The Good Holiday: Development, Tourism and the Politics of Benevolence in Mozambique
João Afonso Baptista
Volume 30, EASA Series from Berghahn Books
ISBN 978-1-78533-546-4
“This book makes an important contribution to critical studies of tourism, and the growing corpus on Mozambican Studies as well as – and this is perhaps its most important contribution – adding significantly to analyses of consumerism and its ethical, economic and political dimensions.”
Bjørn Enge Bertelsen (University of Bergen)
Drawing on ethnographic research in the village of Canhane, which is host to the first community tourism project in Mozambique, The Good Holiday explores the confluence of two powerful industries: tourism and development, and explains when, how and why tourism becomes development and development, tourism. The volume further explores the social and material consequences of this merging, presenting the confluence of tourism and development as a major vehicle for the exercise of ethics, and non-state governance in contemporary life.
Managing Ambiguity: How Clientelism, Citizenship, and Power Shape Personhood in Bosnia and Herzegovina
Čarna Brković
Volume 31, EASA Series from Berghahn Books
ISBN 978-1-78533-414-6
“There is much to love about this book – the choice to address what is extremely rich ethnographic material through three interlocking analytical categories: personhood, citizenship, and power creates the possibilities for an incredibly productive exploration of everyday life, sociality and social welfare.”
Paul Stubbs (Institute for Economics, Zagreb)
Why do people turn to personal connections to get things done? Exploring the role of favors in social welfare systems in postwar, postsocialist Bosnia and Herzegovina, this volume provides a new theoretical angle on links between ambiguity and power. It demonstrates that favors were not an instrumental tactic of survival, nor a way to reproduce oneself as a moral person. Instead, favors enabled the insertion of personal compassion into the heart of the organization of welfare.
Managing Ambiguity follows how neoliberal insistence on local community, flexibility, and self-responsibility was translated into clientelist modes of relating and back, and how this fostered a specific mode of power.