Foreign affairs.(Special Section)

Some travelers obsessively follow exotic footsteps. Driven by a desire for nearness, yearning to merge with native cultures, these adventurers take extreme lengths to conceal their own identity, put on elaborate manners and trappings and attempt to pass as the other. The historian Harry Harootunian wryly calls this strategy "the Pierre Loti effect"--an allusion to the pseudonym of the 19th-century French sailor and writer who popularized this kind of immersion in his travels to Algiers, India, the Holy Land and China.

Loti's approach, Harootunian notes, "is easily ...

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