Trial by fire: connected and disconnected gaze in Corsica

Author(s): Matei Candea 

Abstract

This paper is based on an ethnographic exploration of divergent visual engagements with forest fires in a Corsican village. For 'locals', watching and mapping the spread of a fire on the opposite hillside from the village square is a complex practice which brings to bear a host of emotional and intellectual connections to place, people and history - it is also a shared practice of crisis management, in which generational and identity issues are worked out. Taken together, these features turn fires into a moment when the presence of the tourist as 'spectator' becomes deeply problematic and non-negotiable. Around this ethnographic situation, the paper suggests ways in which ostensibly essentialist and categorical identity conflicts can emerge out of a complex interaction between fluid networks and critical events.

'Paradise is as paradise doesn't': arresting images and visual embodiment in a tourist encounter in Belize

Author(s): Kenneth Little 

Abstract

There is a lot more to the tourist encounter with local Belizians than meets the eye. On March 9, 2004 a "foreign" yacht mysteriously anchored off of Placencia Point, Belize. Inexplicably, it left four days later. No one ever figured out whose boat it was or what it was doing in Placencia. This paper explores how the "mystery boat" served to focus anxieties and wild speculations about tourist encounters. These were evident in the excessive exchange of conspiracy stories about US spies, drug dealers, strange tourist, crazy locals, and corruption, a flow of narrative that conjured a nervous dread that agitated the smooth, sun-drenched visual images of the place. The boat was an arresting image and I track the troubling state of suspense and suspension that haunted the place and its people and that lingered as a troubled impulse that tried to "make sense" of things while the boat was present. More generally this paper tracks the productive space of an encounter that is fashioned between locals and tourists, where images of a beach paradise rub up against a disrupting picture of a local world "gone wild" for tourists. What happens when the fragile architectures of desire and dreamworld are bombarded with testimonies of mystery and haunting? By examining these moments of arrest and encounter, the paper gauges the impacts of new "signs of life" that are based on processes of visual embodiment that conjure rogue vitalities in bodily agitations, free-floating affects, and sites of collective excitations as emergent forces in this new state of emergency taking shape as neo-liberal exception, on the margins of global empire in Belize.

Traditional performance and dance tourism

Author(s): Felicia Hughes-Freeland 

Abstract

This paper will consider the changing contexts, audiences, and students of dance. When dance forms lose their traditional patrons and venues, performers trained in these forms have to adapt in different ways to new cultural and political conditions. Examples will be drawn from performer experiences in Southeast Asia, especially Indonesia and Laos, as they adapt to international audiences at different sorts of venue at home and abroad. The paper will also address the trend for outsiders to a tradition to actively experience 'other' forms of dance, and ask whether this particular form of dance phenomenology contributes to interculturalism in performance.

e-paper The embodied experience of scuba diving for Farang expatriates on Koh Tao

Author(s): Alexandra Wood 

Abstract

The island of Koh Tao, in the gulf of Thailand, boasts a rapidly developing tourism industry centralised around the activity of scuba diving. Scuba diving is prominent and was the basis for the formation and continual negotiation of all economic, political and social structures on the island; yet these are all based around the human experiences underwater. In an analysis of the participatory activity of scuba diving underwater, using literature of tourism, embodiment and ritual, I show how purely visual models only are inadequate for explaining this particular tourist activity, and perhaps most others. Not only are 'seeing' and 'participating' in scuba diving complimentary, rather than oppositional, but further I would argue that dividing the experiences of scuba diving into distinct, sensory based, analytical categories can only be made in hindsight when back on land. Whilst underwater, scuba diving as an activity is but one embodied experience, invoking an overlapping and blending of all bodily senses in response to the equally sensate non-human world into which divers submerge.

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