“What the book offers most is a rich, detailed, and highly personal account of how everyday life is experienced within a community centred on a developmentourism project. It also offers a valuable source of reflection on the process and challenges of doing ethnographic research, particularly in postcolonial settings. In this way, it stands as a useful ethnography to illustrate discussions of tourism, development, community, participation, governance – many of the concepts central to our teaching and whose complexity we often find so difficult to convey to students.” • Anthropos
“The Good Holiday is an ambitious book; at times, exhaustive literature review subsumes the ethnographic examples that are the strength of it. Nonetheless, in demonstrating how [the Mozambican village of] Canhane itself became a ‘mythical local community’ and tourism commodity, the book... contributes to critical scholarship on tourism, tracing the imaginaries and geographic asymmetries that drive it… [and] invites us to reflect on how ethical tourism is a formation and practice that reveals the core of who we may wish to be.” • The Journal of Modern African Studies
“…this ethnographic study is meaningful in highlighting the specific negotiations, gains and losses, continuities and changes in gender relations, space occupation, infrastructure and material resources, and loyalties and perfidies that are played out in the cultural and historical context of Canhane… this book is of considerable value for understanding the politics of international and local development, and it will trigger further analysis and debates about morality and ethics as instigators of action and inaction in the contemporary world.” • Journal of Southern African Studies
“Written in a clear and concise style, Baptista’s book offers and important contribution to the critical analysis of the politics of touristic development. Specialists studying Mozambique might also appreciate the way this work puts into perspective the politics of local economic development during the last decades.” • Lusotopie
“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.
João Afonso Baptista is a Research Fellow at the Institute of Ethnology in the University of Hamburg and at the Institute of Social Sciences in the University of Lisbon.
LC: G155.M78 B37 2017
BL: DRT ELD.DS.152427
BISAC: SOC002010 SOCIAL SCIENCE/Anthropology/Cultural & Social; SOC042000 SOCIAL SCIENCE/Developing Countries
BIC: JHMC Social & cultural anthropology, ethnography; GTF Development studies
