familial pursuits, on the other hand.

When listening to the backpackers tell their tales, we might expect, commonsensically, that most of the voices we will encounter, and their quotations within the stories, will represent dialogue where utterances by identified and personal figures are quoted. Yet surprisingly, the majority of voices are not attributed to personal sources. In fact, quotes such as "Jo said... ", or "Helen told me... " comprise an impressive minority, and they are a minority in a twofold manner: qualitatively they are relatively few, and qualitatively they represent voices which can impressionistically be described at minor, as the "weaker" among a few other voices that are "heard" in the stories.

Due to the scope of this presentation, I will proceed to share a few inquiries and thoughts concerning only two of the voices, both of which could be referred to as "major" and "dominant." In more than one way these voices are "loud" and play a pivotal role in socially contextualizing the stories, as they help structure the plot as well as constitute the identity of the practitioners within the practice referred to as "Israeli backpacking." Additionally, both are not voiced in the single, but in the plural.

The group/chorus voice

Research on Israeli backpackers has consistently indicated that, by large, their preferred manner of travel is not that of solo or individual backpacking. In might have been different in the past. The origin of modern post WWII global backpacking has initially been described as a "drifter" practice (Erik Cohen, 1973), entailing individualistic patterns of traveling motivated by counter-culture and social and cultural alienation. But during the seventies and eighties, both global and local (Israeli) backpacking trends have routinized and "mass-ified." The early drifters were succeeded by backpackers who, thought still claiming individuality, were in fact traveling in a semi-institutionalized socialized practice.

Perhaps this is why the stories backpackers tell are typically told by a narrator in the first person but in plural rather than a single voice. The stories are about a "we" rather than an "I," or better, about an extended "I" which includes a few members of the group. The group could have been formed in Israel prior to the journey or after embarking on the trip; it is sometimes formed ad hoc, for a specific sake, for a limited duration (e.g. a trek, a rafting excursion), or it could be a more lasting group, which retains its cohesiveness throughout the entire trip.

The "extended I" or "we" voices, we will now read/listen to, are conventionally depicted and constructed in the stories through the frequent use of quotations, and particularly direct quotations or reported speech. In the following short vignettes, two typical instances of direct quotations are evoked, both conveying the group's voice, which Deborah Tannen (1989) has designated as a "choral" voice. In the first case, in Shira's story, we meet with a succinct description of the process by which a group comes to be; the centripetal social process by which the chorus voice is achieved and at the same time performed. The description is located quite at the beginning of our interview, along the beginning of a narrative sequence describing trekking in the Azangate track, in Peru.

Shira:

We came together from all sorts of-

I and Joe traveled a little bit together.

I and Mary first of all were friends and we traveled together   Joe [then] joined
And also Tali and Neta and

in Cuzco we met Osnat

And so all of us said

together

"[We] want Azangate!"

[And] we left
[for the trek]

The progressive and centripetal conjoining of members of the newly formed group reaches its peak with the declarative "[we] want Azangate!" The chorus/group voice/quote serves here as a speech act in that it is performative. In and by itself it indicates that there exists now such an entity - the group, which entails identity and social meaningfulness over and above the individual members/participants. Thus, the fact that the group has a voice is not only referred to here by Shira, but is performed as well. The voice, i.e. having a voice and voicing it, is the instance or presence of the group, the atomic social unit during the trip, the "extended I."

This short and concise description is an abstract depiction of the ongoing processes of group consolidation and crystallization, which reflect cultural patterns of sociality typical to past Israeli "Sabra" culture (native born Israelis, Almog, 2000. Katriel, 1986. 1991). In the backpacking trip, these collective patterns, ideas and identities are (nostalgically) revived and revoked.

The next short vignette is taken from Sarit's story, at a point where the group's voice has already been established and is now playing a role along the enveloping plot. In it Sarit is referring to a hesitation "the group" had, as to which of the possible hiking paths should the group choose to explore.

Sarit:

And at the beginning we didn't know if yes or no,

and eventually we decided

"Let's go (yalla)!

On the way we can always decide that we don't feel like it

and change our plans."

Here the "decision" reached by the group is expressed in the group's own quoted voice. The preceding hesitations are resolved in and through action, and the use of direct quotations here reflects this shift analogically. The action is the "speech action," it is the meta-pragmatic shift or a shift to meta-pragmatics. The decision is expressed rather than referred to or reported. The Arabic adopted into Hebrew "Yalla" (colloquially meaning "on with it") hits the spot as it dramatically conveys this shift, i.e. the physical embarking on the trek. Further into the group's voice, reported or ventriloquized in Sarit's speech here, we learn that the "if yes or no" hesitation has, in fact, not necessarily been resolved ("we can always decide"). Future decisions, which add to and build the narrative's drama, still await the group in its travel, but these further "hesitations" and "decisions" are presented as already "on the way," within quotation marks, so to speak. From here and on we can conceptualize the trek, i.e. the act of trekking, as an embodied quotation which is demonstrated and performed within a larger con-text.

A final and brief note concerns personal or personalized voices in the stories. With hardly any exceptions, personalized voices are exceptions to the rule, to the rule of plural-group and plural-collective voices. As such, they mark drama. Their appearance is never taken for granted and always reflects a heightened break with the rhetorical conventions within the stories.

The collective voice

After briefly introducing the group or choral voice, we will now attend and listen to quotations of another plural source, a voice that, along with the group's voice, is frequent in the stories and can be described as playing a "dominant" or "major" role as well.

Returning to some sociological and cultural issues that pertain to the larger context of Israeli backpacking, it is worthwhile noting that research consistently indicates that Israeli backpackers are inclined to congregate. Although no comparative research is available, is seems they tend to do so quite more intensely than other tourists (or backpackers) of different nations and ethnicities (excluding, perhaps, the German and the Japanese tourists). In incessantly seeking each other's company and congregating they reflect and present social and cultural patterns of sociality and interpersonal relationship common within Israeli society (Blum-Kulka, 1997. Katriel, 1991). In fact, these patterns are critical in defining the identity of middle class Jewish Israelis, and play a part in the nation's historic collective narrative of becoming (Zerubavel, 1995. Ben-Yehuda, 1995. Kimmerling, 2001). That such inherent and typical social patterns are re-invoked in a backpacking trip, which has come to constitute a time-honored tradition of a rite of passage, suggests that the travel to "Third World" destinations, and the constructions of identity, gender, bodily experiences, space, authenticity and etc. within the frame of the trip, correlates in multiple ways with what we might call the "Israeli experience." (Noy, forthcoming)

That been said, I would like now for us to hear a voice of which the presence has caught me by surprise. It is a frequent and dominant voice, which, probably due to its abstractness, and to my own too-familiar acquaintance with the backpackers' culture, I did not expect to find/hear in the stories.

In the following are two examples. The first, Ravit's, concerns a description of the voiced reaction of "Israelis" to a decision to embark on a trip to Asia (specifically Nepal and India) during off-season (or better: off-backpacking-season.) In the second vignette Oshrat describes the salient quality of "congregating" among Israeli backpackers.

Ravit:

So we arrived in the end of May, to Nepal.

When all the Israelis [in Israel] heard we're going now to Nepal

like

"are you out of your mind?!"

and

"there's nothing to do there!"

and

"why all of a sudden now?"

"It's not possible to trek, and it's not possible to [do] anything!"

So we said that we'll take the risk.

Oshrat:

They [non-Israeli backpackers] don't go to these guesthouses in which all the
commotion occurs, because they don't like it.

Israelis just love to congregate in one place,
and then they have all the information
[that they need] [...]

[When] you meet Israelis

"Hey, listen, there's a [recommended] guest house near by;
Hey, listen, tomorrow we're leaving for a trek --

you [plural] wanna join?"

Simply like that.

Both excerpts demonstrate a different voice, a clearly discernible voice which is regarded by the narrators as the voice belonging to "Israelis." It is regularly attributed to "all the Israelis," as in Ravit's words, or plainly to "Israelis," as in Oshrat's words. The plural source of this voice is not in the first person -- as the "extended I" or the group/choral voice -- but rather a third person "they -- Israelis." While the choral voice, though blurring the narrator's own voice, is still a semi-personalized voice, in that the group's members are known to the tellers and to the audience by their names, the voice of "Israelis" is clearly impersonal and collective. While the group members are individuals who have transformed and merged into a cohesive group, possessing and possessed by its distinguishable voice, as far as the collective voice is depicted, the narrators never account for any additional details concerning its authorship or ownership, besides pointing to the that it originates with "Israelis." It is thus somewhat a paradoxical voice in that its attribution is undesignated, including any and all, and yet at the same time it is clearly restricted to "Israelis"; i.e. to any and all Israelis (Israeli backpackers, more precisely). This voice does not reverberate between the self and the group, but is anOther, a third party's voice, a fact which is, again, paradoxical, as all the backpackers with whom I met were themselves native born "Israelis." They are all "Israelis" in each other's ears. In fact, by quoting the collective voice, as they do, they show a social and performative skill which itself inscribes them into the very collective to which they refer in the third -- anonymous -- person.

In the first vignette, in Ravit's story, we literally hear of a dispute that takes place between the collective and the group; between the dominant collective voice, voiced through direct quotations, and the group's voice, somewhat less vehement, represented at the end of the section outside of the marks of the quotation. The ladder voice expresses reaction to the collective scoldings and warnings by defying and resisting them ("we'll take the risk"). The exchange that takes place between the "voices" is interesting indeed, as the "risk" here is not the physical risk, entailed in trekking high mountain terrain (a risk which is usually attributed to the backpackers by themselves and by the larger discourse pertaining to Israeli backpacking). Rather, the drama at stake is of a social nature and concerns the constitution of norms, the cohesiveness of the collective and social disobedience, all in the metaphoric -- or metonymic -- realm of backpacking and hiking. In the stories, as in Ravit's case, both these layers -- the physical adventurous risk, and the risky social distancing from the collective norms -- interestingly overlap.

In the second vignette, in Oshrat's story, we again meet with the distinctive voice of the collective, always anonymous and unanimous. We further gain insight into the con-text in which this collective text is composed, or, more accurately, into the con-versation where and when the verses are uttered. We are introduced to the enclaves we mentioned earlier, where Israelis frequently meet and exchange information and experiences. These sites -- which are located along the beaten paths and itineraries in the destination countries as well as in designated sites within Israel, where veteran backpackers meet -- are sites of repeated and frequent storytellings and storylistenings. They are sites in which the backpacking experience/narrative/identity is being shaped time and again as a collective story of a rite of passage, and as a collective story of a storied rite of passage.