Over the weekend, I was reviewing Radical Alterity by Jean Baudrillard and Marc Guillaume for the TLS. One bit that didn't get in was Baudrillard's discussion of Todorov's categories of voyagers. It's illuminating and entertaining.

So with the summer upon us, and holidays in prospect, which are you?

1. The Assimilator: someone who absorbs another culture into their own, erasing any difference - like missionaries, or Marxists, or colonists.

2. The Profiteer: someone who is only interested in elsewhere for reasons of exploitation and trade - like merchants or people in the travel business.

3. The Tourist: someone who travels for the pure experience offered by their destination - like the individual on a packaged tour who sits on the air conditioned coach and only leaves it because they can take a better photograph of the view.

4. The Impressionist: someone who seeks a heighten sensibility or intuition from travel, who takes pleasure in difference - like the grand tourists of the 18th and 19th century.

5. The Assimilated: unlike the assimilator, this is someone who penetrates a culture and adopts it for themselves - like immigrants or ex-pats who have 'gone native'.

6. The Exote: someone who revels in the exotic, keeping their distance whilst being seduced by it - like those Westerners fascinated by Eastern religion who come back talking of chakras and reincarnation.

7. The Exile: someone who lives in a foreign land and uses their location as the basis for their work - like the writer who is a smart outsider and finds inspiration in distance, detachment and nostalgia.

8. The Allegorist: someone who travels to form a judgement of their own culture, not of the foreign place - like the American who comes to Europe to say how awful the US is, or the European who goes to America and says the same.

9. The Philosophical Voyager: someone who travels and explores differences but sees through those differences to detect universal features of humankind - like the Enlightenment museum curator or syncretist of world religion.

10. (This is actually Baudrillard's) The Pure Vector: someone who travels but to no particular place - like the business person who spends their whole life in airports and hotels that are identical regardless of country.