Summer being here, I am moved to repost my “Whiteman Abroad,” originally created June 11, 2006 and still relevant in 2007. It was conceived as an aid for professors on research trips, but it is also applicable more generally. Remember that ‘whitemen’ are not all male, and not all white.
1. You have a professional interest in this region, and you have published articles and perhaps books on it. You still may want to get some in depth information on the specific country you are visiting before you go. Do not simply rely on your hosts to tell you everything. The less you already know, the less they will tell you.
2. Take a guided city tour, and other such tours, if you must, but realize that to do this is no substitute for getting to know the city yourself. You are engaged in fieldwork, not mere tourism. Keep this in mind. Especially if your university is financing your trip, they expect you to return with some real information and experience, not just with a tourist’s report.
3. Read the local papers. They will contain information on minimum wage, housing costs, and the price of food, among other issues. Knowing these things already will greatly facilitate conversations with your informants, interviewees, and other interlocutors.
4. Listen to what people say, sit back, and observe. Do not pester people with uninformed questions–ask intelligent ones.
5. Do not dress as a tourist. You are a business traveler.
6. In countries where food is expensive–by which I mean expensive relative to local wages–it is vulgar to order more food than you can eat, even if you can pay for it.
7. Always remember where you are. There are plenty of good reasons why you should not break the law on your university’s dime. There are even more reasons why you should not do so in ways which may compromise your hosts. If you do not care about them, then at least think about this: these people may live in the Third World, but they have ethical standards and Internet access. Just because they are not professors or Americans, does not mean they will not report you to your university.
8. While everything here may be inexpensive by your standards, it is not inexpensive for local people. Be very discreet when you express amazement at ‘how cheap this is’. Try to think in terms of the local economy and currency. This is a matter of common courtesy.
9. Just because people here are not white, do not assume you can relax your standards of behavior. Especially if you write on ‘race’, now is a good time to send your racist assumptions on vacation.
10. Especially if your published research discusses decolonization, or if your work involves teaching and/or administering what is called, euphemistically, ‘cultural sensitivity’, now is the time to practice what you preach.
Axé.
coldhearted scientist وداد 
I would add to #8 to learn the money. Many Americans seem to act as if the American dollar is understood every where and how it is counted is how other money is counted. One would think it is common sense but I have seen differently.
Good point. This is why I say find out what the minimum wage and the price of food are, but perhaps I should put it more directly.
a basic assumption of humility, wariness, respect, and self-possession are what i find are most needed as a person moves through new environs….regardless of race (going by my inter/cross-USA travels and scenes of course!)
True, Nez, but what irritated me so about certain professors I observed last year – and have observed before – was that they were not even in new environs. They were in environs on which they had published books, that they had lived in. And they were still acting like dumb, Ugly Americans, and they were totally unaware of it.
Then I have this whiteman in the form of a ‘formerly sexually exiled woman’ going on at me, over here:
https://profacero.wordpress.com/2007/05/15/illegal-at-home/.
That is the immediate motivation for my reposting of list. The whitegirl in question paid for sex in foreign countries with exotic young men, after failing to have sex here for 12 years due, she says, to ‘the war between the sexes’. Liberated by her paying experience, she went on to ‘break taboos’ [sic] and marry a Black man, Lamont. Groan.
haha!…ah. but you set things straight, it seems.
that is a weird dynamic that you point out in the first graf.