Review of THE GOOD HOLIDAY by Gupta (original) (raw)

THE GOOD HOLIDAY: Development, Tourism and the Politics of Benevolence 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 book 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.

The Virtuous Tourist: Consumption, Development, and Nongovernmental Governance in a Mozambican Village

American Anthropologist, 2012

This article is about the role of tourist moral agency in governing. The affiliation between vacationing and governing is illustrated through the examination of a case study: the village of Canhane in Mozambique. The main touristic attribute of the village lies in residents’ performance of a society in need, seeking outside solutions and guidance. Virtuous tourism in Canhane is the effect of a capitalist expansion in which ethics, community development, and governance are conflated with tourists’ consumption. Specifically, the commodifying logic that emerges from the presence of virtuous tourists in the village derives primarily from three subjects: tourists’ self-aspirations, residents’ ambition to integrate into the broader socioeconomic order, and the politicization of virtue stimulated by the development industry. Ultimately, this article shows how the cultivation of ethics through tourism consumption has become an ally for the exercise of nongovernmental governance over public spheres.

Mozambique Island: Transform a World Heritage Site in a Touristic Destination

Tourism Management Studies, 2012

Heritage is taken by the Unesco and by national governments as a good way to attract tourism. However in a global world and in a postcolonial context the reality in the ground can reveal other representations and interpretations. The local level-present by the difficulty of everyday living and the past memories-must be taken into account for the success or not of investments in tourism. The local context is powerful in making the facilities or, on the contrary, bringing the local conflicts to the tourism scenarios. The Mozambique Island is a case study for understanding some of these questions. The reification of the place for tourist consumption let the "community", the owner, in the Unesco's terms, outside of the recreated mystical past. The investors complain about the passivity of the people and reclaim changing for a better environment. The resistance for changing for a better way of life must be understood through local logic, knowledge and motivations.

Snowballing in 35oC: an inquiry into second-home tourism in Mozambique

Tourism: an international interdisciplinary journal, 2019

Increased mobility has played an important role in promoting and developing tourism as a global phenomenon. One result since the late 1990s has been the development of the well-researched second-home tourism phenomenon in the Global North. Fewer studies on second-home tourism have been carried out in the Global South, especially in the least developed countries (LDCs). Th e diffi culty of collecting reliable data in LDCs is presented as a key contributing factor to the lack of studies. Whereas researchers in, for example, the Nordic countries have access to comprehensive public registries of second homes enabling large-scale data-driven research, studying this phenomenon in data-poor contexts requires appropriate fi eldwork methods and strategies. Th e following research note discusses snowballing and participant observation methods employed in fi eldwork on second-home tourism in two small coastal Mozambican towns. It concludes with a brief discussion on the fi ndings and the prospects for future research in historically and socioeconomically comparable locations.

Tourism and Human Development in Mozambique: an analysis for Inhambane province

2012

The importance of tourism for economic and social development in the African continentin the second half of the 20th centuryis well documented in tourism research with a conclusion that only African countries that have adopted a tourism strategy are converging towards the US real product per capita. This paper analyses the role of tourism in promoting human development in sub-Saharan Africa using data from a questionnaire undertaken in Inhambane province, Mozambique in 2010, a region that adopted a tourism strategy. A logistic regression for randomized response data model is used, taking into account the answers bias in the data. Policy implications of the research findings are discussed.

Third World Quarterly Pro-poor Tourism: a critique

Tourism's role as a development tool has increased over the past three decades. Its contribution to poverty alleviation was first noted in the 1970s, but this focus was increasingly blurred in theoretical debates over 'development' in the 1980s and 1990s. It resurfaced at the end of the 1990s with the emergence of 'pro-poor tourism' (PPT), defined as tourism which brings net benefits to the poor. In this paper the emergence of PPT is described, its main features outlined, and several conceptual and substantive criticisms are discussed. It is concluded that, while PPT is based on a worthwhile injunction to help the poor, it is distinctive neither theoretically nor in its methods, and has become too closely associated with community-based tourism. Rather than remain on the academic and development margins, it should be reintegrated into and reinform mainstream studies of tourism and development, and focus more on researching the actual and potential role of mass tourism in alleviating poverty and bringing 'development'.

Jamaican tourism and the politics of enjoyment

Critical approaches to tourism, united by a refusal to conceptualize tourism as mere enjoyment, illustrate how Third World tourism typically involves labor exploitation, unequal gender relations, cultural destruction, and environmental degradation. Researchers presuppose, however, that enjoyment is an innocent and self-evident psychological phenomenon underpinned by and opposed to worthier objects of inquiry such as exploitation, domination, and discrimination by virtue of their politically serious, conceptually profound, and empirically complex properties. These critical approaches, however, are not critical insofar as they tacitly assume that the phenomenon of enjoyment is just enjoyment: easily enjoyed and unrelated to the problems of tourism. The main thesis of this paper is that a thorough theoretical conceptualization of enjoyment is necessary for any analysis of tourism to be sufficiently rigorous. The psychoanalytic concepts of Jacques Lacan and the work of Slavoj Zi zek offer an unparalleled theoretical vocabulary with which to investigate the subjective, material, embodied, discursive, and enacted dimensions of enjoyment in tourism. The paper elaborates what I call a politics of enjoyment using key psychoanalytic ideas that include jouissance, the pleasure principle, the Other, and fantasy to critically explicate the contradictions, antagonisms, and impasses that (de)structure Jamaica's ''One Love'' and ''No Problem'' tourism product located on a Caribbean island renowned for beach bliss and civil unrest.