The Good Holiday: Development, Tourism and the Politics of Benevolence in Mozambique [Hardcover ed.] 1785335464, 9781785335464

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THE GOOD HOLIDAY

EASA Series

Published in Association with the European Association of Social Anthropologists (EASA). Series Editor: Aleksandar Bošković, University of Belgrade Social anthropology in Europe is growing, and the variety of work being done is expanding. This series is intended to present the best of the work produced by members of the EASA, both in monographs and in edited collections. The studies in this series describe societies, processes and institutions around the world and are intended for both scholarly and student readership. For a full volume listing, please see back matter

The Good Holiday Development, Tourism and the Politics of Benevolence in Mozambique

João Afonso Baptista

Published in 2017 by Berghahn Books www.berghahnbooks.com © 2017 João Afonso Baptista All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purposes of criticism and review, no part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system now known or to be invented, without written permission of the publisher. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A C.I.P cataloging record is available from the Library of Congress British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Printed on acid-free paper ISBN: 978-1-78533-546-4 (hardback) ISBN: 978-1-78533-547-1 (ebook)

Contents

List of Illustrations, Figures, Tables and Diagrams

vi

Acknowledgements viii Introduction 1 1 Introducing Tourism: Canhane 29 2 The Appeal of Community 59 3 Developmentourism 93 4 The Enigma of Water 121 5 The Walk 153 6 Problematizing Poverty 187 7 Non-Governmental Governance 215 Bibliography 241 Index 273

Illustrations, Figures, Tables and Diagrams

Illustrations Illustration 1.1. Entrance to Covane Community Lodge. The expression ‘Hoyo Hoyo’ on the sign means ‘Welcome’ in Shangane. 27 February 2008.

46

Illustration 1.2. Reception of Covane Community Lodge. The person pictured is the executive manager. 27 March 2008.

50

Illustration 2.1. Woman drinking canhu through a nzécuo. 17 February 2008.

61

Illustration 2.2. People dancing at the lobolo ceremony. 17 February 2008.

62

Illustration 2.3. Meeting in Canhane. Moment when the red zone of the map was explained. 6 October 2008.

69

Illustration 2.4. Workshop in Canhane. 6 October 2008.

83

Illustration 3.1. The school of Mbueca. 11 April 2008.

97

Illustration 4.1. The shallow well in Canhane is a hole dug to allow access to water. 11 February 2008.

124

Figures Figure 1.1. The Great Limpopo Transfrontier Park (GLTP) and adjacent areas. 32 Figure 3.1. Map of the area.

95

Illustrations, Figures, Tables and Diagrams  ◆  vii

Figure 4.1. The position of the water supply system in Canhane. The topography of the village is flat. 126 Figure 4.2. ‘The bellybutton of Canhane.’

136

Figure 5.1. The walking route of ‘the stroll in the village’.

157

Tables Table 1.1. Main steps of the implementation of community tourism in Canhane (October 2002–May 2004).

43

Table 1.2. Balance of the lodge’s activity between 1 June 2004 and 30 November 2007.

49

Table 5.1. Requests for the stroll over the period of three and a half years (seven 6-month periods; 1 June 2004–30 November 2007).

161

Diagrams Diagram 1.1. Organizational structure of Covane Community Lodge. 49 Diagram 1.2. Statutory competencies of the Social Management Committee. Source: Documents from NGO Helvetas, accessed at Lupa’s offices. 1 April 2008. 52

Acknowledgements

This book was made possible by various people and various institutions. My gratitude to them is enormous. I started to write The Good Holiday in the Mozambican village of Canhane, specifically on notebook pages illuminated by a headlamp hanging on a branch of a tree, and finished it almost a decade after, on a laptop at a desk in Lisbon. During these years, I worked in different university departments and lived in different places. I received precious support in all of these, which allowed me to continue writing, deleting and rewriting the words that make this book. In Halle (Saale), Germany, I am sincerely thankful to Burkhard Schnepel, who is mainly responsible for the initiation of this book. Burkhard was the first person interested in this project and his passion for ethnography greatly inspired me. During the three years that we shared an office, Steffen Johannessen transmitted to me a contagious enthusiasm in the moments that I most needed. Sophie Strauß helped me with her fastidious effort in translating large pieces of my writings into German: an administrative requirement that I needed to fulfil at the Martin Luther University. I am also grateful to the Graduate School Society and Culture in Motion (SCM) for granting me the funds that made possible my fieldwork in Mozambique, and the Institute of Ethnology of Martin Luther University for conceding me an office and research facilities to work on this project. I benefited enormously from the discussions I had in the colloquiums organized by Burkhard Schnepel, Bekim Agai, James Thompson and Carsten Wergin in both the Institute of Ethnology and SCM. In Hamburg, I am particularly thankful to Michael Schnegg for allowing and motivating me to continue dedicating time to this book, despite my commitments with other research topics, and to Michael Pröpper for our stimulating conversations on consumption and Africa. I am thankful to my graduate students who incited new

Acknowledgements  ◆  ix

perspectives on old topics in tourism and material culture. The suggestions and ideas I exchanged about tourism, community and governance with Noel Salazar, Tom Boellstorff, Joost Fontein, Jim Butcher and Fabian Frenzel inspired me for some of the theoretical paths that I take in this book. Furthermore, I want to thank Eeva Berglund, the former editor of EASA Book Series in Berghahn, for her counselling and enthusiasm of this work, and Sasha Puchalski, for her commitment in the final crucial stage before publication. In Mozambique, I am extremely grateful to the entire population of Canhane and to the visitors of the Covane Community Lodge who I talked with between 2006 and 2008. However, five persons deserve a special mention: Luis Dinis, who gave my research his warm cooperation; Carlos Zitha, the community leader of the village of Canhane; Justino, an inestimable guide in the village; Salomão Valoi, the manager of the Covane Community Lodge; and Luis, also known as O mulungu de banga, whose hospitality, vitality and courage are beyond description – Luis was, and is, a true source of inspiration. Finally, those who accompanied me throughout all the progressions and retrogressions in this writing project, independent of my place of living and affiliations: my parents, Afonso and Madalena, for their unconditional support and encouragement to pursue my passions (which include this book); Emily, my wife, who always motivates me towards my goals; and my daughters, Mathilde and Juliana, two thunders of vitality and love that came into my life during the making of this book and whose questions about and relationship with the world inspired me to rethink some of the topics in this book. Parts of The Good Holiday were adapted from the essays ‘Disturbing “Development”: The Water Supply Conflict in Canhane’, published in the Journal of Southern African Studies (2010), ‘The Tourists of Developmentourism – Representations “From Below”’, Current Issues in Tourism (2011), ‘Tourism of Poverty: the Value of being Poor in the Nongovernmental Order’, in the edited volume Slum Tourism by Routledge (2012) and ‘The Virtuous Tourist: Consumption, Development, and Nongovernmental Governance in a Mozambican Village’, American Anthropologist (2012). I want to register my profound thanks to all the people who helped me with this book. João Afonso Baptista Lisbon, August 2016

Introduction

The inspiration for this book came from the red dust left trailing behind a moving car. It was a severe summer in Mozambique. That afternoon, I talked with a forty-seven-year-old woman who was seated close to the trail that crosses through the village of Canhane. She was peeling marula fruits when a metallic grey four-wheeler transporting two European tourists flew past us at high speed. Cars are not a common sight in the village, but it was the velocity of its passing that caught our attention. The freshly washed and still-humid marula fruits became covered by the red dust from the road, as did we. After the cloud of dirt dissipated, the woman commented calmly, ‘They may be coming here to visit the community.’ My eyes followed the vehicle, scanning the children playing on the road; chickens and goats scampered out of its way. The vehicle’s brake lights did not illuminate even for a moment. I asked her the obvious: ‘Why would they want to visit this village?’ Now clothed in a veil of dry dust blanketing her skin, she replied: ‘Because the tourists want to see what we are doing with their money. They want to see how the community is developing.’ She gave me a key to unveil the new basis for the ‘art of living’ (Bourdieu 1977: 88) in this Mozambican village since its introduction to community tourism (also known as community-based tourism). Indeed, her response suggested something that became more obvious to me over the next few months: residents of Canhane, located in the southwest corner of Mozambique, had established in their consciousness their new identitarian value in the world – the value of being a ‘developing community’ in tourism. There is an expanding body of literature that addresses the growth of both global aid and the transnational monitoring of conduct in contemporary life. Whether from the perspective of development, climate change, human rights, public health or even commodity

2  ◆  The Good Holiday

consumption, in these debates, the ‘practice of assistance’ – the extending of aid to those who have less – is based on a notion of benevolence that extends beyond borders. In this book, I explore these growing processes of translocal ethical mobilization and campaigning from an anthropological perspective. I analyse the role of destination populations and the physicality of their spaces as producers and products of a particular tourism business that operates in a global market industry. This business sells participation in community development and, in turn, commodifies the ethical dimension implied in such a participatory endeavour to international tourists. In particular, but not exclusively, I focus on a historically marginalized ‘collective’ (Latour 2007) in Mozambique. I employ a Foucauldian discourse analysis, but also critically develop a ‘performative understanding’ (Barad 2003: 802)1 of the sociomaterial dynamics generated by the inclusion of this collective in community tourism. Hence, in contrast with most of the literature on tourism, I dedicate more space to the people visited than to the visitors.2 This means that I explicitly acknowledge the decisive and consequential role of the hosts in the outcomes of tourism activity. Moreover, I bring forward the role of the sensory and ‘the sheer materiality of being there’ (Bruner 2005: 24) in the constitution and reproduction of the subjectivities that make tourism meaningful for all its participants.3 One of these subjectivities in community tourism is ethics. The commercialization of ethics in community tourism does not necessarily lessen the virtue intrinsic to the ethics themselves. As I show throughout the book, the consumption of ethics can result in a practice of meaningful self-cultivation for the tourists, while for the hosts, selling the ethics of ‘helping the local hosts’ can generate a new field of reflection, self-construction and confidence in themselves. In this way, I demonstrate how the commodifying dimension in tourism provides opportunities for the self-constitution of both tourists and hosts in moral terms. Finally, I discuss the ways in which ethical consumption, understood as a modality of participation in local development through tourism, can camouflage what is in effect an attempt to institute an industry of non-governmental governance by international actors. In this process, the advocacy for local development and benevolence energizes the transnational expansion of governance in parallel with the transnational expansion of (ethical) consumer freedom. It paves the way for the expansion of governing action through consumption. Accordingly, by promoting international responses to local rural

Introduction  ◆  3

poverty and by providing moral justification for commodity consumption abroad, community tourism can operate as a technique for converting development institutions, their professionals, and touristconsumers into agents of governance. They arrive in the ‘communities’ not as simple facilitators of development or as tourist-visitors, but as agents who can assume a governing role in these ‘communities’. As I will demonstrate, the institution of local development through tourist ethical consumption can indeed open up local populations and local resources to new forms of international governance. And this is conspicuously evident in Mozambique, a country that in the last decades has fallen into the hands of international development agencies (Negrão 2003); a country, like many other countries in the Global South, in which the vigorous contemporary re-emergence of locality is fundamentally stimulated by transnational agents (Obarrio 2010).

Meaningful Commodities and the Body in Research Over the last three decades, we have witnessed the rise of new benevolent4 trends in tourism.5 Studying these trends leads us to wider reflections, and various questions arise. Why do they develop at a particular time? What made them happen? What consequences do they have in different locations, for different people? Community tourism is one such new trend in international tourism. The organization and activities of community tourism, involving as they do mobility and local and international structures, affect the formation or reformation of subjectivities such as identity, development and ethics. More importantly, studying community tourism allows us to engage with the sociocultural and political processes that are bound up with such subjectivities. Should community tourism in rural Africa be understood as a distinct manifestation of aid? Or, as David Telfer (2012: 156) and others put it, should it be interpreted primarily as a technical programme of local empowerment in line with the alternative development paradigms that arose during the 1970s? Do intentions to help others remain ethically valid after being commercialized in the form of community tourism? Ultimately, studying community tourism allows us to investigate some of the key issues that help shape definitions of modernity, local and transnational governance, systems of power, globalization and ethics in contemporary life. What does the community tourism trend tell us about the present global system in which we live?

4  ◆  The Good Holiday

In both tourism and development industries, community tourism is commonly associated with moral worth. This is particularly evident in projects developed in rural areas in the Global South. In the African countryside, it is promoted as an opportunity for tourists to contribute to the improvement of the living conditions of the deprived populations they visit. However, behind such visions associating it with a principled, humanistic model, we should keep in mind that community tourism is basically a business. Like all businesses, it depends on the income (which can take the form of donations) that it generates to continue operating. Community tourism is contingent on the existence of ethical consumers. It depends on the market demand for responsible, conscientious tourism. It subsists, fails or grows mostly through the purchasing and selling of commodities in the tourism sphere, whether these are goods, imaginaries, services or even ideals of ‘doing the right thing’, and in order to be transactional, all these have to be commoditized. A priori, the economics at work here seem to complicate the aura of ethics surrounding the ideal of community tourism. The crucial role of money in such a model opens up doubts about its benevolent character. David Bell thought the same about ‘hospitality’: in contrast to accommodation, he says, the idea of hospitality is projected in terms of a ‘“holy trinity” of the provision of food and/ or drink and/or accommodation’. At its simplest, ‘hosts provide the “holy trinity” of hospitality for guests’ (Bell 2012: 20; see also Brotherton 1999). However, when Bell examines hospitality as an economic transaction, a service provided in the commercial domain of tourism, this leads him to questions about motive, profit and exploitation. It muddies the generosity and reciprocity supposedly inherent in the concept. The idea of buying and selling hospitality demolishes the beauty purity of this relationship between hosts and guests, he says; it reveals hospitality to be a cynical performance (Bell 2012: 22). Bell’s questions and suspicions draw on the belief that commodity consumption is, in one way or another, always implicated in broader networks of socio-economic inequality and environmental harm (Barnett et al. 2011: 6). This is a view that considers commercial practices to be inimical to the values of genuine goodwill. However, what is peculiar in community tourism is that it is precisely the commodity consumption dimension that confers ‘goodness’ on the relation between economically unequal people. It has a pivotal role in the moralization of the encounters and social relations between international tourists and their hosts (Miller 2012:

Introduction  ◆  5

184). Consumption here, as Juliet Schor and colleagues say, represents ‘a realm of intensely practical morality’ (2010: 282). If tourists do not ostensively spend their money in the disadvantaged communities that they visit and stay in, they do not gain the qualities of agents of social and economic change; simply put, they do not contribute or help. Hence, consumption in community tourism must be understood as an active and contextual process whereby the objects and subjects consumed can be made to matter (Miller 1998). In recent work, scholars have argued that commodities are given new significance and meanings through the particular ways and spaces in which they are consumed (Tilley et al. 2013). Especially among anthropologists, this view posits consumption6 as productive of subjectivity in everyday life (Douglas and Isherwood 1979; Baudrillard 1981; Bourdieu 1984; Carrier 1990; Miller 1992, 2012). This current of thought helped me to structure my analysis. Expressly relevant in this book is the study of the meanings attached to the commodities purchased. Jean Baudrillard’s notion of ‘sign value’ exemplifies this. Influenced by Thorstein Veblen’s (1899) concept of ‘conspicuous consumption’, Baudrillard claims that most North Atlantic societies are organized not around the consumption of material and immaterial commodities but around the meanings attached to them. It is through such meanings, he argues, that individuals acquire and express identity, prestige and status. Following this reasoning, I demonstrate how and why ethical consumption and the consumption of ethics in community tourism can contribute to the self-(re)constitution of tourist-consumers in ethical terms. In this process, not only can the moral worth of the tourists become a commodity, but commodities can also become moralized in community tourism. My goal is to contribute to discussions that exceed the field of tourism studies. The objective is ambitiously anthropological: to produce, as Philippe Descola says, ‘knowledge about the nature of being human’ (2013: 86) in a particular feature of contemporary global modernity – community tourism. In this endeavour, I built on a long lineage of anthropological research, especially that on development, consumption and ethics.7 I rely extensively on my research in Mozambique. This is a country with a history deeply affected by events on a global scale: Portuguese colonialism, socialism, war, democratization, decentralization and neo-liberal politico-economic opening to the ‘outside’ (e.g. Negrão 2003; Pfeiffer 2004; West 2005b; Hanlon and Smart 2008; Obarrio 2010; Igreja 2015b). At the culmination of this

6  ◆  The Good Holiday

historical path, Mozambique is now a post-colony in which its ‘local communities’ represent a value in the international realm, and therefore have or serve different sorts of power. In a sense, this book is an invitation for the reader to accompany me into the heart of one such ‘local community’: the Mozambican village of Canhane. This book is also an opportunity for the reader to access discussions, dilemmas, questions, answers and declarations that can be only collected and realized through a bodily, sensorial way of researching. As Merleau-Ponty famously put it, the ‘body is … the general instrument of comprehension’ (1962: 235). It absorbs, generates and expels knowledge. I wish it were possible to immerse you, the reader, in a cloud of red dirt, as the woman peeling marula fruits and I were, while you read the first paragraph of this introduction. I wish you could feel the 45°C heat during that paragraph, as we felt it that afternoon. I wish you could hear the contrast between the sound of the four-by-four vehicle passing us and the sound of the goats bleating afterwards. Frédéric Gros (2014: 19) says that in all too many books the reader can sense the seated, stooped body of the writer. These are books grafted to chairs and desks in academic offices because they were thought and written in such settings. In the same sarcastic tone, Annie Dillard notes, ‘Many writers do little else but sit in small rooms recalling the real world’ (1990: 44). I hope to communicate a different impression, an impression loyal to the moments of bodily movement and sensation from which this work was largely conceived and written. What I am trying to say is that, in this book, the production of knowledge is related directly to the bodily experience of the moments that originated the subjects of that knowledge. This implies the recognition of the corporeal entailments and connections in the theorizing and writing. The sometimes long and sensorial ethnographic descriptions I make of materials, events and individuals are intended to give you, the reader, some impression of the sensations that were part of the corporeal experience of those moments, of those subjects. They are an attempt to transport you mentally out of the place where you read the descriptions to the place and occasion where and when they actually happened. Ultimately, this book is an invitation for the reader to comprehend the topics of community, development, tourism, ethical consumption and governance by sharing in a sensorial sensibility that the writer gained in rural Mozambique. All forms of knowledge come from somewhere. In this sense, I want to make clear that this book is the product of an attempt at a bodily way of producing knowledge.

Introduction  ◆  7

Community Tourism and the Economies of Novelty The first project of community-based tourism in Mozambique dates back to May 2004. Although it was implemented by an international non-governmental organization (NGO), Helvetas, the ownership and responsibility for its management was attributed to the local population where the project was developed – the residents in the rural village of Canhane in southwest Mozambique. Helvetas announced this initiative as part of a scrupulous development strategy seeking to improve the well-being of the local population. Soon after the tourism project started, the village of Canhane was taken up by the development industry as a successful and exemplary case of development through tourism. In contrast to destination societies dealing with insensitive hedonistic forms of tourism, the residents of Canhane were celebrated as decision makers in their own right and not as objects of tourism exploitation. On paper, these people are proactive participants in a tourism business in which the main goal is to contribute to the improvement of their own society. The Mozambican village of Canhane became a symbol of the merits of community tourism worldwide. Tourism – in particular, mass tourism – has always generated criticism (Crick 1989). From being blamed for its harmful impacts on the environment, to being considered a threat to small-scale societies and their traditions, the word tourism has been widely used as a synonym for malignancy. In the last decades, however, tourism has become the subject of moral renovation (Pritchard, Morgan and Ateljevic 2001; Butcher 2003; Cravatte and Chabloz 2008; Fennell 2008; Jamal and Menzel 2009; Spencer 2010). There has been a massive call by the tourism sector for the incorporation of global sustainability principles and the values of assistance. This was formally expressed in Agenda 21, adopted at the 1992 United Nations Conference on Environment and Development held in Rio de Janeiro. There, 178 governments voted to adopt the program that states that ‘Travel and Tourism should assist people’ (WTTC, WTO and the Earth Council 1995: 34). A new domain of influence ascribing moral value to tourism businesses and tourists’ practices emerged. At the heart of this new approach was the campaign for the development of smallscale tourism enterprises, where local control and decision-making predominate (Wheeler 1995: 45). This movement generated a wave of new ethical tourism alternatives to the destructive format of package holidays: community tourism is one of them.

8  ◆  The Good Holiday

Although the term started to become popular during the 1990s, there is no single definition of community tourism. It is a term that remains vague and contested, despite its massive use in political, legal and development discourses. Community tourism often means different things to different people (Ndlovu and Rogerson 2003: 125; Kiss 2004: 232). Its definition has been blurred by commonplace ideas of promoting welfare for so-called rural, poor and economically marginalized populations. Yet the concept is commonly associated with principles of participation, local empowerment, economic and environmental sustainability, community well-being, self-reliance, responsible travel, gender egalitarianism, pro-poor benefits and local activism. As far back as the late 1980s, Louis Dernoi conceptualized community-based tourism as a ‘privately offered set of hospitality services (and features) … by a local community’ (in Pearce 1992: 18). Since then, a plethora of new definitions has emerged. Dallen Timothy considers it ‘a more sustainable form of development than conventional mass tourism because it allows host communities to break away from the hegemonic grasp of tour operators and the oligopoly of wealthy elites at the national level’ (2002: 150). Clearly, the idea of community tourism came to be used to evoke empathic virtues (e.g. Pearce 1992; Reid 2003; Ryan 2005; Bartholo, Delamaro and Bursztyn 2008; Mowforth and Munt 2009). It suggests a rightful mutual relationship where the tourist is not given central priority but becomes an equal participant in the system (Wearing and McDonald 2002; Salazar 2012). To put it in Latour’s terms, tourists are constituents of a ‘“We all” in the place of others’ (2004: 148). In this vein, Timothy (2002: 150) says that community tourism is about ‘grassroots empowerment’. It develops in harmony with the ‘needs and aspirations of host communities in a way that is acceptable to them, sustains their economies, rather than the economies of others, and is not detrimental to their culture, traditions or, indeed, their day-to-day convenience’ (Fitton 1996: 173). Along the same lines, to Polly Patullo and colleagues, ‘community-based tourism is where visitors stay in local homes, have a glimpse into traditional life, and most importantly, where management and benefits remain with the community’ (Patullo et al. 2009: 1). Community tourism is, of course, a domain of thought that exceeds the scholarly field. In particular, the development institutions, tourism agencies and media associated with the promotion of ideals of local economic sustainability have become central determinants in the constitution and diffusion of public definitions of

Introduction  ◆  9

community tourism. The NGO Planeterra, for example, considers it as an exclusive ‘community development strategy’.8 The travel agency Responsible Travel asserts that, in this format, ‘at least part of the tourist income is set aside for projects which provide benefits to the community as a whole’.9 Finally, for the environmental magazine EarthTalk, ‘community-based tourism generates lucrative revenues for poor or native communities in developing countries while enabling travelers usually accustomed to chain hotels and beachfront resorts to learn about traditional cultures’.10 According to these visions, the relationship between hosts and tourists in community tourism encompasses the desirability of local development. This is a model presented as introducing a range of possibilities for solving problems that other forms of development have not solved. Implicitly, too, community tourism seems to make tourists ‘better persons’; it gives them a gratifying role informed by virtue. It offers tourists the opportunity to be good by redressing economic inequalities, respecting other cultures and protecting the environment while on vacation. In a nutshell, with community tourism, ‘Tourism is no longer a dirty word’ (Tourism Concern 2009: 7). However, there is also a growing body of literature addressing the pitfalls of this model. One of the main arguments is that community tourism is a ‘neo-liberal trap’ that can encourage local populations into systems of delocalized dependency (e.g. Beeton 2006; Giampiccoli 2010). Drawing from research on tourism development projects in Kenya, Manyara and Jones say that it ‘reinforce[s] a neocolonial model, with … heavy reliance on donor funding reinforcing dependency’ (2007: 630). Along the same lines, Kirsty Blackstock (2005) addresses the three major failings of community tourism. Firstly, it takes a functional approach to community involvement; secondly, it treats host populations as homogeneous blocs; and thirdly, it neglects the structural constraints on local control of the tourism industry. More broadly, Mick Smith notes that the key problem in all the tourism formats that fit into the framework of ethical tourism – including community tourism – is that the industry’s actions behind the scenes bear little resemblance to their ethical campaigns (2013: 617). This is so, the argument continues, because of sophisticated processes by which tourism companies hide the negative aspects of their commercial activities, using various forms of image and imaginary management that include exaggerated ethical claims on the part of their businesses (Henderson 2007). Altogether, the central argument for most of the scholars criticizing community

10  ◆  The Good Holiday

tourism is that there is a lack of coherence between its underlying messages and its practices. While there is no shortage of literature advocating or disputing ethical claims in community tourism, these discussions tend to focus on case studies of ‘best practices’ or the opposite. To a lesser degree, authors have provided insights into more fundamental questions about how and why ethical values become associated with community tourism; or how tourists’ ethical and developmental attributes might come to be recognized in community tourism. The crucial question that needs to be answered is this: what places community tourism in the fields of ethics and local development at all?

Community Tourism: Development in Tourism In the popular discourse of our times, the classification area of the Global South bears the markers of weakness, shortage and underdevelopment (Escobar 1995; Mbembe 2001; Ferguson 2006). In practice, this means the Global South has the character of a social and material terrain that needs to be developed. More than any other region in the Global South, says Achile Mbembe, ‘Africa stands out as the supreme receptacle of the West’s obsession with, and circular discourse about, the facts of “absence”, “lack”, and “non-being”’ (2001: 4). Africa is the field of development par excellence. The spread of associations between the African continent and incompleteness in the public domain is part of the global political understanding that the world is made up of two unequal halves – the wealthy North and the wanting South – and furthermore, that one half needs to be helped by the other half. This assumption, premised upon a binary ‘donor’ vs. ‘beneficiary’ logic, underpins international development. In the background, however, there are a myriad of ideological scripts encouraging, implicitly or explicitly, such a perception of the world. The most convincing and effective of these scripts originate from the offices of international development organizations (Ferguson 1994). Development rationale cultivates mainstream assumptions of what constitutes a ‘developed’ and ‘developing’ society through hierarchies of values, statistical charts and commensurable indexes of life (Escobar 1984). It is precisely the efficacy of this rationale in promoting a normative reading of the world that assigns Africa to a special state of insufficiency (Mbembe 2001). This rationale and its scripts help to produce a global perception of Africa’s reality in such a way that the continent becomes an open field for the exercising of the authority of international development.

Introduction  ◆  11

Of course, these arguments are not new. There is a vast body of illuminating literature that critically addresses the strategies of development, aid and humanitarian intervention.11 Among other scholars, Arturo Escobar, James Ferguson, Charles Piot, Didier Fassin, Tania Li, Gilbert Rist, David Mosse, Gustavo Esteva, Majid Rahnema, Wolfgang Sachs, Serge Latouche and Fabrizio Sabelli have all made valuable contributions in this domain, namely in the so-called postdevelopment theory. But by bringing up these broad perspectives on the character of development rationale, I want to call attention to one of its ramifications: community tourism. Indeed, for the majority of scholars and activists focused on this tourism model, and despite the variety of definitions of community tourism, there is a single aspect on which all seem to agree: community tourism derives from the development industry. As Scarlett Cornelissen says, ‘The theoretical premises of community tourism have a long history, originating from the participatory and empowerment development models that emerged as a new paradigm in development discourse in the 1970s’ (2005: 21). Hence, it is no surprise that international aid agencies are increasingly encouraging and financing NGOs to promote and implement such a concept in the areas rhetorically and symbolically located in the southern, deprived half of the world. As the director of the NGO monitoring community tourism in the Mozambican village of Canhane once told me, ‘Now all the funders, NGOs and communities want community tourism in Africa: it’s the new fashion here.’ One of the most common ways of talking about community tourism is by associating it with the attempt to free local populations from inequality and poverty. Revealingly, this is the very same association usually made to justify, or to legitimize, development interventions. As Björn Hettne says, development ‘has changed in everything except its normative concern with emancipation from inequality and poverty’ (2002: 11). The forces supporting the relevance of the industry of development in the Global South are, to a great extent, the same forces campaigning for community tourism in that region. These are the forces that pushed for the universalization of codes of conduct in tourism, as was evidenced in the famous publication Global Code of Ethics for Tourism by the World Tourism Organization in 1999. And these are the same forces that help push the subjects of poverty and inequality into the tourism industry, transforming these subjects into the products and attractions that need to be helped through tourists’ visits.

12  ◆  The Good Holiday

Community tourism was born from these forces and, therefore, is often accompanied by moralistic assertions, such as ‘Leave the world a better place’ (Sustainable Travel International), ‘Your holiday can make a big difference’ (community-based-tourism.org), ‘Give Sustainability a Local Flair’ (Tourism Intelligence Network), ‘Travel with a cause’ (Ecoteer), ‘Towards a new culture of peace and sustainability’ (Tribal Travel) or ‘Fighting poverty, protecting biodiversity’ (United Nations Volunteers). In community tourism, statements of morality and approval come from various spheres. In May 2015, European Union ambassador to Swaziland, Nicola Bellomo, made the grand claim that ‘community tourism is beneficial to the traveler and destination. It takes development to the grassroots and has great potential to alleviate poverty in rural communities’.12 The language used to refer to tourists in community tourism is that of social development workers rather than holidaymakers. In such a way, international tourists are conceptualized beyond fun, relaxation and hedonism: they are crusaders against poverty and inequality. Although community tourism is a product of ‘developmentality’ (Deb 2009), there is not only one singular power behind it. Community tourism is the result of various forces. At the large scale, however, I argue that community tourism has emerged mainly through a process of convergence between two previously differentiated spheres of activity and interests: it is where the forces of development and tourism overlap each other’s domains. The agency generated by the interaction and alliance between these two industries helps to produce a new singular and powerful industry in its own right: the industry of novel development solutions to touristified old problems. I refer to this hybrid industry, in which the strategies, activities and goals of development and tourism are the same, as developmentourism. Developmentourism represents a different phenomenon from ‘development tourism’ (Salazar 2004; Spencer 2010). As I explain more thoroughly in Chapter 3, development tourism is fundamentally about a certain type of tour and touring – the so-called exposure trips or development-oriented tours. The tourists that take these tours remain ‘tourists’, and the international development professionals that work in the areas toured, or that plan, organize or coordinate such tours remain official development representatives. Now, in developmentourism, this distinction is radically blurred. Developmentourism involves the absolute blending of the two domains of activity into each other: development is tourism, and tourism is development. In this way, not only are tourists’ motivations and actions fused with

Introduction  ◆  13

development work, but the professional undertakings of development employees are also indistinguishable from tourist activities. I contend that developmentourism is the industry that bolsters community tourism. From the marketing point of view, such a hybrid industry lives through its constant communication of the problems of small-scale societies, and the promotion of new delocalized solutions to those problems. It is through the diffusion of local problems and the potential ability of development professionals and international tourists to solve them that certain populations are constituted as developing communities in community tourism, which in turn allows them to simultaneously gain the status of both development and tourism protagonists; that is, they become useful or valuable assets in the sphere of developmentourism.

Community Tourism: Benevolence in Tourism Community tourism as a morally superior alternative to the package holiday necessitates no less critical evaluation than any other contemporary form of human activity. Of particular importance, for example, is the way in which the ‘empowered’ hosts create, adapt to, apprehend and appropriate tourists’ demands. In what way do these people project themselves into the collective role of being a ‘developing community’ in tourism? On the part of the tourists, one could wonder what motivates them to engage in and spend money on community development during their leisure time abroad. What or who mobilizes these individuals to incorporate the role of assistants to distant Others? It is often said that we inhabit an increasingly mobile and interconnected world, in which peoples, ideas, imaginaries and materials flow physically and virtually in time and space. Actually, the world as it is known today exists as evidence of the fact that people and ideas travel (Jamal and Robinson 2012: 3). Basic human needs, such as finding food and shelter, guided most early patterns of travel. In a later stage, trade, escaping natural phenomena like floods or droughts, and military conquest and conflict also played central roles in human travel. Although migration today continues to be largely influenced by the quest for nourishment and safety, in the last five decades or so, ‘having fun and relaxing’ have become conspicuous forces stimulating transnational human mobility. At the end of this sequence, in more recent times, another motive for travelling became popular: benevolence.

14  ◆  The Good Holiday

By benevolence, I refer to the pursuit of value for the self in such a way that it may also be of potential benefit of others. At the general level, it means a commitment to a policy of moral action for living in society with others. This does not imply the existence of benevolent totalities in the world. What constitutes and counts as benevolence varies depending on time, location, situation, context and experience – benevolence is not singular but plural. At the micro level, benevolence involves an individual’s purposive acts, or inclination to act, to further her/his moral self-enrichment by benefiting others. In this regard, I find David Hume’s ([1751] 1998) moral philosophy particularly relevant in my analysis of the politics of benevolence in community tourism. Hume related benevolence to the origins of morality and, in contrast to Kant, he did not see benevolent action as necessarily motivated by obligation or duty. For Hume, the lack of duty in, for example, a charitable act is what attributes the virtue of benevolence to that act. Accordingly, going on vacation is not a duty, and neither is humanitarian behaviour while on holidays. Indeed, holidays are commonly associated with the opposite of duty. They are a period of time devoted to pleasure or relaxation, a break from the constraints of obligations. This is why people’s meritorious practices during this period of a ‘break from it all’ are especially related to benevolence. These are optional practices and for that reason, at least in public and strategic discourses, they can gain the character of benevolence. From the satisfaction of basic human needs to the pursuit of self-cultivation by acting benevolently towards distant others, the motivations underlining the history of human travel are vast (e.g. Cohen 1972; Crompton 1979; Dann 1981; Gnoth 1997; George 2001; Venkatesh 2006). This variety of motivations opens the door for new fields of inquiry and reasoning. Robert Fletcher (2014), for example, suggests that the recent increase in participation in rigorous and strenuous ecotourism activities resonates with the cultural values of upper-middle-class Westerners, who constitute the majority of ecotourists. According to Fletcher, typical characteristics in ecotourism’s outdoor activities, such as the delay of gratification, determination through suffering and willingness to assume risks, reproduce the faculties originally cultivated to further individual professional success in North-Atlantic societies. Indeed, we should not forget a simple but fundamental premise: the practices and structures of travelling are indicative of the social, economic, historical and material contexts from which the demand for them emerges.

Introduction  ◆  15

Following this perspective, the contemporary emergence of community tourism in ‘the South’ should be interpreted, among other sources, within the politics of travel and benevolence in the tourists’ own societies. Whether referred to as ‘moral tourists’ (Butcher 2003), travellers, visitors, ‘new tourists’ (Poon 1993), ‘guests’ (Smith 1989), ‘justice tourists’ (Pezzullo 2007), ‘political tourists’ (Moynagh 2008) or even friends, all these individuals who travel and spend their time and money in community-based lodges are, nonetheless, consumers. What makes these tourist-consumers more responsible, more ethical than other tourists travelling to the casinos in Las Vegas or the sun in Majorca is their explicit willingness to participate in the solution of problems in the societies they visit with their consuming behaviour. In practice, they express goodness through commodity consumption. They embody the righteousness of action by consuming for the ‘significant Other’. Under this view, and in contrast to the destructive character commonly attributed to tourism (e.g. Nash 1977; Crick 1989), tourists visiting Canhane in Mozambique are not seen as irresponsible hedonists. Rather, they are celebrated for their benign character. Hence, it is possible to integrate Canhane into a contemporary way of vacationing that implicitly links tourists to the well-being of societies ‘in need’. To put it differently, community tourism in the Mozambican village of Canhane is part of a more general trend in tourists’ North-Atlantic societies. This is a trend that connects consumption behaviour with the lives of Others – tourists can engage in moral action and ‘make a difference’ through their informed, conscious decisions about where and of what to consume while vacationing. The webs of meaning that associate such consumption decisions with an ethics of benevolence are critically analysed in this book.

Community Tourism: Consuming (as) Self-Cultivation Since its origin, and regardless of the variety of forms that it takes, community tourism has been associated with alternative development approaches concerned with issues beyond strict economic reasoning (e.g. Telfer 2012). More critically, however, one could say that it descends from a system that generates market novelties. Besides deriving from the international development industry, this is a system in line also with the economies of production and consumption in North-Atlantic societies. These economies are mostly fuelled by the constant replacement of what is no longer new – a

16  ◆  The Good Holiday

continual renovation and renewal which both Joseph Schumpeter and Friedrich Nietzsche called ‘creative destruction’. Among other authors, Zygmunt Bauman (2008) says that the structural engine driving North-Atlantic economies, where most of international ethical tourists originate, is the pursuit of gratification through the purchasing of tangible and intangible things. Without the continuous production and acquisition of commodities, the gross national product (GNP), which is the official index of collective well-being, is low. This tells us why today’s poorer class, at least in capitalist societies, is made up of non-consumers. Certainly, societies energized through commodity consumption depend on humans’ cyclical dissatisfaction, rather than fulfilment, with their possessions and situation. This, in turn, leads to humans’ continual search for solutions to their dissatisfaction in the market. Colin Campbell calls it the ‘cycle of desire-acquisition-use-disillusionment-renewed desire’ (1987: 90), and identifies ‘insatiability’ as ‘the most characteristic feature of modern consumption’ (37). Following this reasoning, a main argument developed in this book is that the consumption of vacation experiences in the community tourism’s form in Canhane, as in most ‘elsewheres’ in the Global South, is part of the tourist-consumer quest for a new moralized ‘I’. This relates to a mode of being-in-the-world – Heidegger’s (1996) Dasein – that encourages the individual to conceptualize herself/ himself as a project that needs to be continuously improved and developed. It therefore entails a strong emphasis on self-actualization, an injunction to fully engage in life by spending time and money improving oneself (Fletcher 2014: 66) – always becoming, rather than being (Bauman 2008: 13). Community tourism is often an opportunity for tourists engaging in projects of social change abroad. However, while allowing the moralization of tourism (Butcher 2003), community tourism also provides the conditions for tourists to reform their own selves. Taking part in community tourism is more meaningful than simply going on vacation. It is a moral event in which the act of consuming ‘for others’ can work also as a way for the consumer to acquire – even provisionally, as most of all gratifications in the commodity world are provisional – a moral ‘I’. Tourism activity has been widely mentioned as an opportunity for individuals to remove themselves from their everyday routines and social pressures where they live (e.g. MacCannell 1973; Turner and Turner 1978; Graburn 1983; Leed 1991). What has been less explored is how tourism can be used as a way for individuals to

Introduction  ◆  17

reformulate themselves; resorted to as a means to be ‘born again’, morally; or, to build upon Regina Bendix’s words, as ‘central to the project of be[com]ing human’ (2002: 472). In this book, I further explore this view. I analyse the production, embodiment and diffusion of moral strategies in tourism activity as part of a project of becoming human, or rather, becoming humane. I develop the argument that the ethical register associated with community-based tourism is the product of the campaign of a large-scale industry that sells solutions to both local social problems in the Global South and existential ethical crises in ‘the North’. In practice, these solutions are about the making of horizons of hope for the local populations, and the production of commodities of self-cultivation and spiritual elevation for the international tourist-consumers. Although I specifically consider the village of Canhane, community tourism is a phenomenon that goes far beyond the local scale and the blending of development with tourism. As already addressed, analysing community tourism, as I propose to do here, allows us to engage with the progressive politics of individuals’ self-making, as well as with questions of hope, representation, social and economic development, ethics/morality, non-governmental governance, and transnational systems of power in the contemporary world. My last and fundamental wish is that the information and reasoning presented in this book will be inspiring to the reader and will add ‘something else’ to our knowledge about the variety of ways, possibilities and politics implied in the quest for the ‘humanely human’ in contemporary life.

Contextualizing Knowledge The world and the realities that inhabit it are subjective and relational. Academic articles, reports and books should be considered in terms of this reasoning. They come from somewhere and are created by someone. In particular, anthropology acquired its historical legitimacy from ‘being there’, in the sense that the researcher witnesses and assumes an active role in the subjects of study. There is no passivity here: the personal characteristics of the anthropologist are inevitably and actively implied in the type of information produced and, therefore, are integral to the outcomes of the research. What comes to be anthropological knowledge is nothing more than a version of reality provisionally determined by specific methods in which the body and background of the researcher matter.

18  ◆  The Good Holiday

That said, the most credible and honest way I know to present this book is to relate the way the information and knowledge that support it were produced, and to disclose any personal idiosyncrasies that may have helped or hindered in this process. Familiarizing the reader with the ethnographer may help diminish the aura of mysticism that often hovers over the idea of fieldwork, and can demonstrate how problematic such a process can be. Thus, the condition of introducing the figure of the researcher and first-person descriptions into the text goes beyond style. Rather, it is a matter of validity that involves the partial view through which knowledge is created, namely through someone’s experience. In January 2008, when I was on my way to the town of Chókwè in a chapa (the most common public form of transportation in Mozambique, the Toyota Hiace), I initiated a fruitful conversation with a woman in the seat next to me. She had lived for two years in Massingir, which was the district where I would eventually establish myself. She introduced me to some of the characteristics of the region. Other people inside the van started participating in the conversation, sharing the names of people they knew who could be useful for my work. The driver also joined in. He heard me say that I was living in Germany, so he commented about how good the Germans are for the Mozambicans. He drew a parallel with what he called the ‘colonists’, saying that, in contrast to the Germans, the ‘colonists’ still think of Mozambique as their colony and not as an independent country. He was referring to the Portuguese. The driver continued with this topic, always in a critical way, until he asked me if I knew Portuguese people in Germany. I then announced myself as Portuguese. The interior of the van, containing some sixteen people, became instantly silent. The lively and informative talk we had been having up to this point was replaced by expressions of embarrassment, and the next hour and a half of travel was mostly silent. By revealing my nationality, I had eliminated any chance of continuing the conversation and, perhaps, accessing more important information, as I had been until that point (although the collective reaction to my nationality can be interpreted as important information in itself). The environment in the chapa was suggestive of what I could expect for the next year in southwest Mozambique. Indeed, I was about to establish myself in the interior of the province of Gaza, which was one of the regions in the country most resistant to Portuguese hegemony (Liesegang 2007) and, according to various scholars, the heart of the ‘Shangaan sense of superiority’ (Lubkemann 2005: 501).

Introduction  ◆  19

A Portuguese person in the countryside of southwest Mozambique is not neutral, and can inspire extremes; as I was told once, admitting to being Portuguese can stimulate sentiments of both love and hate from the residents. The knowledge of my nationality might have limited my access to certain topics, inhibited the sharing of views on specific issues, increased suspicion about my long-term presence in the countryside, and even contributed to perceptions of me as a sort of ‘colonial’ spy. What I want to make clear here is that, as a Portuguese anthropologist, announcing neutrality in a Lusophone postcolonial setting is not acceptable; being Portuguese in Mozambique inevitably affects the politics of fieldwork and, in turn, the construction of knowledge. The main region where I conducted research is highly patriarchal, showing strong gender-based structural differences. As a man, I occupied a position in the social structure of the village of Canhane that a woman researcher could never attain, in the same way that a woman researcher could access and generate information that I never could. The fundamental intimacy of face-to-face research in the village was shaped by the local gender order. Hence, regardless of my effort to accomplish a pluralistic perspective and represent multiple voices, a disproportion in gender perspectives exists, and therefore the female voice is somewhat less prominent in this book. In contrast to the coastal area of Mozambique, being branco (white), as I used to be called by random people, in the inner east region of the province of Gaza is not discreet. Among other aspects, being branco carries implications of excessive public attention with regard to one’s behaviour. This enormous interest in one person’s individuality can obviously affect the productivity of fieldwork, particularly by fostering a sort of chronic, long-term psychological fatigue, diminishing the capacity to maintain tactful and emphatic behaviour so commonly identified as essential qualities in ‘the field’. Finally, with regard to myself as ‘tourist’: to approach tourism through the lens of anthropology implies dealing with one of the biggest threats to the legitimacy that derives from anthropology’s methodology; a methodology founded in the idea of ‘getting close to people and making them feel comfortable’ with that (Bernard 2006: 342). Anthropologists have long pointed out the similarities between their empirical work and tourists’ activities. Sidney Mintz, for example, referred to anthropologists as ‘serious tourists’ (1977: 59-60), Pierre van den Berghe ‘in-depth tourists’ (1980: 370), and Jean-Paul Dumont ‘sophisticated tourists’ (1977: 224). Of course, this association is even more loudly voiced outside the discipline.

20  ◆  The Good Holiday

Geographer Jim Butcher, for example, goes a step further and says that the field of ‘New Tourism is a little like amateur anthropology’ (2000: 46). While, in the popular arena, anthropology seems to have succeeded in divorcing itself from colonialism (Lewis 1973), in the last decades, however, it has gained a new partner: tourism. More subtle than before, this new coupling raises unvoiced concerns within the profession about what anthropology is and where it is headed (Wolf 1980). Arguably, the growing spread of the equivalence between anthropology and tourism may justify why anthropologists, in particular those that conduct fieldwork in regions popularly known as tourist destinations, continually confront and defend their professional status against the image of the tourist. In fact, over the years, whether in conferences, small workshops or private conversations, I have noticed numerous manifestations of this anxiety about legitimacy in my fellow anthropologists. So far, this is a largely confused subject because it is about the construction and demarcation of a status by anthropologists themselves – the self-proclaimed non-tourists. By saying this, I do not want to trivialize its relevance. For example, a great percentage of the anthropology students coming to my Anthropology of Tourism seminar are in search of such clarification. They are concerned with their anthropologist-selves, and resort to my seminar to find convincing arguments that they can use to soothe their identitarian embarrassment. What has become evident for me is that most of them feared tourists, as they represent something close to what the anthropology students idealize as their professional lives, while at the same time also representing what they as anthropologists should never become. Let me give a concrete example from the classroom that, I believe, illustrates to a great extent the politics of distinction, not only by anthropology students but even more markedly by established anthropologists, in relation to the tourists. At some point in the seminar, I assign a task to my students in which they have to play a role. I divide the class into two different groups: long-term tourists interested in local culture travelling to a certain region, and anthropologists travelling to the same region during the same period of time for fieldwork research. In the second half of the class, each group presents what they intend to do in order to pursue their goals. The results are often uncomfortably enlightening. Basically, both ‘tourists’ and ‘anthropologists’ do the same things. The difference comes from the labels they attribute to what they do. I find this revealing because it illustrates accurately many of the discussions I have with

Introduction  ◆  21

other anthropologists researching tourism. What the outcomes of this exercise reveal – even, I suggest, beyond the classroom – is that the specialized labels used by the group of ‘anthropologists’ to represent their ethnographic methods are no more than a conspicuous attempt to claim difference from the ‘tourists’. To clarify my position, the differences that might exist between anthropologists and tourists do not come from the posture or methods employed in ‘the field’, but depend rather on what one does or makes with the information acquired and produced while there. This book is the product of my own making. In this vein, I believe it materializes the result of my stay in the village of Canhane in such a way that it can be considered anthropological.

Book Overview Tourism, development and the Mozambican village of Canhane (its residents and materials) constitute the backbone that binds together all the chapters in this book. Yet I extend the themes and space of discussion further than these in order to accomplish cross-cultural comparative perspectives. This approach reflects my general belief that a critical analysis of an array of subjects and multilocal angles, together with an assessment of the global forces at work, provide the clearest route towards the anthropological understanding of what makes people who they are, and of the hows, whats and whys of their aspirations. I make use of discourses, ideologies, performances and sensorial dispositions implicated in the production of new sites of meaning. I analyse these productions and sites of meaning mostly through the study of the agency generated by the blending of development with tourism. Finally, the arguments presented here draw upon fourteen months of fieldwork undertaken by me in Mozambique, mainly in the village of Canhane, between 2006 and 2008.13 In each chapter, I focus on a different theme. Each of these is marked by ethnography and theoretical specificity. In the next section, Chapter 1, I introduce the reader to the village of Canhane, through what is basically an ethnographic descriptive account of the implementation of community-based tourism in the village. Critical discussions of community tourism are not explicitly part of this initial section of the book. This chapter, however, is essential to provide a factual context to serve as the basis for the theorizing in the book.

22  ◆  The Good Holiday

Community tourism is a practice of vacationing that helps to constitute situated realities and delocalized subjectivities, according to which people can strategize about themselves and others. Although this might seem obvious, it is worth emphasizing that the starting point for any community-based tourism is the demarcation of a specific group of people as ‘the community’. What makes a community in tourism? Why is the concept of community used in the way that it is? Not surprisingly, the discussion around the concept of the concept of community suggests an analysis that extends beyond the field of tourism. Accordingly, Chapter 2 is an attempt to deconstruct the meanings of community as one of the most conspicuous categories to have emerged since ethics became a determinant in tourism. I demonstrate that in development, in tourism, and in the industry that results from the blending of the two, the particular ways in which ‘community’ is evoked help to promote and constitute specialized economies of performance. Declarations of community also serve to cultivate certain expectations and imaginaries in the tourists’ minds, specifically related to ideals of purity, harmony and escapism, to the exclusion of other possible ones. Ultimately, in Chapter 2, I focus on the nature of the meanings of community in community tourism and explore their consequences. In Chapter 3, I take a comparative approach between two villages in Mozambique: Canhane and Mbueca. The starting point for the discussion is the strategic representations of tourists as protagonists of assistance in the two societies. The ways such representations are locally produced and reproduced reflect something broader: the emerging interlaced relationship between the development and tourism industries. I introduce the concept of developmentourism in this section. As in many other destination societies in the Global South, in the villages of Canhane and Mbueca, development and tourism are merged into one singular practice. This is a practice that exceeds the meanings conveyed in the familiar concepts available to characterize either development or tourism practices. The concept of developmentourism captures the undifferentiated character of this hybrid industry, and this is empirically supported by the residents’ representations of the international tourists as donors and the international donors as tourists. I analyse the broader economic and moral order informing the local politics of representation in destination societies and the ascent of worldwide developmentourism. Chapter 4 is about a dilemma motivated by the allocation of tourism benefits in the village of Canhane. I discuss the role of space and infrastructure in ordering the social, and how efforts at

Introduction  ◆  23

development and ‘community empowerment’ through tourism can prompt local conflicts. The spotlight is on water supply. With profound water shortages persisting in the village, the local residents decided to invest revenue generated through the community tourism business in a water supply system. Since its completion, however, the village has experienced contradictory social upheaval. Although the water system is functioning, in practice it is not being used. In this chapter, I address the reasons behind the water supply paradox in Canhane. I hope to transmit what I felt while experiencing the enigma of water use in the village: a paradox that seemed to require a detective of social causes to unravel residents’ neglect of what they most wanted. Chapter 5 proceeds from the conclusions of the previous chapter. This is one of the most ethnographic sections in the entire book. The contradictory outcomes of the water supply situation in Canhane, as discussed before, are analysed in a different way, specifically through the practice of a tourist walking tour. I explore the role of immediate sensation in the knowledge that results from tourists’ participation in that tour. I try to lead the reader through this walking tour, as it is sold in the community tourism lodge in the village. I then discuss the processes and the underlining logic leading to the institutionalization of ordinary places, materials and people as tourist attractions. My goal here is to explore why the inoperable water tank, installed by the residents with the money generated by the local tourism venture, has become the tourists’ most visited sight. While digging deeper into the hidden nature of community tourism, this chapter is ultimately an analysis of the regulation principle of walking tours and of the sensory in tourism activity. In this spirit, I address the tourist subject as a sensing subject. I argue that tourists’ ethical meanings in Canhane reside not only in the so-recognized power of the gaze and representation in tourism, but fundamentally in direct sensing. In Chapter 6, I show how the residents of the village of Canhane have adopted and put into practice the principle that their development and tourism value relies on them being poor. I conceptualize poverty as a strategic and technocratic category invested as a field of developmentourism intervention as well as a category of potential integration for local residents. I think of ‘potential’ here as a condition in its own right, which makes things happen, and not as something inconsequential, lying somewhere between what does not exist and what might come to pass. From this perspective, I analyse the production of both subject-problems and their solutions. Finally, I

24  ◆  The Good Holiday

reason about the role of such a production in ethical tourist consumption. To demonstrate my point, I go beyond Canhane and community tourism, and I engage in case studies of slum tourism in the Global South. Finally, Chapter 7 is the most conclusive. Here, I explore the role of tourist moral agency in governing. Community tourism in Canhane is the effect of a capitalist expansion in which ethics, development and governance are conflated with tourists’ consumption. I demonstrate in this final section that the commodifying logic emerging from the presence of tourists in the village derives primarily from three subjects: tourists’ self-aspirations, residents’ ambition to integrate into extensive webs of opportunity, and the politicization of virtue stimulated by the developmentourism industry. This chapter shows how the cultivation of ethics through tourism consumption has become an ally for the exercise of non-governmental governance over public spheres. This book results from seven years of discussions, reflections and commitment. It is also a product of personal perseverance and, most of all, enjoyment, and I hope the reader also enjoys it. I did not write it only for anthropologists, but for all those dedicated to considering the world as it is now and ourselves within it. In other words, although I approach the world we live in mostly through the lens of community tourism, this book is fundamentally a reflection of what make people simultaneously subjects and objects, governors and the governed, self and Other in it.

Notes  1. In consonance with Karen Barad, by ‘performative understanding’ I mean an understanding not limited to the representationalist power of words. ‘Performativity,’ Barad says, ‘is precisely a contestation of the excessive power granted to language to [understand and, thus,] determine what is real’ (2003: 802). Hence, this implies the recognition of the nonrepresentational capacities and efficacious powers of material configurations (Bennett 2010: ix) and sensorial grasp in the process of understanding.  2. For a similar approach see, for example, Brennan (2004), EvansPritchard (1989), Stronza (2007) and Theodossopoulos (2014).  3. By subjectivities, I mean three interrelated phenomena: (a) humans’ ways of perceiving, thinking, feeling, understanding and aspiring; (b) the

Introduction  ◆  25

ideas, realities, values and truths that these generate; and (c) the broader forces that produce and organize them – these forces may be cultural, social, political or material. In this sense, subjectivities are necessarily ‘dynamically formed and transformed’ (Biehl, Good and Kleinman 2007: 10), as well as always unfinished and unfinishable. They are inherent to both ways of being and means of governance. Yet, as João Biehl and colleagues say, subjectivities are more than ‘just the outcome of social control or the unconscious’; they also provide ‘the ground for subjects to think through their circumstances’ (2007: 14).   4. Here and throughout the book, I do not refer to benevolence uncritically, as an absolute equivalent to kindness, altruism or generosity. Benevolence is not free of strategies and politics, and therefore it can serve political and economic interests. As the reader will understand more comprehensively during the series of events and arguments that I narrate and explain in the next seven chapters, I do not approach benevolence as an independent intuitive structure of feeling. Rather, I consider benevolence as a performative inclination or behaviour that can be structured and even deliberately governed by broader interests and forces. Hence, when I argue that we are now witnessing an unprecedented emergence of benevolent trends in tourism, I obviously do not intend to imply that these are absolute and unproblematic modes of goodness.   5. There is a growing body of literature in this domain. See, for example, Butcher (2003, 2007), Macbeth (2005), Cravatte and Chabloz (2008), Fennell (2008), Higgins-Desboilles and Russell-Mundine (2008), Jamal and Menzel (2009), Mowforth and Munt (2009), Butcher and Smith (2010, 2015), Pritchard, Morgan and Ateljevic (2011), Scheyvens (2011), McCabe, Minnaert and Diekmann (2012), McGehee (2012) and Mostafanezhad and Hannam (2014).   6. Although the term consumption can be referred to the use of non-commodified goods (Hugh-Jones 1995; Wilk 2004), I use it in relation to commodities (e.g. Miller 1995).  7. Among other anthropologists and works, these have an explicit and significant impact in my argumentation: on development, Escobar (1988, 1995), Ferguson (1994, 2006), Mosse (2005, 2013), Li (2007b) and Rottenburg (2009); on consumption, Douglas and Isherwood (1979), Baudrillard (1981), Bourdieu (1984), Carrier (1990), Wilk (2001), Graeber (2011) and Miller (1992, 2012); and on ethics, Robbins (2004), Lambek (2010), Fassin (2011), Faubion (2011) and Zigon (2014).   8. http://www.planeterra.org/pages/community_based_tourism/37.php, accessed 19 May 2010.   9. http://www.responsibletravel.com/Copy/Copy901197.htm, accessed 19 May 2010. 10. http://www.divinecaroline.com/33/55728-community-based-tourismbrings-experience#ixzz25lW97DeZ, accessed 8 August 2012.

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11. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, the relationship between anthropology and development was redefined. There was a fundamental shift from applied forms of ‘development anthropology’ to a more detached ‘anthropology of development’. The latter implied an explicit focus on the very institutions and forms of knowledge through which ideas of development were produced. Therefore, from initially being regarded as a self-evident process, development began to be understood as an ‘invention’ and as the means by which its supposed superiority was tautologically reproduced. This shift motivated anthropologists to question the apparatus that was ‘doing’ the development (see Yarrow and Venkatesan 2012: 3). 12. http://www.observer.org.sz/business/73090-private-sector-must-steertourism-initiatives-eu.html, accessed 4 June 2015. 13. In this book, I do not use pseudonyms nor do I refer to the names of the participants. However, there are passages in which who I refer to is obvious, as for example with the community leader of a village or the head of an NGO. In these cases, the acknowledgement of their social or professional positions is important for the arguments at stake. Yet all the people I interacted with and who I quote or simply mention were aware of my research and they authorized me to use our conversations and any photos in which they might be pictured for the purposes of my writings.

1 Introducing Tourism Canhane

At the beginning of 2001, the Swiss director of the NGO Helvetas in Maputo went to the city of Nelspruit in South Africa. Nelspruit is commonly used by the new postcolonial elites living in the capital of Mozambique as a place to escape to. The cities are connected by nearly 200 kilometres of prime asphalt. In Nelspruit, the abundance of shiny shopping centres and offices of international organizations in the downtown area is the main attribute that captivates, in particular, the expatriates living in southern Mozambique. While there, the Helvetas director consulted the periodic South African journal of the United States Agency for International Development (USAID). The journal included a discreet announcement of the awarding of grants for so-called community development in the surrounding region of the Limpopo National Park in southwest Mozambique. ‘The content of USAID’s announcement was very generic. It only mentioned the area of implementation – a vast area, though’, one of the staff working for Helvetas confirmed to me in September 2006. Soon after the Swiss director returned to Maputo, he urged an internal working group to prepare an application for the funds. ‘He came back from Nelspruit very awakened,’ a security guard at the Helvetas offices recalled. The enthusiasm that radiated from him was prompted by more than just the possibility of new funds for the NGO. The Swiss director saw an opening to a world of opportunities for Helvetas if they succeeded with their application. As I became aware through the numerous conversations I had with the NGO professionals in 2008, USAID’s announcement meant an

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incentive for the NGO to extend its work, its authority and the ethos of community development into southwest Mozambique. The targeted region has a special character. It lies in the buffer zone of a transfrontier conservation area named Great Limpopo Transfrontier Park (GLTP). This is a zone which in the last decades has been projected and considered, at least politically, in a transnational fashion.1 It was officially proclaimed a conservation area on 10 November 2000 by the Ministers of the Environment of three neighbouring countries: South Africa, Zimbabwe and Mozambique. They signed a document authorizing the incorporation of South African’s Kruger National Park, Zimbabwe’s Gonarezhou National Park and Mozambique’s Limpopo National Park into one single transfrontier conservation area of approximately 35,000 square kilometres. According to the official information provided by the park, ‘The Great Limpopo Transfrontier Park will be a world-class ecotourism destination … managed to optimize benefits for sustainable economic development of local communities and biodiversity conservation’ (Hohl et al. 2015: 46). The GLTP was initially launched in the 1990s through Anton Rupert’s personal initiative. Rupert2 was a wealthy South African philanthropist, conservationist and tobacco magnate whose multiple business ventures included tourism. He was a founding member and the former president of World Wildlife Fund (WWF) South Africa (then called the Southern African Nature Foundation). It was Rupert who initiated talks with the Mozambican government and involved the World Bank in the conservation border initiative. During this lobbying process, the region gained the status of possibility, a horizon of ecological and social potential to be realized under the auspices of development and tourism. The envisioned future of a transnational geography that appeared to embody morality persuaded various international institutions and corporations to financially support the GLTP initiative.3 The USAID announcement that captivated the Swiss director in Maputo was part of this trend. Officially, the GLTP is rooted in a field of benevolence ‘beyond boundaries’ (Spierenburg, Steenkamp and Wels 2008: 87). On the surface, it was born and operates under the aura of ecological concern and general goodwill. This is revealed through the formal rhetoric that accompanies it, namely the ‘promotion of cooperation and peaceful relations between member countries’ (Lunstrum 2013: 3). The institutional name of the park reinforces it: ‘Peace Park’. Accordingly, the most prominent ‘non-profit’ institution in charge of the GLTP describes the park in this way: ‘the establishment and

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development of [the GLTP] is … an African success story that will ensure peace, prosperity and stability for generations to come.’4 Furthermore, the association of the GLTP with (supposedly) universal qualities is conspicuous in public discourses and public events related to the park. For example, at a ceremony to celebrate the relocation of twenty-five elephants from South Africa to Mozambique in the GLTP, Nelson Mandela said, ‘I know of no political movement, no philosophy, no ideology, which does not agree with the peace parks concept as we see it going into fruition today. It is a concept that can be embraced by all.’5 For Louis D’Amore, the righteous character of the GLTP derives from an ideology ‘of peace [that is based on] the perspective of an organic and interconnected world’ (1994: 113). Indeed, the aura of virtue hovering over the park seems to stem from the promises that transnational integration, mobility and connectivity represent in the universal modern sensibility. In his extensive ethnography of the GLTP’s implementation, David Hughes participated in various workshops and meetings where, he says, ‘ecologists spoke repeatedly of the need for … “connectivity”’ (2005: 169), which they linked to a more virtuous ‘future government’ in the region (172). All things considered, in this discourse of grace, promise and transnational circulation, tourism and the tourists emerge as the natural supporters and allies of the GLTP. And so, the industry of tourism becomes seen as an industry of peace and brotherhood in the region (Khamouna and Zeiger 1995: 86; Litvin 1998: 63). What had begun as a modest scheme for groups of smallholder farmers and herders to benefit from tourism (Hughes 2005: 158) has grown to become a mammoth landscape of leisure – a prodigious terrain of ecological union, freedom and mobility for all. Consider the message conveyed by Open Africa, one of the most active tourism companies in the GLTP, about the Park: ‘travelers, like animals, should march across Africa’ (Hughes 2005: 173). Yet, to its critics, the version publically portrayed of the park – as a unifying and moral socio-green venture – camouflages its real goals. One of these critics is Rosaleen Duffy, who argues that the NGOs that take over transfrontier conservation ventures, such as the GLTP, ‘are part of a process of shifting responsibility for conservation out of state hands and into the hands of non-state entities and complex, non-territorial networks of governance’ (2006: 96). This is actually a criticism voiced by various Mozambican officials who worry that the assistance provided to the park by international technocrats and donors comes with strings attached, or with conditionalities that

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Figure 1.1. The Great Limpopo Transfrontier Park (GLTP) and adjacent areas. Map by the author.

impinge upon the decision-making capacity of the national, regional and local government (Lunstrum 2013: 4). Other critics say that the park is fundamentally about the creation of new saleable products and about the integration of the region into the broader markets of development and tourism. Within this process, Spierenburg and colleagues warn, ‘local communities are … under-represented, underrespected, under-skilled and under-resourced actors in this power game’ (2008: 96). In regard to the growing importance of networks of NGOs and institutions in the area, Maano Ramutsindela (2007)

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argues that the relationship between the Peace Parks Foundation, which plays a key role in monitoring the GLTP, and the private sector represents the infiltration of global neo-liberal principles into the region. According to Ramutsindela, this is evident in the way that international corporate sponsors use their funding of the Peace Parks Foundation as a means to establish their brand in the marketplace. These corporations, he suggests, try to capitalize on the institutionalization of an ethic of ecological intervention in the region in order to enhance profits. Indeed, many scholars have referred to the ways in which environmental conservation all over the world is utilized for profit by international organizations (Jamal and Stronza 2009: 315). Specifically, in the language of the GLTP planners, moral economy often seems to substitute for, or at least to intermix with, the ecological. To mention a few examples, Du Toit describes the park as ethically and economically optimal because wildlife held a ‘comparative economic advantage’ over cattle (du Toit 1998, in Hughes 2005: 171). In a presentation for an elite of conservationist technocrats, Rowan Martin, who is an influential consultant for development projects in southern Africa, presented his suggestions for the GLTP under the title: ‘The potential earnings from wildlife are limited only by marketing skills’ (Hughes 2005: 172). Continuing in this atmosphere of marketability, Hans Harri, a South African tourism magnate, referred to the GLTP as a ‘Limpopo tourism corridor’ that could boost investor-led growth. This is what he said about the park to one of Mozambique’s leading newspapers: The entrepreneurial dynamic obliges the men who have big business in South Africa to look, in other parts of the globe, for other markets. This is dictated by development, and we are sure that, in addition to satisfying the ambitions of our businessmen, we will contribute so that, in recordtime, a strong economy is implanted in your country [Mozambique] (Notícias 1997: 9, in Hughes 2005: 173).

This prophetic thinking has conjured a wave of transnational flows and interventions in and around the park. The GLTP’s scope has evolved from a Southern African story to become a significant conservation and tourism modality of transnational modern life to be told to the world at large. In the process, the Mozambican side of GLTP gained the quality of an economy of possibilities; a terrain promising futures to a myriad of agents, including international companies, development institutions and local populations: ‘an anticipated economy’, as Hughes (2005: 172) calls it. According to the

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scholar-consultant Anna Spenceley, the official Joint Management Plan of GLTP ‘encourages the park to work closely with the tourism industry … [and] recommends that cultural tourism be developed and marketed within local communities’ (2006b: 651–52). To be sure, human residents, natural scenery and fauna in and around the park gained the role of resources to further one end: tourism. Joining in with this current, NGO Helvetas applied for USAID funds with a project aimed at ‘community development through tourism’. The idea was to establish a tourist lodge in the buffer zone of the park that would capitalize on its proximity to the GLTP. In turn, this lodge would provide benefits for the local community while also offering a cultural experience for international tourists. The proposal was opportune and morally sound. The applicants did not have to wait long to receive an affirmative response, and obtained an initial $50,000 in funding from USAID. In the successful project proposal, Helvetas did not specify the target area (or population) for the intervention. This became defined only after many consultations by the NGO’s staff in 2002 with provincial and district government representatives. In one of these sessions, the district administrator of Massingir invited several professionals of the NGO Helvetas to visit a place he thought had potential. Located in the Municipality of Tihovene, the area had a scenic view over the Elephants River and the Limpopo National Park. The sensory potency of the landscape, the tranquillity of the locale and its aura of privacy, as one of the visitors explained to me, instantly captured the group’s attention. ‘And that was it,’ he said conclusively. ‘We all agreed about the place. We all saw its tourist potential.’ The visual impressiveness of the landscape played the decisive role in the selection of what came to be the location of the first community lodge in Mozambique. As Spenceley put it, no analysis ‘was undertaken by Helvetas to evaluate whether the lodge [in Canhane] was the most sustainable form of tourism development for the community’ (2006a: 23, emphasis added).

‘The Community’: Canhane ‘When we first arrived there, the community of Canhane didn’t know anything about tourism,’ the main precursor of the tourism project working for Helvetas said. ‘We asked them,’ he recalled, ‘“What do you guys from the community need most?” After we listened to their answers, we informed them about how tourism could

Introducing Tourism: Canhane  ◆  35

be a good way to achieve that in the community.’ The following is an excerpt of an internal report made by Helvetas (2002a: 3, 6) on the first meeting they had with the residents in Canhane: The meeting was held on the 05 November 2002, where 64 people participated, from the figure 31 were women and 33 men. 2.0 Objectives • • • •

To know the Canhane community. Identify the natural resources and existing problems in the zone. Disseminate the land law and its regulation. Confirm the site of the tourist camp.

… After the presentation there was a space for discussion. In the first moment people were not sure what to say. After about 3 minutes answers were like as follow: ‘We want the tourism project to come as soon as possible, we do not want to wait for long period’ [sic] said one of the participants.

From this meeting onwards, three decisive concepts were brought by the NGO staff into the everyday life of Canhane: community, tourism, and community tourism. These concepts were translated into expressions of novelty, solution and hope, irremediably shaping the politics of the local from then on. According to data from 2006 directly provided by the hereditary leading authority in the village – lider comunitário (community leader, in English), as the residents refer to him6 – Canhane has a population of 1,105 residents (567 women and 538 men), making up 203 families. Owing to the predominance of informal emigration to South Africa,7 particularly to work in the mines, those numbers are inaccurate. My guess is that not more than 650 people actually lived in the village in 2008, during my time there. Similarly to what Stephen Lubkemann (2000) describes from his research in the Machaze area of Mozambique, some men from the village established permanent households in both South Africa, where they work, and Canhane, their birthplace. The residents speak Shangane and only a few are fluent in Portuguese, the national language of Mozambique. All the people originally from the region are known as Machanganas, meaning ‘the people of Sochangana’, who, escaping from Shaka Zulo in 1821 in South Africa,8 conquered part of present-day Mozambique.

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As soon as the population of Canhane accepted the tourism project, they had to reorganize internally in order to conform to external demands. The residents were asked to create a committee of ten people from the village headed by a president – who had to be someone other than the community leader. This person would be ultimately responsible for the management and operation of the lodge. ‘The decision was very simple,’ one of the local residents said about the internal selection of the staff committee. As I confirmed through numerous conversations, the nomination process was casual, peaceful and made public. ‘It was like this,’ another resident clarified, ‘one person pointed to somebody saying, “I think he should go to the committee,” then another said, “that woman too”, and so on, until the ten people were chosen.’ No person ever gave me any indication that disputes had occurred in the nominations. Apparently, this event was unenthusiastically courteous. What were the reasons for the collective unanimity? Why were there no symptoms of power disputes? Presumably, the creation and institutionalization of a local elite of individuals that would project Canhane to the world through their leading role in the tourism venture seemed a good opportunity for the ascent of new figures in the local power structure. This is even more relevant knowing that the community leader had to remain outside of the management structure. The new committee was a sort of unconventional opportunity for the residents to access and recreate new forms of local authority. Indeed, Canhaners were given a chance to break the orderly power that had persisted since the precolonial constitution of the village. Even so, there were no individual manifestations of ambition, and the moment of the committee’s election was a moment of apathy, as if it was about an insignificant matter. The fundamental question is: why? ‘We didn’t care,’ a resident clarified with a facial expression of obviousness. As the current president of the committee explained to me, ‘The community was very suspicious about all this. At that time, nobody actually believed tourism would ever be implemented here.’ The creation of the committee was locally understood as an inconsequential protocol, and therefore the nominees were not associated with potential social power. What were the reasons behind such social distrust? A brief analysis of the village’s historiography helps us find answers.

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History Matters Portugal claimed sovereignty over Mozambique when Vasco da Gama landed on the Island of Mozambique in 1498. However, the Portuguese were only able to consolidate control over southwest Mozambique, where Canhane is located, after defeating the Gaza Kingdom, which at that time was governed by the Nguni lineage. According to Gerhard Liesegang (2007), Nguni’s hegemony in Gaza started in 1825 and ended when the Portuguese captured and exiled its last ruler, Ngungunhana, in 1895. During this period, people of Nguni origin turned into an aristocracy. They oversaw the work of local populations and captives, sometimes growing long fingernails that prevented them from being able to perform manual labour. This was a region of extreme social and economic asymmetries. With the advent of colonial rule in southwest Mozambique, precolonial political institutions were incorporated into the colonial administrative system. The severe inequality and discrimination between people persisted. Across the whole of Mozambique, the new colonial regime institutionalized tax collection, forced labour, the prohibition of commerce in alcoholic drinks except for Portuguese wines, the recruitment of young men to serve in the colonial army, and various kinds of work at the Portuguese administrators’ request (Gonçalves 2006: 33–34). In Canhane, people were forced to work in the production of cotton. ‘They [Portuguese] started to come here to buy what we produced, but also collecting taxes that we had to pay with the money from our production,’ a middle-aged man from the village told me. Although colonialism in Mozambique was an epoch of marked prejudice, various scholars also highlight that colonial officials commonly adopted what Karen Fields calls the ‘principle of calculated noninterference’ (1985: 52). They regularly ignored the general guidelines dictated from Portugal, and in practice the colonial ‘administrators on the ground were not passionate about eradicating indigenous ways’ (Igreja 2014: 781). Albert Farré says that one of the characteristics of Portuguese colonialism in Africa was the attempt to compensate for the administrative weakness with legislative profusion. However, ‘there was a radical gap between the principles and values established by the colonial laws and the principles and values performed daily by the Portuguese in the colonies’ (Farré 2014: 200). Mozambique was then a sort of space of exception – to play on Giorgio Agamben’s (1998) idea of the ‘state of exception’

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– because the colonial authority on the ground allowed exceptions to the legislation (e.g. Serra 2000; West 2005b; Gonçalves 2006). After 25 June 1975, Mozambique ceased to be a colony of Portugal. Influenced by the policies of Tanzania’s first president, Julius Nyerere, and his doctrine of African Socialism, the Mozambican leaders of the military campaign Frente de Libertação de Moçambique (FRELIMO) established a one-party state allied with the Soviet bloc. The expectations that came with independence were high. After independence, explains João Coelho (1998: 61), the development strategy established by the new state regime for the rural areas in Mozambique was based on two main pillars: population resettlement and the transformation of production relations. In particular, the grouping of rural populations into centralized planned settlements – the villagization programme – was seen as a way to modernize the countryside and a useful response to internal insecurity. Juan Obarrio (2010: 278) calls it a politico-developmental project aimed at addressing the political economy and juridico-political issues of governance and jurisdiction. In Mozambique, villagization began in 1977. People’s expectations were raised by the promise of benefits from the state (Casal 1996), and Canhaners were among those who sought to benefit. The state policy of villagization and the Massingir Dam, which was started by the Portuguese in 1972 and completed in 1976, resulted in the relocation of Canhane residents to an area at a higher elevation and therefore less prone to flooding in 1977. While announcing their relocation, the state-party FRELIMO promised the residents brick houses at the new location. ‘But they simply gave us sheets of zinc,’ a resident complained loudly one rainy morning while we were both under the zinc roof of the outdoor entrance of his house. Anyone who has been under a roof made of thin corrugated zinc during heavy rain knows how loud it can be and how difficult it is to hear others talking or be heard. The uninterrupted noise of the rain accompanied our entire conversation that morning. The ambience of auditory discomfort dramatized his complaint and reinforced the reason for his criticism. Water supply, which is the most bemoaned subject in presentday Canhane, was also guaranteed by the FRELIMO government, which actually built two water pumps. Yet they were never an effective mechanism, and therefore were left in a state of abandonment soon after their implementation. Canhane exemplifies what Coelho generalizes to apply to the entire country: ‘The limited state capacity to foster the villagisation programme’ (1998: 65).

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After the resettlement of the population, a machamba do povo (communal farm) was established in the village. All over the country, the government intended cooperatives to be the main form of production and economic development in the communal villages (Coelho 1998: 74). In Canhane, the involvement of the residents in the model of cooperative production was, as I was once told, ‘just following ideas that we didn’t agree with. In the machamba do povo we saw a lot of fraud because many people ate maize without having worked for it since everything belonged to the povo [collective]’. As with the production of cotton under the Portuguese regime, Canhaners were informed by the FRELIMO government that they would have to work on the communal farm in order to produce more. In turn, this would help them to increase sales and to generate more money, part of which had to be paid in the form of a fee to the FRELIMO state-party. In the eyes of most residents, the similarities between the postcolonial setting and the colonial regime had become evident. Coelho reports the same in Tete Province: ‘As to the effects of villagisation in general, problems in the communal villages were not very different from the ones the peasants had faced some years before during the aldeamento9 process’ in the colonial regime (1998: 83). Unsurprisingly, in Canhane, as in many other regions in Mozambique (Bowen 1989), the communal farm was an unpopular symbol of the postcolonial government’s policies (Lubkemann 2005: 496) and was therefore abandoned shortly after it had started. During the Mozambican civil war (1977-92), residents in Canhane were encouraged to form a pro-FRELIMO militia force to fight the bandidos armados (armed bandits) or the Matsanga, as the Resistência Nacional Moçambicana (RENAMO) movement was known in the region at that time. For that, ‘we were told that we would receive benefits’, a resident said, ‘but the truth is we were never compensated.’ In addition to the disillusionment with the absence of the promised infrastructural improvement, the socialist ideology of the independence movement began to be criticized. ‘Despite the promises, our lives didn’t change and we are just like we were before,’ an elder said in Canhane. He confided to me later in the privacy of his hut, ‘Life was better when the Big Noses [Portuguese] were here. There is more illness now.’10 His remark may reveal more about his tensions with the present than his actual experiences in the past – an intrasubjective positioning of contentment and dissatisfaction in time. Various scholars have argued that nostalgia is due to a ‘concomitant integration

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and completeness lacking in any present’ (Lowenthal 1989: 29). The sense that the present is an epoch of disappointment, David Lowenthal says, produces a sad illusion: ‘in yesterday we find what we miss today’ (1985: 49). This emergence of memory, this turning towards the past, Andreas Huyssen (2000) calls the ‘present past’. In his words, ‘One of modernity’s permanent laments concerns the loss of a … past … Perhaps such days have always been a dream rather than a reality, a phantasmagoria of loss generated by modernity itself rather than its prehistory. But the dream does have staying power’ (Huyssen 2000: 34). To date, Ramah Mckay (2012) is the anthropologist who has most explicitly explored the role of nostalgic memories in contemporary Mozambique. Drawing on her fieldwork in central Mozambique, she demonstrates how residents of the rural district of Morrumbala use nostalgia about their past experience as refugees in Malawi to criticize and make claims about present regimes in Mozambique. More than revealing past events that constituted ‘a better life’, Mckay shows how nostalgia can be a means to make claims in the present. As she puts it, ‘Concurrently, claims to support are imagined and articulated not through discourses of the state, rights, or national citizenship, but through reference to a … past’ (2012: 288-89). The remark by the elder in Canhane can be interpreted in the same way: he uses his memories of the colonial past not to express the truth of a reality, but as a contextual lens through which the virtues of the national postcolonial present are questioned. In fact, this is a present that various scholars characterize as a period of national ideological fiction in Mozambique, and so a period when ‘Peasants distance themselves from the state’ in the same way as the state ‘also distance[s] itself from the peasantry’ (Gonçalves 2006: 39, 35). José Negrão goes a step further and describes this as an epoch of both betrayal and abandonment by the Mozambican government. As he puts it, ‘the rural peasantry, which was so ingeniously mobilized by the FRELIMO regime to overthrow the colonial power, was forgotten [by the FRELIMO government] since independence’ (Negrão 2003: 6). Basically, the national postcolonial project in Mozambique reinforced the prejudices and conditions of affliction that it was intended to resolve (Farré 2014: 202). The elder was not the only person that admitted a preference for the colonial past to me. As people became more familiar with my presence, I was told more and more about similar sentiments by the residents. At first, such revelations seemed absurd to me, and I did not take them seriously. I know now that I was not alone. As William

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Bissell says, ‘To most contemporary ethnographers, expressions of colonial nostalgia are deeply unsettling’ (2005: 216). James Ferguson (2002), too, stresses that such expressions typically provoke avoidance or disbelief. In my case, such expressions did not stop, and despite my disinterest in the topic, people continued to tell me about their ‘colonial nostalgia’. At a later stage, these were not voiced only in indoor one-to-one conversations, but also in outdoor gatherings with various people. It started to become obvious that such declarations were less about the colonial past and more about the dynamics of the present situation of independence. And this interested me. I was then struck by a question: what circumstances and actors in the present are the residents accusing or calling for when they speak well of the colonial past?11 My quotidian life in the village allowed me to access a postcolonial (hi)story of Canhane characterized by frustration. On one occasion, when I was having dinner with one of the four moragueles in Canhane (these are the chiefs of each neighbourhood in the village), the biography of development prophesies in and for the village was suddenly used to justify resentment. After talking about the statutory competences of the tourism operation’s Social Management Committee, the moraguele suddenly switched the topic to himself: ‘You know, if I wanted I could be on the committee as well, but I refused.’ Apparently, he had been one of the nominees, but he had immediately declined to take part. ‘Some years ago,’ he said in a calm mode to justify his decision, ‘I had attended a course about cattle. It was an NGO that did this. I spent a lot of time on the course, because they told me I would receive more cattle. But nothing happened afterwards.’ What he told me was not unusual. Residents’ autobiographies of disillusionment with unfulfilled postcolonial promises by the state and development institutions abound in Canhane. At the large scale, this represents a frustration with the systemic failure of the parade of successive developmental trends and promises to ‘fix’ chronic inequalities in the country, which emerged since the 1980s in Mozambique. To the point, local residents’ gradual disillusionment after Mozambique’s independence reveals much about their sceptical reaction and indifference when presented with the intentions and promises of solutions by NGO Helvetas – ‘We didn’t care.’ Tourism was another word augmenting the dictionary of disappointment in Canhane.

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The Materialization of Promises ‘But then came the moment when we all put tourism into our hearts, as something that really would happen,’ a member of the committee said in an emotional tone, before mentioning the decisive cause: ‘Helvetas asked us to build the lodge.’ In light of the limited conditions of the built environment in the village, new infrastructure plays a vital role in Canhane. In contrast to organizational imperatives, such as the Social Management Committee, material infrastructure is not redundant in Canhane. The arrival of the construction equipment represented the materialization of the tourism promise. ‘That was the day when the future began,’ a resident told me. Various scholars have argued that material infrastructure has attached to it the idea of future possibilities, horizons of improvement, realization and, ultimately, progress (Porter 2002; Edwards 2003; Wilson 2004; Harvey and Knox 2012; Baptista 2016a). For the residents, the arrival of new material equipment fabricated or collected elsewhere meant the formalization of ‘the investment in our community by Helvetas; they clothed us’, an elder woman explained to me shyly. Her use of the word investment can be interpreted in two complementary ways: in the Shakespearean (1604: 18) sense of dressing the locale and the ‘locals’ appropriately (‘they clothed us’), and as an action performed with the hope that it will lead to rewards in the future. ‘This mode of thought,’ Brian Larkin says in general, ‘is why the provision of infrastructures is so intimately caught up with the sense of … realizing the future’ (2013: 332). More pragmatically, Coelho contends that, in the context of rural Mozambique, ‘development could only result from concrete and tangible socioeconomic improvements [i.e. material infrastructure], rather than from political and ideological mobilisation’ (1998: 73). Accordingly, in Canhane, the tourist infrastructure came to represent the possibility of having a local future of development. During the construction process, the Social Committee was asked by Helvetas to name the lodge. This request carried a different meaning than the request for the election of the staff committee. Residents had already started building the lodge and, therefore, perceived the tourism project with enthusiasm. In the course of modern globalization, Edward Bruner (2005: 22) tell us, individuals become more aware of their localities through the valorization of their sociographies, and voice this in their own idiosyncratic ways. Specifically, the request that the villagers choose the lodge’s

Introducing Tourism: Canhane  ◆  43

name encouraged the renaissance of local significances. It fostered the reconstruction of competitive social identity, and stimulated the Canhaners’ wish to differentiate themselves from neighbouring villages. The name chosen for the lodge was Covane Community Lodge. This expresses the Canhaners’ tribute to a figure from their legendary past – ‘Covane’, who was the first community leader of the village – as well as their quest for collective exclusivity in the face of the new circumstances of the present and aspirations for the future – ‘Community’. Local history matters in the new social order of the present and future in Canhane.

The Community of Canhane: A (Hi)Story with Purpose What I am going to recount was told to me by those residents who proclaimed themselves the connoisseurs of local history; the elders of the village. It is a story told by the Canhaners about themselves. Before present-day Canhane was named, the area was known as Ngovene, which means it was founded by the Ngovene family lineage. But at some point, Ngovene was taken by a different ruling lineage: the Zithas. ‘It all started,’ an elder resident began to tell me in a late afternoon, ‘when this place was under Valoi Ngovene’s Table 1.1. Main steps of the implementation of community tourism in Canhane (October 2002–May 2004).  1. Presentation of the project to the provincial authorities  2. Presentation of the project to the district authorities  3. Selection of the place to build the lodge  4. Presentation and consultation with the population of Canhane  5. Informal delimitation of the land of Canhane (7,723ha)  6. Project construction plan of the lodge approved by the provincial authorities  7. Creation of the Community Management Committee of the lodge (Comissão de Gestão Social)  8. Initiation of the construction of the lodge  9. Formal partnership agreement between the Community Management Committee and NGO Helvetas, regarding the function of the lodge 10. Opening of a bank account for the lodge in the city of Chókwè 11. Management staff of the lodge recruited 12. Opening of the lodge for the tourists (May 2004)

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chieftaincy’. On one occasion, a man called Marunzele Zitha arrived at the banks of the Elephants River, a zone that was under Ngovene’s rule. He was tired because for a long time he had been paddling on a tree trunk and only using one oar. He opted to stay and to rest in the area for the next days. But then, while there, he fell in love with a woman whom he later married. The chief Valoi Ngovene was happy with their matrimony, and as a gesture of welcome to Marunzele Zitha, he offered him a parcel of land. This was approximately the same as the area of Canhane before the village was resettled to its current location. Marunzele Zitha accepted the offer and established his life with his wife there. At that time, the population of Ngovene had to pay an annual tax to Valoi Ngovene, the local chief. The payment was made in marula fruit pits. When the occasion to pay came, Marunzele Zitha decided to mix the marula pits with dry human and animal faeces, and he offered that mixture to the Ngovene chief. His attitude was strongly reproved by the other residents. It was understood as a public display of disrespect for local tradition and social order. He and his family were then named vá canhane, which means a group of people who are stubborn and break the rules. Chief Valoi Ngovene was very angry and complained to Marunzele Zitha about his obstinate behaviour. Soon after their altercation, Marunzele Zitha became sick and died. After his death, there was no rain in Ngovene. The population became worried. A year later, the council of the residents consulted a local ‘sorcerer’ who informed them of the cause of the drought: Marundzele Zitha was angry with them. There was only one solution to this: the residents had to organize a public ceremony in which the Vá Canhane – the Zitha family – had to participate. During the ceremony, it started to rain heavily. Afterwards, the new local chief and the elders of Ngovene decided to make peace with the Vá Canhane people and gave them another opportunity to be included in the local social life. Years later, when another occasion to pay the tax arrived, the first son of Marundzele Zitha, called Covane Zitha, decided to replace the mandatory pits with an elephant tusk. Again, the population considered this to be a disobedient act in which the authority of the Ngovene chief was challenged. This time there was no mercy, and the council of the elders took an extreme decision: to kill Covane Zitha. But the Ngovene chief, who had the final say, did not accept this decision, and opted to let Covane live according to his own rules. ‘This was when the community was born,’ a resident explained to me proudly.

Introducing Tourism: Canhane  ◆  45

From the moment the Ngovene chief gave territorial independence to the Vá Canhane, Covane Zitha became known as Canhane (stubborn) and his territory as ‘the lands of Canhane’, which led to the later common use of the single word ‘Canhane’ to refer to the area. This story, which is locally declared to be ‘the history of Canhane’, is a discourse of exclusivity. The stubborn personal attitude that is associated with the origin of the village represents the quest for uniqueness by its residents. Canhane is now the only village in the region that is not founded by the Ngovene lineage; that is, it is the only village in the region that was born from a separation from the conventional power. Fundamentally, such a story of exclusiveness serves to institutionalize the locale and its residents as a distinctive society in the present: as the residents often said, ‘We are a community.’ This view aligns with Anthony Cohen’s (1985: 57) suggestion that all communities derive their sense of exclusivity from the symbolic construction of references formed according to historical boundaries. Cohen stresses that these references, these boundaries established by a past serve to socially orient and define a people. Naturally, these are pasts greatly invested by public imaginary. The subjective formation of the community in Canhane, by which the residents differentiate themselves from others, informs us about the role of the ‘radical imaginary’ (Castoriadis 1975)12 in the broader process of constituting institutional arrangements of demarcation. In January 2008, I met with an ex-member of Helvetas, who was now director of the Mozambican NGO Lupa. In his office in Maputo, in an air-conditioned atmosphere, he told me: ‘When we first arrived in Canhane, they were very disorganized and not aware of their potential, and we had to hire a person to research their historical background. But now they have changed completely. They are very empowered and already acting as a community.’ His point was clear: being a community is a source of empowerment, and the ‘History of Canhane’, as it is announced in the informative folders displayed in the tourist lodge, is an important factor in such a process. Indeed, as I explain in more detail in the next chapter, to be a community is the basic precondition for Canhane residents to be empowered. The remembered history and the transmission structures of local collective memory that are put into practice through the tourism venture inform a certain kind of strategic truth: the ‘truth’ of the past required by the new circumstances of the present. This ‘truth’ of Canhane, which shapes the present by recreating the past, is not neutral, and reveals socioeconomic interests. In particular, it reveals the impacts of the powerful ascension of two complementary regimes

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in the village: development and tourism. The Canhaners’ (hi)story about themselves and the fact that their self-distinction is now an important matter are, moreover, part of the modern politics of legitimacy and recognition within such interests and regimes. Everywhere in the world, the transmission of collective pasts is commonly used to foster social identity, to support meaning and to justify or challenge the present. Drawing from The Journals of Søren Kierkegaard 1853–1854, Keith Tester says that, if ‘It is perfectly true, as philosophers say, that life must be understood backwards, [we must not] … forget the other proposition, that it must be lived forwards’ (2004: 9). Along the same lines, Canhaners as community gain their internal coherence through the continuous transmission and reaffirmation of a mythic version of the past in the present. But their employment of such a transmission and reaffirmation procedure indicates their ultimate aspirations in living forwards. The name the residents chose for the lodge is a privileged field to attest this strategy. The word ‘community’ in the lodge’s name reflects the local campaign for exclusiveness in the present and for the future (‘we are a community’). Yet such exclusiveness is essentially engendered by the objectification of an imaginary past of singularity and self-determination: ‘Covane’. By referring to their mythic ancestry in naming the lodge, the residents territorialized the tourism project; they constituted it into a sign of Canhane’s exclusiveness and dominion over land, as well as a sign of social distinction from neighbouring others. And so Covane Community Lodge became both a symbol of local history and the affirmation of such a history in the

Illustration 1.1. Entrance to Covane Community Lodge. The expression ‘Hoyo Hoyo’ on the sign means ‘Welcome’ in Shangane. 27 February 2008. Photo by the author.

Introducing Tourism: Canhane  ◆  47

present, which in turn opens up new possibilities for the future – as I was told, it means ‘when the future began’. The version the elders told me about Canhane’s history is not only expressed through narratives, ceremonies and public events. Today, such a history is most evident in the contemporary infrastructure of the village, namely in the form of a tourist lodge. Finally, the emergent local eagerness for such a history exists not only due to definitions and hopes for the present, but is most fundamentally about aspirations for the future. The story told about Canhane is a history for the future. Putting it broadly, in Canhane, residents’ contemporary interest in and enthusiasm for the local past derive from their insertion into a broad web of significations. This web prompts a new self-ascribed sense of value in Canhane’s inhabitants. In practice, and contrasting with the surrounding populations, Canhaners’ engagement in and valuation of their collective history is maintained, if not intensified, because they are continuously asked about it. The relevance of their (hi)stories about themselves results from the importance they attribute to those who request such information – mostly the development experts and international tourists who visit the village. These foreign individuals are locally perceived as, and present themselves as, a new hope for the future, a new opportunity in Canhane. In this sense, they represent a morality because they embody how things should and could be socially better.13 Hence, local history becomes an attribute for the constitution of the local community, and a certain version of the past is proffered as a guide to the future. But what gives value to local history in that process of constituting community – or what Michel Foucault would have called ‘its conditions of emergence, insertion and function’ (1972: 163) – is the background of those who ask about and for that history. The social mores of the questioners are the framework that leads and inspires Canhaners to match and reproduce specific expectations, namely being a community. The story the elders told me about their village is thus the product of an external request, which nonetheless serves the residents in strategizing and making sense of their present lives and hoped-for futures. In other words, the contemporary constitution and affirmation of Canhane as a community is more than just the outcome of a mythical exclusive past; it is a matter of the local politics of recognition within a pervasive web that involves Canhaners’ interactions with development experts and international tourists.

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The Configuration of Community Tourism in Canhane On paper, Covane Community Lodge is managed by the Social Management Committee, which is comprised by ten elected representatives from Canhane – four women and six men. This committee reports to the General Assembly (Assembleia Geral) that encompasses the entire population of the village. All the residents are formally considered to be ‘stakeholders’ in the community tourism business. In public, development, tourism and scholarly international discourse, Canhane is largely acknowledged in empowering organizational terms. The village is referred to under the banner of a new era of global solutions to local social predicaments, and declared a worldwide success story. Take the following examples: - ‘The Canhane community in southern Mozambique represents an important new model for community development’ (Norfolk and Tanner 2007: 16); - It ‘is an eloquent example of how communities, when organized and knowledgeable of their rights, can make sustainable use of resources to produce wealth’;14 - It moved ‘towards a change in attitude and awareness of new opportunities … which has served to encourage and build trust amongst the community’ (Salomão and Matose 2007: 17); - It ‘is gaining a greater capacity to get involved with the outside world, and to participate in the process of development’ (Calane 2006: 12); - ‘The lodge created employment opportunities for community members and generated revenues for local suppliers to the lodge. The experience improved the community’s planning capacity and its ability to deal with the outside world’;15 - ‘It can be concluded that CCL [Covane Community Lodge] is positively contributing to the protection of the local forest resources through the use of eco-tourism and cultural activities’ (World Wide Fund for Nature 2007: 21); - ‘The story of Canhane Community in Gaza Province shows the numerous benefits of land delimitation’ (Nielsen, Tanner and Knox 2011: 2); - ‘The project establishes a real and practical example … in the tourism industry [which] can be used as a model for replication.’16

Introducing Tourism: Canhane  ◆  49

Table 1.2. Balance of the lodge’s activity between 1 June 2004 and 30 November 2007. Tourists

3,327

Earnings

US $76,240

Expenses

US $43,010

Balance

US $33,230

Source: Documents from Helvetas, accessed at Lupa’s offices. 1 April 2008.

According to the statutes established by Helvetas, at least 50 per cent of the earnings of the lodge must be spent on local community development. As it was sanctioned in the initial phase of the project, every six months the General Assembly must receive the profits

Diagram 1.1. Organizational structure of Covane Community Lodge. Figure by the author.

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at a public meeting that has to be directed by the NGO involved in the project, which was the Swiss Helvetas until 2008, and the Mozambican Lupa thereafter.17 • General Assembly (Assembleia Geral): Consists of all the residents of Canhane. The statute of the General Assembly declares the local population has the right to monitor the Social Management Committee and to be consulted prior to any relevant decision regarding the lodge; • Social Management Committee (Comissão de Gestão Social): Represents the interests of Canhane’s residents in the tourism business. In theory, it bears the executive responsibility for the management and marketing of the lodge; • Covane Community Lodge: Employs a manager, a receptionist, two maids, a driver and two security guards. The lodge also subcontracts other people for tourism activities, such as fishing trips and dancing displays. After 2007, the position of most of the employees at the lodge became seasonal, dependent on the presence of tourists. Up until December 2008, four of the employees were from Canhane. Accommodation at the lodge consists of two brick chalets, two wooden chalets, fixed tents and space for camping. The brick chalets were given names in Shangane. One is called Mabaramane, a

Illustration1.2. Reception of Covane Community Lodge. The person pictured is the executive manager. 27 March 2008. Photo by the author.

Introducing Tourism: Canhane  ◆  51

50-centimetre-long fish common in the nearby Elephants River. The other brick chalet is Mopani, the designation for a popular tree in the region, which is locally used for firewood and to produce charcoal. This referentiality of naming is intended to highlight the importance of the local natural resources for the population. The lodge also includes the reception area, outdoor cold-water showers and toilets, a small room with crafts on display, and a dining area where the visitors can purchase meals, soft drinks, bottled water and beer. There is no electricity or mobile phone network in the area. According to a consultancy report done in 2005, ‘observing the criteria used in South Africa, the lodge appears roughly equivalent to a one star facility’ (Spenceley 2006a: 44). This is not necessarily a weakness of the tourism venture. The material limitations of Covane Community Lodge add a distinctive dimension to the tourism experience: the ‘North-South’ axis of movement. It offers the possibility for the international holidaymakers to leave behind the affluent North-Atlantic societies and to embark in an imagined and sought ‘realistic rural Africa’. Arguably, from the tourists’ point of view, the experience of such infrastructure restrictions authenticates the community-based nature of the local business.

Contradictions in Canhane: Community Tourism Management Tourism is an industry that asks for a wealth of different skills and forms of expertise. It involves a conglomeration of capacities, functions and demands that have to be met, such as accommodation, entertainment, food service, transportation, cleaning, informative assistance and so on. Because the level of demand in the sector is highly volatile, tourism management has to include ad hoc competencies in order to correspond to diverse requests, in a variety of functions. The internationalization of tourism means that tourist managers must be aware of trends and developments taking place in other countries. They must consider the cultural changes that transform tourists’ expectations about what they wish to experience, as well as the significances that should be attached to those experiences. Indeed, the core of the tourism business rests on the ability to understand, know, meet and anticipate the customers’ expectations (e.g. Fletcher 2014: 153). In this sense, successful platforms of tourism management depend on global references and rely on continuing examination and actualization to achieve positive results.

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According to the status of the community tourism enterprise in Canhane, all these tasks and exigencies are formally attributed to the ten elected volunteers who constitute the Social Management Committee. This is a committee in which the vice president is the only person who is able to read and write. He is also the only individual that speaks fluently any language other than Shangane, namely Portuguese. Furthermore, no one in the committee has access to computers, Internet, electricity or newspapers. All these restrictions raise doubts about the successful character of local empowerment. They contradict the way Canhane is presented to the outside. Indeed, more than two decades ago, Odhiambo Anacleti noted that people participate in, act with reference to, and attempt to manage what they know already (1993: 45). This renders the

Diagram 1.2. Statutory competencies of the Social Management Committee. Source: Documents from NGO Helvetas, accessed at Lupa’s offices. 1 April 2008. Figure by the author.

Introducing Tourism: Canhane  ◆  53

ideal community-based tourism model in Canhane something of a paradox. As Robert Fletcher stresses in relation to ecotourism, but which is also relevant to our case in Canhane, ‘despite the emphasis on local self-mobilization and control, successful ecotourism [and community tourism] development may require substantial cultural capital that many locals are unlikely to possess, due to their very status as the poor, rural members or less developed societies seen as best suited for this development’ (2014: 162). While working on a report sponsored by international donor organizations, commonly known in the corridors of development institutions in Mozambique as operadores (operators), the consultant noted the following about the tourism project in Canhane: ‘the lodge is dependent on a monthly payment of US$10,000 channelled from USAID through Helvetas. This is used to finance salaries of the staff, training costs and some operational expenses’ (Spenceley 2006a: 38). The ‘training costs’ mentioned are paid directly to the external consultants, like the author of the report herself, and to other NGO professionals. What this means is that the conspicuous incapacity of the members that constitute the Social Management Committee to fulfil their statutory tasks is an opportunity, or even, to put it more radically, an excuse for the recruitment of development professionals. On one occasion, I met with a former employee of Helvetas, now working for the newly constituted NGO Lupa, at a cafeteria in the town of Tihovene, which is around 12 kilometres from Canhane. It was after sundown, and he had just arrived from Maputo. That day, he drove more than seven hours and had to deal with a flat tyre. He was visibly exhausted but still eager to talk to me. Perhaps due to his fatigue, perhaps due to his displacement from his everyday routine, perhaps because of the tone of informality that our conversation gained through the night, at one late point he surprised me with his frankness, saying: ‘We consider the community of Canhane our safety guarantee: they are our way to economically support the NGO.’ In this moment of sincerity and openness, Canhane as a community was explicitly declared a resource of and for the NGO; a source of income appropriated by the tentacles of development. While his observation reveals the interests that the promotion of community empowerment via community tourism in Canhane hides, it also ignores the roles of other participants in the concealed side of the venture. In truth, the local residents are not passive targets in this pursuit of benefits. Many Canhaners do use their position as key players

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in the alliance between them as a developing moral community and the industry of development to gain personal benefit. To mention a brief example, in 2007 the president of the Social Management Committee was arrested by the police. The reason for his detention was simple: some employees of the Covane Community Lodge were working illegally. Two state inspectors had made a visit to the lodge and asked for the social security numbers of the employees, and had discovered that some of them were not registered in the national system. ‘As soon we knew that,’ the president of the committee said, ‘we started making questions to Helvetas.’ However, neither the committee nor the NGO were able to resolve the problem. Meanwhile the fine was increasing. ‘At some point they [the state inspectors] tried to discover who was actually running the lodge. That was when they came to me, because I’m the president of the committee.’ The committee members and other residents in Canhane intensified contacts with Helvetas, stating that the fine should be paid immediately. ‘But Helvetas continued doing nothing,’ the president exclaimed loudly. As the individual responsible for the management of the lodge, he was arrested and sent to prison in the city of Chókwè. He stayed in jail for two days, until the fine was finally paid by Helvetas. Months later, the president started pressuring the NGO to pay him an indemnity for the moral damages caused by the time he spent in prison, which the NGO did by giving him 1,500 metical (US$61.00). Yet his demands – what in the NGO are referred as ‘the president’s blackmails’ – did not stop. According to the director of NGO Lupa, ‘even having been paid, he doesn’t leave us in peace. He’s always asking us for more and more money for him. This is still because of the period when he was in jail. It is a neverending story’. In one way or another, all the participants in tourism expect to gain and make something from it. This book is about the benefits, losses, expectations and realities generated through (not just in) community tourism. Overall, I explore the development and tourism venture in Canhane as the function of both impersonal processes operating at the large-scale (i.e. globalization, international development, tourism expansion and the market) and the personal aspirations and actions of the individuals implicated in it.

Introducing Tourism: Canhane  ◆  55

Notes   1. A clear example of the growing promotion of the transnational character of Southern Africa is the regional brand ‘Boundless Southern Africa’. This is a marketing initiative that promotes the entire region of nine southern African countries ‘in terms of ecosystems and not in terms of political or geographical boundaries. It unites African nations as viable and worthy collective tourist destinations’ (https://www.matchdeck. com/company-profile/125-boundless-southern-africa#/index, accessed 14 June 2015).   2. Anton Rupert was born on 4 October 1916 and died on 18 January 2006.  3. For example, the Development Bank of the Federal Republic and Federal States of Germany [KfW], WWF-US, The World Bank, Agence Française de Développement (AFD), Deutsche Gesellschaft für Internationale Zusammenorbeit (GIZ) and Global Environmental Facility (GEF).   4. http://www.peaceparks.org/Content_1020000000_Peace+Parks.htm, accessed 24 November 2009.   5. Nelson Mandela speech on 12 October 2001. http://www.peaceparks. org/content/newsroom/news, accessed 24 March 2004.   6. In Mozambique, the term and the very idea promoted through the concept of ‘community leader’ are not politically and historically neutral (e.g. Buur and Kyed 2006; Gonçalves 2006; Santos 2006). Furthermore, as Harry West (2005a: 18-23, 2005b) shows in his ethnographic research on Northeast Mozambique, ‘community leaders’ are not homogeneously sanctioned and recognized throughout the country. In post-war Mozambique, local community leaders were institutionalized in a 2000 law decree introduced by the national government. After the colonial and socialist periods, this institutionalization constituted a ‘third moment’ of articulation with the realm of the ‘customary’ and ‘traditional’ (Obarrio 2010: 263). According to the 2000 decree, community leaders are defined as ‘people who exercise some form of authority upon a given community’ (Gonçalves 2006: 30). Therefore, in the national legal system, community leaders are formally recognized as ‘Community Authorities’; that is, together with the other category of ‘village secretaries’ that officially constitute the Community Authorities, community leaders are legally recognized by the Mozambican government as individuals with administrative authority, rights and duties over the population of a certain territory – the community. However, in contrast with the village secretaries who are directly appointed by the political party in government, community leaders have to be ‘identified by the local community’ (República de Moçambique 2000: Art. 1.a; Orre 2010: 274). In this sense, they epitomize the post-war politics of decentralization, but also represent the institutional and juridical attempt to control the impact of such a decentralization; to bring rural populations under state control (Buur and Kyed 2006: 851). For Juan Obarrio (2010: 264),

56  ◆  The Good Holiday

the legal recognition of ‘tradition’, ‘custom’ and territorialized conceptions of political belonging and authority, which the figure of the community leader embodies in contemporary Mozambique, illustrates one way in which indigeneity and autochthony emerge in the country. In Mozambique, people use different expressions to refer to the community leaders. Mpewe, Mwene Alupale, Mwini Dziko, Fumu, Mambo, Nkhoma (Serra 2000: 19), Chefes das terras, Encoces, Inhamasangos, Mucazambos, Senhores dos lugares and Régulos (Feliciano 1998: 155) are just some examples. In Canhane, the residents use two expressions: Lider comunitário, in Portuguese, and Hosi, in Shangane. The latter has a broader meaning because it refers to both a spatial delimitation and the main authority in the village. As I consider further in Chapter 4, in contrast with the rest of the country, Canhane does not have a village secretary: the hereditary community leader is the only community authority in the village. Therefore, in this book, I adopt the English translation of lider comunitário – community leader – to refer to the main individual authority or, as it is in the national regulation, the local community authority in Canhane.   7. The character of migration in this region is so conspicuous that authors such as Bridget O’Laughlin (2013: 181) refer to it as ‘a migrant labour area’.   8. At the time of their territorial conquests in Mozambique, those now called Machanganas had the war name of Manicusse (da Costa 1899). They inherited the name of Ngungunhana’s grandfather, a Zulu who came from South Africa to establish himself in the present-day province of Gaza in Mozambique.   9. Aldeamentos refer to concentrated settlements that had been established between 1968 and 1974 by the Portuguese colonial regime to increase state control over the rural populations in Mozambique. 10. Referring to his research in the Mozambican province of Tete, João Coelho (1998: 72) suggests that the official attitude of rejection towards ‘traditional’ healers by the Mozambican government after the independence of the country led to the increment of health problems in rural areas. 11. This is a question that I answer not in one sub-section or chapter but throughout the entire book. For now, let me suggest that such expressions of nostalgia indicate residents’ awareness of, participation in, and responses to the novel conditions in the village, and they are the ascension of a new governing power headed by a confluence between development and tourism to the detriment of the postcolonial Mozambican state and government. 12. ‘Radical imaginary’ is a Cornelius Castoriadis’s concept that implies that acknowledging history is impossible without creative imagination. 13. For a similar approach on contextual morality defined in terms of the ought to become through tourism, see Kellee Caton (2012: 1907).

Introducing Tourism: Canhane  ◆  57

14. Gaza: Communities participate in sustainable resource use, Newspaper Zambezia Online, 5 May 2010, http://translate.googleusercontent.com/ translate_c?hl=en&langpair=pt|en&u=http://www.zambezia.co.mz/ noticias/94/9491-gaza-comunidades-participam-no-uso-de-recursossustentaveis&rurl=translate.google.com&twu=1&client=tmpg&usg=A LkJrhj_8SIAd6byRVecjaanRV6IK6MoeA, accessed 5 May 2010. 15. Focus on Land in Africa (FOLA), http://www.focusonland.com/fola/ en/countries/brief-community-investor-partnerships-in-mozambique, accessed 20 March 2014. 16. Covane Community Lodge – Mozambique, Studies of CBT. Blog developed by students from L’École de hautes études en sciences de línformation et de la communication (CELSA Paris-Sorbonne), https:// tellingkazbegi.wordpress.com/tag/canhane-community, accessed 16 September 2015. 17. At the beginning of 2008, all the development projects of the Swiss NGO Helvetas hosted in Maputo were handed over to a newly constituted Mozambican NGO called Lupa – Associação Para o Desenvolvimento Comunitário, created and composed by former Helvetas staff.

2 The Appeal of Community

On 17 February 2008, the habitual quietness of Canhane was interrupted. The village became crowded and loud in the early morning, with numerous people gathering into groups. Different attractions made it a special day. Perhaps the most emblematic was a television connected to a battery set up outdoors, playing loud music to the delight of the children. I was repeatedly asked to photograph the adults dancing close to it. At some point, a woman came to me and said, ‘Don’t photograph her: she doesn’t deserve it.’ Without having time to say anything, I was instantly surrounded by other women who started arguing and screaming at each other. Tension and joyfulness cohabited side by side in Canhane. Not far from there, other adults were seated around containers of canhu – alcoholic drink made out of fermented marula fruit – and distributed in small gatherings. The area was crowded with residents of the village, and intrigue was in the air. ‘Look, that one over there! I haven’t seen him here for a long time: opportunist,’ a young man commented about a neighbour of his. On this day, Canhane held a lobolo, which means a ceremony of bride-wealth organized by the fiancé’s parents. The young man’s critical observation was prompted because the fiancé’s family was giving the guests free drinks and food, which according to him led to the momentary arrival of new family friends: ‘They came here just hoping to find free meat to eat.’ The numerous people that remained at the party consumed large amounts of alcohol, each one drinking it from a nzécuo – a dried, hollow gourd – in one gulp (Figure 2.1). Over the course of the day, the social environment became unstable, with quarrels taking a prominent role. On one occasion, the second priest from the Twelve

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Apostles church in the village joined the group I was in. After a couple of minutes, he said, ‘Let us amuse ourselves and play a game.’ His suggestion fell on the gathering unexpectedly. ‘What?’ another man exclaimed, ‘But we are drinking canhu: aren’t we amusing ourselves?’ The priest, who is known for his integrity and commitment to the principles of the church, shook his head while looking at the ground. ‘Of course not,’ he answered expressing disappointment, ‘canhu is only for us to get drunk, and calls for problems and conflicts, but the game is for amusement.’ In Canhane, this drink is also celebrated for its sexual attributes. The aphrodisiac connotation means that people excuse sexual behaviour that would be severely reproved if it happened outside the canhu season, such as the case of infidelities among married people. ‘In the old times,’ an elder explained to me, ‘women couldn’t drink canhu close to men. But now everyone does it together … women, men … and that makes for a lot of agitation.’ The canhu drink is good for about twenty-four hours before it spoils. For this reason, it must be consumed within a short period. It is made to be shared and, therefore, it might be said that it promotes social unity and interaction. However, while on the one hand the canhu season may reinforce social links between the residents, on the other hand it may foster internal divergences and conflicts, and it reveals dissimilarities between them. By stimulating both social communion and morally free circumstances, the canhu season unveils otherwise hidden frictions in the village. Obviously, the public manifestation of social disharmony in Canhane also occurs outside the canhu season or lobolo events. The issue of conflict in the village is actually materially inscribed in space and independent of special celebrations and seasons. For example, one of the newest buildings in Canhane is a brick house that faces the dirt road, which cuts the village into two main blocks – neighbourhoods one and two are on one side of the road, and neighbourhoods three and four are on the other side. I talked with the owner of this building. ‘That’s a business that I have had in mind for a long time. It will have salt, biscuits, and juices,’ said the entrepreneur – a father of eleven children, with two wives, and born in 1966 in Canhane. Two words were prominently announced on the front of the house: ‘No Jellus.’ I asked him about the expression. ‘That’s the name of the store,’ he answered. ‘I chose that because it’s important for us to be less jealous of each other. There is a lot of envy here that makes people blind to what really matters.’ No Jellus hints at the presence of divergences in the everyday life of Canhane. ‘Let’s put our hates,

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Illustration 2.1. Woman drinking canhu through a nzécuo. 17 February 2008. Photo by the author.

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Illustration 2.2. People dancing at the lobolo ceremony. 17 February 2008. Photo by the author.

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differences and gossip away and start working hard instead,’ the entrepreneur concluded. In contrast to extraneous common visions of rural populations in Mozambique as uniform groups of people wholly grounded in magical-religious economy (Feliciano 1998), moral order (Lubkemann 2000: 61), consensual organization (República de Moçambique 2000: Art. 8) or cooperative living (Coelho 1998: 74-75), No Jellus embodies both the role of the individual and the presence of social disagreement in what are generally perceived in national politics (Obarrio 2010) and in development and tourism realms as homogeneous human collectives. On one hand, No Jellus demonstrates the existence of processes of individual differentiation in the ‘community’. Because it derives from an individual initiative, it exposes personal development, not ‘community’ development, in Canhane. No Jellus was born from the private accumulation of resources and wealth by the owner. Yet it means more than just a business; it is a public material manifestation of his personal, distinctive character in the village. On the other hand, the public message of No Jellus is also socially moral: the need for the residents to stop being envious of each other. It is worth remembering this because No Jellus informs us about how current practices in the village are acknowledged by its own members as made up of multiple conflicts and divergences. Ultimately, No Jellus reveals the village of Canhane as a heterogeneous social field. There is no uniformity in Canhane. Some men own more than sixty oxen, while other men have none. Some adult men have more than two wives, while other men have no wife. Some people have more than twelve children, while others have no children. Some families live in brick houses and other families live in mud huts. There are literates and illiterates, individuals who are fluent in three languages (Portuguese, English and Shangane) and others who speak only the local language (Shangane). There are residents who have migrated internationally and others who have never left the region. Furthermore, besides the cult of ancestors and witchcraft, there are three churches in Canhane: Twelve Apostles, Assembly of God and Zion. All these differences inform and are informed by the heterogeneous social character of Canhane. Yet what this village exemplifies in state, development and tourism discourses is a model of homogeneity; to be precise, a ‘community’. For example, a European reporter who visited the Covane Community Lodge in 2004 wrote the following about the residents: ‘the decisions are or should be taken by the community itself, which

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in turn maintains the activities that define its identity as a rural community – cattle breeding and subsistence agriculture’ (Lopes 2006: 33, emphasis added). This excerpt typifies the image perceived and pursued by most of the foreign visitors in the village. This is an image that reduces anybody’s behaviour in Canhane to a symptom of an unambiguous social model; a model defined in terms of harmony and identitarian rural sameness. Arguably, the circulation of such an image of homogeneity can be explained through one basic and universal cognitive aspect: it is easy to see a group of Others as a single entity rather than as a ‘society of individuals’ (Gauchet 2010). As Achille Mbembe acutely notes, the experience ‘of the “I” of others and of human beings we perceived as foreign to us, has almost always posed virtually insurmountable difficulties to the Western philosophical and political tradition’ (2001: 2). The point is that the presentation of Canhane in terms of ‘desingularization’, as Boltanski and Thevenot called it (in Buller 2013: 159), ignores how the residents can act according to disparate interests rather than for a unanimous collective good (e.g. Ferguson 1994; Li 1996; Mosse 1999; Shafer and Bell 2002; Kumar 2005). And so, like many other social collectives in the Global South, Canhane is externally understood and projected to the outside in relation to the idea of indivisible oneness; that is, as a community. At least in the North-Atlantic tradition, ‘the individual’, as the primal antonym of community (think, for example, of the owner of No Jellus), has since Plato and Aristotle been associated with the polis in the ‘North’, not with the rural in the ‘South’ (e.g. Giddens 1991; Bauman 2000; Howard 2007; Beck and Beck-Gernsheim 2010; Comaroff and Comaroff 2012; Baptista 2016b). Under the influence of this view, the concepts of ‘individual’ and ‘community’ have travelled through the world and are now frequently used to explain ontological contrasts between societies and places (Said 1978). ‘Perhaps the most familiar of these contrasts,’ J.Z. Kronenfeld noted, ‘is that between “communal” African society and “individualistic” Western society, which is often linked to the contrast between the “traditional” and the “modern”, the “rural” and the urban”’ (1975: 199). The notion of individualization as ‘modern living’ (Bauman 2001) is, indeed, intimately associated with the rise of Enlightenment reason, with the ‘modern man’ (Simmel 1950), and with European industrialization (MacFarlane 1978) and therefore is persistently related to elsewheres other than villages in Africa, which in this way gain the reference of collective bodies outside of ‘modernity’1 (Mbembe 2001: 10).

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To begin clarifying the theme of this chapter, since the 1970s, the term ‘community’ started to be massively adopted by development and tourism industries in an attempt to increase rigour in the rhetoric of project implementation. Its widespread use today led Anthony Jones to describe it as an ‘aerosol word’ because of the ‘hopeful way it is sprayed over deteriorating institutions’ (in Bryson and Mowbray 1981). By bringing into existence what it refers to, the concept of community can work as a means of power, because it makes, unmakes and moralizes groups. Specifically, its hyphenated cousin community-based has been endorsed by institutions such as the World Bank, United Nations, international NGOs and travel agencies operating in Africa, South America and Southeast Asia to advertise a moral ideal (e.g. Gooneratne and Mbilinyi 1992; Stock 1995; Nel, Binns and Motteus 2001; Mansuri and Rao 2003). For example, for the director of the NGO Forum in Uganda, Warren Nyamugasira, community-based approaches make significant contributions to ‘promoting togetherness’ (2002: 11). For Service Opare, specialist in development studies, community-based means the opportunity for local residents to ‘tap the “we-feeling” that group solidarity generates’ (2007: 25253). Along the same lines, the director of the consultancy Social Compass, Jehan Loza, highlights that community-based organizations are vital conduits in building ‘social ties among the citizenry’, and thus, ‘are integral to the wellbeing [sic]’ (2004: 300-1) of the community. These examples could be multiplied endlessly. Nevertheless, what they implicitly attest is that the contemporary spread of the concept of community-based contributes to both the homogenization and moralization of social collectives in the Global South. To put it in Amitai Etzioni’s (1996) terms, it conveniently ignores ‘the darker side’ of the groups catalogued as communities. Beyond any perspective that naturalizes or essentializes societies, whether by promoting the moral invisibility of individuality (i.e. as with rural communities) or by overemphasizing the role of the individual (i.e. cosmopolitan metropolises), Canhane should be understood first and foremost as a collective with its own built-in tensions, individualities, moralities, divergences, diversities, materialities and collective order. Canhane is not the community’s model from which the residents are predominantly communicated to the world. In its most plain definition, the concept of community in Canhane is a resource and an imaginary, which needs to be constantly reinvigorated both from the ‘outside’ and from ‘within’.

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The Map: Meeting Diversity in the Community In October 2008, a group of development experts came to Canhane to meet with the residents. At the meeting, a map of the local area was presented to the audience. ‘This map is to tell you how to treat your community land,’ the director of the NGO Lupa said in Portuguese, ‘from now on, you know the areas for tourism development, for agriculture, for pasture, and so on.’ The entire area of Canhane was made visible in a chart that exhibited various colours, words and lines indicating borders. This compartmentalization and organization of space springs from the very language embedded in the notion of community. As David Hughes notes, ‘communitybased development empowers people in their areas and nowhere else. Hence, planners obsess about cartography and, in particular, about boundaries … [The boundary] certificates the community as a natural scale for development – as a container of people’s ambitions’ (2005: 167). After a brief pause, the NGO director continued: Let me specify: do you see this red area on the map [pointing at the map (Figure 2.3)]? This is the area destined for tourism in the community. It is good for you to know this, because if anyone comes here wanting to invest in tourism, you know now where to lead them. But count on us to help you with all the tourism investors.

In contrast to the residents, this was not the first time that I saw the map; I had been introduced to it on 17 September 2008. The director of NGO Lupa had then shown me a small version in his office in Maputo. He was visibly proud and, while radiating an air of satisfaction, he asked my opinion about it. The director explained that the map was the outcome of a consultancy service carried out by what he initially called ‘another party’. However, shortly thereafter, he revealed the consultancy had been done by his wife. She was the other ‘party’ who in 2007, he clarified in such a way as to indicate the credibility of the consultant, had taken a course in aerospace photography at one of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) centres in the United States. Later in the meeting in Canhane, the NGO director suggested some activities to the residents. ‘These activities,’ he said by way of conclusion, ‘will help to boost tourism in the village.’ He focused mostly on handicraft work: ‘and if there is no knowledge in the community on how to do it,’ he insisted, ‘we bring people that

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know, and they teach you; they help the community with that.’ The director was referring to those who in the development language are known as ‘community specialists’. Under the halo of communitybased interventions, community empowerment and participatory rural appraisal, this meeting was part of a larger process aiming at fostering Canhaners’ reliance on development professionals coming from elsewhere. Because of the rhetoric utilized, it also served to promote the inculcation of a rationale in Canhaners’ consciousness about themselves; to promote a certain self-perception of the residents energized by an imaginary that can be capitalized upon in development and tourism: the imaginary of community. Various scholars have suggested exploring the imaginary as a medium for understanding the concept of community. One of the most eminent scholars in this field was Benedict Anderson. As he put it, ‘Communities are to be distinguished by the style in which they are imagined’ (Anderson 2006: 6). The imagined, Cornelius Castoriadis (1975: 8) tells us, is a determined creation, and ‘reality’ is its product. Because they produce effects, such as the creation of ‘realities’, it is important to recognize the practical capacities of imaginaries and, moreover, the way such capacities are capitalized upon. In the context of Canhane, the association of the village with community indicates the effect of an imaginary (community) that makes ‘real’ a field (Canhane) of and for regulation and intervention. This is formally indicated by the Mozambican Ministry of State Administration: ‘The institution of the community is a reality that manifests itself before the … juridical system’ (Ministério da Administração Estatal 1996: 24). In practice, the realization of Canhane as a community contributes to strengthening the role of foreign development institutions and their experts in Canhane; by institutionalizing it as a community, the village and its population, imagined-as-one, are developmentalized. Hence, what Lars Buur and Helene Kyed say comes as no surprise: the official recognition of ‘the existence of consensual traditional communities’ in contemporary Mozambique derives from ‘the results of a series of donorfunded studies on traditional authority’ in the period of 1991-97 (2006: 852). This causal relationship between the compartmentalizing of (certain) people through communities and the ethos of development-donors, of course, does not occur only in Mozambique and Canhane. In a different region, in a different country, but following the same logic, Barrie Sharpe cited the director of the South Bakundu Forest Regeneration Project in Cameroon, funded by Japanese and

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US aid money, who had said: ‘If they don’t have a “community” we’ll make them form one, and then we’ll order them to participate’ (Sharpe 1998: 39). One hour after it had started, the meeting in Canhane had evolved into loud disagreements and public confrontations, mostly between the head of the village and the other residents. During this phase, the development experts assumed a passive position, not intervening at all. They, who in development literature are addressed as ‘a team of experts committed to the improvement of the socioeconomic situation of local communities’,2 told me afterwards how surprised they were, as one of them said, ‘the community leader was easily pushed against the wall by some men from the community who were invisible before’. The stereotypical versions of homogeneous and harmonious Canhane were momentarily challenged. The invisible divergent appeared, and it appeared loudly. The main quarrel was that the community leader and a restricted group of elders had recently received a visit from a retired Mozambican minister. This person had shown interest in acquiring community lands for him to build a tourist lodge. Actually, the retired minister had been given the lands already, and the entire process of handing them over took no more than two days. The political chair of Massingir district played a key role in de-bureaucratizing these proceedings: a document was signed, the terrain was delimited and the Cerimónia de Juramento (oath ceremony) was held in less than forty-eight hours.3 Yet this was made known to most of the residents and to the foreign experts only on the occasion of the meeting. More alarmingly, the portion of land destined for the implementation of the new lodge was outside the red area that had been indicated by the NGO director in the map. Shocked by the information, an elder from the audience got up and yelled angrily: ‘I’m not afraid of the generals! [referring to the retired minister – the investor]. You should also be brave like me, and not be cowards. I used to run from them during the civil war, but I don’t have to do it anymore.’ His remark instigated more disorder with several people making loud and divergent comments.­Chaos took over the meeting. These quarrels revealed a society fragmented and disoriented. The meeting exposed a compound of divergent opinions and interests, internal tensions and contradictions to the ‘foreigners of the capital’, as the residents of Maputo are often called in the rest of the country. In the end, packaged juices were distributed by NGO Lupa to the

Illustration 2.3. Meeting in Canhane. Moment when the red zone of the map was explained. 6 October 2008. Photo by the author.

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participants. This practice is common in rural Mozambique, serving as a sort of incentive for popular participation. ‘Beginning with our community leader and ending with our young men who only think about playing football, there are lots of problems here because everybody thinks in a different way,’ a middle-age man confided in me while he was collecting his juice. In line with what happened at the end of the meeting, his words informed a heterogenic version of the village; a village that, nonetheless, is celebrated to and from the outside for its internal sameness and harmony. The point is that before, during and after this meeting, the NGO experts of Helvetas, Lupa and all the other development organizations involved in the village always promoted Canhane in terms of social uniformity and cohesion. The image of homogeneity prevails independently of any information portraying the situation as otherwise. The association of the village and its residents with the concept of community substantiates such an image. Since the opening up of independent Mozambique to international development interventions, the association between certain collectives with community happens almost everywhere in rural Mozambique. Against the background of what Jocelyn Alexander (1997: 20) refers to as a ‘profound crisis of authority’ in the postwar rural areas (Buur and Kyed 2006: 850), international donors and NGOs avidly looked to the image of community and the ideal of ‘community authority’ as sites for government decentralization (West and Kloeck-Jenson 1999: 461), neo-liberal post-socialist governmentality (Obarrio 2010: 265) and the development of development. As Euclides Gonçalves (2006) puts it, most advocates of the democratic and decentralization reforms in Mozambique assume that there is a positive correlation between democracy, decentralization, development and communities. Under this rationale, the later are assumed to be led by ‘traditional’ community leaders who are believed to be ‘locally accountable development brokers’ (Gonçalves 2006: 29). The point is, Ramah Mckay says bluntly, ‘the community [has become] the locus of political action and development in the postwar period’ in Mozambique (2012: 291). The character of favourableness that is implied in this correlation between development and community is underlined not only through the actual practices and discourses of development institutions but also through local residents’ attitudes. For example, Lars Buur and Helene Kyed (2006) report that, in 2002, the village of Mathica, in Manica Province, held a ‘recognition ceremony’ that was intended to formally identify the ‘traditional’ community authority.

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There were doubts and hesitations because no one was sure about the identity of that person. At some point, the chefe da localidade – the state official in charge of the locality – came up with a name. Concerns for the (absent) status of the locality and the people living there had prompted him to ‘produce’ such a figure, as he later confessed: ‘“Now we are going to lose out on development, now there is no community leader when the NGOs come”’ (Buur and Kyed 2006: 855, emphasis added). The problem was not the absence of local authorities, because Mathica was already under the formal jurisdiction of a district administrator and chefe da localidade. The problem was the absence of an authority that would formally connote Mathica with community. Ultimately, the logic behind the chefe’s announcement, which prevails in public consciousness in Mozambique and beyond (e.g. Kumar 2005), was that the locality and its residents would have to be standardized and homogenized as a community in order to be eligible for development. The circumstances of Canhane and Mathica shed light on the way development policymaking can rely on (and is believed to depend on) processes of ‘genericization’ (Brosius, Tsing and Zerner 1998) rather than on particularity. Indeed, when the goal is to foster development intervention by external actors, addressing homogeneity is strategically more convincing than informing the multiple compositions, diversities and contexts that are inherent to any social collective. Here, the strategy is not to address the ‘real’ but to put something else in its place – the creation of substitutes. This may explain why the concept of community is so prevalent in the rhetoric of policymaking and development intervention in the Global South. In this rhetoric, the concept of community is used to create ‘a reified entity that has a definitive substantive content’ which, therefore, ‘assumes the status of a thing that people “have”, or “are members of”’ (Baumann 1996: 12). To put it more simply, the institutional recognition of contrasting peculiarities and concerns in a social collective make the process of targeting that same collective for development intervention more difficult – uniformity rather than diversity is what makes community projects more convincing and intrinsically good. Canhane thus represents the broader logic of intervention by an industry that produces and simultaneously relies upon homogeneous visions of (certain) people. The continuing association of the local residents with the idea of community by the development experts is part of the process of disposing of particular subjects in order to lead them. As William Fisher stresses, the discourse of development

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renders independent groups of people as objects of unity, providing and defining knowledge of these objects in such a way that it makes them amenable to control (1997: 449). The production of this knowledge, Fisher continues, creates the boundaries of the domains of truth. It becomes the basis for the process of comprehension, realization and legitimization, which ultimately guides development agency (Wearing and McDonald 2002: 197). This helps us to understand why, in the development order, the image and understanding of Canhane as a uniform/harmonious whole are unchangeable. Indeed, various scholars have warned that, in development discourse, the way community is realized does not imply actual information about those who constitute the community. Peter Loizos and Brian Pratt wrote in a report for OXFAM that ‘common interests and characteristics are projected on to a community before there is any real evidence that they exist’ (1992: 37). Likewise, in Mozambique, Arnall and colleagues note how development discourse about community-based projects is ‘not matched by the reality on the ground’ (2013: 326). Merle Bowen (1989) focused ethnographically on such a ‘reality-gap’. Three decades ago, between 1986 and 1987, Bowen studied the farming systems in the district of Chokwe, which is an agriculturally important area located in the Mozambican province of Gaza. She concentrated mostly on Lionde, one of the fifteen ‘local communities’ near the Chokwe irrigation scheme. In 1987, several developing projects funded by international donor organizations or departments in North-Atlantic countries assisted the family agri-food sector in Chokwe. The main objectives of these project-interventions ‘were to provide extension services (limited to education and training) and to supply agricultural inputs’ to the local communities (Bowen 1989: 367). However, Bowen stresses, these projects were designed and implemented by development technocratic professionals without any knowledge of the ‘communities’ in the area. One of the main characteristics was that such ‘donor-sponsor peasant projects … depended mainly on imported producer (seed, fertilizer, ploughs, hoes and sickles) and consumer goods (motorcycles, bicycles and rubber boots)’ (Bowen 1989: 367-68). In this case, the aura of local community in rural Mozambique morally shrouded the enterprise of commodity production and export in the donor countries. By and large, the concept of community that circulates in the development professional world entails the construct through which those working in that world can best exercise their intentions. What all this means is that the homogeneous Other is more workable and

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economically more advantageous (i.e. a better target for consultations and commodity dispensation) than the heterogeneous Other.

The Significance of Community According to the Mozambican writer Mia Couto, there has been an expansion of concepts informing the potentialities and ways of developing his country: ‘local community’, he says, is the latest buzzword (2005: 17). Likewise, Juan Obarrio notes that, in Mozambique, ‘“community” is the new keyword for indigenous locality’, and this was promoted by ‘the foreign development industry’ (2010: 282). As with all the other topics in the book, this phenomenon should not be read in isolation. To be answered properly, questions about the expansion of community in Mozambique lead us to other geographies. Since the seventeenth century, the concept of community in particular has been utilized to criticize North-Atlantic modernity. Early sociologists saw the very idea of advancing modern society as being in opposition to the ideals underlying the morals of humankind. The basis of this view was that human harmony, closeness, solidarity and values of trust – what Ferdinand Tönnies (1988) attributed to the social unit of Gemeinschaft – were being replaced by competition, disharmony and insecurity. This belief found support in the work of anthropologists in the first half of the twentieth century. As Mysore Srinivas commented, ‘nobody can fail to be impressed by the isolation and stability of … communities’ (1960: 23). Like Srinivas, other anthropologists researching remote areas of the world were able to find and describe ‘communities’ as real features which, now we know, were projections of romantic nostalgic ideals that originated in their own societies. For example, Alan MacFarlane (1977) says that as urbanities sentimentally ‘needed’ and dreamed of communities, social scientists methodologically and conceptually required communities. And so, John Bennett explains, ‘community’, like ‘culture’, became an ‘immensely useful but entirely too broad organizing’ concept in anthropology (1970: 627). In light of this growing critique, MacFarlane (1977: 632) calls community one of the controlling myths of our time, shaping not only policy and government but also thought and research. In postindustrial societies, community became entrenched in the modern moral order (Taylor 2002), as both nostalgia about an imaginary idyllic past and moral solution to problems caused by the

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conditions brought about by modernity. Hence, in contrast to the impersonal modern era (Bauman 2008), community emerged as an expression of social goodness, a virtuous aggregation of people that cooperate among themselves (Tuan 2002: 307). It came to represent a social foundation of allegiance (Calhoun 1982: 897), meaning ‘the closer, warmer, more harmonious type of bonds between people’ (Hoggett 1997: 5). Canhane as a local community is thus the product of an extensive phenomenon. It informs and reproduces conditions that go well beyond the physical borders of the village, of the country of Mozambique, or even of the continent of Africa: at the core of the development discourse of community in and about Canhane is the tacit desire for difference in the most affluent societies globally. Timothy Morton draws a parallel between the extrinsic romantic ideology of community and the experience of ‘place’.4 He says that romantic ecology seeks ‘a place away from the enervating, phantasmagoric illusions of city life, as well as the industry, dirt, and noise’ (2007: 169). Dean MacCannell also tells us about the search and desire for place: ‘Security; familiarity; duty to one’s parents, spouse, and offspring; the good law; measure; order – these are all found in places (2011: 123). Yet like community, ‘place’ is bound up with a certain anxiety. ‘It seems we have lost something,’ Morton says, ‘But what if the story was more complicated? What if we had not exactly lost something?’ (2007: 170). He suggests that ‘we couldn’t lose place because we never had it in the first place’ (Morton 2007: 170). Morton concludes that the idea of place as a substantial ‘thing’ with clear boundaries was brought about by the insecurities of modern globalization, and, like the idea of community, is itself in error. Today, in public discourse, the superiority of speed over slowness and of exterritoriality over locality or place are said to contribute to a general sense of anxiety about the present and the future. The sense of precariousness and the propagation of conditions of insecurity have emerged at the core of the modern politics of everyday life. The global, it seems, has become an arena of imminent risk and danger, and this is emphasized almost daily by politicians, journalists, scholars and all other sorts of opinion-makers. The idea of a Risk Society (Beck 1992) is planted and fertilized in public consciousness by occurrences, pessimistic projections of the future, and formal discourses on the most unlikely events. For example, far from offering a message of peace and stability, Barack Obama in his December 2009 Nobel Peace Prize address gave a speech on warfare and insecurity in which he used the word

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‘war’, in singular or plural form, 44 times.5 He characterized modernity everywhere with the ideas of affliction, risk and war. But ‘if we want a lasting peace’, he said, ‘then the words of the international community must mean something’; the solution for the present and future would come from the entity of community. The growing preponderance of a general state of instability in most societies in the world has been addressed by various scholars. Drawing on Marx’s alienation, Weber’s rationalization and disenchantment, Durkheim’s anomie and Freud’s repression, Robert Fletcher engages with the idea of restlessness to characterize the present era. ‘For the past two centuries at least,’ he says, ‘numerous observers have identified, and sought to diagnose, a profound sense of restlessness at the heart of modern life’ (2014: 187). Which concept better characterizes present global times is debatable. My point is that in the increasingly globalized world, what ascribes to community the value of a lost and desirable treasure is the distress and uncertainties that are colonizing public consciousness. ‘We miss community,’ Zygmunt Bauman says, ‘because we miss security’ (2001: 144). The imaginary of community represents the opposite of the predicaments of global competitive and unstable life. It has become a source of peacefulness and cosiness in an insecure, restless, instable world; ‘an island of homely and cosy tranquillity in a sea of turbulence and inhospitality’ (Bauman 2000: 182). As Gerard Delanty says, the idea of community offers a comfortable illusion and promises a utopia (Delanty 2010: 91); a utopia that, nevertheless, serves to counter a lack in the vanguard of modernity (Baptista 2014b). Hence, the prevalent acclamation of community in Mozambique as elsewhere relies on the promise of the antithesis of the unpredictability of modern life in general. Following this reasoning, one could infer that by explicitly placing the idea of community at the core value of the business, community-based tourism transforms the very resource scarcity created by the expansion of ‘competitive and insecure modernity’ – that is, the scarcity of social places of harmony, security, goodness, stability, serenity – into a business opportunity. In Mozambique, the massive contemporary adoption of the term community can be observed in the manner in which questions of politics, economics, law, environment, ethnicity, development, tourism and certain collectives are articulated. Hughes (2005: 160) suggests that the concept of community replaced the single class and unit of analysis of peasantry in the country. But the main point is that, by embodying moral significance, ‘community’ became a type

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of word that is rarely used in a negative sense. As Chetan Kumar (2005: 277) says, people never want to say they are against community; it is a synonym for social virtue. In Mozambique, its aura of goodness positions community as a valuable rhetorical resource. It has become a convenient source for moralising state, development, economic politics and interventions even if in practical terms this leads to ambiguous ends. Take the following example: On 17 May 2008, a seminar titled The New Modalities of Tourism Activities was held in the capital city of Maputo. The National Vice Director of Tourism in Mozambique made the keynote speech. According to him, he was responsible for all current legislation concerning tourism in the country. In his speech, he focused on the legislative regulations of tourism investment. With the formality that accompanied his entire presentation, he clarified the audience about this: ‘All the tourist businesses in Mozambique – like hotels, lodges, pensions – have to give five per cent of their incomes to the local community. It is the law!’ He continued in an instructive and informative way, ending with a ramble on the ethical basis that supported such a legislation. This last part in his speech was filled with rhetorical expressions of benevolence, and accompanied by a rather less ceremonial body posture. Overall, he made the central aim of his public presentation evident: to inform the audience of the benefits of tourism for what he repeatedly referred to in a compassion tone as ‘our local communities’ (as nossas comunidades locais, in the original Portuguese). Right after he finished his speech, an impetuous but pertinent question arose from the audience: ‘Which community is paid by the hotels located at the city centre of Maputo?’ The vice director hesitated for a few seconds, causing an uncomfortable silence in the room. Embarrassed, he said slowly, ‘There, we have a problem. It’s something to be resolved in the regulation.’ His public discomfort stemmed from the broader incongruity and ambiguity that inform some of the national laws in Mozambique (e.g. Negrão 2002: 20-21; West 2005a; Obarrio 2014). Ironically, the vice director had corroborated this viewpoint in his contribution for the edited volume Tourism and Local Development. In the chapter The Role of the Central State in the Regulation of Tourism Sector, he wrote: ‘The public administration of tourism, the national organization of tourism, and the law of tourism are areas insufficiently studied in Mozambique. It is not by chance that the emergence of laws on tourism in Mozambique are not questioned yet’ (Chambal 2007: 69).

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More to the point, what various scholars and the vice director himself hints at, even if unintentionally, is that tourism regulation in Mozambique builds on a conception of the country as a compound of local communities. It is as if there is no non-community setting in Mozambique. For example, according to the Mozambican Strategic Program for 2005-9, the development of tourism must ‘stimulate the self-esteem of communities’ (Valá 2007: 19, emphasis added). This, and all the other official declarations and decrees that prevail in Mozambique lauding communities, raise an elementary question: what is a local community and who is or are the legitimate representative(s) of it? At least according to the Constitution of the Republic of Mozambique, Article 1 of Law Number 19/2007, from 18 July 2007, local community is defined as follows: A group of families and individuals, living within a territorial circumscription of the level of locality or inferior, which aims to safeguard common interests through the protection of housing areas, agricultural areas, cultivated or fallow land, forests, localities of cultural importance, pastures, water sources and areas of expansion. [translation by the author]

Small-scale territorial circumscription, shared common interests and ruralism are the three most basic characteristics defining local communities. In light of this view, local communities are components of rural landscapes (which makes the question raised in the conference highly relevant) and are intimately associated with nature (‘agricultural areas’, ‘forests’, ‘water sources’, ‘pastures’). Moreover, the decree indicates that community residents behave territorially in relation to the safeguarding of their common interests. The idea institutionalized by law is that local community members think and act in a single, shared way. Of course, this stereotyping is not exclusive to Mozambique, Africa or the Global South. For example, Gerd Baumann says that by conventionalizing residents in the Southall area in Greater London ‘as “belonging to” or even “speaking for” a pre-defined “community” one runs the risk of tribalizing people’ (1996: 8). This is an issue to keep in mind because the past few decades have witnessed the radical increase of burgeoning official projects with the prefix community attached to them worldwide. Nonetheless, nebulous and dubious connotations of community remain, everywhere. Canhane in Mozambique is part of this trend. To return to the seminar in Maputo, the 5 per cent of tourism revenues mentioned by the vice director cannot be effectively given to unrealistic counter-modern entities, abstractions which are said

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to be beneficiaries – the communities. Although the question raised after the vice director’s presentation was opportune, the problem of identifying local communities is not exclusive to Mozambique’s bigger cities, such as Maputo, Beira, Nampula, Tete or Quelimane. The postcolonial policy of villagization and the increasing urbanization of the country, particularly in the coastal area where tourism investment is more evident, have geographically and socially incorporated the hypothetical distinct ‘group of families and individuals, living within a territorial circumscription’, as the Mozambican’s Constitution describes communities, into a continuous, borderless and social space. In Mozambique, Obarrio says, the interconnections between the urban and non-urban ‘are so profuse that the distinction really only exists at an administrative level. However, this description of difference is not merely an abstraction that (mis)represents the actual state of things but, rather, through its expression in juridical instruments, it reveals itself as a technique’ of power, ‘essential for the image that the nation-state needs to project to legal advisers and international agencies’ (2010: 282-83, emphasis added). In Mozambique, the pitfall of promoting tourism regulation based on an ambiguous concept as ‘local community’ undermines the application of practical, objective law (Negrão 2002: 20; West 2005a; Buur and Kyed 2006: 852; Obarrio 2014). Along with this circumstance of incertitude comes the impracticability of the sound idea of ‘community development through tourism’. In this context, the promotions of community-based development, community empowerment or community participation through tourism are most often marketing manoeuvres and political procedures that serve to moralize tourism realizations and investments. Community is utilized as a moral rhetorical tool of enablement. Its association with goodwill enables and facilitates the expansion of tourism markets in Mozambique. Yet, Raymond Williams (1976) warns us, ‘it was when I suddenly realised that no-one ever used “community” in a hostile sense that I saw how dangerous it was’ (quoted in Baumann 1996: 15). Jean-Luc Nancy, the French philosopher, shares this concern: Little by little I have preferred replacing it [the word community] with the awkward expressions being-together, being-in-common, and finally being-with … I could see from all sides the dangers aroused by the use of the word community; its resonance full invincible and even bloated with substance and interiority; its reference inevitably Christian (as in spiritual, fraternal, communal community) … All this could only be a warning (2009: 24-25).

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Having considered these narratives, warnings, inconsistencies and modes of operation, the concept of community that is projected onto societies such as Canhane should be interpreted primarily as a moral instrument that is used to legitimize policies, strategies and conducts. The concept embodies ethical intentionality. As such, it is utilized in many contexts where its (ambiguous) meaning has practical consequences. This is why Kumar stresses that images of community are central to issues of project implementation in the Global South (2005: 279). In Mozambique, from the offices of governmental departments and NGOs in metropolitan Maputo to the interiors of dark dwellings made of mud in remote villages only accessed by foot in Niassa province, the term community and its hyphenated derivative, community-based, are creatively and economically used for their moral aptitude.

Development and the Moral Project of Community-Based TechnoServe was founded in 1968 in the United States, but is now an international non-profit organization represented in more than twenty-five countries. The organization’s institutional slogan is ‘Business Solutions to Poverty’. As announced on the company’s website, the mission of TechnoServe is to help ‘men and women in poor areas of the developing world to build businesses that create income, opportunity and economic growth for their families, their communities and their countries’ (technoserve.org). Established in Mozambique in 1997, TechnoServe gained national protagonism for its interventions in the tourism sector. Canhane is one of the five tourism projects that the organization is involved in.6 I met a TechnoServe representative on 14 October 2008 at the Covane Community Lodge. He was there to participate in a workshop with other ‘partners’ and to present his report on what he called ‘the necessities of the community-based lodge’, and ‘to make the community more competitive in the tourism market’. The TechnoServe expert justified his presence with the task of ‘facilitating’, as he repeatedly said, an intended partnership between the local Social Management Committee and international private investors. He insistently referred to TechnoServe and himself as the ‘facilitators’ in this process, attributing the verb ‘to facilitate’ the meaning of a job concept in its own right. During our conversation,

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‘community-based’ was by far the term most mentioned in his technical language. At some point, the ‘facilitator’ informed me about this: ‘The community-based lodge needs an injection of four hundred thousand dollars. The majority of this is to spend on infrastructure, but also on consultation services, community service et cetera. It is for helping the community.’ He added that TechnoServe had secured $150,000 of non-recoverable funds from the Ford Foundation for that end, of which at least 40 per cent would be spent on community training. Meanwhile, the services for community training had already been contracted to the company Proserv Tourism Mozambique, which is a subsidiary of the holding company Proserv International. During our conversation, we were interrupted by a man in his thirties who was also fluent in Portuguese. It was around five o’clock in the afternoon when he came to us and, in an alarmist tone and with a sense of urgency, asked the following to the facilitator: ‘Have you brought Baygon?’ He meant the most common insecticide brand used for extermination and control of insects in households in Mozambique. After receiving a negative response, he raised the level of his voice, ‘Really? So how do you deal with all these crazy mosquitoes?’ ‘They simply don’t bite me so much,’ the facilitator, who was a friend of his, replied. ‘Uháááuuu,’ the other responded loudly and quickly, ‘my boy is so lucky. I wish I was like you. I’m a magnet for mosquitoes: they simply love me. But I hate them. I couldn’t exist in a place like this, so full of mosquitoes and God knows what else.’ Then, he added a dramatic and final, ‘Please, take me out of here!’ Already when I was alone with the TechnoServe representative, I asked him who that person was. ‘He’s an expert in promoting tourism’s capacity-building in rural communities,’ he replied, before clarifying: ‘He’s the Proserv responsible for the community training that I talked to you about. He’s the one who will develop the training here.’ His clarification was revealing. In the name of the community-based project, thousands of dollars were allocated not to the community’s residents or to the local Social Management Committee, but to pay for the services of a person who when facing the presence of mosquitos in the area, begged to be taken out of there; after all, on paper, he was the expert on rural communities. In addition to TechnoServe and Proserv, two other institutions were present in the two-day meeting at the Covane Community Lodge: NGO Lupa and the African Safari Lodge Foundation. The latter self-promotes its role in Canhane as a consulting institutional

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partner of the community-based project that aims to show the local residents ‘the way in terms of using tourism for powerful forms of rural development’ (asl-foundation.org). Although all these ‘partners’ emphasize the community-based nature of the project, the Social Management Committee constituted by the local residents who have the formal responsibility over the lodge participated only briefly in these set of reunions. Actually, they were authorized to attend the workshop for only one morning meeting. On that morning, at around nine o’clock, I met them outside on the tree trunks that enclose the area for dancing shows in the lodge. The meeting which they were supposed to attend with the expert professionals of the four institutional ‘partners’ was taking place in the restaurant. ‘They told us to leave, because they needed to talk,’ said one of the members of the committee resignedly. As I clarified later, the committee members were in this morning meeting for a total of thirty minutes. To be clear, let me recapitulate this again: during a two-day event organized around the goal of strengthening the community-based character of the local tourism business, the members of the community themselves had access to what was being at stake for thirty minutes. There seems to be an obvious but also revealing paradox here. On the one hand, the concept of a ‘community-based’ project was overemployed and highlighted by the consultants, experts and facilitators during this event. On the other hand, these same professionals of development seemed to have neglected to include those who were supposed to actually constitute ‘the community’ in key decisions concerning the community-based project. This represents a clear case in which rhetoric and ideology are disconnected from practice. The way this workshop was held serves to exemplify how the massive use of the concept of ‘community-based’ in the development or aid industry is, in the main, an attempt to validate and legitimize development power. A community-based project can only start after the demarcation of a specific group of people as ‘the community’ (Sangameswaran 2008: 388). What the community-based project in Canhane shows is that this demarcation assists in the formulation of a field of external intervention. Concretely, in rural Mozambique, a group of people who have been ‘turned into’ a community become a development resource. This means that the structuring of certain collectives of individuals as communities legitimizes a raison d’être for the development apparatus in those same collectives; it legitimizes the expansion of the development industry.

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Advocates of community-based organizations (CBOs) describe them in terms of local empowerment, yet this connotation is not effective without further implications. Most of these advocates also emphasize that ‘CBOs need various forms of [external] support to enable them to make a productive contribution to rural development’ (Opare 2007: 256). In addition to other methods, and in the name of ‘community capacity building’ or ‘community-driven development’ (Arnall et al. 2013), such support is realized through abundant consultations, courses and workshops promoted at the local level. Accordingly, the community-based tourism enterprise in Canhane has been targeted for numerous externally driven actions. Most of these activities happen under the sound designation of ‘community capacity building’. Examples of these include codes of conduct for dealing with tourists (2004), a handicraft course (2005), a management training course (February 2008), English I (March– April 2008), a bartending course (July 2008), English II (October 2008), a course on conservation and sustainable planting methods (30 September-4 October 2008), a course on ‘community ownership of land’ (September 2008), a workshop on the analysis and identification of profitable sections (6 October 2008) and a waiter training course (1–5 December 2008). All these point to a crucial understanding of Canhane as part of a much broader phenomenon: the virtues of community and, in turn, the moral charm associated to community-based organizations assist in the process of the development conquest of societies found mostly in rural settings. This is why the idea that ‘development practitioners have a key role to play in facilitating community-based organizations to enhance social betterment’ (Kaplan 1996; Opare 2007) is strongly promoted by international development organizations. This self-assigned role gains the character of more than just a technical matter; it is a moralized practice of assistance. In this case, power and conquest are exercised in reference to the economics of care and provision of solutions to the predicaments of the ‘underdeveloped’ and ‘unskilled’. The constitution of certain groups of people as ‘communities’ in the Global South is part of this politics of solutions and benevolence. The village of Canhane evidences the hidden facet of corporate aid agency. Given the increasing importance of community participation and community empowerment in conventional development discourse, community tourism opens a potential Pandora’s box. It provides a window of opportunity for non-community-based agencies to capitalize on the community-based. Geoffrey Manyara and

Illustration 2.4. Workshop in Canhane. 6 October 2008. Photo by the author.

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colleagues (2006) warn that such a model of tourism represents a neo-colonial and neo-liberal strategy. Among other scholars, RuizBallesteros and Hernández-Ramírez corroborate this and stress that the majority of community tourism projects are highly dependent on NGOs and other external development agents, which contributes to the prosperity of those organizations (2010: 202). Accordingly, the tourism project in Canhane has been pulling up and nurturing the NGOs behind this venture. As in the example of the Proserv expert who was concerned with the mosquitoes and ‘God knows what else’, every workshop, course or consultation in the village was funded by external organizations to the foreign agencies, consultants and facilitators responsible for them. The English course undertaken in March and April of 2008, for instance, was financed by, as the Lupa director told me, ‘Spanish mola [“spring”, in English] from the World Tourism Organization’.7 The predominance of development events financed by international institutions shows how the community tourism business has served as a way of introducing not only tourism and tourists, but also development and its experts-consultants-facilitators into the village’s life. In this vein, community-based represents the empowerment of the empowerers. So far, I have attempted to show how the concept of community in Mozambique is based on a global moral imaginary that authorizes and promotes external actual intervention in the very subject that it fantasizes. But what I still have not approached is how such an imaginary is appropriated and reproduced by the local community members themselves. In what way do Canhaners use and try to capitalize on the condition of community? To what extent does the promotion of Canhane to the condition of community produce new levels of consciousness in the residents about themselves?

The We-Less Presentation of Community The first time I talked with the head of Canhane in private was on the day after the lobolo event mentioned at the beginning of this chapter. He was waiting for me under the shade of a tree near his house at two o’clock in the afternoon. His punctuality was indicative of the formality he adopted throughout the conversation. As soon as he started talking, a word emerged as dominant in his discourse: ‘community’. He pronounced this word in Portuguese (comunidade) innumerable times, embedded in the rest of his Shangane vocabulary. The frequency with which he employed it was notable, as if it was

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part of his recurrent language. His selection of words demonstrated something common in the village. Although the concept of community is foreign to Canhane – the closest concept is munti, which can roughly be translated as population – it has become a determinant in the contemporary everyday life of the village. Our conversation was divided into two parts. The first was concerned with the history of Canhane, while the second was focused on the venture into tourism. It was in the second part that the term community abounded in his speech. ‘The community is benefiting from tourism,’ he said before demonstrating it with an example: ‘Because of tourism revenues the community now has a new classroom, which helps the education of the children of the community.’ In this passage, he employed the term three times, all in the context of benefits from tourism. One might expect that, as a substitute, he could have opted for the pronoun ‘we’ or its possessive ‘our’ – e.g. we are benefiting from tourism, instead of ‘the community is benefiting from tourism’; or, education of our children, instead of ‘education of the children of the community’. From that day on, the word community prevailed in most of our meetings. Edward Bruner contends that the way people in destination societies speak about themselves ‘to foreigners influences how they talk about and express their own culture to themselves’ (2005: 22). The outcomes of my research in Canhane confirm Bruner’s conclusion. The community leader’s repetition of the word community was in line with a commonplace discourse used by many other residents, not only with tourists and development experts, but also among themselves. Discourse cannot be reduced to words. That is, ‘discursive practices are not simply a product of the ability to speak, but the result of actions taken by a multiplicity of institutions and agencies that have a “machinic” mode of operation’ (Lazzarato 2009: 112). The selection of certain words in language to express ideas derives from webs of meaning that, in turn, allocate value and power. By saying this, I want to re-emphasize that the rhetoric and imaginary of community is a field that constitutes new subjectivities, social status, consciousness, systems of value and social power in accordance to a larger order. Indeed, there is a broader dimension to the use of community in Canhane. In this sense, I find some parallels with Harry West’s (2005a) study of the ways contemporary Muedans in northern Mozambique employ the word ‘democracy’ (democracia) and adopt and adapt some terms and concepts from the international democracy lexicon. Like democracy in the Mueda plateau region, the

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word community in Canhane is part of a linguistic mosaic produced and sustained by the residents who have gained varying degrees of fluency in other languages and woven them into their own. In their use of democracy and community, both Muedans and Canhaners draw meaning from different systems of power, geographical reference points and historical strata. In the particular case of Canhane, the rhetoric of community allows an emblematizing of the residents in accordance with an extrinsic, but self-conscious, imaginary condition that values them. What I am suggesting is that community is not just a concept the residents have adopted passively as the outcome of their subjugation to a broader regime of value and influence; it is also a potential new source of authority for the Canhaners themselves – a ‘language of power’ (West 2005b). As such, it can be reconverted into a new local mechanism of legitimacy and exclusivity.

The Value of Community and Its Mechanisms of Exclusion Canhaners have incorporated the potentialities of being the materialization of an imaginary through which they are externally acknowledged as an exclusionary local condition. The question that therefore remains is: how is the global discourse of community converted into a local one? In October 2008, the NGO Lupa organized an English course in Canhane. The course was conceived for a dozen attendants, with the selection of the participants being made by the manager of Covane Community Lodge. They were the ten people constituting the Social Management Committee, the community leader and a fisherman living in the neighbouring village of Cubo. The fisherman was not born in Canhane but in the coastal province of Inhambane. He was selected for the course because he often guided the tourists along the Elephants River and, together with his wife, show them the local way of fishing and conserving the fish. On the second day of the fifteen-day course, a development expert from a Dutch NGO based in Maputo and a representative from the Mozambique Ministry of Tourism attended the class. They had been invited by Lupa to informally attest to the impacts of community development and tourism in the village. During the class, the English teacher suggested the election of a class delegate. Besides his teaching role in this course, the teacher was also the receptionist at

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the lodge, one of the two tour guides of tourist visits in the village (an event which I approach thoroughly in Chapter 5) and finally, as he told me ceremoniously, ‘the one responsible for the link between the community and the lodge’. After his suggestion, silence and doubt fell over the room for the next two or three minutes. The collective indecision pressured both the NGO and Ministry of Tourism’s representatives for another suggestion: they recommended the fisherman to be the class delegate. The other attendees remained silent, unresponsive to the suggestion, and the class proceeded without a definitive decision. On the fourth day of the course, I met the fisherman in his adobe house in Cubo village. I asked him how the course was going. ‘I don’t know, and I don’t care,’ he said angrily, ‘I was kicked out of it the day after you and the other people from Maputo were there.’ Accordingly, on the third day of the course, when the development expert, the Ministry of Tourism representative and myself were not in the class, the rest of the attendants accused the fisherman of not being a member of the community of Canhane. They said that he should not benefit from the English course at all. ‘They came up with this stupid argument that I’m not from the community,’ he complained, ‘but they forget that I’m the one who contributes more to the community with my patience with the tourists, because in the end most of the money paid for my guiding tours goes to the lodge, not to my family.’ Increasingly irritated, he went on, ‘this is not the first time that such a thing has happened; whenever foreigners engage me in front of them, the villagers say things like this: “you are not from the community”, or “we are the ones who need to be helped”.’ The teacher of the English course also confirmed to me that this quarrel had taken place. Half a century ago, Wayne Brockriede noted that ‘a rhetorical act occurs only within a situation, and the nature of that act is influenced profoundly by the nature of the encompassing situation’ (1968: 12). This is an elementary but also crucial observation that highlights the premise that each rhetorical act derives from the characteristics of ongoing processes and situations. Indeed, the distinguishing way the Canhaners evoke community must be understood within the broader situational context that gives it relevance and meaning. Being in the community is, in the community-based process, a value, an opportunity, a source of power, and therefore needs to be exclusionary. As the work of Pierre Bourdieu (1977, 1984) shows us, power can derive its logic from the utilization of certain categories – such as community. This relation between power and categories

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can be socially effective. It can have effects in the social ‘habitus’ of the human collectives that come to be defined through certain categories. In this sense, the category of community can be utilized as a powerful tool of inclusion or exclusion, a vehicle for the authoritative definition of who constitute(s) us and the others. This is why, regarding the incident during the English course, the concept of community served to present the fisherman as a sort of internal other, a local yet not a community member. The Canhaners’ discourse of community represents a reflexive self-validating quality, which nevertheless is in accordance with, to use Brockriede’s words, an ‘encompassing situation’ that creates the condition of local community as a socio-economic opportunity. John Comaroff and Jean Comaroff (2009) present similar conclusions from their studies in South Africa. They stress that the entry of the Makuleke people into the tourism business world has heightened their awareness of being the community of Makuleke. ‘According to one prominent man,’ they say, ‘all the talk about tourism, even when it has been a cause of conflict, has “served to bind us together [into] a community”’ (Comaroff and Comaroff 2009: 15). In this case, the lack of clarity as to what community actually consists of is not critical. The value of being the representation of the imaginary of community lies in the potentiality of exclusivity; the potential benefit that can come from being ‘the inversion’ (Graburn 1983) of everyday life in the geographies of wealth located in the ‘North’, which are inhabited by the tourists visiting the Makuleke people. Especially in Africa, where the characteristic of scarcity, as well as purity, spirituality and closeness to nature are so markedly projected worldwide (Mbembe 2001), the term community can thus represent a value-added concept, serving as a marketing resource to attract international tourist-customers from the most affluent societies in the world. Hence, the colonization of Canhaners’ discourse about themselves, revealed in their discourse of community, comes as no surprise. Since the tourism project was introduced in the village, Canhaners began projecting themselves, internally and externally, through such a discourse of opportunity, which meets the normative standards for global market integration; that is, integration in the extensive market of buyers and sellers, products and services, dealers and producers of development and tourism. Furthermore, in adopting the discourse of community, these residents engage in rhetoric as a process of adjusting people to ideas.

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Canhaners participate in a dominant system of representation empowered by a transnational moral imaginary. They are participants in such a system because, by using the non-Shangane term community to represent themselves, they create and authorize an imagined entity that did not exist as such before the implementation of the tourism project by the development industry. Fundamentally, Canhaners’ appropriation of community to represent themselves entails a reflective, conscious and collective aptitude required to see and talk about themselves in the same way as a foreigner (in particular, development professionals and international tourists) would see and talk about them. As with most symbolic creations and materializations of ideas, the state of being a community must be continually revived and sustained by discourse. In this process, Canhaners come to embody the proof of what is seen and said; they authenticate and incarnate the argument that constitutes them as a homogeneous, needy, rural, moral and impoverished social entity. And so, as Akhil Gupta (1998) also suggested in the context of India, standardized underdevelopment became a form of collective identity in Canhane. Let us remember that ‘underdevelopment’ here means competitive value. In this regard, the new possibilities brought by development and tourism to overcome the problem of Canhane’s association with a recognizable form of underdevelopment give competitive value to Canhaners; by ‘needing help’ they can be targeted for assistance. This suggests the idea that the community rationale that promotes interpretations of certain peoples as enclosed in places of social harmony, but also of isolation and material deprivation, may produce new forms of locality based on the performance of morals (‘we are the ones who need to be helped’). These morals, however, are in line with global market ideology – in particular, the market where development and tourism validate the activity of each other. Ultimately, Canhane presents forms of collective being in which the constituents of the community become an object to themselves: the village arises to the world as a social field of self-objectification.

Conclusion In Africa, the discourse and ideology of community have tremendous impacts on present ‘regimes of living’ (Collier and Lakoff 2005: 22-23), especially those regimes marked by the development industry. The word community attracts international attention and

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carries with it powerful significance, which often relegates community-based models to processes of acquiring funding opportunities for development organizations (Agrawal and Gibson 1999: 631). In practice, however, any project that has at its heart the concept of community is ambiguous, because it relies on an imaginary and idealistic construct: a stereotypical idealization of the Other, an ‘ideal masquerading as social fact’ (Blackstock 2005: 42). The word comunidade (community) resounds in every corner in Canhane. It is highly popular and therefore it pervades the local atmosphere. I hope the reader knows now that this prevalence suggests much about the broader order in which the residents live in. Indeed, Canhaners have become aware of their condition as a community. This consciousness emerged after the implementation of the community-based tourism venture in the village. During this process, local residents have progressively appropriated the ideology of community as a means of possibility, of opportunity that comes mostly from them being targets of external intervention. In this sense, Canhaners are explicitly placed, and place themselves for others, as the antithesis of modernity; as a collective with no individual aspirations, no diversity or internal competition, but rather with common and shared interests. Basically, community has become the dominant category through which Canhane and its residents are acknowledged, and Canhaners have been reproducing it. Their participation in this representational process reflects their aspiration to membership and inclusion in the global market of development and tourism. Self-orientalization became a technique of the orientalized. Ultimately, Canhaners show how imaginaries can become realities produced and reproduced to validate the global economy of intervention through benevolence.

Notes   1. I draw on Achile Mbembe’s (2001: 10) reference to modernity as a phenomenon that has been primarily and primordially understood from the perspective of Western rationalism.   2. http://www.unwto-themis.org/en/programas/volunteers/convocatorias/mozambique2010, accessed 18 May 2010.   3. In Canhane, the ancestors must be informed about any transition of power or ownership over the land, ‘otherwise they become angry and can boycott everything,’ a resident told me. The usual proceedings in

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land concession imply that the investor has to bring five litres of red wine and offer this to the ancestors (which is done by irrigating the field), to bring an additional litre of red wine to be consumed at the locale during the ceremony, and to pay 300 metical (US$10). All the wine brought must be used during the ceremony.   4. The association between community and place has been addressed by various anthropologists. David Hughes, for example, narrates an ethnographic episode in the Great Limpopo Transfrontier Park in which he says: ‘In 1999, brochures of the Poverty Alleviation Action Programme exhorted Chipinge peasants in English to “Participate in the development of your community”. The author, of course, translated this statement, but he or she found no Shona cognate for “community”. Resorting to the standard geographical lexicon, the Shona version of the brochure (when back-translated) urges: “Become a member in planning the development of your place”’ (2005: 167-68, emphasis added).   5. According to the transcript of Barack Obama’s speech at the Nobel Peace Prize ceremony in Oslo on 10 December 2010, as released by the White House. http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/11/world/europe/11prexy. text.html, accessed 11 February 2010.  6. In addition to the Covane Community Lodge, the other projects of TechnoServe are: Manda Wilderness (Niassa province), Guludo Beach Lodge and Ibo Island Lodge (both in Cabo Delgado province) and the Ilha de Moçambique (Nampula province).   7. In Mozambique, money is commonly mentioned using the term mola (spring), meaning that it allows people to move.

3 Developmentourism

This chapter is about the production of representations at tourist sites. The representations that I analyse not only reveal a way of perceiving reality, but indicate a way of actually producing and organizing reality – they act as coordinates of reality in those sites. I take a cross-cultural comparative approach between two villages in Mozambique: Canhane, the focus of the book, and the village of Mbueca in the north of the country. Specifically, I explore the strategic representations of the tourists as protagonists of assistance in the two destination societies, and the interlaced relation between development and tourism industries that such representations reveal. In order to downsize the complex alliance between the two industries, I use the concept developmentourism and introduce it into the social sciences.1 The term captures the merging of development and tourism – they are undifferentiated from each other and, therefore, the two industries or the two terms, which are conventionally taken as distinct or even opposed, should appear as a single word and single morpheme. Developmentourism cannot be divided into smaller meaning units, because it means a single and distinct undertaking. My aim is twofold: to analyse the broader economic and moral order that informs the local politics of representations, and to explore how a possible new culture that emerges from the integration between development and tourism is reflected, produced and reproduced in the two villages in Mozambique.

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Mbueca ‘Want to enjoy a little opulence and do your bit for the local community at the same time?’ asked a journalist of the British newspaper The Observer in an article titled ‘Luxury without the Guilt’. The clarification came immediately afterwards: ‘It’s no longer an impossible combination … in the Lake Nyasa’s [sic] most gorgeous corner, Nkwichi Lodge and the Manda Wilderness project have together assumed a prominent role in [Mozambique’s] tourism renaissance.’2 In 1994, two British brothers developed an idea for creating a tourism venture that would help local communities in southeastern Africa. They mobilized private investors who were willing to invest US$500,000 in the project. Their idea was materialized in 2001 when they established a lodge on the pristine Mchenga Nkwichi beach,3 located on the shore of Lake Niassa, in the largest but least populated province of Mozambique – Niassa. The Nkwichi Lodge is surrounded by an idyllic landscape that is part of the Manda Wilderness Area – a privately initiated conservation region of 120,000 hectares. As advertised in the organization’s website, ‘the Manda Wilderness Community Trust works closely with Nkwichi Lodge to ensure local communities also benefit from the growth of responsible tourism in the region’.4 The Nkwichi Lodge is cited worldwide as an example of good practice in tourism. Among an extensive list of awards, it was announced as the winner of the Virgin Holidays Responsible Tourism Awards 2008 for best small hotel/accommodation in the world. It received the Condé Nast Traveler World Savers award in 2012 in the ‘Doing It All’ category for small resorts. Furthermore, it won the To Do! contest in 2011 for the best socially responsible tourism project. ‘When tourists come here,’ one of the managers of the lodge told me, ‘they already know about our community development work. Actually, many come because of that.’ The activities offered to the guests include canoeing on the lake, snorkelling and guided tours to the community development projects in nearby villages, particularly to Mbueca. I asked the British national in charge of the community development policy about the feedback they receive from the tourists after visiting the village of Mbueca. She said, ‘It is positive, but most of them are surprised that they are so well received by the villagers when they live in such shortage conditions; it’s like lack of resources on one side, but smiles and tenderness on the other side.’

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Figure 3.1. Map of the area. Map by the author.

According to the local authorities, Mbueca has around 750 people. As the main tour attraction, the village does not have electricity, mobile telephone networks or flushing toilets; households rely on firewood for cooking and candles and paraffin lamps for light. The village is not accessible by road, only by footpaths or boat. The closest road passes through Manda Mbuzi village, a two-and-a-half hour journey by foot. Farming, fishing and tourism-related jobs constitute the main economic activities in the village. In April 2008, I came to Mbueca to record the perceptions and thoughts of the inhabitants regarding tourism in general and the tourists they meet in particular. I stayed in the village one month. As is the most common method, I tried to steer informal conversations towards debates about tourism. However, this proved to be a difficult task. Each time we engaged in the topic, the residents opted to speak of donors (doadores). The word ‘tourists’ (turistas) was absent from our conversations. Despite my efforts to provoke and

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induce the use of the word, they persistently resorted to the development category. ‘We are often visited,’ the man in charge of the only store in the village said, ‘by donors from across the whole world: from Europe, Asia, America.’ Their use of donor seemed to point at a meaning not covered by or limited to the ordinary and dominant use of the concept. Nevertheless, they used it. Perhaps this was so because there is not yet another concept available for them to use in regard to the meaning they want to express. Days passed without any reference to the tourists. The reason for this intriguing phenomenon became clear following a personal tourism experience – I played the role of a tourist at Nkwichi Lodge.5 On one occasion, I asked a group of people for someone who could show me the village. They then called a man who introduced himself with the English version of his Portuguese name. He was my guide for the next three hours on a tour centred around shortage, need and the potentialities for community development in the village of Mbueca. I was first led to the health clinic. My guide explained that it was built in 1986 by Catholic priests. However, in 1994 they were told that the church could no longer support it. ‘That was when our régulo [head of the village] asked the government to hire a nurse and purchase medicines,’ he said. No one was in the clinic. I was told that the nurse in charge had to leave, as he does every three months, to get medicines from the town of Metangula. After twenty minutes of touring the clinic, we went to visit the Anglican church. It is the most prominent building in the village, located on an elevated area allowing a panoramic view of the village and Lake Niassa. Despite the comparatively good condition of the church, I was introduced to some of its limitations, such as, in the guide’s own words, the ‘unbelievably hot temperature that it reaches when it is full of people attending the mass.’ When we finally left the church, another man spontaneously joined us for the rest of the tour. He was not born in Mbueca, but in Mocimboa da Praia. Nonetheless, he considered himself a ‘local’ because he had been living in the village for twentytwo years. He was the director of the school at Mbueca, which was our next, and last, destination. When we arrived there, he recounted how the school was built by the local community with materials and money given by donors and by the British NGO Manda Wilderness Community Trust. ‘However,’ he said, ‘the school is still incomplete. The doors were our most recent improvement, made possible only through the money given by donors. But we need more support to provide better

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conditions for our children. The urgent needs now are for chairs and to repair the floor.’ During the visit I was silent most of the time. The director gave a formal speech as a standard presentation. Later, he guided me to his office and kindly asked me to sit on a chair in front of his desk. He asked me to fill out the visitors book, as if I had just seen an art exhibition or a monument. One of the columns of the book, titled Observations, was full of English comments made by previous visitors, such as: ‘keep up the good work’, ‘thank you for showing us the school’ or just, ‘good’. Moreover, some of the comments ended with a number preceded or followed by a monetary symbol (e.g. ‘$80’, ‘50€’). After I had filled out the visitors book, without having written any number under the column Observations, I gave it back to him. But then he slowly returned it back to me and repeated something that he had already emphasized during his presentation: ‘The donors usually support us.’ At that moment I realized something that later became obvious and was confirmed throughout my stay in the village: whenever the Mbueca residents talked about ‘donors’, they were referring to those whom I considered tourists. This finding raised a new basic question: why have people in Mbueca adopted such a category among the range of other categories? In other words, why have they attached the signification donors to tourists?

Illustration 3.1. The school of Mbueca. 11 April 2008. Photo by the author.

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Canhane In the previous chapter, I challenged the idea of Canhane’s collective as a single voice. There are, of course, different opinions and representations among the residents. However, in demystifying the notion of the homogeneous nature of the social structure of Canhane, I hope I have not promoted a narrow perspective of it; that is, a version of the village as excessively diverse, irregular and disoriented. Despite its heterogeneous character, Canhane is to some extent subject to a certain local order. As I mentioned in the beginning of Chapter 2, Canhane may in fact represent a model, not the model of community proclaimed by extra-local institutions, but a more exclusive one; a model of society informed by historiographies, colonial outcomes, national politics, and local responses and resistance to them. Concretely, Canhane has unitary characteristics that support the presence of prominent positions shared by most of the residents about tourism and the tourists in the village. This section is about one such perspective. Most of the Canhaners approve of having tourism activities in the village. When I asked them directly why, the typical answers I got were: ‘because the tourists support the community’, ‘it brings benefits to the community’, ‘tourists’ contributions are to help the community’ and ‘tourists assist the community’. What started to become clear during my research in Canhane was that such common discourse conveys and is inspired by Canhaners’ normative significations: the category tourist embodies an agent of community development. Especially among the fishermen who live in the lower part of Canhane, on the banks of the Elephants River, the Covane Community Lodge is instead called Helvetas. It is explicitly associated with the international development organization that developed and originated the community tourism venture in Canhane. Such an association is also common in neighbourhood villages. For example, just after I had interviewed the community leader of the village of Cubo, he said to the person who accompanied me: ‘I used to see him around [referring to me]. Is he sleeping at Helvetas [referring to the Lodge]?’ There is a direct and deliberated lack of differentiation between the lodge and the Swiss NGO Helvetas. Importantly, the fusion of meaning between development and tourism realms exceeds the spatial and infrastructural dimension and includes all the foreign individuals who stay overnight at or even just visit the lodge.

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Rather than earning a connotation close to the idea of development or aid work, the development professionals that visit Canhane are all named tourists. Not even the numerous formal appointments the Canhaners have in the village with donors, professional consultants and other development experts have led to their adoption of any other denomination than the category tourists. Although on many occasions these development professionals only stay for a couple of hours in the village, they are nonetheless still and always locally considered tourists. In the case of Canhane, the dominion of development is transferred to the sphere of leisure activity (the donor is called a tourist), while in Mbueca the reverse happens (the tourist is called a donor). Both discourses are important because they are not passive: they inform practice. From an anthropological perspective, the challenge here is to pay close attention to what people do and say and how they use their categories to understand the situation. Where do these conceptions come from? How do they relate to the place-inthe-world that these villages, Mozambique or Africa have come to occupy in the new global order? In sum, what do these two cases, which seem to counter each other, tell us?

The Category Tourist According to James Buzard (1993: 1), the word ‘tourist’ is a lateeighteenth-century coinage used for those people touring areas such as the English Lake District. Robert Aubin (1944: 334) suggests that the word was first planted in the language in 1780 with the announcement of a poem called Ode to the Genius of the Lakes in the North of England written by an anonymous poet. From the time of the formation of a ‘tourism social science’, as Dennison Nash (2007: 1) put it, there has been an effort expressed in many institutional reports, research articles and monographs, and by national state institutions and transnational organizations, to achieve a universal definition of the tourist. However, since German sociologists’ attempts to define it in the 1930s, inconsistencies can still be found and none of the generalized conceptualizations has been widely adopted (Cohen 1984: 374). Despite its increasing relevance on the planetary scale, anthropologists in particular have had a hard time defining tourism (Stronza 2001: 265), and, as Malcolm Crick noted, a ‘fundamental uncertainty remains – namely, about what a tourist is’ (1989: 312).

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The ambiguity that surrounds the universality of the meaning of tourist is due to the inconsequent task of defining ‘the fluid subject’. Indeed, concepts such as fluidity, flow, instability, change or movement are often evoked to represent the present era, which as Zygmunt Bauman (2000: 7) says, is characterized by the end of preallocated and static reference groups. The high dynamics of global contemporaneity call for the rethinking of the concepts that convey stable meanings. As Stuart Hall (1996) argues with regard to race, a concept can be attached to and detached from so many different places, groups and ideas that it operates as a free-floating signifier (Dixon and Hapke 2003: 143). In this chapter, my goal is not to contribute to a universal definition of what constitutes the tourist. Rather, I intend to address the emerging dedifferentiation of the meaning of tourist, a concept that no longer clearly represents all types of holiday promoted, available and practiced in the present. To resort to a cliché, this is a present that is dominated by infinite exchanges of symbols, peoples, values, images, goods and narratives, leading to the unbinding of processes that define contemporary social life – using John Urry’s words, ‘postmodernism involves a dissolving of the boundaries’ (2002: 74). The increase of interwoven proceedings and the disintegration of clear borders between what were previously differentiated social activities have led to the reproduction of categories of activity that express, reflect and reproduce dedifferentiation. It is in this sense that we are now noticing the conspicuous emergence of new kinds of dedifferentiated Others – e.g. ‘the other in us’ (Pandian and Parman 2004). Hence, what is important is not so much the universal definition of the tourist, but what the category represents in different contexts – what it incorporates and excludes – and, more crucially, what it camouflages. The principle behind the classification of the donors in Mbueca and the tourists in Canhane informs the way in which definitions of reality are constituted and maintained through linguistic processes. The rhetoric of donors and tourists must be deconstructed, and attention should be paid to whose voices are speaking and whose interests are being served. Following this line of thought, I suggest that behind the speaking subjects expressed in Mbueca and Canhane lies the substantiation of a broader phenomenon: those social collectives in the postcolonial Global South that are under the aegis of community tourism have become crucial allies in the production and reproduction, affirmation and vindication of the development market.

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The Roles of Discourse Through resorting to the subject of madness, Michel Foucault considered discourse as ‘the interplay of the rules that make possible the appearance of objects’ (1972: 32–33). For him, discourse makes its objects through meaningful social interaction. The Foucauldian use of the concept of discourse encompasses not only communicative practice, but also the ideological systems that animate the structures of social practice; that is, discourses shape the ways in which we apprehend the world (they are prescriptive) and exist to express certain realities in accordance with ideological principles. However, the actual effects of ideology are neither homogeneous nor static, as neither are societies. Michel Picard, for example, notes that the meaning associated with the Balinese expression for ‘touristic culture’ (budaya wisata) has shifted from identifying a threat to Balinese society to describing a positive feature of modern Bali (1996: 165). As James Ferguson states, ‘discourses have important and very real social consequences’ (1994: xv). Yet language as discourse is limited. By disciplining our thinking, language includes certain possibilities of knowledge – generating certain realities – but also excludes others. Discourse constructs its own conventions by constituting frameworks of sense-making, producing meanings and making sense of reality through the way it rules in, or rules out, certain ways of thinking (Fairclough 1992). Facing all of this, the important question for the anthropologist must be: ‘what was being said in what was said?’ (Foucault 1972: 28). Scholars have pointed out that in order to understand discourse as a social practice, it must be examined in the commonplace occurrences of everyday life (Marston 1989: 439). It is this latter suggestion that I want to grab hold of by adapting Foucault’s question to the main topic of this chapter: what was being said when the Mbueca residents referred to the ‘tourists’ as ‘donors’ and the Canhane residents referred to the ‘donors’ as ‘tourists’? Categorizing the world and its constituents through language and words is an essential feature of the legitimation of knowledge. Some years ago, the Mozambican president Joaquim Chissano held a rally in the northern city of Nampula, in which he presented the ministers of his government. His speech was made in Portuguese, with direct translation to the regional language, Emakua. After he presented the minister of culture, the translator hesitated, and said:

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‘he is the minister of fun’ (Couto 2005: 128). The absence of an equivalent word is not a result of the limitations of the Emakua language, but another way of interpreting the world and, in turn, of producing and maintaining different forms of knowledge: words are essential tools in our conception of the world and ourselves. To understand the meaning of words, one has first to consider them as the words of someone, informed by significations brought by the context in which they are applied. Words are agile ingredients of language appropriated differently by people, but nevertheless fundamental to the construction of social reality (e.g. Gergen 1999; Phillips, Lawrence and Hardy 2004). The categorization of tourists as donors (Mbueca) and donors as tourists (Canhane) reflects the world as it is represented by the speakers. More precisely, the use of one word to encompass both tourists and donors, the intertwining character of their meanings, informs the way the speakers make sense of and perform the world of which they are part. It is now well-known that the power of the development industry rests on a historically produced discourse (e.g. Dubois 1991; Escobar 1988; Ferguson 1994; Yarrow and Venkatesan 2012). This discourse has emerged most notably from the worldwide political rearrangement that occurred after World War II. Ever since the post-war transformations, development institutions have elaborated and circulated a particular political vocabulary characterized by its ‘mobilizing metaphors’ and ‘linguistic strategies’ (Shore and Wright 1997) that justify and legitimize their interventions. In the view of many critics, the development apparatus identifies problems resulting from an idealized form of progress-order, which in turn requires the intervention of the same agencies that produce and sustain that version of social progress (e.g. Rahnema 1992; Ferguson 1994; Fairhead and Leach 1997). These are the institutions that assume the technical solutions to the problems that they announce. James Ferguson (1994), for example, has demonstrated how the discourse of development has constructed the African country of Lesotho as a particular kind of object of knowledge that, fundamentally, validates development interventions. Arturo Escobar (1988) has illustrated how development knowledge organizes the construction of the problem of hunger in the ‘Third World’. With a particular focus on Colombia, he explains how some institutions utilize a set of practices in the construction of the problem of hunger in such a way that they can control policy themes, enforce exclusions and affect social relations. In the same way, Luis Avilés (2001) has

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shown how institutions devoted to international development have created a discourse that influences the conduct of the epidemiological profile of El Salvador. Basically, the discourse of development generates a structure of knowledge, and in so doing attempts to shape the ways in which realities are perceived and defined. The institutional structure that arises from this process and its globalization through policy and funding mechanisms have produced and consolidated the types of legitimate knowledge of and for development all over the planet. This, perhaps, explains the expanding pervasiveness of development thinking, and why many researchers with a direct connection to such institutions accept so lightly standardized frameworks of representation as applicable across diverse geographies and cultural forms (Yarrow and Venkatesan 2012). More often than not, development knowledge has become globalized in such a way that it has achieved the characteristic of popular ‘world opinion’ – Africa as a receptacle of negativeness and otherness is one such example (Mbembe 2001). As the Mozambican writer Mia Couto says, ‘Africa is still seen by the world as an exotic place, of an elder telling stories close to a fire, of the wizards, of the witchdoctors’ (Zanini 2008: 30). According to Couto, these images and the associated categorizations of the continent ignore fifty years of independence, urbanization, industrialization and the emergence of some of the most energetic metropolises in the world. The global diffusion of such images means that ‘Africa’ as a category enters Western imagination through a series of lacks and absences, failings and problems (Ferguson 2006: 2). The obvious problem here is that such images do not just distort social reality: they also may shape it. It is in these terms that Africa becomes a discursive and imaginative reality within which, and according to which, some people live. This perspective builds on an immense body of research ‘analysing international development as the expression of a particular “discourse” that not only pursues economic transformations … in the places it operates but also seeks to acculturate local inhabitants to a particular cultural perspective’ of themselves (Fletcher 2014: 15). However, as I show in this book, this is not unilateral. Marginalized people can also manipulate and, in turn, profit in unexpected and particular ways from those aid-funded projects that promote and are based on stereotyped discourses of them as underdeveloped, marginalized and poor (e.g. Rossi 2004; Mosse 2005; Li 2007b).

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Being ‘Third World’ The concept of the ‘Third World’, introduced into the literature of the social sciences by the French economist and demographer Alfred Sauvy in 1952, has become a term of reference appropriated by the discourse of development. Its original meaning, used by Abbé Sieyès (1748-1836) to signal the emergence of the bourgeoisie as a political force in the eighteenth century (Mintz 1976: 377), was then converted into a new significance, essentially expressing shortage, poverty, exoticism and underdevelopment. The concept and its new meanings have spread as a fictitious construct and have become an omnipresent reality. Yet discourses, as Edward Said (1978) noted, are not innocent explanations of the world. They are a way of ‘worlding’ (Spivak 1987), of appropriating the world through knowledge. Wide-reaching connotations of Africa as ‘Third World’ have induced and legitimated the interventions of development institutions in order to resolve the problems that the working concept brings with it. As Martin Mowforth and Ian Munt note, ‘in itself the Third World is a socially constructed and contested entity that is inexorably related to development’ (2009: 371); this is how and why, Ferguson (2006) suggests, the ‘nongovernmental states’ emerged. I once met a Mozambican in the town of Tihovene (around 7 kilometres from Canhane) who spontaneously brought up this topic. He was in his early sixties and had spent a decade working on HIV/AIDS prevention programmes in and with international NGOs. He had recently switched his professional activity and was now selling fishing materials for a company in Maputo. At the kiosk Paga Logo ao David (Pay Immediately to David), he told me: ‘For Mozambique, the global alarm about HIV in the country is useful, because it allows the money to continue coming in, and so it’s useful to maintain such awareness, because it is an export business.’ He looked at me with a serious expression and remained silent for some ten seconds. ‘I know what I’m talking about,’ he continued, ‘I’m just saying the obvious and what my professional experience taught me: the poverty of the communities, developing them, helping them et cetera are mostly convenient resources that are promoted because these are transformed in businesses. Lots of people make money and careers from it. That’s why we are Third World, and that’s why it’s convenient for some people that Mozambique keeps being Third World.’ I asked him for permission to write down his words as I

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took the notebook out of my pocket. ‘No problem,’ he said, ‘but what I’m telling you everybody knows. Did you read the last book of Mia Couto?’ He was referring to the novel The Last Flight of the Flamingo, where through a labyrinth of personages, events and stories the author provides a subtle look at emergent Mozambique nationhood. Take the following passage from the book: We need to show the population off in all its hunger and with all its contagious diseases … our destitution is turning a good profit. To live in a country of beggars, it is necessary to uncover our sores, expose the protruding bones of our children … This is the current order of the day: gather together your remains, make it easier for the disaster to be seen. The foreigner from outside, or from the capital, should be able to appreciate all the wretchedness without sweating about it too much (Couto 2004: 56).

Mozambique is part of the ‘Third World’ framework. The country was under an international embargo in 1983, which was only lifted after it agreed to join the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) in 1984. This was the time when Mozambique started to benefit exponentially from international donations (Bowen 1989: 366; Negrão 2003; Pfeiffer 2004). The country was pushed down by a deep economic crisis due to the civil war (1975-92), and by then it was internationally considered the poorest nation in the world (Negrão 2003: 3). Until that time, independent Mozambique had never authorized the presence of international NGOs.6 However, in 1984 the United States demanded that two NGOs, namely Care and World Vision, be authorized (Hanlon and Smart 2008: 35). Over the next five years, 180 international NGOs were established in the country (Hanlon 1991: 207). This was a period in Mozambique that José Negrão calls one of ‘hunting disgrace’ by the arriving ‘charity multinationals’ (2003: 3-4). Since then, whenever Mozambique resisted adopting the internationally driven policies of structural adjustment largely imposed by the World Bank and IMF, it suffered more international embargoes, such as in 1986 when all humanitarian food supply was stopped (Hanlon and Smart 2008: 36). The aid flowed only as long as Mozambique agreed to a set of economic and political policies imposed by the same institutions providing aid. This situation has led to the institutionalization and increasing professionalization of solidarity, benevolence and aid in the country. It rooted the aid-dependency model in almost every domain of the nation. And so, Mozambique became a donor-oriented world of development reforms, programs and projects. The Mozambican Prime

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Minister Luísa Diogo confirmed this publically: ‘Mozambique has been helping itself through its integrity in the implementation of the [international] reforms, programs and projects … [but] we need more resources [donations] to continue presenting good results’ (Anon 2008). Under the veil of institutional diplomacy rests a strategic game of appearances: it is in the interest of some countries to be categorized and ranked as developing in order to justify claims for development support, just as it is in the interests of institutional donors to represent them. Since 2004, more than half of the annual budget of the Mozambican government comes from foreign donors, international development organizations and governments from Europe and North America – known as the G-19. Their contributions attest to the continual dependence of the country on international donations and, in turn, show the influence foreign development institutions have in the national politics.7 The presence of institutional donors – or ‘partners’ as they are commonly called – is so marked that the government of Mozambique publishes an annual report on their individual performance, in which they are classified according to a chart: ‘strong’ donors have more than thirty points, ‘medium’ donors have between twenty-three to twenty-nine points, and those with less than twenty-two points are considered ‘weak’ donors. Referring to the development industry in Mozambique, Juan Obarrio says: it ‘intervenes at every level; from the ministerial and developmental capital city of dark financial flows, to the rural countryside of the “customary” villages, shaping the outcome of political processes. It defines macro-legal reforms at the central level or designs the reemergence of the customary as “local community”’ (2010: 283). No wonder then that populations in the countryside of Mozambique have adopted and appropriated for themselves the discourse of development as a way to be included in and benefit from the web of global existence. The industry of development or aid has become the main ruling force and mechanism of opportunities in Mozambican society, thereby spreading the ideas of its dominance and relevance all over the country. In this vein, I believe that the similarity between the words previously quoted by the Mozambican prime minister and the discourse formally spoken to me by the director of the school of Mbueca (i.e. ‘But we need more support to provide better conditions for our children’) is more than a simple coincidence. These are words informed by the formative discourse of development that has been institutionalized

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in the country’s post-independence order, particularly conspicuous in the last two decades. ‘Donors’ (doadores), ‘human-animal conflict’ (conflito Homem animal), ‘capacity-building’ (capacitação), ‘community participation’ (participação comunitária), ‘community development’ (desenvolvimento comunitário), ‘NGO’ (ONG), ‘partners’ (parceiros), ‘local development’ (desenvolvimento local), ‘facilitators’ (facilitadores), ‘poverty eradication’ (erradicação de pobreza) and, of course, ‘community’ (comunidade) are terms that have spread throughout landscapes, some of these not even connected by roads and phone networks, and become part of the common discourse in most of the remotest villages in Mozambique. Some of these are concepts expressing problems, others are simply working concepts. However, the spread and inclusion of such concepts into all the domains of Mozambican society, obviously strongly reliant on institutional development support, exercise constraint upon other otherwise possible forms of discourse and, therefore, other possible forms of knowledge. This is why Wolfgang Sachs argues that ‘breaking with “development” as a habit of thought is part and parcel of an overdue decolonization of minds’ (2010: xii). The system of rules that emerges through discourse is said to be responsible for the organized ways of conceptualizing objects, people and ideas and, inevitably, of thinking in strategies (DiazBone et al. 2007). It is this character of producing normative orders of knowledge and action that ultimately establishes a dominant construct of reality, defining the problems and their solutions. To put it conclusively, the new concepts that are now part of the common rhetoric in Mozambique carry with them meanings in which the development ideology is the legitimate framework for handling them. Discourses make not only certain ways of thinking possible, but also certain ways of being (Phillips, Lawrence and Hardy 2004: 638). By adopting the discourse of development, inhabitants in the countryside of Mozambique are making a decision about ‘being and nothingness’ (Bauman 2000: 173); that is, local communities are reaching a position in the new global inequality order by being the representatives of the antithesis of modern societies: they are the institutional ‘Third World’. However, there is an existential cost for these peoples: by accomplishing inclusion via their adherence to the discourse of development, the ‘local reality’, at least to the outside, is transcended and reified in accordance with development rationality. The members of these homogenized human aggregations become, as Mia Couto put it, ‘those who look to a mirror that was invented by others’ (Zanini 2008: 30) – a mirror, I would

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add, that reflects back their identity in terms of ‘insufficiency’, on which, however, the residents try to capitalize.

Development in Tourism: Developmentourism Development strategies based on tourism are very much part of the ‘neo-liberal’ plan (Smith and Duffy 2003: 137). Faced with a contemporary world increasingly ruled by commodity consumption, in which almost every matter is subject to the same principle of evaluation as all other items of consumption, local communities commodify their ‘underdevelopment distinctiveness’ in order to place themselves in the global consumer and development markets. Tourism emerges as the proper vehicle for that purpose. For the sake of this argument, let me return to the village of Mbueca. When I first arrived in Mbueca, the positive image of responsible tourism that floated over the region hid conflicts, in particular between Mbueca residents and the managers of the Nkwichi Lodge. ‘The donors come here because of us: they want to help us, not the lodge at the beach. They must not interfere in our relation with the donors,’ an inhabitant of the village said to me. The origin of the quarrel can be traced back to when a group of ‘donors’, after visiting the village, promised US$820 to the population. Accordingly, when they returned from the village tour, they delivered the money to the managers of the Nkwichi Lodge. However, ‘that donation never arrived here. They [the lodge managers] kept it for themselves at our expense,’ one of the brothers of the régulo of Mbueca said. On the other hand, the member of the lodge staff in charge of the community development policy argued, ‘if we give that money directly to them, it will never be used to improve the school and the church, which was the tourists’ wish. They have to present to us first how, and on what, they intend to spend the money.’ Clearly, the British managers assumed for themselves the role of patrons, as well as the powerful position of intermediaries between the ‘donors’ and the residents. Yet the supposedly dispossessed people in this relation – the residents in Mbueca – also showed their strength through their ability to negotiate their position in tourism by using the authority of development. ‘We now want to have more fathers… two fathers,’ the régulo of Mbueca said to me. He was referring to another investor in tourism with whom he was negotiating. While I was in the village, I was told that an Italian who had been living in Maputo for five years

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had been invited by the régulo to build a lodge at a beach within the jurisdiction of Mbueca. This was also part of the ongoing animosity. ‘We know,’ the brother of the régulo insisted, ‘that the Nkwichi Lodge doesn’t like that! They want to be here alone. But the new lodge will be better for us because it will bring more donors and more development to our community. We are the ones who need support, not them.’ Mbueca exemplifies how the halo of development and underdevelopment in tourism can reproduce a complex set of power relations between tourists, managers of tourism enterprises and the destination populations. It also shows how the placement of tourism as a potential development tool and the discourse that verifies it (e.g. ‘… more development to our community. We are the ones who need support’) can be used and appropriated as a local strategy within an expansive market-driven framework. In other words, the residents of Mbueca obtained their tourism value by self-consciously representing a development problem. The authority of such a problem is used by the producers of local tourism – which includes the local residents – as a legitimate competitive force. In this case, the lack of differentiation between the possibilities that development and tourism represent for the local community makes underdevelopment a quality, a market attribute of the local community in both fields – development and tourism. The discursive practice of referring to donors as tourists is as much a strategic representation ‘from below’ as a reflection of the development and tourism order in which Mbueca is placed. Such a representation constitutes part of the hegemonic strategies of establishing sense and control of the visitor-Other, in accordance to the interests of the development and tourism industry (in the singular), as well as those of the local community. As in Mbueca, this emergent facet of what I call developmentourism is also characteristic of Canhane, and is expressed, among other ways, through their representations. A South African consultant who did research in Canhane in 2005 wrote: ‘many people in the village reported that they had seen tourists in the village over the past week’ (Spenceley 2006a: 113). The consultant was hosted at the Covane Community Lodge the month prior to the interviews. She stated that, ‘none [of the tourists during that period] had undertaken the village visit. Therefore, it appears that estimates from villagers were exaggerated’ (Spenceley 2006a: 113). Why did the residents report having seen tourists during a period when no tourist came to the village? Who were those invisible tourists? I believe she

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was one of them: what the consultant did not realize was that the Canhaners were including her and the other development experts who visited the village during that period in the category of tourists. In this sense, the residents invert the perception held by the Mbueca inhabitants: in Canhane, the ‘donors’ and all the professionals associated with the development sector are ‘tourists’. Accordingly, at the beginning of October 2010, I was told by the staff of the Covane Community Lodge that, ‘lots of tourists will come next Tuesday. It will be a busy time for us.’ The population of Canhane were also commenting on it. The day before these tourists arrived, I met the driver of the lodge’s truck at his hut, and asked him about if he knew exactly who they were. ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘we already know them: they are from the NGO TechnoServe.’ He added later, ‘it’s a group of tourists that work on the relationship between the lodge and the community. They come here to help the community.’ As in Mbueca, the tourism project in Canhane provides evidence of the way its inhabitants have adopted and put into practice the principle that their tourism value lies on them being potentialities for development. In both villages, community development is the legitimate tourism product. Therefore, its members use the underdevelopmental nature that has constituted them as ‘hosts’ to attain a position in the global tourism market: they capitalize on the underdevelopmental value of their tourism constituency to achieve market integration. Development should be seen, then, as the structuring element of the modality of tourism in Mbueca and Canhane; it is something that has been incorporated into it and not something that stands outside of it. In this modality of holiday practice, development and tourism operate side by side, share the same vision and goals, and are therefore both perceived by the inhabitants as undifferentiated. Moreover, this is explicitly and strategically manifested through their discursive representations of the tourist-Others as protagonists of assistance. The aid-related meanings attached to the word donor in Mbueca and tourist in Canhane are compatible with the interests of the inhabitants of both villages. This local process involves the disposing and manipulation of representations in favour of one’s own context. If it is true that the involvement of development in tourism is to a certain degree a response to the existing ethical consumer expectation and to a macroeconomic order, it is also appropriate to say that this depends on the protagonists of the encounter at the local level. Their actions, which show a strong commitment to the developmentalization of tourism, foster the means by which tourism

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becomes dedifferentiated from development in their villages. Both industries are merged into one singular practice, and therefore I propose that this should be presented linguistically in the same way: as developmentourism. Anthropologists Noel Salazar (2004) and Rochelle Spencer (2010) explore an ethical modality of tourism which they refer to as ‘development tourism’. They approach development tourism through direct ethnographies (Spencer 2010) and case studies (Salazar 2004) of tours organized by Western NGOs to their development projects elsewhere. Spencer says that the aim of these tours is to ‘inspire tour participants to become more socially and environmentally active on their return to their own countries’ (2010: 97). Likewise, Salazar notes that Vredeseilanden, the Flemish NGO that he studied, ‘hoped that the visits to their development projects would lead to an increased commitment of the tourists back home’ (2004: 98). Clearly, there is a temporal and spatial dimension in development tourism that exonerates tourists’ development action from the here and now of their holidays. Instead, tourists’ development action is an enterprise of their everyday lives at home; an enterprise of their nontourist time, space and roles. Therefore, in development tourism, tourists remain tourists, representationally distinct from the development experts that they meet, who guide them, or who work at or for the places they tour. In development tourism, there is an explicit differentiation between the leisure practice of tourism and the professional practice of development, between the tourists and the development employees. In developmentourism, this distinction is radically blurred: the matter of development is the very same matter as that of tourism – development is tourism and tourism is development. In this sense, not only are the actions of the tourists fused with the work of development professionals, but the qualified undertakings of the latter are also indistinguishable from tourists’ activities. Moreover, developmentourism is not reduced to a service in the tourism offer, such as ‘exposure trips’ (Salazar 2004: 95) or ‘NGO study tours’ (Spencer 2010). Developmentourism is much more encompassing. It is an industry in its own right, an industry that considers tourism not only as a ‘tool of development’ (Spencer 2010) but also as the very profession of development. In this sense, developmentourism discloses and describes an emerging practice that has been concealed by the inability of familiar available concepts to describe it.

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More on Dedifferentiation In theory, the dedifferentiated character of tourism found in both villages, Mbueca and Canhane, is in the spirit of the present age (Doquet and Evrard 2008: 187). Especially, the merging of aid and business has energized the growth of anthropological literature on corporate social responsibility and on how international corporations have made themselves development agencies (e.g. Rajak 2011; Schwittay 2011; Gardner 2012). A good case in point comes from Dinah Rajak’s (2011) research on the transnational mining corporation Anglo-American. Rajak shows how the coalescence between business and aid performed through the practice of corporate social responsibility led the company to accumulate and extend power over the social order at different scales and in different domains. From the company’s global headquarters to its mineshafts in South Africa, the merging of roles and goals make the jurisdiction of influence of Anglo American more pervasive. In the increasingly globalized world, this propensity for confluence is an expanding condition. This is why Linnet Taylor and Dennis Broeders claim in general that ‘discourses of development are mingling with those of profit as corporations increasingly move into the space previously occupied by states and nonprofit donor institutions’ (2015: 232). Postmodernity is said to be characterized by the quality of dedifferentiation, an increasing dissolution of borders between differences (Lash 1990). In the unbounded contemporary world dominated by infinite exchanges and interwoven processes, the present is often regarded as expressing rootlessness (Smith and Duffy 2003: 110), and even the idea of home, historically essential to defining the tourism experience, is redefined. In this vein, Jean Urbain gives an example of how the porosity between the everyday and the elsewhere of holidays is increasing. While researching the subject of ‘holiday homes’, he met a woman who told him: ‘Since I moved into an individual house, each evening when I come home I feel like I’m on holiday’ (Doquet and Evrard 2008: 187). She was taking herself on holiday in her everyday life. Indeed, the world has become an infinite collection of possibilities as individuals can place themselves in the skins of ‘tourists’ everywhere, even at home. Her observation therefore reflects a broader issue: the borders between home and away, everyday and extraordinary, settled and mobile are progressively blurring. As the distinction between home and away began to dissolve, so too the distinction between work and pleasure began

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to disappear (Lash and Urry 1993; Rojek 1995). Such a merging has enabled many people to holiday through working. This can be found, for example, in those who spend long-term vacations volunteering to save animals in danger of extinction, work at orphanages, building schools or doing research through tourism (‘scientific tourism’; West 2008). In the modern way of being-in-the-world, the extraordinary could also mean the everyday, and as Marjorie Esman noted in relation to Louisiana Cajuns in United States, individuals can be ‘tourists within their own culture’ (1984: 465). All this comes down to saying that where there once had been a world of structural differentiation, there is now a world of dedifferentiation, in which the tourist is reproduced in unlimited fields of life. The extension of this perspective has led John Urry to radically proclaim the ‘end of tourism’ (1995). Historically, scholars have been accustomed to thinking of tourism as an external force acting upon a pre-existing object (Wood 1998: 223). Urry’s fatalist perspective is thus justified by the perception of the disintegration of tourism’s specificity for the reason that everyone can be a tourist, all the time, now that tourism is nowhere yet everywhere (Urry 1995: 148). As a corollary of the conspicuous emergence of this paradigm of fusion, there has been a growing acceptance within social sciences that tourists and destination people are no longer so easily differentiated. Chris Ryan (1991), for example, noted almost two decades ago that a blurring of the boundaries between these once distinct groups of individuals often occurs when tourists repeatedly return to a particular destination where they have established strong relationships with the inhabitants. Consequently, these same tourists ‘become part of, but not from, the host community’ (O’Reilly 2003: 308). As tourism and other aspects of culture are becoming dedifferentiated (Wood 1998: 223), new interwoven modes of practice arise. It is precisely the creativity and dedifferentiated character of the nature of tourism modes that arise from or within this framework of fluidity and mergence that inform the developmentalization of tourism – that is, the integration of development discourse, knowledge and action into the tourism experience. Close to Canhane, in the town of Tihovene, there was a man whose job was supplying water to the region. He woke up religiously every day at five in the morning and arrived home at nine at night. One day he told me, ‘I’m tired of my life. I’ve an idea for a tourism project. First, I thought to implement it here, close to the Massingir Dam, but I’m done with this. I need to be close to the sea.’ He said he knew the head of a village on the northern coastal area of Mozambique,

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a few kilometres away from the city of Nampula, who could give him land to implement the tourism business. ‘Because you work with tourism and come from Europe, can’t you find development funds to support this?’ he asked me. ‘You could be my managing partner, and the main goal would be to support community development in the village of my friend. I could stay there, in the office, while you could be travelling elsewhere.’ The ‘office’ that he mentioned was the lodge. This episode epitomizes the dominant popular understanding of tourism in the country: tourism as a logic of activity merged with development enterprise. Development, local communities and tourism have become melted into each other’s logics in contemporary Mozambique. Beyond the country, notably in the postcolonial Global South, the private sector, governments, NGOs, media, tourists and residents in destination societies all assist in the creation and promotion of tourism as a developmental act. Focusing on the village of Doubou in Burkina Faso, Cravatte and Chabloz (2008) analyse the ways in which the NGO Tourism and Développement Solidaires embraced and put into practice the feeling of solidarity between the tourists and the visited inhabitants. Kate Simpson also offers eloquent evidence of the intimate relation between development and tourism. Concentrating on the gap-year industry, where the targets are mostly young people who take a gap year between school and university, Simpson examines the way development is promoted and sold through international volunteer tourism. Accordingly, the gap-year industry creates and promotes a geography of need in which the ‘enthusiastic western volunteer … becomes the … agent of development’ (Simpson 2004: 685). In a broader sense, Butcher and Smith (2010) address volunteer tourism as indicative of postdevelopment politics, which nonetheless appeals most to the individual ambitions of the tourist in constructing their own ethical identities. Here, the individual politics make the rule: personal development through the development of significant Others. Finally, to finish this set of examples let me return to my personal experience in Mozambique, but this time staying outside of the orbit of Mbueca and Canhane. In November 2008, as soon as I arrived at the coastal town of Tofo, I was informed by the driver of the chapa – public transport – about ‘a concert with a great band that will take place at the lodge on the beach’. Just before I left his vehicle, I asked him: ‘Will I see you at the concert tonight then?’ ‘No,’ he answered, ‘it’s only for tourists.’ I had arrived at the sanctuary of tourism in Mozambique.

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The concert was formally announced o­n a promotional poster at the location of the event. It included text in English, as follows: [The name of the band] They are playing for U all tonight to give U a GOOD TIME and the feeling of Mozambican Traditional DRUMS and RHYTHMS. They play for free! U – in return – could do them a BIG FAVOR in the form of a DONATION for their performance and especially to finance a new Timbila. We don’t like to charge Entrance Fee or raise our prices to support the Band to get a new Instrument more we want U to feel free in what u like to spend for this special charitable purpose. Thanks a lot for UR Support!! We appreciate UR help! [emphases in the original]

After persistently being informed during that day about the high quality of the band, I asked the lodge staff the reasons for not charging an entrance fee. ‘It’s better this way,’ one said. ‘Why is that?’ I asked, ‘Will the band get more money from donations than if everyone pays an entrance fee?’ The answer was even more vague: ‘That we don’t know. The tourists who want to support should donate money.’ In practice, the touristic event informed the ideological parameters that join humanitarianism and leisure. The simple fact that tourists were put in the position of charitable supporters – the donors – contributed to the belittlement of the band, which in this way was constituted as the needy group from the start. This event is just one example out of many others that show how the institutionalization of solidarity is embedded in the tourism sphere in Mozambique. To that end, the conduct of tourism in Mbueca and Canhane, which expresses dedifferentiation between development and tourism, donor and tourist, should not be interpreted merely as a local phenomenon. Instead, both cases reflect a contemporary extensive modern phenomenon in which tourism is essentially projected into the moral development agenda. As indivisible from each other, the development and tourism industry (developmentourism) grows bigger and bigger as a ‘desiring machine’ that feeds on the beliefs and dreams of the moral subjects it creates (de Vries 2007: 30).

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Conclusion The day before I travelled towards the north of Mozambique in the direction of Mbueca, I met with a development expert who at that time worked for the German Corporation for Technical Cooperation (GTZ) in Maputo. He pointed out what he considered the main structural difference between the Nkwichi lodge and the Covane lodge. According to him, ‘while the Covane promotes tourism based on the community, the Nkwichi exercises tourism on the community: it’s like a UFO hovering over the community’ – at this, he opened his arms wide – ‘but in contrast, tourism in Canhane is built within the community itself.’ Later, he added, ‘the only similarity between them is that both provide a community experience to the tourists.’ His remark about resemblance was incomplete; there are other similarities between the two. Particularly relevant for the purpose of this chapter is that both are based on a policy of exhibition that commodifies community development in tourism. After doing fieldwork in the two villages, it has become clear that in both cases the principles behind the provision of the ‘community experience to the tourists’ intersect with the ‘UFO’ fuelled by development ideology, which hovers not only over Mbueca but over most of Mozambique. The view of the aid organizations as voluntary, non-profits, independent or ‘third sector’ (e.g. Fisher 1993; Korten 1990; Salamon 1994) that are also separate from market principles contributes to popular perceptions of them as moral, part of a benevolent segment of society. These perceptions are linked with oft-stated aims of doing good, helping the Other in need, and community development in the ‘Third World’. What I am trying to demonstrate is that these moral conjectures are now also at the crux of one particular form of tourism and have become marketable themselves. In particular, historical occurrences in Mozambique inform the contextual conditions that have fostered the existing intimate relationship between development and tourism in the country. After the country’s independence, ‘the external tourism … was basically dominated by the accommodation of the members of International aid’ (Guambe 2007: 43). Most of these aid workers were ‘middle or upper-middle class Europeans and Americans with at least a university education’ (Pfeifer 2003: 729). They were on short contracts, for a few weeks or months, and most of them ‘viewed their experiences in Africa as an adventure’, describing themselves as ‘aid cowboys’

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(Pfeifer 2003: 729). Joseph Hanlon says that, during their stay in Mozambique, they did ‘very well by doing good’ (1991: 200). He explains the international aid workers had a lifestyle that contrasted greatly with their lives at home. It represented a sort of escapism for them, a restorative break from daily life (Graburn 1977), to use one of the most popular definitions of tourism; they pioneered the merging of development with tourism and the alliance between solidarity, international dependence (Ferguson 2013) and leisure in Mozambique. Indeed, the country’s independence from Portuguese rulers meant also its opening to new vulnerabilities, to new and different foreign dependencies. Mozambique became confined under the shadow of the development ‘UFO’. On the ground, as tourism diversifies, the representations of tourists also vary. In this section, I approached the emergence of such representations by resorting to the people visited. The tactful response and adaptation of the residents of Canhane and Mbueca to the simultaneous presence of development and tourism in the villages has led to their representations of donors as tourists (Canhane) and of tourists as donors (Mbueca). Development and tourism became dedifferentiated, and they melt into each other – developmentourism. These two cases in Mozambique also suggest that developmentourism should not be simply seen as an imposition by the ‘North’ upon the ‘South’: it is to some degree produced as a result of the mutual interests of all the participants. However, we should also bear in mind the broader moral and economic order in which local communities in Mozambique and in most of rural Africa are situated. This means those who seek to put their underdeveloped status up for sale, to profit from what makes them different, find themselves having to do so under the universally recognizable terms in which their difference is represented (Comaroff and Comaroff 2009: 24). The commodifying impact of being underdeveloped can be interpreted as a means of community empowerment in the sense that it generates market mentalities, and that the local communities become more integrated in a worldwide system. Yet one may also consider that such processes increment the dependency status of the ‘underdeveloped’ hosts from the wider web where they are now integrated and on which they have to rely. The representations of donor and tourist in Mbueca and Canhane are reflections of a market ruled by developmentourism principles in which the residents participate as product, producers and sellers. The dedifferentiated donor-tourist informs the wider context

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where the two villages operate, and demonstrates how development has become part of the industry of entertainment. Fundamentally, Mbueca and Canhane confirm the incessant pressure for the creation of new markets and products induced by the expansion of an ethical consumer radius.

Notes  1. Some scholars have used the term ‘development tourism’. Two of the most obvious scholars addressing it are anthropologists Noel Salazar (2004) and Rochelle Spencer (2010). There are substantial differences between the way these and other scholars approach ‘development tourism’ and the way I conceive developmentourism. ‘Development tourism’ is not only aesthetically but also semantically distinct from developmentourism. One of the main differences is that ‘development tourism’ implies a binary relation in which development, as a professional activity, is distinct from tourism, a leisure activity. In other words, development is not the same as tourism. In contrast, by compounding or conflating development with tourism in one single word – developmentourism – I imply that both are the same.   2. h ttp://www.guardian.co.uk/travel/2006/may/14/ecotourism. observerescapesection?page=all, accessed 2 November 2009.   3. In the Chinyanja dialect spoken in the region, mchenga nkwichi means ‘squeaking sands’. Nkwichi is an onomatopoeia that imitates the sound made when one walks barefoot on the fine white sand of the beach; ‘It makes,’ a resident of the village said, ‘a sort of “nkwichi, nkwichi, nkwichi” sound. So we started to call it Nkwichi beach.’   4. http://www.mandawilderness.org, accessed 23 October 2009.  5. Methodologically, I attempted to become the phenomenon that I wanted to understand through what Jeff Ferrel and Mark Hamm (1998) call deeply experiential verstehen.  6. Although Mozambique did not authorize the official installation of international NGOs, by 1984, there were (already) numerous international aid workers in the country (Hanlon 1991).  7. To mention one example outside of Mozambique, but which resonates with the power of international development institutions in the country, Andreas Dafinger and Michaela Pelican (2006) observe that the revised 1994 land legislation in Burkina Faso was only put into practice due to pressure from international development organizations in an attempt to restructure the entire national agricultural paradigm. Commenting on this case, Julia Eckert, Andrea Behrends and Andreas

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Dafinger (2012: 18) say that the by-laws of these development organizations can be more powerful and transformative than the national legislation in most African countries.

4 The Enigma of Water

Shortly after the Covane Community Lodge opened its doors to tourists in May 2004, Canhaners were asked by the professionals of NGO Helvetas about their priority for investing the expected tourism revenues. ‘That was an easy question,’ one elder in Canhane told me. According to him, their first answer was precise and unanimous: ‘Water, we told them water.’ In this chapter, I present and analyse the implementation of the water supply system in Canhane and its contradictory effects. To clarify from the beginning, this is not about the use of natural resources for tourism. Rather, it is about local responses to the reorganization of natural resources that derived from the politics of benevolent dispensation of developmentourism. I narrate what might be seen at first glance a paradox. I tell the story of a case where the achievement of social aspirations of development generates social insecurity for the very people who claimed them. The collective endeavour performed in Canhane to organize a reliable water supply is an interesting case through which to observe and access the ‘politics of the local’ (Agrawal and Gibson 1999: 637) that can emerge with community tourism in a development-oriented context. Specifically, the realization of Canhaners’ collective desire to access tap water in the village, and their active participation in attaining their own ‘development needs’, resulted in intra-social conflict, which revealed them as active participants in an apparent contradiction. The larger point that I develop in this chapter is that the arrangement of an essential natural resource such as water can be a mechanism for social (dis)ordering and not a simple matter of means-ends necessity, which limits any capacity to predict the social outcomes

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of water supply projects (Mosse 2008: 943). As David Hume demonstrated in his empirical philosophy and Max Weber showed through his interpretative sociology, the way societies organize and disorganize themselves exhausts purely instrumental and technical rationality. Motivations and ends cannot be always subjected to and understood through instrumental approaches, such as costbenefit analysis, rational calculation, trade-offs, scales of measurement, means-ends rationality, utilitarianism and all other technical explanatory renderings of everyday life. Rather, motivations and ends can be subjective, fruits of contextual emotions and desires. There is a non-project-oriented dimension to people’s lives that validates the unintended social consequences arising from any development project dealing with natural resources (Cleaver 1999: 599). In Christo Fabricius’s words, ‘objectivity in community-based natural resource management is a myth’ (2004). Canhane confirms this, even though the water venture in the village was to a great extent driven by the residents themselves. In this sense, Canhane challenges a whole tradition of functionalism born in anthropology by authors such as Bronislaw Malinowski and Radcliffe-Brown. It attests to how human life can be based on unpredictability, nonlinearity and unintentionality. In contrast to community-based rhetoric that tends to homogenize certain populations as unconditionally coherent, equitable, intrinsically moral, harmonious and predictable (Ferguson 1994; Li 1996; Mosse 1999; Shafer and Bell 2002; Kumar 2005), the example of Canhane illustrates the weakness of universal notions of community and participatory development (Leal 2007). It attests to how community participation has become an unsubstantiated act of faith in development – something intrinsically good, implicitly assumed to have a positive moral value and destined to succeed (Cleaver 1999: 599). Based on my analysis of the spatial arrangement of and access to water in the village, I address the importance of considering the multiple and dynamic processes that emerge within societies in any development-oriented context. I am going to describe how spatial arrangements and social status are interdependent and, moreover, central means for ordering everyday life (Law 1993). My main challenge in this chapter is thus to radically demystify the jargon of ‘participatory development’, in particular when comprising representations of local community as groups of people that are intrinsically coherent and possessing an inherent moral faculty (Chapter 2).

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Conflictual Improvement Prior to the 1970s, the population of Canhane lived on the shore of the Elephants River, which is about 5 kilometres away from presentday Canhane. However, the state policy of villagization that followed Mozambique’s independence (Coelho 1998; Lorgen 2000; Obarrio 2010) and the construction of the Massingir Dam1 resulted in their relocation to a higher area less prone to flooding. Since Elizabeth Colson’s (1971) pioneering work on the forced resettlement of the Gwenbe Tonga on both sides of the Zambezi River, in Zimbabwe and Zambia, many studies focusing on the impacts of dam-building have emerged. Most of them suggest that in the name of national progress and in line with claims for rational models of society and nature – what James Scott (1998) calls ‘high modernism’ – local access to essential resources is neglected and made difficult (e.g. Goldsmith and Hildyard 1984; Isaacman and Sneddon 2000; World Commission on Dams 2000). This is also the case for Canhane. The colonial and postcolonial state-imposed dam in the region of Massingir led to processes of marginalization and deprivation of the local population. Until their compulsory relocation, Canhaners lived in a fertile valley close to essential resources such as water, wood and productive land, which all proved scarce in their new settlement area. There is an ever-growing body of literature that provides empirical evidence of the causal relation between space and culture and how changes in one can affect the other.2 Countless ethnographic descriptions demonstrate that human intervention can structure space in the same way that space itself can structure human behaviour – space operates as both cause and consequence of culture. In this sense, space is culture. These studies fortify the idea that changing the place of residence most likely entails social and individual behavioural changes. Such variation took place in Canhane. After their relocation, Canhaners had to readapt their daily practices to the new locale, including vital routines. Access to water was one of them. Since their relocation, the dearth of such a basic resource has long been bemoaned by the local residents, who claim that water shortages have been the worst effect of their resettlement (see also Lunstrum 2004). At present, Canhaners have two ways to access water: from a communal shallow well in the village, which however is often dry, or from the Elephants River around 5 kilometres away. Obtaining water is difficult and, in particular, women expend much of their daily energy getting it.

Illustration 4.1. The shallow well in Canhane is a hole dug to allow access to water. 11 February 2008. Photo by the author.

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As I mentioned before, my first contact with the population of Canhane was in September 2006. At that time, the residents were digging a ditch from the village to the lodge, which has water supplied by the Elephants River that is nearby. They were also burying several flexible plastic pipes to be used to provide water to the four numbered neighbourhoods that constitute the village. Mostly, the women of each neighbourhood took turns each day to work on the water endeavour. The pipes were intended to supply water to a tank that, in turn, would drain it through three taps implemented near the shallow well area. The distance covered was around 7 kilometres. At the beginning of 2007, the still unfinished system started evidencing technical problems. The issue was that the water pump placed near the river did not have enough power to pump water for more than 5 kilometres – less than the required distance. The solution was to buy a new and more powerful water pump. But its cost was extremely high and the revenues from the lodge were not enough to cover it. Most of the Canhaners were disappointed. Many of them directed their frustration largely toward NGO Helvetas. On one occasion, I participated in a village meeting where I was the only person present who had not been born in Canhane. Although the original purpose was to discuss issues related with the local school, debating the water theme ended up taking the majority of the time. Various residents blamed Helvetas for the failure of the water project. At one point, as is usual in these meetings, an old man took advantage of a brief silent gap to stand up and say: I want to talk about the water. It was Helvetas’ decision to dig such a long ditch, and all the technicalities were planned by them, so the failure was their fault. Money was wasted. Money earned by the Covane [lodge]. People worked there for nothing. They [Helvetas] should have known that it wouldn’t work before we started digging.

If there were voices of discord present, they were silent throughout. In fact, collective ‘back-channelling’ (Gibson 2003: 1348) through utterances like ‘hmmm’ and ‘hã-hã’ were frequently used to encourage any speaker who had approached the subject in such a manner. No one defended the position of Helvetas, and this criticism and suspicion of the NGO was maintained until the end of the meeting. Canhaners’ reactions at this point provide clues about a broader phenomenon that had intensified since the implementation of the community tourism project. I am referring to the confrontation between community development instigated by external professional

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agencies, and the view ‘from within’. Rural populations, as Christo Fabricius (2004: 38) states, often see conservationists and development activists as the evil perpetrators of land evictions. In his work on Chishanga in southern Zimbabwe, Gerald Mazarire (2008) demonstrates how Hera people have always perceived postcolonial development initiatives with scepticism. For Mazarire, development programs related to the water flowing through the rivers of Chishanga are perceived by the residents as a threat because these are said to be camouflaged strategies of appropriation of land and authority. In Mozambique, in the Sussundenga district, Schafer and Black give the example of a local chief who actively encouraged the new settlement by members of his village in an area intended to be recreated as a forest reserve by ‘extra-local’ institutions. His purpose was ‘scaring away conservationists whose intentions he perceived as a threat to local livelihoods and control over resources’ (Schafer and Black 2003: 72-73). To return to Canhane, despite residents’ focus on an outside culprit and their association of the water project’s problems to the

Figure 4.1. The position of the water supply system in Canhane. The topography of the village is flat. Figure by the author.

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failings of ‘aid architecture’ (Mosse 2013: 237), the meeting reinforced their engagement with the water situation. Hence, soon people started to consider new ideas for supplying water to the village. This time a shorter route had to be found to link Canhane to the Elephants River. After days of popular scrutiny, they found a possible route of 5 kilometres. However, the ditch would have to be dug in the bush, in places infrequently accessed by the residents and inaccessible to the truck owned by the lodge. This made the work harder, particularly regarding the transportation of workers, equipment and food supplies. Even with such difficulties, the Canhaners embraced the work once more. More importantly, this time they took full responsibility for the technical decisions. Residents’ viewpoints, aspirations and participation were all mobilized, and therefore, the elements of so-called community participation that development discourses emphasize as required for successful resource management were present. This suggested there would be positive results for the population. Months later the supply system was finally installed. The technical restrictions of the infrastructural apparatus dictated the exact position of the water taps: these had to be implemented in the northeast corner of neighbourhood four, which is the place in the village closest to the river (Figure 4.2). Various anthropologists have stressed how physical infrastructure can exceed its obvious purposes. From social democratic disorientation (Baptista 2016a) to the way it segregates rather than integrates individuals (Prestel 2015), infrastructure can counter the effects it is intended or projected to have. As Brian Larkin says, infrastructure is not simply ‘out there’ (2013: 330). It is much more than passive and inanimate matter that conveys human intentionality (Latour 2007: 85; Bennett 2010). This line of thought inspires an inevitable question: what does the water infrastructure do to Canhane’s residents?

The Afterlife of Construction By being involved in planning and implementing the water supply, Canhaners had up to this point fully addressed ‘community participation’, but had not yet established the institutional mechanisms for managing and controlling the water system. Peter Harvey and Robert Reed say that, ‘in general, this is fulfilled through the formation of a community water committee that is responsible for operating the system’ (2007: 365). Accordingly, just after the tank was

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installed, a water committee was created and a man from the village was chosen to be its president. The committee was an organizational imperative. This standard procedure signified the reiteration of Canhane as a ‘legible local community’ (Scott 1998) in and for the context of development policy. The newly constituted institution in the village communicated the attempt to develop Canhane in terms of higher organizational imperatives. It served to normalize the locale in line with delocalized standards. In Weber’s terms, this can be viewed as a bureaucratic and modernization process that provides a rationale for formalizing and organizing the population into predefined forms recognized by external officials (Mosse 1999: 322). Put simply and conclusively, the water committee met external expectations regarding the way Canhane’s society should organize from within. The nomination of a man as president of the committee reflected the gendered control of key resources in the village. Historically, recognition of women’s ability to control resources in the whole region is extremely limited (Sheldon 2002; Tvedten, Paulo and Montserrat 2008). With regard to water, women have a recognized and long-established responsibility to obtain and distribute it: they are the water-givers. But according to social power arrangements, the supervision of water as a key social resource must be performed by men. Hence, in the new way of organizing water in Canhane, manifestations of possession and control over the resource followed such a gendered arrangement. Before, because of the abundance of water in the Elephants River, differential control over it according to gender was not so evident. However, the situation changed. Water is now situated inside a storage tank positioned in the village, which means it is limited and has to be managed, controlled and rationed. Water became an object of measurement. This brought up new social exigencies that necessarily challenged the existing water order. Even though it was accomplished under the auspices of the community-based model, the implementation of the new water supply system carried with it a broader confrontation between old and new social processes. The implications of this type of clash have been approached diversely by other authors working in Southern Africa. To give a few examples, Corrado Tornimbeni (2007) describes how the residents of the villages of Tse Tserra and Mussimwa-Rotanda, in west-central Mozambique, have simultaneously used historical processes and modern instruments to preserve individual and group interests. In a different sphere, Nhantumbo, Norfolk and Pereira

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(2003) suggest that new management processes brought about by community-based initiatives in Derre, also in Mozambique, produced mechanisms for the exclusion of old people and subsequently led to conflicts within traditional authorities. Steve Johnson stresses (2004: 217–18) that when some members of the Mozambican village of Bawa were recruited as game guards and started to enforce new laws governing their fellow residents, division and dissent grew within that village. Their actions were in accordance with new processes of community management and control of natural resources promoted by the growing community-based trend in the region. Finally, around 270 kilometres north of Canhane, John Comaroff and Jean Comaroff (2009: 14–15) note that the implementation of community-based processes, which were intended to capitalize on local culture through tourism, led to dissatisfaction among some of the Makuleke people on the South African side. Accordingly, the chief of Makuleke is said to have misappropriated tourism revenues for his own needs, leading to intra-social tensions. Nevertheless, in Canhane, despite the potential social challenges of the new water arrangement, the gendered division with regard to the control of the resource remained. Men retained control of the water supplies. In particular, the president of the water committee seemed to possess several crucial characteristics necessary for assuming such a role. For instance, he was one of the few Canhaners fluent in Portuguese as well as the Shangane language. He also had an old motorbike that allowed him to quickly reach the water pump. Finally, as a fisherman, he was experienced in dealing with the Elephants River, where the water comes from. The water supply achievement was greatly celebrated beyond the village, particularly in the corridors of development institutions. The annual report of NGO Helvetas for 2006 to be distributed to its donors announced it with pride. Here is an excerpt: Successful Activity in 2006 Drinking Water in Canhane is a Reality Now Today Canhane already consumes drinking water, the water source is less than 500 meters for every inhabitants. [sic] For one of the ladies of the village, the work developed brought back the pride of her origins, increased her self-esteem, allowing, most of all, a better perspective on life for all (Helvetas 2007: 33–34).

Despite the exaltation of success, the water mechanism stopped working after one month of operation. The rumour that the pipes

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were being cut during the night spread rapidly in Canhane, assuming the form of an uncomfortable story. According to this rumour, people from the village were going into the bush to drill holes in the pipes. Many residents rejected this version and said the pipes were simply not strong enough to deal with the water pressure: ‘They must be replaced, and that’s it. The tubes were provided by Helvetas, but they aren’t good,’ a resident complained. Soon the technical argument overtook the sabotage version. Whenever I asked about the water problem, people spoke of the bad quality of the pipes or – a second technical argument that slowly started to become popular – about the old age of the water pump. Once again, the NGO emerged as the guilty party and this became a normative discourse in the village. The interruption of water supply persisted for a long time until the Mozambican government provided the population with new pipes, partly due to institutional pressure from the NGO Lupa, the local successor to Helvetas. As the head of the project told me: If we were guilty of anything, which I don’t agree to, now we are not anymore! We have given them everything they needed. We even pressured the Water Department of the Government of Gaza to provide them good, I mean very, very good water pipes. What do they want more!?! What will they invent more now!?

Yet despite such asserted efforts, the water supply system continued to fail in Canhane. Actually, the new, ‘very, very good’ pipes were never installed, and they remained stored close to the household of the community leader. Gradually, the water problem became a controversial subject in the village. People avoided talking about it to me or in my presence. Their discomfort was not so much a consequence of the lack of water itself, but rather due to the motives behind the stoppage. These were causing a constant renewal of intrigues. Whenever the topic was referred to, the manager of the Covane Community Lodge began to say, ‘I don’t know what’s happening and I don’t want to know.’ In general, Canhaners were very brief when the issue came up, often saying Ku yila (which roughly means ‘taboo’) as a way to put a stop to my curiosity and to end conversations on the subject. No one in the village was taking action to resolve the mysterious situation, and a social climate was established that was not conducive to resolving the problem either – whatever it was! In the meantime, to add more inconsistency to the ongoing enigma, a further intriguing situation occurred. As was common,

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several development experts visited the village to verify the impact of community-based tourism in Canhane. Their purpose was to evaluate the local benefits of tourism and to collect data to mediate future donations in support of such initiatives. Although the water supply infrastructure had not been working for a long time, it suddenly began to work, exclusively during the two-day period that they were there. The community leader’s son had gone to Maputo the day before their arrival to buy parts and accessories for the supply system, including purification tablets and extra screws. He left Canhane at two o’clock in the morning to return again on the same day around six in the evening. His commitment was undeniable. However, the day after the development experts left the village, the system stopped supplying water and never functioned again. It had been a protocol of appearance. Most importantly, the episode reinforced the idea that the functioning of the supply system was primarily a matter of will rather than a technical problem. As mentioned earlier, a functioning water supply was the foremost spoken desire of the Canhaners ever since their resettlement to the area in the mid 1970s. I myself witnessed the Canhaners’ commitment to reaching this goal. Many tourists also witnessed the residents’ engagement in the construction of the pipe system (see Chapter 7). However, when the water supply was finally ready to operate and provide what they claimed to be their most needed service, the residents appeared to reject it. What were the motives behind this? Obviously, I was not the only person puzzled by this paradoxical situation. The Lupa employees often talked of it. On one occasion, when I was at the Maputo annual Tourism Fair, one of the NGO staff came to me and asked: ‘Can you try to find out what the hell is going on there and tell us, please?’

The Gender Rationale At the beginning of the spring 2008, the Covane Lodge hosted a young Mozambican woman who had recently been given a job in the NGO Lupa. The purpose of her stay was to give a course to the residents in how to organize a small farm where they would employ, in her very words, ‘sustainable agricultural techniques’ and grow mainly medicinal plants. The communitarian farm, as it was named, would be established near the lodge and it would become part of a tourist programme – specifically, a tour of the Sustainable Garden.

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I went to visit her at the lodge together with a teacher at the school in Canhane. Born in Maputo, the teacher had been living in the village for three years. We chatted about several issues, mostly about our professions. Later, after we engaged in more informal conversation, the teacher invited her to visit him: ‘Next time you come here, you should visit me in Canhane.’ ‘Okay, I will try,’ she answered promptly, ‘Maybe I’ll love the place and I’ll decide to live there forever. I’m tired of living in the city.’ His face took on a strange expression. ‘You wouldn’t hold out,’ he said, ‘Women here don’t have an easy life. They spend all day working to support their husbands, or if they are not married, the men of their family. The men just lie around all day while the women never stop. And when it is time to eat, they even can’t sit on a chair close to the men; they eat sitting on the ground.’ After a few seconds of silence, he continued, ‘That’s why no one resolves the water problem in the village. The men are the ones who have power here. Because they don’t have to do anything to get water – women do that for them – they don’t care! The ones who could quickly resolve this entire situation aren’t interested in it.’ I was surprised by his criticism. After months of talking to him regularly, asking him about what the motives behind the passivity regarding the water issue might be, he had finally given his opinion. Moreover, his comment indicated a lucid understanding of the nature of the social (in)action regarding the water problem; that is, the relevance of gender. In his opinion, gendered structures of authority were at the core of the water problem. In fact, basic social structures in the village confirm a significant level of gender inequality. These structures are key determinants in gender relations, serving to legitimize male authority. They can be found in migration, agricultural production, polygamy, the fact that only men can become community leaders and the owners of household resources and so on. Although women support society through their productive and reproductive efforts, they are ignored as commanding participants in their own right. I witnessed one dramatic situation that was symptomatic of the significance and perception of gender constructs in Canhane. On one occasion, a woman was beaten up severely by a man between the lodge and the village. She had to be transported immediately to the closest health centre in Tihovene. This situation preoccupied the people of Canhane not so much because of the violence involved, but because, as someone told me, ‘she has an owner [her husband], who won’t like to know she was beaten up by someone other than him.’

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Although the relations of power between men and women are not static but rather contextual, gender inequality can be found in many aspects of daily life. Central to the purpose of this chapter, the cultural arrangement and reproduction of gender order in the village plays a primary role in constituting women as water-givers. This is supported by the general belief that the life-giving power of water is intertwined with the ability of women to generate human life. Providing water, like providing life, is socially, symbolically and historically perceived as a female function in Canhane. Therefore, in Canhane, the importance of water (also) derives from the entanglement of its material qualities with its symbolic meaning and, ultimately, from its role in social ordering; water interacts as a social symbolic signifier through which gender relations are constituted. Because of the scarcity of water in the village, the cultural attribution of the role of water-giver to women contributes to reinforcing gendered discrimination. This is conspicuous in many ways. For instance, in the morning it is common to observe women arriving back in the village, coming from the banks of the Elephants River carrying heavy barrels full of water on their heads. Such a water-carrying technique is used exclusively by women, who learn to carry water on their heads from an early age, when they become apprentice water-givers. This is an extremely arduous routine. Among other daily practices, its exclusive learning based on gender reflects and reproduces gendered roles and, in this case, inequalities. The argument of the teacher was instructive in pointing out the contextually disparate power positions of men and women in the village. Gender seemed to be the crucial aspect in defining the willingness and capacity of the collective to solve the water problem. More theoretically, this rationale supports the idea promoted by various anthropologists, such as Michael Schnegg and Theresa Linke, which argues that ‘in small-scale societies, [water] institutions can hardly regulate one affair without reference to others’ (2015: 207). By combining ethnography and network analysis in seven villages in northwestern Namibia, Schnegg and Linke demonstrate how the implementation of new regimes of managing the water in ‘face-toface communities’ cannot be separated from the activity of the multiplex relations (Gluckman 1955), including economic, political, religious and gender relations, existing in those same societies. Some weeks after the enlightening comments of the teacher, I went to visit the self-proclaimed responsible person for the traditional dances in Canhane, which are mostly performed for tourists. He lived in neighbourhood three. Of the four neighbourhoods,

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the third is said to be the most conservative. Most of the elderly residents live or spend most of the day in this neighbourhood and many of the ancestral ceremonies take place there. As it is known in the entire village, neighbourhood three is where memory and social conduct are most strongly reinforced. When I arrived at his household, the person I was looking for was not there. I was informed by one of his wives that he would return soon, so I decided to wait. In that time, I joined a group of people close by and had the chance to listen to a revealing conversation between some women. It was around eight in the evening and getting dark, so it was difficult to see their faces. The duskiness may have contributed to a feeling of anonymity in my presence, since they allowed me access to their intimate and illuminate conversation. The women were seated on two mats in front of one of their houses, whispering about the water supply problem in Canhane. ‘Everyone has to benefit from it and not only some of us,’ said one of them. The other replied troubled, ‘Of course, this water situation cannot go on. This is not good. Otherwise, those who benefit will suffer; they should be pursued.’ She was referring here to witchcraft. Witchcraft is a concept rarely verbalized among Canhaners but widely practiced and feared. As a mystical ability to cause harm to others, it functions as a counteractive force in conflict situations. Witchcraft is always about those who want to disturb others: ‘where there is no conflict there will be no witchcraft’ (Hammond-Tooke 1989: 84). Essentially, it is a sign of a dispute and a ‘language of power’ (West 2005b). This was a conversation between women, which means between those who have the severe task of walking long distances to collect and carry water. Intuitively, they are the ones who would benefit most from the new water supply system. For women, the piped water supply should represent a solution, not a problem. Nonetheless, both women were clearly opposed to it, which contradicted the convincing argument of the teacher. Before proceeding with my attempt to unravel the water supply dilemma, let me clarify that it is not my intention to generalize the opinion of these two persons as that of the entire female population of the village. Obviously, there are various opinions about various subjects among the women. The diversity of opinions in Canhane attests to the heterogeneous quality of the village. However, this conversation did represent a perspective predominant among the women on the issue of water. It is one illustrative example among many other similar episodes that occurred while I was in Canhane, which indicates a

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common attitude amongst the female inhabitants on the new water scheme. Being somewhat older, the two women I listened to were both female heads of their households. Because of the local practice of polygamy, and being senior wives, they were not expected to often act as water-givers themselves – this was mainly the work of younger wives. Yet there are many cases when older wives do in fact have to get water, as substitutes for younger wives. For instance, when a woman has sexual intercourse at night with her husband, she is responsible for serving him breakfast, or as it is called throughout the country, the mata-bicho, on the following morning. To do so she has to remain within her household and thus cannot fetch water. This task must then be performed by other women, usually the female head of the household, involving as it does a walk of more than 9 kilometres, with half of it involving them carrying a heavy barrel full of water uphill on their heads. Therefore, the basic enigma is that despite having to play the role of water-givers on occasion, these older women were against the new water system. This suggests that the deeply entrenched gender relations involved in the control and supply of water were not the only significant factor causing the failure of the water supply infrastructure. Even women water-givers were critical of the new system, which was most likely to benefit them above anyone else. What all this suggests is that attention to factors other than gender and mechanical problems must be included in the analysis.

Spatial Expressions of Control over the Commons Local residents call the locale where the community leader lives umbigo de Canhane (bellybutton of Canhane). I visited his household in many occasions, particularly during the canhu season. While there, I became conscious of the geographical advantages of the location. The village institutions most important for ordering social everyday life are positioned close to his residence: the shallow well, the school, the two state-owned brick houses that accommodated the director and assistant director of the school, the Twelve Apostles church, which is the main church in the village, the official meeting point of Canhane, where decisions and meetings with foreign institutions take place, the Covane Committee office, the ‘bell’ that is used to call the population to announce public meetings, the football field, the public transport stop, and the loja (store) which is a

Figure 4.2. ‘The bellybutton of Canhane.’ Figure by the author.

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concrete block house run by a local association that sells various products (although it was rarely frequented by consumers, it was still a common place for people to stop by). In sum, the location of the community leader’s house allowed him easy visual access to the most vital aspects of daily life in the village. It is a privileged location for both understanding and controlling Canhane. The area around the community leader’s household (see the grey circle in Figure 4.2) is understood as a communal place. I was told that I could walk freely there. ‘Here,’ a resident said at ‘the store’ while pointing to the close surroundings with his forefinger, ‘you can walk without restraint. This is the belly button, the centre of the community.’ The idea of a place cannot exist in the absence of some externality or oppositional element. Without expressing it directly, his comment implied the reverse: I needed to be more attentive to where else I could not walk so randomly. This contrast was confirmed repeatedly whenever people gave me directions outside this area. For example, outside ‘the centre’ I was often told not to walk straight to the place I wanted to go to, but rather given directions that meant skirting around apparently empty spaces. These empty spaces are understood as g!uéque, which in this context means household areas without fences. In contrast, when I was in the village centre, people always told me to go straight to wherever I wanted to go. This navel area is thus understood and ordered as the public space of Canhane, while the rest consists of intimate and private territories. Crucially, such representations of space provide clues about the publicness of goods being dependent on their location. To return to our main topic in this chapter, despite its scarcity, water in the village was always positioned at ‘the centre’, in the communal shallow well, and therefore it was acknowledged as public, like the place itself. Hence, moving the access point for water out of a public space into a private zone risks fostering perceptions of private ownership of it. The change in the location of the village’s most fundamental resource also risked its alienation from the purview of the community leader: the source of water was now out of his physical line of sight. Therefore, the social apprehension of the reduction of his personal control over the water access was conducive to collective perceptions of the privatization of water, as if the public had been colonized by the private. Water became an empowering mechanism of privatization in people’s minds. It confronted the residents with new ways of ordering the social, which ultimately undermined existing conceptions and practices of authority.

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The controlling location of the community leader in the village is reinforced by the gathering of communal materials around his ‘central’ position. It acts as a self-reinforcing system: the centre is reinforced by his close spatial relation with communal goods and vice versa. For instance, the lodge’s truck is always parked at the community leader’s household, even though the driver lives elsewhere. Such daily conduct reflects and reiterates a way of ordering the village’s resources and thereby of maintaining a social equilibrium. Its permanent control by the community leader provides the truck with the signification of collectivity. In other words, his private control over the truck has a public dimension. Such a social belief is also true of other equipment kept close to his house, like wooden stakes, tubes, old generators, metal sheeting for roofs, empty containers, plastic chairs and of course redundant or uninstalled water pipes. Furthermore, the control of these goods by the community leader validates difference. It enables him, as the controller, to authenticate his hierarchical rank and legitimizes his role as the community leader. Ultimately, the centre or ‘the bellybutton of Canhane’, where he lives, is collectively defined as both a space of social power and a space of publicness. What are the reasons for this spatial configuration? And why does the exclusive control of the community leader over some goods represent publicness in Canhane? Only a historical analysis will make it possible to understand the social motives behind the centralization of the commons around the figure of the community leader, and why this plays a key role in the water supply dilemma in Canhane.

Placing Symbols: The Zitha Lineage and the Community Leader After the last ruler of the Gaza Empire, which encompassed the actual region where Canhane is located, was captured and exiled by the Portuguese in 1895 (Liesegang 2007), the colonial authorities institutionalized traditional community leaders as administrative intermediaries in the region. This was applied all over Mozambique, leading later to the code of Indigenato (Gonçalves 1946). In line with the French colonial Code de l’Indigenat (1888–1947), first implemented in Algiers, the Indigenato regime was a juridicopolitical system officially adopted in Mozambique in 1928. It sanctioned the legal demarcation of indigeneity and, subsequently, the subordination of the indígenas to local ‘customary’ chiefs (Mamdani

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1996; West and Kloeck-Jenson 1999; O’Laughlin 2000; Meneses et al. 2006). Under this system, the Portuguese colonial regime delineated the responsibilities of the community leaders, such as informing Portuguese administrators about available labourers and recruits for the colonial army, collecting household taxes, controlling the entry of foreigners who were not carrying a valid pass in their area of jurisdiction and enforcing the state wine monopoly (Serra 2000: 385). As compensation, the community leaders were paid by the colonial state. The Portuguese regime adopted local rules of power succession and let customary practices govern the arbitration of disputes, which has invariably contributed to the strengthening of the authority of community leaders over the populations. Indeed, the local traditional authorities have derived personal benefit and accumulated power for themselves through the colonial system. As a consequence of such a politics of selective empowerment, the colonial era contributed to increase intra-social separatism. It intensified internal class distinctions between the institutionalized ‘natives’ themselves. This topic deserves a little more contextualization. The 1899 Labour Law officially introduced the distinction between two classes of people living in Mozambique: ‘natives’ and ‘non-natives’ (or ‘civilized’). It served to legitimate the foreignAfrican binary (Obarrio 2010: 265). Later, in 1917, an intermediate category was established: o assimilado (the assimilated), referring to an African who had assimilated a degree of culture, education, Portuguese language, work ethic and Christian principles sufficient to be eligible for full citizenship (Farré 2014: 204). The institutionalization through law of individuals by group categories had conspicuous consequences in various fields. The subsequent Land Law of 1918, for example, divided all land into three classes: ‘state land’, ‘land under private tenure’ and the ‘native reserves’ (O’Laughlin 2000: 10), which were under the control of the community leaders. In these ‘native reserves’, community leaders could expand their own personal power. This institutionally conceded autonomy increased their authority among the populations, and therefore it was a determinant in fortifying practices of differential control of communal resources. The later abolition of the Indigenato in 1961 did not entail any fundamental change in the power of governance by community leaders in rural areas. In fact, mainly due to the rise of national liberation movements, the authority of local authorities was strengthened by the colonial regime (Cabaço 2010; Farré 2014), and community leaders started to be seen by the Portuguese as possible

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allies in the resistance against the emerging national liberation front (Coelho 2012). Hence, after Mozambique gained independence from Portugal (1975), the political party FRELIMO that took power in the country officially excluded community leaders from positions of authority – hereditary chieftaincy was abolished. FRELIMO considered community leaders ‘in the group of the compromised (os comprometidos)’ (Gonçalves 2006) because, Joseph Hanlon (1984: 171) notes, ‘they compromised themselves by voluntarily supporting the repressive colonial apparatus.’3 In this way, the new postcolonial socialist regime pushed forward new territorial power arrangements. For example, it encouraged the formation of grupos dinamizadores (dynamizing groups) in every village, which were expected to act as provisional political organizations (Pitcher 2002: 48). It also stimulated the inclusion of secretários de bairro (village secretaries) who would act as representatives of the FRELIMO government. The main intention behind the implementation of these local government structures was to diminish the power of long-standing customary institutions, which were then decried as legacies of colonial rule. However, the implementation of such administrative and governing schemes was not applied successfully in all areas. Canhane was one of these places. In fact, today, Canhane is the only village in the entire Massingir administrative area that does not have a village secretary. Moreover, in all my time there, I did not find any evidence of the presence of any promoter group associated with the FRELIMO government. In the recent past, FRELIMO divided the promoter group’s structure in Canhane into three sections: one for culture, one for agriculture and one for the promotion of the political and social role of women – the Organização da Mulher Moçambicana (Organization of Mozambican Women). Yet these have faded over time, and now they are completely absent in the village. Canhane does represent the failure of the socialist collectivization policy projected by FRELIMO onto rural villages: most people do not pay taxes and cooperative production does not exist anymore, if indeed it ever did. As I mentioned in Chapter 1, after Mozambique’s independence and the resettlement of Canhane, a machamba do povo, which can be roughly translated as ‘people’s agricultural field’, was established in the village. It materialized FRELIMO’s socialist ideology of agricultural cooperatives and communal sharing. However, this project was abandoned in the village even before the Mozambican civil war started in 1977. In line with the precolonial

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constitution of Canhane, today, local residents work on their own fields, and the community leader in particular and the Zitha lineage in general are recognized as the main institutional authority in the village. The hegemony of the Zithas in Canhane represents a case of singularity in the postcolonial context in the region. Take the following episode: at the beginning of 2008, the teachers of school in Canhane told me about ‘an American who is in the Limpopo National Park for more than one year for “defending”, and she is living with the communities, like you are.’ Instead of ‘researching’, the teachers used to say ‘defending’ whenever mentioning the presence of academic researchers in the region. According to them, the ‘American’ was conducting fieldwork to finish her graduation somewhere in the United States. Later, however, I confirmed she was collecting data for her Ph.D. at the Wageningen University in the Netherlands. Her presence in the region for more than one year intensified my curiosity. We finally met in the middle of April 2008, in the town of Tihovene. I was immediately surprised by her fluency in Portuguese, which confirmed her long presence in Mozambique. After our first encounter, we met briefly several times, but it was only in October 2008 that we had a proper extended conversation. At one point, she told me how she was particularly engaged in researching local values of the ecosystem and presented me with a theory that she was developing regarding the ascension of power by the traditional community leaders. As she said, The traditional community leaders are almost nothing in these places. The power and authority are in the hands of the political leaders [village secretaries]. However, with the ongoing resettlement processes in the Limpopo Park, this is now changing, and it seems the traditional leaders are recovering some of the social power and influence that the independence had taken away from them.

And then she asked me: ‘How is the relation between the political leader and the traditional leaders in Canhane?’ I told her that I had never heard about the existence of a political leader in the village. ‘Really? But you should check more carefully,’ she said surprised, ‘because every village here has a political leader: it’s an effect of the country’s independence.’ I offered her counterarguments, from my own experience in the village, pointing to the non-existence of such a figure in Canhane. Yet she continued to defend her version: ‘That’s impossible: every village has a political leader in Mozambique.’ Her assertiveness made me question my knowledge of the subject.

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Meanwhile, after we had been talking for one hour, another woman joined us. She was the assistant of the American researcher. It happens that she was from Canhane. ‘Good that you arrived,’ the researcher said to her while looking at me, ‘Now we’ll clarify once and for all our difference: so, do you know the political leader of Canhane?’ she asked her. The answer came promptly: ‘There’s no political leader there.’ ‘What?,’ the researcher said, ‘how’s that possible? Almost two years living in this region and I never heard of a community without a political leader.’ ‘Well, this is a different case,’ the other women said, ‘don’t forget that the village is called Canhane.’ She looked the researcher in the eye, and smiled before elucidating, ‘Canhane means stubborn; they are stubborn people. There is only one leader there, one community leader, and he is a Zitha.’ The surprise of the researcher, who was experienced in the region, reflects the singularity of Canhane. Among other conclusions, the village contradicts the simplistic argument that resettled people across southern Africa are more easily controlled by the national governments (Fabricius 2004: 9). Specifically, non-compliance in Canhane, in particular the rejection, distrust and lack of interest in state policies, has idiosyncratic motivations. One of these is the distinctive role of the ruling lineage. As addressed in Chapter 1, Canhane was once a Ngovene area, which means they were founded by the Ngovene family lineage. But now the village is a territory dominated by Zithas, a different family lineage. Actually, all the surrounding villages are Ngovene areas except Canhane. Summarizing what I have already addressed in Chapter 1, I was often told that this change, from the Ngovenes to the Zithas, took place in such a mulish way that Marunzele, the first Zitha in the village and the one responsible for this shift, was named Canhane, which as the assistant of the American researcher said, means stubborn. Soon after his death the lands were called the lands of Zitha Canhane – the stubborn Zitha – or just Canhane. This is a history that supports an obvious culture of local disengagement from the central political authority in the country. Once I was aware of this story, I tried to track the Zithas, historically and geographically. I was told by the community leader in Canhane that the Zithas originally came from a region about 150 kilometres away from his village, called Caniçado. One week later, I went to Caniçado. While there, I talked to men who belonged to long-established, precolonial lineages. In the beginning, I only met people of the Cuinica lineage; the Zithas seemed nonexistent. However, after a few days of persistent searching and presence

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I spontaneously met a man, the eldest brother of the community leader of the nearby Chimbembe village, who provided me with the following narrative: Zitha is Cuinica. A long time ago, whenever a Cuinica fought against others, if victorious he used to yell, ‘Zithááááááá!’ It was also common whenever a Cuinica completed hard work successfully to go to an open place, for instance the middle of the village, and yell, ‘Zithááááááá!’ So, after some time, many people started to call us Zitha instead of Cuinica. The difference is that nowadays there is a tendency to refer only to those Cuinica who have moved out from here as Zitha. Actually, I think Canhane is the only place outside of Guijá [the district where we were] that is governed by Zitha. They are Cuinica who moved. But we are all the same. Cuinica and Zitha belong to the same family.

The origin of Canhane is symbolically entrenched not only in the stubborn personal attitude of its first leader, Covane Zitha, but also in a delocalized lineage-principle of triumph: ‘Zithááááááá!’ Both are historical and mythological aspects that serve to authorize and perpetuate the current model of commanding in Canhane. How are such a narrative and ideology of Zitha’s distinctiveness expressed and reproduced in contemporary Canhane? Among other manifestations, these are revealed through public events. Public commemorations and events often express the way societies institutionalize mythologies and explicitly reinforce them in their history. They have also come to encapsulate and delineate cultural diversity (Frost 2016). Given their capacity to redefine and sustain locations and social collectives, in recent years, a new subfield of public ‘festivals and event studies’ has emerged (Picard and Robinson 2006; Getz 2007; Frost 2016). Anthropology, of course, has had a long relationship with commemorations and events (Cohen 1980; Turner 1982; Handelman 1990; Cohen 1998; Green 2002). In this tradition, John Helsloot (1998) writes of the efforts of Dutch colonial officials to affirm Dutch identity and culture in Java through the festival of St. Nicholas. For Laura Jeffery (2010), Creole festivals in Mauritius serve as paradoxical sites for expressing both cultural rootedness – in particular articulated in opposition to other ‘Creole cultures’ – and cosmopolitanism. The motivations and goals of public commemorations and festivals can be paradoxical indeed. As human geographers Michelle Duffy and Gordon Waitt say, they ‘function as a form of social integration and cohesion, while simultaneously they are sites of subversion, protest or exclusion and alienation. It is precisely this paradoxical nature that creates the festival’s

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socio-spatial and political significance for notions of community and belonging’ (2011: 55). Festivals, then, are platforms for institutionalization and reflexivity; not only meant to allow momentary relief from everyday practices but to give and institutionalize (historical) explanation to such practices. Rüdiger Bubner (1989: 144) calls this the theological understanding of the festival, which he characterizes as the celebration of history. Accordingly, every December a small group of men from Canhane organize the Zitha Football Cup. The event, paid for through remittances from Canhane’s emigrants living in South Africa, is well known beyond the local vicinity, reaching villages and towns as far as 140 kilometres away. In the 2008 Zitha Cup, the winning team won 8,000 metical (US$304, in the currency conversion at the time), while the second-place team won 4,000 metical (US$152). There is no other public event in the region with a similar lineage reference. The founding of a Zitha tournament illustrates Canhaners’ self-confidence in a particular lineage and reinforces the connection between territory and a people. It promotes the ‘sense of collective place-identity’ (Igreja 2015a: 694). In the Zitha Cup, there is a public and general intensity reproductive of idiosyncratic social meaning. ‘Canhane is Zitha. Zitha and Canhane mean the same,’ the community leader’s cousin, who is a security guard at the Covane Lodge, once told me. Like other sorts of ‘languages and practices of land’ (Fontein 2006) that combine space and genealogy, labelling a public event with a lineage title reflects a sense of territorial and genealogical pride, whereby distinctiveness is restated and affirmed both to the general public and to the Canhaners themselves. Fundamentally, the geographical dissemination of this message of social distinction perpetuates and informs the Zitha dominance within the locale – Canhane itself. Juan Obarrio says that all over Mozambique there has been a ‘reemergence of locality and its figures of “customary” authority’ (2010: 263). He characterizes this re-emergence as a ‘third moment’ in the recent history of the country, ‘in which the postsocialist state reverses its previous commitment to a total effacement of the realm of “tradition” within a negotiation with transnational donors and development agencies’ (Obarrio 2010: 279). Contemporary Canhane is, of course, under the influence of these general circumstances. However, while in a ‘second moment’ (Obarrio 2010) most rural populations in Mozambique had to adopt and adapt to FRELIMO’s politico-developmental project of socialist modernization, namely through the integration of political leaders in their

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everyday life, Canhane resisted it. In this sense, Canhane is not part of the country’s ‘third moment’ because it did not pass through a ‘second moment’. It has endured in idiosyncratic continuity, in which ‘traditional’ authority never ceased to play a central role in the local social order. The overall point that must be emphasized here is that, in the present as in the recent past, Canhaners’ resistance to the national government policies was always fuelled by local representations of lineage uniqueness and territorial integrity. And such a resistance, to put in Lefebvre’s (1991) terms, assists in the ‘production of space’. The physical arrangement of space in the village, particularly the centre as a situated spatial practice promoting the control of the commons by the community leader – a Zitha – is a result of these circumstances. Canhane’s constitutional past operates as a symbolic resource that reproduces cultural meaning and supports the configuration of contemporary power and social ordering arrangements. In the practice of everyday life, any deviation from this norm, even if the result of ‘participatory development’ or community-based approaches, as it was the case with the implementation of the water taps outside ‘the belly button of the community’, is a source of contestation, quarrels and, potentially, social upheaval. The social motivations behind the contradictory behaviour towards the new water supply system are driven by processes that position, spatially and symbolically, a particular past as central to ordering the present. In David Mosse’s words, ‘water systems involve the interplay of past and present embedded in a landscape that is a store of … residues of meaning, as well as ecological constraints’ (2008: 947). Correspondingly, the past-oriented practices and principles that have been ordering everyday life in Canhane are now the root of concerns regarding present change. Canhane illustrates, then, the importance of considering local pasts, even if highly contested and imagined, in order to understand perceptions of and reactions to contemporary community-based projects. More specifically, understanding how such community-based projects will be received and what responses they may provoke requires a thorough understanding not only of local aspirations and necessities but fundamentally also of local historiographies. The actual power and authority of the community leader in Canhane relies less on his personality and more on his role as a symbol: he is a Zitha. As Michel Foucault (1978, 1980) and many other scholars have since discussed, power resides not in things, persons or institutions but rather in relations. In Canhane, the

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power of the community leader is relational, it derives from his relations with people, things and subjects. It is also the result of a social concession; he has been given the duty to exercise it. The population of Canhane is thus an accomplice in processes of social differentiation in the village. The use of the past plays a determinant role in the social validation of such differences, because while allowing the present community leader to exercise power, the collective is allowing historical legendary accomplishments to regulate their present life (think of the story of Marunzele Zitha – Chapter 1). Therefore, the control over resources vested in the community leader is a clear consequence of local social validation and legitimation, and not the result of personal charisma. His power in the village and the spatial manifestation of that power – the geographical centralization of social institutions and commons – are verified by the local residents, which then makes such sanctioned spatial practices essential for the ordering of the society.

Perceptions of Publicness and Privatization of Water Tourists visiting Canhane are told by Canhaners that natural resources in the village do not belong to individuals, not even to the community leader, but to the community. In a conversation about tourists, community-based tourism and Canhane, the oldest resident present made this understanding clear. He said, ‘The benefits of tourism are not for me, for her [pointing to a women passing by and carrying a barrel full of water on her head] or for anyone in the village. It should not be like that. No person should gain anything from that. The benefits must be for all of us here.’ His statement assumes a dichotomy between the individualization and collectivization of assets, pointing to a distinction between the publicness and privateness of goods. The benefits of local tourism are affirmed by the Canhaners as a collective claim. Because those benefits are collective, they should not be the property of any individual, but should belong, as the residents say, to ‘all of us here’. Natural resources, like tourism benefits, are declared public: a collective substance. This was continuously reaffirmed to me during my stay in the village. However, as I mentioned before, this is not to say that there is no social recognition of individual or gender authority over natural resources. Canhane’s social orderliness is not based on who owns or retains the possession of the commons, but it relies on who oversees them. Specifically, this

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is understood as the duty of the community leader. The public is a domain supervised by the community leader, which reinforces and attests to his status and authority. Such a sanctioned mechanism of rulership is an essential component in the normative expectations of the population. It is crucial to highlight that this form of rulership is fundamentally a collective expectation that is not gender-based, even if the roles of authority that derive from it are highly gendered. This is why women, who have the difficult task of getting water and could expect the most benefits from the new water supply system, did not approve it. It has been widely demonstrated that extra-local skills may be claimed by individuals in order to gain influence and power at the local scale (Edel 1966). In contrast to the community leader, the individual chosen to supervise the water supply in Canhane seems to fit this model. His technological knowledge of water provision was vital for his nomination by the fellow Canhaners. Yet their choice was contrary to long-established forms of ordering the society, and his nomination gave him an extra-local source of legitimacy. For example, as the controller of the water, which is now linked to positive tourism impacts, he became a sort of representative of the village to the outside. In particular, he started to embody the successful community-based development case that Canhane represents to the tourists and development experts. In his new role, he had to manage a myriad of duties, people and things related to his obligations. One of these is charging money per barrel of water, an inevitable task necessary to support the maintenance costs of the entire supply infrastructure. These managerial tasks not only empowered him personally in a domain of the collective, but also reinforced social perceptions of the privatization and individual appropriation of water in the village, which, as we saw already, proved to be in direct conflict with established social organization and power structures. As David Mosse notes (2008: 941), water systems not only are shaped by but also themselves shape the social. Such perceptions and the social anxieties that they carry are, of course, not exclusive to contemporary Canhane. Historical research across the region indicates that the effective ‘appropriation of water was often key to the appropriation of land in southern Africa’ (Fontein 2008: 745). For example, Gerard Mazarire’s (2008) work on Chishanga in southern Zimbabwe shows how the power derived from controlling surface water and rain through rain-making ceremonies is inherently linked to a sense of ownership of land and contestations over authority. Matthew Bender (2008) shows how

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innovative pipelines implemented by the Tanzanian government on Mount Kilimanjaro during the Ujimaa period challenged traditional leadership over water, and stimulated local concerns about the extension of government control into the most intimate domains of daily life. Likewise, in Canhane, the new water supply project was interpreted as a means for delegitimizing traditional authority over the land and over society. The developmental tourism failure of the Canhane water project owes more to how Canhaners interpreted the water supply system than to the effective service that it would bring to the village. The symbolic significance of the water tank is entrenched in structures of authority and conceptions of public and non-public spaces. Extending it beyond the village, this indicates that water supply projects should not be interpreted on the basis of their functional and technical potentialities alone without reference to the complex social, cultural, historical and political representations in which they are embedded. Finally, the complex and contradictory ways in which the control of water and social power converge in Canhane also resonate with broader processes of commodification and the privatization of natural resources, as well as popular responses to them. Existing scholarship that has explored how ‘neo-liberal’ strategies for the ‘production of water’ have been adopted across Africa, and particularly in South Africa, are helpful in this domain. For example, both Buntu Siwisa (2008) and von Schnitzler (2008) have explored the complex politics involved in the establishment of water provision and new water technologies, as well as popular responses and protests against them, in the townships of Durban and Johannesburg in South Africa. These conflicts reflect the impulses of the ‘neo-liberal’ impetus and the counter-reactions to it generated ‘from below’. As a response to the conflicting dimension of the privatization of water, there has been a developmental anti-privatization shift, particularly since the 1990s. This has been popularized through the promotion of community water management approaches (Bakker 2003: 335). This ideological shift introduces principles of water democracy and the idea of water as a human right, into ongoing debates about water provision. In Canhane, if the water supply had succeeded, Canhaners would have become clients, instead of users of what they perceive and conventionalize as a public good. Indeed, as an effect of expansionist development discourses of participation, benevolence and community-based tourism, Canhane implemented and reproduced wider

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‘neo-liberal’ norms. However, the social reordering required by the implementation of the new water scheme has shown to be dependent on the willingness to challenge spatialities of authority. This social flexibility and general consent to change was lacking, and so the water scheme has remained unfulfilled.

Conclusion The control of the community leader over the commons is an important contemporary form of social order. His personal connection to communal goods is bound to a collective reliance on a localized spatial practice: the centralization of the commons around the community leader’s house. Such physical configuration informs the relationship between the residents and the village itself, and it both reproduces and derives from social meaning. ‘The centre’ is not a product of chance but a project of order, the cause and consequence of social hierarchies and representations of publicness. Furthermore, it orders residents’ lives while reproducing a specific past. In the centre, we find what Michel Foucault called ‘the disciplinary treatment of multiplicities in space’ (2007: 32). That is, it represents the constitution of a specific space within which the multiplicities are constructed and organized according to the principle of hierarchy, communications of relations of power, and the effects specific to this distribution. To recapitulate, the social texture in the village was challenged by the implementation of the water supply system, which carried with it new ways of organizing society. By resorting to the new taps implemented outside of ‘the belly button’, even for a short period, Canhaners realized that they, in turn, were undermining traditional leadership and allowing new forms of authority. Such new practices, which temporarily disciplined water users according to logics of privatization, were understood as confrontational social behaviour. Water was located at the core of contested spatialities of power (Fontein 2008), generating a landscape of insecurity and internal conflict. The rumours about the sabotaging of the water pipes and the prolonged periods of inoperability reflect this social turmoil. As many authors have pointed out, it is through regular use that institutions are strengthened (Manning 2002: 81). Therefore, by not being used, the new water supply system could not gain strength and social acceptance. In the end, the decentralization of communal resources was not sanctioned in Canhane, even if a new water supply

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was strongly desired. This illustrates the central place of water as an arena of social reliability on traditional structures of power. The larger issue at stake here is that the social conflicts that emerged in the village represent a criticism ‘from below’ of the widely celebrated and normative consensus that exists about the beneficial effects of community-based development ideology. The flawed outcome of the participatory and community development strategies that were deployed in Canhane illustrate the importance of questioning rather than simply adopting development moral rhetoric, which assumes that simply because the process is communitybased and participatory it is bound to succeed. The enigma of the water situation in Canhane reflects the confrontation between different modes of organizing power and social values. While Canhane society is being integrated into a worldwide order of devaluation of distances and porousness of borders, conspicuously through the local incursion in the developmentourism order, it simultaneously fights to maintain the long-established habits of organizing internal power through strict bordered objects, ordered through conceptions of a concrete centre and its peripheries. This chapter is close to its end, but the subject of the water supply system is not finished yet. We should not forget that along with the developmental influence, Canhane is also a tourism place – a field of developmentourism. Hence, a pertinent question arises from such dual engagement: in what way does the development rationale influence Canhaners’ presentation of the village to the tourists, as well as tourists’ ways of looking at it? I believe the water tank can give us useful hints to help answer this. In the next chapter, I try to explain why and how that is so.

Notes  1. Construction of the Massingir Dam was started in 1972 by the Portuguese. Its main purpose was to provide flood control and irrigation for the Lower Limpopo Valley, further downstream. The dam was completed in 1976.  2. On discussions of both space and culture, see for example Park and Burgess (1925), Foucault (1961), Altman (1975), Giddens (1985), Rapoport (1990), Augé (1992), Moore (1996), Hendon (2000) and Thomas, Sheppard and Walter (2001). More specifically, on the relation-

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ship of causality between space and culture, see Whiteford (1978), Pred (1990), Rémy and Voyé (1992) and Baptista (2006, 2016a).  3. The historical commitment of community leaders with the colonial regime in Mozambique is highly disputed by various scholars. As Euclides Gonçalves highlights, ‘There is extensive documentation suggesting that the so-called comprometidos many times outwitted the colonial regime and some of them actively supported FRELIMO during the liberation struggle’ (2006: 34). See, for example, Alexander (1997), Coelho (1998), West and Kloeck-Jenson (1999), O’Laughlin (2000), Connor (2003) and West (2005b).

5 The Walk

In the previous chapter, I showed the social dilemma and complexities inherent in the water supply impasse in Canhane. With such an analysis, I have raised arguments that might influence the reader to interpret the new water tank and all its infrastructure as a serviceable waste. After all the effort and revenues spent on it, the persistent inoperability of the water system does seem to make the material and collective investment a complete failure. However, such a conclusion proved to be wrong. My interest in the Canhaners’ commitment to solving their water insufficiencies pushed me to write an article that was published elsewhere (Baptista 2010). In the comments I received from the anonymous reviewers, a scholar said reluctantly: ‘Why did no-one think of this before when slogging their guts out digging the second ditch which it is claimed was the decision of the village?’ Prior to this section, I introduced some general arguments pointing at the unintentional and non-project-oriented dimension of people’s lives, which anticipates an answer to that question. As Michael Jackson notes in his book Existential Anthropology (2005), human lives are not always products of functionalist and instrumental deliberation, but intuitive continuations wrought by historiographical, ecological and economic conditions. Scholars such as Donald Moore (2005), Tania Li (2007b) and Jeremy Gould (2007) have turned to Deleuze and Guattari’s (1987) indeterministic notion of assemblage to capture the uncertain and unpredictable side of peoples’ endeavours. In their view, an assemblage is a process of ordering which, nevertheless, is contingent – it is not a stable procedure that

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guaranties or promotes a final and predefined outcome (Moore 2005: 24). Assemblage thinking interprets the association between humans and non-humans – our condition of existence – as a processual and unpredictable whole. Other authors follow Bruno Latour’s ‘collective’ (2007), a concept that is intended to characterize the causal, but always uncertain, relationships between humans and the non-human, materiality and immateriality. This chapter engages in and expands these views. But fundamentally, it assumes that the efforts people make in their lives, or as Tim Ingold would say, the paths humans take through the world (2011: 4) do not always or necessarily follow the logic of means to an end. In Canhane, it so happens that the residents’ endeavour and the new water mechanism in itself were revealed to be an adequate and coherent achievement for the purposes of community tourism. The analysis of the water tank phenomenon in the village allows a tentative answer in the affirmative to be given to John Urry’s interesting question, ‘whether it is in fact possible to construct a postmodern tourist site around absolutely any object’ (2002: 92). Although it does not represent the typical distinctive exotic feature that might attract international tourists, the inoperative water tank not only has become a tourist sight in Canhane, but is actually the spot most visited by tourists. What I intend to bring to light is how and why this happened. Let me clarify that my concern is not to analyse or systematize the motives behind the Canhaners’ effort in the water mechanism. Rather, I wish to demonstrate how and why that infrastructure has become a trump card in community tourism. In this regard, the water tank does have the potential to symbolize what was morally and externally projected for Canhane: community development through tourism. In particular, it explicitly incorporates four essential vectors of the community tourism ideology: local development, participation, empowerment and tourism. That means it represents the solution to solving the most relevant shortage informed by Canhaners’ own felt needs (local development), it was accomplished by the local residents (participation and empowerment) and it was made possible due to tourism revenues (tourism). In effect, however, the water tank represents what in practice it is not – it is not the solution to the water scarcity issue. The fact that it does not work, and thus its social effect is distant from its original intended purpose, is not relevant to its becoming the most significant tourist sight in the village. What is determinant for its touristic

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success, if the reader will allow me to restate, is its material ability to represent (and be sensed as) something that has currency in community tourism: a developmental solution that was made possible due to tourism revenues. The water tank presents a case for thinking more expansively about the ways particular material forms come to ‘mean’ (Murphy 2013). It is not just a neutral substratum: it produces meaning. The water mechanism impacts the ways both the tourists (who visit it) and the residents (who built and live with it) come to perceive and formulate their role in developmentourism. It has the capacity to cultivate an awareness in the tourists’ thought about themselves as crucial protagonists in local development, insofar as the tank exists due to tourist revenue. In this sense, it promotes the idea of the locale and its inhabitants as a suitable field for the practice of benevolence in tourism. Clearly, the water mechanism serves a moral purpose beyond its surface function. It signalizes and enacts the imaginary of community development through tourism. As John Urry stressed in a more general sense, but nicely matching our case, ‘We do not literally “see” things. Particularly as tourists we see objects constituted as signs. They stand for something else … such signs function metaphorically’ (2002: 117). Yet, to add a new layer to this story, the evocative power of the water infrastructure as sign and metaphor of a solution to local predicaments does not emerge from the association of its materiality with the virtues of community tourism alone. Most importantly, the emotional success and touristic victory of the water mechanism derive from a meaningful sensory event that precedes the moment of its tourist encounter – a walking tour. It is this latter suggestion that I want to push further. How does the triumph of the inoperative infrastructure come about in and through a walking tour? And, a more structural question, what does this tell us about community tourism in Canhane? I believe that an ethnography of the ways we apprehend and make sense of ourselves and our surroundings through our walking bodies can give us arguments that are useful for building answers to these questions.

The Framework of Sensation The Covane Community Lodge is outside of the village. It is located at the shore of the Massingir Dam lake, around seven kilometres

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from the area where the residents live, and is reachable by a red sand road that crosses through an unpopulated forest. Hence, the lodge can be entirely filled with tourists without necessarily originating face-to-face interaction between them and Canhaners. There is, however, a premeditated way for tourists to encounter the local residents, and that is ‘the stroll in the village’ (originally announced in Portuguese as Passeio á aldeia). The stroll in the village is a time-maximized walking experience saturated with emotional significances. In an elementary style, it consists of a standard walkable circuit that takes tourists through five spots in a specific order: - First, the community leader; - Second, the medicine man; - Third, the shallow well; - Fourth, the primary school; - Fifth, the water supply tank. The stroll is a service that can be purchased at the reception of the lodge. This is not the only way for tourists to visit Canhane. As it is expressed in various texts available in the lodge, tourists are actually encouraged to visit the village on their own, whenever they want. Yet at the end of the friendly invitation, the reader is challenged with an effective warning: ‘The risks are not the responsibility of the Covane Community Lodge.’ In a context where the local circumstances are unfamiliar to most of the visitors, the mention and thus suggestion of risks reinforces apprehension. The fact is during my one-year presence in Canhane I never saw tourists walking by themselves in the village. All those who visited it had requested the stroll and therefore paid for that walk. This point is relevant. It means that tourists decided ‘to consume’ – in the monetary sense (Graeber 2011: 492) – Canhane. Through their choice, tourists support and favour the commercialization of what could have been a free experience. This announces by itself the interdependent relationship between tourist consumption, the commodification of local ordinary life, and community development that animates developmentourism in the village. Nevertheless, even operating in a commercial dimension, this walking tour meets tourists’ demands for what various authors have called as ‘existential authenticity’. As Rebecca Sims (2009: 324) and

Figure 5.1. The walking route of ‘the stroll in the village’. Map by the author.

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Mary Conran (2006: 275) put it, existential authenticity describes the ways in which tourists can construct their identity and cultivate their selves by experiencing a more humanist, personal and real interaction with others. Juergen Gnoth and Ning Wang say that tourists’ orientations towards existential authenticity mean they ‘are able to experience authenticity in the context of the commoditization of culture, because a humanistic orientation makes them have an empathic understanding of local people’s rights to development’ (2015: 171). Accordingly, the walking experience of the stroll supports and substantiates this quest for authenticity. Walking, to use Frédéric Gros’s words, means ‘to experience the real’; the authentic real (2014: 94). And to pay for that experience of the real in Canhane demonstrates an understanding of and the zeal for embeddedness in local development. When it was first established, the stroll was guided by a local resident. In Canhane, he is perceived as a reputable person that has valuable skills suitable for the task, such as fluency in Portuguese, average English and a profound knowledge of local history. However, some months later, he was given the job of driver of the lodge’s truck. From then on, the role of tourist guide was taken by either the manager or the sub-manager of the lodge, who are not from Canhane and do not live there. Neither of them had attended any course in tourism guiding. Although Portuguese and English are the languages they usually use while touring, Shangane is their first language, which often complicates their ability to communicate. Yet their difficulty with the tour languages reinforces the authenticity of the whole experience for the tourists; it validates the foreignness of the locale and the experience in the village as genuine, unpretentious, real and unsophisticated. Tourists’ dialogues in the village happen while they walk, which reinforces to them the character of simplicity of their experience. Walking is one of the most humble forms of activity to those who are able to walk. It does not require special equipment and facilities. ‘To walk,’ Gros says, ‘you need to start with two legs. The rest is optional’ (2014: 2). Walking intensifies moments of direct sensation of the terrains traversed. By sensation I mean ‘the heterology of impulses that register on our bodies’ (Panagia 2009: 2), which promotes a unifying relationship between the sensing subject and the sensed. In this sense, the stroll is more than just an event of perception. It is an experience of dwelling. Heidegger (1975) interprets dwelling as a way of being in the world in which one is intimately

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intertwined with and concerned for it. Likewise, the stroll is an occasion for tourists to develop a direct and compassionate relationship with Canhane and its residents, a relationship built from direct embedment and unfolded by their sensing, walking bodies. As I try to show further, tourists’ sensing practice generates moments of relation, and stimulates, even if temporarily, the ideological constitution of supranational associational lives in development and ethical terms; better put, it stimulates a transient sense of supranational communitas (Turner 1969) between the international visitors and the local hosts. The dialogues between the tour guide and tourists emerge in motion. But they emerge also from the nature of their immediate interactions with the residents and the particular infrastructure that they visit in the village. This means the verbalization of subjects that occur during the stroll is a direct consequence of the route’s pre-sanctioned setting and the sensory experience that such an itinerary instigates. Faced with the aesthetics, textures and smells toured, tourists’ talks are emotional but also diverse. The tour guide rarely assumes a position of controlling speaker, as it is common in mass package tours. Actually, for the most part, the tourists’ walk proceeds in silence. To some extent, the structure of feeling and perception of the stroll conforms to a well-known phenomenon in human cognizance: in Zygmund Bauman’s words, ‘We are challenged by what we see, and we are challenged to act – to help, to defend, to bring solace, to cure or save’ (2008: 64). In Canhane, however, this causal association between seeing and ‘acting’ is incomplete. Such an association reflects the predominant view in North Atlantic societies in favour of vision and of what is seeable (Howes 1991; Geurts 2002: 9). Since ancient philosophy, Constance Classen says, ‘sight is held to be the most important of the senses … [and] vision is still the “first among equals”’ (1997: 402). Yet the affective and humanist force of the stroll does not derive solely from vision or, as it has been addressed more recently in tourist studies, from the ‘embodied gaze’ (Obrador-Pons 2003; Edensor 2006; Urry and Larsen 2012). It derives from multisensory and synesthetic practice (Merleau-Ponty 1962), which exceeds, particularly in terms of the quest for authentic and moral experience, the hedonistic sightseeing so often associated with package tourism. In the stroll, realities, meanings and knowledge are coproduced by tourists’ sensory organs and by the agentic force of their immediate surroundings

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(including resident people). I argue that through the stroll, Canhane becomes a meaningful site where different sensing and senseable subjects interact. And in consequence of such immediate interactions, the stroll comes to be the most powerful mechanism promoting developmentourism in the village. All things considered, the stroll fosters a sense of climax and impulsive positivity towards the end of the route in the visitors’ minds. Moreover, the multisensory quality of the ‘walking along from place to place’ (Ingold 2010: 121) and the momentary bodily proximity with the materially deprived Other triggers the tourists to ‘help the community’ – or rather, it confirms to them their venerable value in helping them. As I was told often by the residents, ‘It is good to receive tourists here because they see us in our place and [thus] help the community.’ In the same vein, a staff member of NGO Lupa said, ‘That stroll represents what we really want for tourism there: tourists who are interested in the community. The five-star tourists who go to coastal areas and who don’t want to know about local cultures are not our aim.’ Tourism and the stroll in Canhane operate for a particular postcolonial target: the moral, sensitive, responsible Western tourist. In this regard, one could say that the call on the senses in the stroll is characteristic of the ‘experience economy’ of our present era. David Howes refers to this as the ‘hyperaesthesia, or the sensual logic of late consumer capitalism’ (2004). Along this current, I intend to show how the ‘Canhanescape’ (to put it in Appadurai’s style) and the spirit of benevolence in community tourism can be deeply nurtured by a politics of the sensorial. To demonstrate my point empirically, I guide the reader through the standard procedures of the stroll in the village. But before I engage on that, it is important to introduce a short methodological note: I got around the lack of information about the sensory moments in the stroll by introducing myself at the event. I would approach the tourists and ask them if I could accompany them during the walking tour. In those occasions, I always presented myself as a social researcher, guaranteeing to them that I would be discrete and would not take photographs. It was through this ‘participative’ approach that I collected much of the information on face-to-face interactions between the tourists, the residents and the other materialities in Canhane, which I now begin to relate.

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Table 5.1. Requests for the stroll over the period of three and a half years (seven 6-month periods; 1 June 2004–30 November 2007). period 1

period 2

period 3

period 4

period 5

period 6

period 7

Total

24

14

18

14

61

2

65

198

Source: Documents of NGO Helvetas, accessed at the offices of NGO Lupa, Maputo. 1 April 2008.

Moment One – The Community Leader ‘First of all let me introduce you to the community leader of Canhane,’ the tour guide said elegantly to a couple of Italians, a few minutes after they got out of the car. The three had come directly from the Covane Lodge. In rural Mozambique, according to customary ethics, foreigners to the locale should follow strict conducts of passage, such as introducing themselves to the headmen, formally asking permission to circulate and paying a voluntary fee to the authorities of the accessed area (Tornimbeni 2007). Following this tradition, in contemporary Canhane, tourists are initially guided to the community leader’s household. Yet their visit owes more to the reproducing of tourist attractions than to the ethical and economic imperatives implied in the conducts of passage in the past. The tourists’ visit means the community leader is the first sight to be toured and ‘sensed’, both as a personality to ‘make sense’ of and as an Other that ‘can be sensed’. It represents a symbolic beginning that authenticates tourists’ entry into the emblematic space of local community. Typically, the headman of Canhane greets the tourists with a prolonged handshake by grabbing his right elbow with his left hand while he shakes the hand of the tourist with his right. It is a sign of respect, showing that the arm of the tourist is heavy. This fleshmeeting interactive moment is a wordless way to communicate both respect and admiration to the tourists while it promotes an atmosphere of hospitality. It results from an agentive ‘tactile tactic’ (Hillewaert 2016: 50) of inclusion – an intentionally used tactic in the presentation of self and promotion of social relations. Touch here is practiced to affirm feelings of fraternization and to enhance interpersonal involvement. It reciprocally connects and humanizes the community leader and the tourists. After all, as various authors

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have demonstrated, tactile sensation can promote ‘the feeling of being internal’ to each other (Martin 1995: 272). This is so for the simple reason that touching and being touched necessarily involve physical contact with another body. The experience of touch implies that one is usually closer to the perceived entity than in cases of hearing, vision and smell. ‘For this reason,’ Stephen Thayer says, ‘of all the communication channels, touch is … the most powerful and immediate’ (1982: 298). It is effective for marking and making relationships (Finnegan 2005: 19), and a fundamental medium for the expression and production of meaningful acts (Classen 2005: 1-2). However, as Emmanuel Lévinas (1967) so eloquently explained, the inescapable bodily proximity that touch implies cannot be reduced to a mere question of material closeness. In Lévinas’s opinion, touch is actually at the core of the origin (not just expression) of ethical relations. Because it implies direct contact, touch may lead to a more frightful and honest interpretation of the beingness of the Other. Moreover, it bridges the gap of indifference that may separate one person from the other. It is from this perspective that anthropologists Paul Geissler and Ruth Prince (2010: 13), for example, conceptualize touch as the primary modality of making ethical relations in Uthero, Western Kenya. After the prolonged handshake – an initial ‘practice of relatedness’ (Geissler and Prince 2010: 13) and ethics – the visitors are invited to sit outdoors on plastic chairs, which are usually placed in a circle. These chairs accommodate the protagonists of the encounter – the tourists, the guide, the community leader and, eventually, any other men already there. The women from the village sit on the floor. The community leader is rarely alone, but he is the only one announced by the tour guide. The other residents that remain at the locale hardly engage in the conversation, rather lapsing into silence. Canhaners’ apparent passivity is an effect of their respect for the tourism arrangement; they prudently adhere to the tourist order. As an elder who was often present in these encounters once explained to me, ‘That’s when the tourists want to meet the community leader, not others.’ These moments are also an opportunity for the residents to evaluate the performance of their leader. Whenever he is in the immediate presence of tourists, his behaviour is scrutinized by a mixed audience of visitors and residents. In this sense, the community leader is experienced not only as a novelty by the tourists, but by the Canhaners as well. As Cristiana Zara says about the Ganga Aarti ceremony in the Indian city of Varanasi, in Canhane, there is also ‘a

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con-fusion of gazes projected on to each other’ (2015: 36). Visitors and visited, all are simultaneously performers and witnesses, and they all participate in the momentary production of community tourism through the multiple gaze. After sitting down, the tourists-become-guests are encouraged by the silence, a loud silence that falls over the group, to put questions to the community leader. Silences, like any other form of communication, must be understood within the borders of a specific context. In this case, ‘silence is an absence with a function’ (Glenn 2002: 263), and not the indication of a failure or denial of communication. It operates as an ‘invitational rhetoric’ (Foss and Griffin 1995), a language; a potent idiom that serves as an opening for relationality, where room is provided for the tourists to feel part of the event, rather than simply spectators. ‘How many people are there in the community?’ ‘How old are you?’ ‘What kind of activities do people do here?’ ‘Why is the name of the community Canhane?’ These are some of the questions that emerge from the tacit pressure. At this point, the tour guide translates the tourists’ languages into Shangane and vice versa. The community leader engages in the conversation with efficiency, often resorting to documents and maps that he keeps at home. He participates in the stroll by representing the traditional authority and the ultimate source of information about the village. In addition to the symbolic welcoming to the community, the underlying raw format of the meeting reinforces the sense of meaningful interaction for the tourists: more than just touring or gazing, they find themselves socializing in the village. Essentially, from the very start of the stroll, tourists are represented and present themselves as sensitive individuals who, therefore, would wish to meet the community leader on his own turf. They are assisted in perceiving themselves as more than just tourists: in Canhane, international visitors become partners in a moral and developmental crusade. In this process of becoming, touch, hearing and all the other senses play an important role. Therefore, in contrast to mainstream understandings of tourists as gazing subjects (Urry 2002), I suggest interpreting tourists firstly and fundamentally as sensing subjects.

Moment Two – The Medicine Man Next in the stroll, tourists are guided to one of the local medicine men. The village has four medicine men, locally referred to as either

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curandeiros (in Portuguese) or niangas (Shangane). They all are men. There is an informal hierarchy among them based on their age. The oldest is the most requested in his practice, and is also formally consulted in the village whenever there are collective concerns. His importance in Canhane goes beyond the medicinal practice, and he is always the first choice for the stroll. The medicine man encounter is more individualized, less public and comparatively more intimate than the previous tourist moment. It happens in an indoor atmosphere shared by the tour guide, the tourists and the medicine man himself. His consulting mud hut, which accommodates the meeting, is a space of darkness, packed with numerous objects related to the practice of medicine. Some of these objects are hanging in the air from hooks attached to the ceiling, others lay on the earthen floor. But the aspect that most immediately strikes the tourists is the near darkness of the place. The insufficiency of luminosity is an agent of sensation that generates momentary feelings of intimacy and occultness. Authors such as Peter Davey (2004), Mikkel Bille and Tim Sørensen (2007) defend that ‘without light, form and space have little meaning’ (Davey 2004: 47). These scholars neglect the agentic power of the deficit or near absence of light. Their view descends from the legacies of Enlightenment and ideologies of civilization associated with the primacy of vision. As Constance Classen remind us, ‘Using the visual adjectives “bright” and “brilliant” to mean intelligent only came into vogue during the era of the Enlightenment, when the cultural importance of sight [and light] was on the rise’ (2005: 5). Accordingly, back in the eighteenth century, in one of the most influential texts on vision ever written, George Berkeley says this: ‘the proper objects of vision constitute an universal [sic] language [through which] we are principally guided in all the transactions and concerns of life’ (1709: 147). It is under this understanding that ‘the conceptual significance of light [became] a vehicle of truth and spiritual “enlightenment”’ (Langerman 2012: 175). However, as various contemporary ethnographies, especially on blindness, show (Kaplan-Myrth 2000; Hammer 2013), forms and spaces gain meaning not only through the eyes (vision), but through other sensory bodily organs too. This is actually supported by various anthropologists (Classen 1997; Howes 2003) who criticize the tremendous emphasis that their own discipline attributes to ‘the power of observation’ (Clifford 1983: 124-25), rather than to sensation (c.f. Helmreich 2007; Hayward 2010). Definitely, in

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Canhane, the darkness of the medicine man’s room compels a form of meaning-making not subjugated to the power of the visual world alone. There, tourists are mobilized multisensorially to consider other ways of treating illness; there, tourists can display their competence in dealing with and understanding otherness by becoming creatures of total sensation; there, tourists are revealed to themselves and to others as beings resistant to a modernity in which, as Dean MacCannell (2011: 20) presents it, visibility is the organizing principle of social life. The medicine man’s hut is an interactive arena, where different values meet and new meanings are created. In this moment of the stroll, tourists were very interventional, asking him numerous questions and commenting on matters they perceived as appropriate at the occasion. Their proactivity shaped the medicine man’s future performances. I realized the cumulative character of innovation in his presentations by listening to the adjustments he made according to previous tourist encounters. The following example took place between March and May in 2008: Medicine man: When I do surgeries, the person lies down on this mat [pointing to a mat close to him]. It’s not very comfortable, but it’s what I can offer. Then, I use this blade to operate [he raised his right hand holding an old rusty blade]. Tourist: Do you use only that one? I mean, do you apply the same blade in different surgeries? Don’t you change it? Medicine man: No, no. I change it. I know one single blade can transmit many diseases to different people. Tourist: But don’t you have another type of instrument, more appropriate for it? That’s a razor blade; it’s not good for surgeries! Medicine man: No. This is the one I use. It’s the type of instrument I have access to.

Two months later, the medicine man was visited by two other tourists. In the same section of the presentation, his discourse was revised. Medicine man: For the surgeries, I tell the person to lie down on this mat [pointing to a mat close to him]. I prepare myself, and when we are ready I use this blade to operate on him [he raised his right hand, this time, holding a new and shiny blade]. I always use a new blade on each person: I never repeat the same blade on different people.

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Unfortunately, I’m unable to use an appropriate instrument to operate and benefit the community. Tourist: ‘Unable?’ What do you mean by unable? Medicine man: ‘I don’t have how’ [não tenho como, in original Portuguese – common expression in Mozambique for inability to do things otherwise]. Tourist: Ah, okay, I understand. Please, carry on. How often do you do surgeries?

In the second dialogue, the medicine man included more and somewhat different information, such as the exhibition of a new blade. He revised his presentation by increasing its sentimental character. This was particularly evident when at the end of a disconsolate sentence he employed the moral term ‘community’. As he said, ‘Unfortunately, I’m unable to use an appropriate instrument to operate and benefit the community.’ By mentioning his usage of a different blade for each person, he included the answer to a question raised by the previous tourists. It was like if he anticipated tourists’ concerns in this matter. So, he clarified them in anticipation. Such verbal modifications are not exclusive to this comparative example. Rather, they represent the cumulative process that characterized his presentations. Questions commonly reveal the interests or concerns of the questioners, which lead us to an obvious conclusion: by containing the answers to the tourists’ questions, the discourse of the medicine man was cumulatively adapted in accordance to the interests or concerns of the tourists. This is not to say that he was a passive figure in this process, merely reproducing the interests or concerns of others. The medicine man attached novel emotional roles to the new information provided. But nonetheless, such new information and sentimental import were in accordance with his perception of the tourists’ main interest or concern: to ‘benefit the community’. Following this reasoning, if a question reveals the interests of its questioner, then the idiosyncratic characteristics and identifications of the questioner herself/himself provide the background for the question itself. What I have in mind here is that it was the ingrained characteristics and identifications of the tourists (the questioners) that stimulated the nuanced alterations in the medicine man’s presentation. Putting it another way, the cultural backgrounds of the

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tourists are essential for the production and final format of what they see, hear and sense in general at the mud hut. Expanding on this theme, this feedback logic carried out by the medicine man resonates with the outcomes of Robert Fletcher’s (2014) research on ecotourism. Fletcher contends that tourists’ experiences of wilderness are structured by a strategic regimen of cultural ‘habitus’ (Bourdieu 1977) characteristic of the ecotourists’ group in their own metropolitan societies. In this respect, tourism ‘profits by selling people’s dreams back to them’ (Davis 1997: 244). It gains its force by offering and reflecting back to the tourists their identifications, expectations and ideologies. Likewise, in Canhane, tourists’ discourses and sensorial experience in the consulting mud hut are shaped by the particular perspectives that they bring with them. The question that now arises is: who are these individuals who opt to spend their leisure time and money walking in Canhane?

The Tourists of the Stroll Those eager to visit the village seem to share a particular way of experiencing tourism. Their opting to take the stroll is part of their moral sensitivity to the Other and interest for local development; a sensitivity and interest mostly built in opposition to the masstourist stereotype. In this fashion, the tourists of the stroll present themselves as actively concerned with the community’s problems, and aspire to feel those problems as part of their experience. On one occasion, a fifty-year-old Portuguese woman who stayed two nights at the Covane Lodge told me: The tourism agency in Maputo didn’t want me to come here. I asked them, ‘Why?’ They said, ‘Because you won’t have nice conditions there; it’s a poor place, they don’t have electricity, hot water, good facilities, and blah, blah, blah ...’ My answer to them was: ‘It’s precisely because of that I want to go.’ I had to prove to them I’m not a typical tourist; otherwise they wouldn’t stop talking about that.

A few minutes later, she concluded by saying, ‘I want to be closer, feel, understand and help the community.’ She announced herself in terms of what Martin Zuckerman (2007) calls a ‘sensation seeking’ personality. Despite the efforts of the tourism agency, she maintained and defended her choice, and in so doing she manifested and reproduced her idealized tourist status. Indeed, Canhane and the

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stroll gain in significance as moral travel destination and practice, which in turn serve to cultivate a tourist self that competes for distinction from the ordinary version of tourists. At stake here is the sense of involvement through community tourism in a sort of counterculture, a rejection of mainstream sedentary, insensitive, careless society. In particular, the tourists’ walk and their devotion to sensation in the village are crucial to the forms of morality, benevolence and care (both self-care and social care) that they cultivate and that cultivate them. Although embracing a benign and distinctive tourist persona, the Portuguese traveller did not embark on an ideological and romantic portrayal of egalitarianism, and also affirmed herself in contrast with the people of the destination. She deliberately positioned herself as a person who could ‘help them’ – and therefore as someone different from the local residents who embodied privileged conditions and potentials in relation to ‘them’. In this case, one could say that community tourism is a ‘business of “difference”’ (Salazar 2004: 85), and so it is of utmost anthropological interest. As Eduardo Viveiros de Castro notes in more general terms, difference is what produces thought and being and, for that reason, ‘remains as a value and a prime problem for anthropology’ (2013: 271-72). The encounter with difference is at the core of the community tourism experience in Canhane as elsewhere. This has become evident to me by listening to the often long tourist biographies told by the tourists themselves at the Covane Lodge. As one German visitor said, ‘I often travel to places like this [Canhane]. Among other reasons, I love this, either in Africa or South America, because it implies entering a world of differences. I see and feel different things and different ways of living. I love it.’ Overall, the appeal of contrasts attracts him to places and societies that are pervaded by the aura of community tourism. ‘Just love it.’ The Portuguese tourist whom I introduced above informed me that she was a doctor in her home country; ‘A general practitioner,’ she said. When she visited the medicine man, she expertly expressed her concern and knowledge about the health practices to him. Yet her pedagogical attitude and mode of involvement were not an exception. Independent of their professions, most of the tourists approach the medicine man in the same way, striving to educate him using an instructive style. Their commitment implies a combination of awareness with didactics. As the medicine man himself explained to me in private, ‘they usually ask me, “what type of diseases can

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you cure?,” then they speak about my work, alert me about some things, and teach me about various diseases like malaria, diarrhoea and AIDS.’ The effect of tourists’ pedagogy and dedication to the Other goes beyond the reformation of local health practices. Self-idealized as responsible and ethical individuals, the tourists provide the motifs according to which the medicine man creatively (re)produces appropriate discourses of benevolent commitment to his own ‘community’. These are discourses that accommodate concepts of benevolence and development recognized and intelligible by the tourists. At the consulting mud hut, the atmosphere of care emerges from the dynamics and reflections generated in interaction.

The Reflector Engagement The medicine man encounter reveals a particular tourist phenomenon: the reflector engagement. It involves a set of situational practices that mirror and confirm the visitors’ presumptions. As we saw before, the comments and questions made by tourists leave their imprint in the medicine man’s consciousness about what should be performed for and said to them. His discourses deliberately reflect the ideas that he apprehends from tourists’ questions and comments. Such ideas have an idealized aspect, for if the medicine man is to be successful he must offer the kind of situation that reproduces the tourists’ stipulations. In other words, the medicine man reflects back to the tourists their own ideas of rightness, and through that reflection he becomes both a vehicle for and representative protagonist of such a rightness in community development. Tourists approach the medicine man using a didactic and advisory style – as an entity that should be developed. The medicine man, in turn, validates their moral educational role through the agency of reflecting that back to them. He consciously presents himself as an element that needs to be improved in accordance with tourists’ concerns, and thus he reinforces their conceptions of him as someone incomplete or inadequate compared with the ‘modern men or women located in the Northern industrialized world’ (Smith and Duffy 2003: 120). He validates tourists’ commitment to the community through him and makes their visit a worthwhile experience of selfworth for them. This type of activity – the medicine man’s effort to generate an affective experience to the tourists, an experience

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that fulfils their emotional expectations – Arlie Hochschild (2003) would call ‘emotional labour’. Nonetheless, while responding appropriately to the projections placed on him, the medicine man also favours his own needs, which may be in radical contrast to the moral dimension of what he represents there and then for the tourists. For example, when he said, ‘Unfortunately, I’m unable to use an appropriate instrument to operate and benefit the community,’ the medicine man confirmed to the audience his poverty and introduced an opportunity to be helped by them (in order for him to help the community). A few minutes after that occasion, he reinforced the same idea by saying directly to the tourists, ‘I don’t have enough money for good instruments.’ As a corollary, before the tourists left his consulting hut they gave him money. I did not listen to what they said to him then, but it was self-evident that they were emotionally compelled to help him monetarily in order for him to be able to ‘help the community’. Note that the stimulus that triggered this moment of direct donation came primarily from the way the medicine man had re-projected, and thus confirmed, a specific image of himself and of the community to the tourists. He projected to them their own ideas of local poverty, but at the same time he gave them some hints and the opportunity for them to solve or at least contribute to minimizing the problem. The medicine man insinuated a way for the tourists to do and feel good; for them to extend their sense of duty and moral realization beyond their home societies; for them to have a good holiday. However, on the night of this donation, the medicine man broke his routine. He went to the closest town of Tihovene and bought two bottles of liquor and some goods for his family. This was not the first or last time that he received money that was intended to improve his practice – specifically for him to acquire new and more ‘appropriate instrument[s] to operate and benefit the community’ – directly from the tourists. This was also not the first or last occasion on which, having received donations directly from the tourists, he left Canhane to purchase goods for his family. In fact, the entire time I was in Canhane, whenever he referred to the way he does surgeries, he never presented any instrument other than the razor blade to the tourists. This hints at the individual life politics that can emerge in developmentourism regimes, and reveals the way in which, independently of the community-based aura that validates the project, some individuals can gain more than others from it.2

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As Arnall and colleagues mention in their study of elite capture in rural Mozambique, the end result is the reinforcement of benefits for some local residents ‘at the expense of their community as they are actually legitimated by outside actors’ (2013: 308-9).

Moment Three – The Shallow Well The shallow well is the first communal place the tourists visit, and it is there and then that they are introduced to the water scarcity problem in Canhane. The visual impact of shortage is strong, and authenticates a poverty. Mostly frequented by local women, the shallow well is probably the most immediate mark that matches the imaginary of ‘underdevelopment’ in tourists’ minds. It collects public everyday life and scarcity into the same place. In this area, there is a hole in the ground. The women go down to the bottom of the hole with their buckets to fetch water. The entire place is naked of trees and shade, which dramatizes the precarious conditions of water supply in the village. The aesthetics of dryness makes this the locale in Canhane where water as a basic resource for human life can be most tragedized and viscerally valued by the tourists. The place in itself communicates inhospitableness to the senses. At the shallow well, the tourists experience ‘real tourism’ in the sense of their ‘notion of a genuine local experience’ (Smith and Duffy 2003: 114). They can directly experience and become knowledgeable about ‘real people’ and ‘real situations’ – the ‘hyper-real’ (Brown 2013) – in a circumstance that is often shocking for them. It is a poverty show that contrasts with visitors’ ordinary lives. In this sense, this ‘extraordinary experience’ is ‘liminal’ and can be viewed as a quintessential rite of passage (Turner 1969), which might shake the calm and self-control demonstrated so far by the tourists in the stroll. A forty-one-year-old British woman sat immobile on a rock for around two minutes, in strong sunlight, looking at the setting of the place. ‘Are you okay?’ I asked her. ‘When I see these same situations on TV or on the computer screen,’ she said, ‘I’m not close enough, so it’s easy to turn off feelings. But now that I’m here … It’s impossible to ignore it.’ Her tearful comment cannot be disentangled from the actual sensory potency of the moment and place in which it happens. She confirmed what many scholars have suggested: ‘There has always been a nagging inadequacy around the assertion that one cannot sell poverty, but one can sell paradise. Today,

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the tourist industry does sell poverty’ (Salazar 2004: 92). Canhane verifies it. But Canhane also shows that the commercialization of poverty in tourism is only effective through an appeal to the senses. Tourists become organoleptically sensitive to local poverty. That is, in the shallow well, there is a correspondence between the way tourists perceive the locale in terms of its textures, temperature, smells, sounds and lighting, and the signification of poverty that comes from such sensory experience. More importantly, the experience of directly sensing a situation of poverty is what allows them to be emotionally affected by it. This unmediated experience of sensation requires the tourists to be immersed in the place, which leads them to be compellingly touched by it. Indeed, during the stroll, the experience of direct sensation is central for the constitution or validation of tourist subjectivities, such as the very ideas of underdevelopment and poverty. The area of the shallow well is understood as feminine by the residents. This gendered representation of space is a consequence of the social attribution of women as water-givers, as I mentioned in the previous chapter. Accordingly, the first impression that tourists usually verbalize after reaching the locale is ‘poor women’. Although brief, this comment, made by a twentysomething woman that I met in the coastal area of Tofo a few months after she had visited Canhane, includes the two points most mentioned by tourists about the shallow well; specifically, ‘poverty’ and ‘women’. Tourists’ perception is not an outcome of Canhaners’ strategic enactment. The shallow well is, indeed, one of the places in the village where women most like to stay. Among the most obvious reasons for this is that it is a privileged area for them to socialize with each other, without being called lazy by men. Furthermore, it is where they are informed about the latest rumours in the village, speak about their problems and reinforce links with other women. Hence, their presence at the shallow well during the stroll should not be framed as ‘performed authenticity’ or ‘staged authenticity’ carried out for tourists’ consumption (MacCannell 1999); tourism and tourists are irrelevant to their appearance at the locale. This is not to say, however, that Canhaners do not play a conscious role in this ‘poverty moment’. The way they participate in prompting the ‘poor women’ connotation can be found in their authorization of the inclusion of the locale in the stroll. In other words, at the shallow well, the residents allow themselves to be sensorily experienced by the tourists in a particular and preselected

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everyday life atmosphere. As we see in the next chapter, this does not always happen, because there are places and situations tourists are not allowed to access. The shallow well is fundamentally a space, a moment, ‘an aesthetic of sensation’ (Stranger 1999: 270) sanctioned in the politics of exhibition. Crucially, it exhibits the most convincing arguments to connect Canhane to poverty in the visitors’ minds, and the Canhaners are conscious of this. At one spontaneous gathering, an elder said cheerfully, ‘The wife [his wife] tells me that tourists are impressed when they see her getting water in the hole.’ He interrupted himself to drink more canhu. Before he had time to return to his comment, another man cut into the conversation and, while looking at me to assess the quality of my attention, he added mournfully: ‘Áhhh, it’s Canhane’s poverty!’ His remark was supported through body expressions coming from the rest of the people in the group; most of them shaking their heads affirmatively. The elder who started the topic switched from his animated mode and participated in the new sad moment. Like many other residents and in many other occasions, not only did they prove to be aware of the representation that the shallow well has in the visitors’ minds, but they also validate and participate in it by reproducing such a representation as their own. In Canhane, material deprivation is a tourism product that needs to be re-enacted from within. The expressiveness of the scenery appeals to an informal tour without the need for a structured tourist presentation. When there is water in the hole, the place acquires a social vitality difficult to feel in other areas. At this moment, there is no individuality to see or presentation to listen to, but only the residents of Canhane embedded in a circumstance of shortage to feel. Usually, tourists and the guide remain silent. ‘Verbal sacralisation’ (Fine and Speer 1985) is redundant, while the sensory experience of being there lifts the tourist to an emotional level and legitimates a specific character of knowledge of the place and of the residents. As happens throughout the entire stroll, at the shallow well visitors are suggestively free to participate and be part of the social action; they are implicated in the place as dwellers (Heidegger 1975). Sometimes this is manifested through their taking pictures, timidly simulating getting water from the shallow well, or approaching the women close by. Such a corporeality of movement produces intermittent moments of physical proximity, and the structural confines between Canhaners and tourists seem to be attenuated through

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direct interaction. This is a chance for communion between individuals of radically different socioeconomic status, with poverty as the background. Hence, at the same time that the place emanates desolation and comfortlessness, it stimulates transient connection between the sensing-tourist and the sensed-Other. It stimulates a momentary transcultural sense of communitas (Turner 1969), in the sense that it triggers tourists’ compassionate bond with what they feel, independently of the level of cultural and economic contrast implied in that process. Soon, the shallow well becomes part of tourists’ geographies of affect; it becomes a place where they are invaded by a ‘transient humility’ and ‘an essential and generic human bond’ (Turner 1969: 360) with what they feel. ‘No matter who they are and what they do, everybody needs water,’ a French tourist commented softly to herself at the shallow well. ‘We all are humans and we all should have decent access to water. Not this. This is not decent.’ From the tourists’ side, what emerges from and in this moment in the stroll is a general feeling of transcommunitarian responsibility and duty over the local residents. And so, the deprived Other is integrated into the sense of a supralocal group where people are responsible for one another.

Moment Four – The School The stroll continues with more affecting plurisensorial experiences. The school comes next. Here, the children are taught literacy from grades one to seven. According to a text titled ‘Impacts in the Community of Canhane’, which is announced at the reception of the lodge, the village has a ‘conventional school room + twenty school desks and twenty-seven old school desks that were also rehabilitated with the tourism income’ (emphasis added). At the school, tourists have the opportunity to experience a positive side of the village, which (and this is the important point here) is announced as being a direct consequence of their holiday in Canhane. ‘Before, children used to attend classes under that big traditional tree,’ the tour guide said on one occasion while pointing to a canhoeiro (marula tree) not far from them. Most of the tourists that I accompanied on the stroll approached the canhoeiro and remained for a few minutes in its shade: they went to the tree to ‘feel it’. Their contemplation of the moment and their imagination of what it is to

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attend classes under that canhoeiro are produced through somacognition – body-sensory thinking and apprehension. As happens in all the other locales that the tourists experience in the stroll, this area and moment of presentation is fundamentally an area and moment of sensation. The context of sensation and the guide’s factual discourse highlight the positive replacement of the previous, precarious teaching situation (under the tree) by the new one (classroom). With this, the tourists are introduced to local development, a development that nevertheless is suggested as only being possible because of them – the tourists themselves. This is expressively reinforced when they are led to a sign inscribed at the entrance of the classroom. It says: ‘Primary School of Canhane. Enlargement of the Classroom. Contribution of the Covane Lodge and of the Community. 2005.’ The sign associates a concrete materialization of development with the community tourism project. It explicitly bonds development and tourism through the assertion of the contribution, and thus participation, of tourists in local development. Tourism and the tourists are developmentalized in the same way that development is touristified: the local school authenticates Canhane as a field of developmentourism. Whenever the director of the school is present, he accompanies the tourists through the building. As when they visited the community leader and the medicine man, the tourists are expected to ask questions. Yet the context of conversation is more formal now than in the previous encounters. The director of the school, a man in his thirties who was born and educated in the crowded, urban Maputo, manifests a different diplomacy, and invites them to his office, replete with maps of different regions in Mozambique, wooden chairs and empty shelves, for a more reserved conversation. The adults that tourists meet while experiencing their first case of community development via tourism – the tour guide, the director of the school and the teachers – are not from Canhane. The place indicates development not only because of the infrastructural improvements, but also because of the internal foreigners present. The teachers, who at some point in their conversations with tourists end up telling the latter about their provenance beyond the village, apply distinctive diplomatic skills that are different from those of the Canhaners. For instance, I saw some of the teachers consulting tourism guidebooks or maps belonging to the visitors and helping them with suggestions about other places to visit in Mozambique.

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These are sophisticated encounters that reveal a new perspective of Canhane, which the walking tourists had not experienced before in the stroll. The school is the only place in Canhane with a Mozambican flag. Every morning a teacher hoists the flag in front of the school and lowers it again later in the afternoon. This routine is a state practice in the village only performed by the internal foreigners. Canhaners have no commitment to this. The infrastructural outline, the presence of Mozambicans born elsewhere, and the country’s flag give an extra-local sense to the place. Yet the school area is not a sort of an island alienated from the rest of the village. The ‘children of the community’, as the head of the village called the daughters and sons of the residents (see Chapter 2), attend the place. Therefore, in the context of the stroll, this is a site and a source of community empowerment and community development. But more fundamentally, in the stroll, this represents a site and a source of tourists’ value, recognition and patronage.

Moment Five – The Water Supply System The stroll finishes with the water tank at the northeastern corner of the village. The outline of its apparatus contrasts with the majority of the village’s landscape. It embodies social betterment. While underlying the value of the water supply for the community, the tour guide often employs special linguistic patterns that sensitize the visitors. For example: ‘We are now looking at another effect of tourism in the community’; ‘The community have applied tourism revenues here, and they have built this’; ‘The water tank has changed their lives.’ On the whole, water, the tank and tourism are rhetorically configured as community development symbols. The imprinting of meaning on the site becomes greatly emotive. On numerous occasions, tourists expressed a sort of personal relief, revealed through their pleased comments. Some that I heard included: ‘Oh, look at this hidden equipment’; ‘What a nice surprise’; ‘Water for everybody?!’; ‘I’m happy now’; ‘Beautiful’; ‘Well done.’ The apprehension that accompanied the walking visitors through most of the stroll has given place to a rapidly emerging collective zeal. There it is, right there, just in front of them: evidence of development! This is a place of gratification, of optimism’s apparition. It is also palpable. Following their impulsive observations,

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the tourists often approach the water mechanism and touch it. One placed the fingers of her right hand on the wood that supports the tank. Another grasped the aluminium tube where the taps were installed. Other tourists walked alongside the flexible plastic tube that supplies water from the river, pressing it gently with their hands in different spots. What became evident was that, for these tourists, the importance of that moment, the value of the water mechanism and their own relation/association to it, (also) gained significance through touch. Tourists’ comments and the virtue of the occasion expressed through their tactile contemplation derived less from the single moment when they faced the water equipment and more from the communal shallow well that they had ‘felt’ before. Through this sequential journey, they realize a positive evolution of one of the most basic necessities for human life: water access. From the shallow well to the water tank, tourists make a sensory-emotional journey from poverty to improvement, from social embarrassment to human dignity, from a problem to its resolution. Put differently, the arrangement of evidence of improvement towards the end of the walking tour, and the sensorial dimension of actually experiencing such an improvement, provides a sense of climax at the water tank. In this sensorial odyssey, tourists encounter bipolar infrastructural conditions while a particular display about the possibilities of developing the community is promoted. More to the point, in their sequential journey, tourists can experience and confirm their own positive and preponderant role in helping the local population. In contrast to the shallow well, the area around the water tank is often empty of people. The infrastructure stands alone in the scenery with no social vitality around it. The place holds an atmosphere of stillness. Like the other development effect of tourism in the village – the school – the water tank is rarely frequented by adult residents. Tourists question the reason for this: ‘Why is no one getting water here?’ an Italian man accompanied by his girlfriend asked the tour guide. They are told that there have been technical problems with the water mechanism and that it is a temporary situation, soon to be resolved. Although this argument is not uniformly interpreted and passively accepted by all tourists, they usually do not insist on questioning the reasons for its temporary inoperability. Instead, the visitors tend to celebrate the water system as a real and worthy accomplishment of social improvement in the village. Arguably, their sensorial odyssey overcomes the mastery

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of technical and unemotional ‘rationalization’ in their judgements (Beck 2002: 18). And so, in their minds, in this last moment of intuition, the water tank converts into a symbol which ‘indexes’ (Keane 1997) something more than its mechanical functionality.

The Becoming of a Tourist Sight Coming back to the crux of the matter, in Canhane, the water tank is treated and exposed as motivator, symbol, sign and effect of benevolence in developmentourism. However, behind the physical apparatus, there is another version of the story to be told. It is a version that reveals the antithesis of the local improvement. Because of internal ways of ordering the society, the implementation of the water supply system in that part of the village was doomed to fail even before it was established, and it actually never functioned. Yet this version is absent from the tourist walking experience; a version that represents neither what the Canhaners and the ruling development NGO want to show, nor what tourists want to access. This is why the fact the water supply system does not work is irrelevant to the meaning that it represents in the visitors’ minds. The aesthetic experience and the ‘perspectival sensing’3 provide the knowledge that tourists want to gain, and likewise the knowledge Canhaners and the developmentourism industry want to provide. In this sense, and extending beyond the last stop in the stroll to the entire walking experience, what tourists directly sense are idealistic versions of the phenomena that they access. It is through this framed, perspectival, multisided and multisensing structure of feeling, in which tourists use their own bodies to see, smell, touch and hear the residents’ insufficiencies as well as the contributions to and potentialities for solving those same insufficiencies, that tourists engage in a project of self-cultivation.

The Provision and Pursuit of Self-Cultivation The stroll is more than a mere leisure activity. It provides the tourists with various significances, but most of these are bound up in a logic of moral participation. The way of experiencing Canhane in the stroll stimulates this. As Gros observes, ‘walking gives you participation’ (2014: 96): participation in the solidity or softness of the

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ground stepped upon, in the infrastructures touched along the way, or in the lives of the people met. More than other ways of experiencing places and people, walking foments participation in the immediate profusion surrounding the walker, and it ‘helps retrieve the absolute simplicity of presence’ (Gros 2014: 67). Therefore, it both communicates an ethical posture and, concomitant with this, allows more effectively the propensity to feel closer, to understand and to be part of the travelled landscape. ‘Walking,’ Gros concludes, ‘lets you feel it in an abyss of fusion’ (2014: 181, 191). This way of experiencing tourism, by walking, far away from airconditioned atmospheres and immediately sensing the material and human Other in rural Africa, is in conformity with the emergent ethical modes that populate leisure activity in contemporary modernity (Pritchard, Morgan and Ateljevic 2001; Butcher 2003; Macbeth 2005; Cravatte and Chabloz 2008; Fennell 2008; Jamal and Menzel 2009). Other forms of tourism charged with an ethical orientation include ecotourism (Fletcher 2014), voluntourism (McGehee 2012), pro-poor tourism (Scheyvens 2011), recreational activism (Erickson 2011), NGO Study Tours (Spencer 2010), social tourism (McCabe, Minnaert and Diekmann 2012), development tourism (Salazar 2004; Spencer 2010), travel philanthropy (Honey 2011) and solidarity tourism (Higgins-Desboilles and Russell-Mundine 2008). All these are tourisms celebrated for serving as a force of virtue; an ethics in action. Indeed, what gives some forms of tourism ethical value is the specialness of doings carried out by the tourists. Ethics in tourism, I contend, is intrinsic to tourist moral action; that is, it is intrinsic to the tourists’ actual doings, such as where they go, how they go there, what they pay for, who they meet, and how they perform their tourist character while travelling. It is through such actions, through such doings and relationships of commitment to the travelled-to and travelled-through, that the question of what counts as morality, ethics and benevolence comes to matter for the tourists and tourism. This proposal regarding the nature of ethics in tourism suggests a shift in the conceptual focus of tourist studies related to ethics: from ‘ritual inversion’ (Graburn 1983) to modes of involvement; from touring to dwelling; from mediated knowledge to sensing knowledge4 – or, in the particular case of the stroll in Canhane, walking knowledge. Tourists’ sense of care and responsibility for the human beings they interact with has as its enabling condition the structuring circumstances reproduced in the places they visit. In Canhane, the

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stroll is a way for the tourists to participate and be aware of their importance in supporting and, implicitly, superintending a ‘community’. It is through their sensory walking experience that Canhane is converted in a dramatic landscape in which the duty to reduce local poverty is partially transferred from the development professionals or even state representatives to the tourists. Putting it in another way, what I contend is that the tourists are prompted to realize their actions as a form of moral agency as a consequence of the inclusion of the sensorial in their tourism experience. For example, the bodily bringing of tourists closer to material expressions of local development, such as in the case of the new classroom and the water tank, encourages them to value in a visceral, and therefore deeply felt way the money they spent in the Covane Community Lodge, their presence there and, more profoundly, their very beingness or selves. In this way, tourism practice is superiorly dedifferentiated from developmental practice and it acquires a moral value. Nevertheless, it is mostly through their sensorial activity in the village that the tourists realize themselves as protagonists of morality; a morality which is conspicuously associated with the task of ‘helping a community of others’. Yet in this context, sensing is not only an important facet of lived experience with respect to the other, but also an important moral commodity. Actually, Canhane represents a prime example of the experience economy, in which what is sold to the tourist-consumer is inherently personal, individually felt and specifically memorable. While classic economic products are external to the buyer, experiences are intrinsic to the individual who engages in them on an emotional, bodily or even spiritual level. This is in line with the emergent rise of sensory marketing, which starts from the precondition that what consumers value most derives from the means of consumption rather than from the products themselves. In tourism, the role of sensory marketing is growing. For instance, the enterprise São Paulo Turismo (SPTuris) in Brazil launched the ‘map of sensations’, which encourages visitors to experience certain preidentified spots in the metropolis through their senses (mapadassensacoes.com.br). Likewise, the stroll is an attempt to institute a ‘sensescape’ in Canhane of moral worthiness through an economy and politics of the sensory in tourism. However, I do not intend to promote the idea that there are powerful independent entities – the Canhaners and the NGOs behind the tourism enterprise in the village – dominating and imperially inducing another independent and powerless one – the

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tourists. Developmentourism is not unilateral. Particularly evidenced through the stroll, Canhane is constituted as a meaningful setting that tourists consume, but which they also help to produce. Tourist practice here goes hand in hand with the tourists’ quest for self-distinction (think of the Portuguese traveller) and self-cultivation. When tourists visit Canhane, they are not passive elements acting naively as human puppets or gullible consumers of set-up sensorial dispositions: they also seek to ‘feel it’ and to acquire moral worth, to that end resorting in the stroll to a sort of leisure catharsis. In this sense, the stroll can be characterized by tourists’ preceding desires to feel legitimate and veritable experiences, to confront the real reality5 – including real poverty – and by the active role of Canhaners in providing it. The stroll reflects and confirms the tourists’ aspirations and idealized self-distinctive lifestyles back to them. In so doing, it incorporates a strong component of ego-touring (Munt 1994): it is a way for tourists to accumulate a particular type of cultural and moral capital that supports their idealized identifications, their expectations and their worldviews. It is a site of tourists’ personal and moral development. Often the tourists of the stroll leave the experience somehow involved in a momentary moral conscience of doing good and, as one tourist told me after she finished the tour, they ‘take something meaningful’ with them. Naturally, the enjoyment and gratification that these tourists obtain implies that they are open to or interested in material shortage and personal involvement in ‘developing communities’. That is to say, the stroll and the entire developmentourism activity are interwoven with tourists’ significances and investments. Tourists’ modes of being are at the very heart of this principled modality of touring and tourism. In a radical article, Ian Munt notes, ‘new tourisms have begun to be conceived (especially among the new petit bourgeoisie) as reflecting personal qualities in the individual, such as strength of character, adaptability, sensitivity or even “worldliness”’ (1994: 51). For Munt, new forms of tourism are reflections of tourists’ lifestyles and their self-projections. Tourism in Canhane fits this model. It complements the processes of self-cultivation, identity formation and individualization (e.g. Beck and Beck-Gernsheim 2010; Howard 2007) that takes place in tourists’ own societies (Fletcher 2014). As mentioned earlier, in Canhane, the tourists prefer to be guided into the village rather than visit it by themselves. To say this is to contend that ‘the sensoriality of claim making’ (Panagia 2009:

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17), which derives from being in the phenomenon of appreciation, can be driven according to a pre-constituted referential model. Sensory life is indeed susceptible to being guided. This is particularly evident in the stroll, when certain sensory practices that fortify tourists’ quest for self-cultivation and self-worth are exalted, while other practices that could frustrate such a quest are not enabled. Here, I am particularly influenced by Jacques Rancière’s concept of the ‘partition of the sensible’: We will call ‘partition of the sensible’ a general law that defines the forms of part-taking by first defining the modes of perception in which they are inscribed … This partition should be understood in the double sense of the word: on the one hand, that which separates and excludes; on the other, that which allows participation. A partition of the sensible refers to the manner in which a relation between a shared ‘common’ and the distribution of exclusive parts is determined through the sensible. This latter form of distribution, in turn, itself presupposes a partition between what is visible and what is not, of what can be heard from the inaudible (Rancière 2001).

Rancière explicitly places sensory experience, which pervades our daily existence, under the aegis of a politics of separation and exclusion. If we see the sensorium as constitutive of subjectivity, as Lars Tønder (2015: 3) stresses, then this process of ‘partitioned’ provision and accessing of sensation – what might be called a politics of selection of what is to be sensed – gains crucial relevance. This is because the ideas and meanings that have effects in individuals and societies to a great extent originate from the selection of what can or cannot be sensed. Precisely, in Canhane, it is the stimulation of tourists’ multisensory capacities in pre-sanctioned encounters of sensation that helps to constitute a series of key subjectivities for them, such as their sense of moral participation in local development, self-distinction from mass-tourists and the very notion of poverty upon which they exercise their moralities and give donations to eliminate it. The validation and authentication of Canhane as a society to be morally developed via tourism is greatly reliant upon the efficacy of a politics over the tourists’ senses. Having said all that, one could conclude that the establishment of the water supply system had better results as response to existing tourist-consumers’ expectations than as an attempt to resolve the water scarcity in the village. It ‘provides a valuable service to the self-staging of development [and tourism] cooperation’ (Rottenburg 2009: 73). That is why, to give a direct answer to the

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question addressed at the beginning of this chapter, the water tank has become the most visited place in Canhane by tourists, though a place unfrequented by Canhaners themselves. As the youngest wife of the director of the Social Management Committee of Covane Community Lodge said about the absence of local residents at the water tank: ‘There is nothing to do there.’

Conclusion Material objects are not necessarily the product and reflection of their maker(s). What matters most is the significance that they gain, the way they are sensed and the inherent message they acquire and come to convey in the social context where they exist. Material objects can, indeed, obtain new functions and meanings according to the social circumstances in which they are sensorially ‘consumed’, and they are a creative part of social life (e.g. Miller 2008). In Canhane, the continuous inoperability of the water supply system has contributed to its appropriation by two emergent and intermixed socio-economic categories: tourism and development. For this reason, the water tank obtained functions other than the one related to the purpose of its creation. There must be no doubt: the tank in Canhane is a developmentourism sight. Its faculty relies on the way it aggrandizes and honours potential social benefits of community tourism in the village. It operates as a mechanism that energizes the ideology of community development rather than as a mechanism that allows residents access to the most required natural resource claimed by them. Basically, the water tank is a symbol in the realm of imagination. It symbolizes the accomplishment of the imagined horizon of social and material development in Canhane; the imagined horizon that initially served to create and moralize the implementation of tourism in the village. It is precisely through the evocative power of the symbolic, imagination and morality that the water tank has become touristified. This process of touristification informs the cultivation of an emergent social order in Canhane, an order which encompasses and intermixes development and tourism. Finally, the stroll promotes the authentication of that order in tourists’ consciousness, mainly by the way it produces and reproduces a certain type of emotional walking knowledge in them. It provides and allows a tourist sensorial experience which, nevertheless, is in line with tourists’ own ideologies of moral benevolence and local

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development. In this way, the stroll urges or confirms the importance of developmentourism and developmentourists in Canhane. Summing up, in this chapter, I present the stroll as a tourist experience of dwelling (Heidegger 1975) structured in economic asymmetries; an experience supersaturated with significances, sensorially apprehended. David Bunn says that the frenetic political economy and cultural and social developments since the 1920s that characterize most of the North Atlantic nations are believed to have had ‘widespread negative effects’ on people. One of these is the ‘numbing of the senses’ (Bunn 2003: 2007). The stroll can be thought of as a response to this: an opportune response that can revitalize the deadened power of the senses, bring it to the core of meaning-making, benevolence and tourists’ sense of being. The stroll can be, then, an opportunity for the international visitors to rebuild themselves in moral terms through the awakening of their sensorial capacities. Nevertheless, this event of sensation is the outcome of a broad strategy, a planned ceremony of intention enabled by the organization of the sensed. It occurs under a prearranged disposition that orders what comes to count as subjects of perception. Indeed, unmediated sentient experience may be subjected to what Davide Panagia (2009) calls ‘a regime of perception’. In Canhane, with the distribution and assignment, inclusion and exclusion of the sensed, the stroll puts such a regime into effect, and therefore it structures the tourists’ modes of perceiving and attending to the village. As I continue to demonstrate in the next chapter, this distribution organizes not only what is to be sensed but also what is not; what can and cannot be heard, smelled and seen. In this vein, the stroll organizes the ways and possibilities for the tourists to constitute subjectivities concerning morality, identity, selfhood, justice, difference, poverty and development. Canhane shows, then, how the promotion of sensorial immediacy as a vehicle for the individual to acquire moral status does not come without broader power implications. It illustrates how the organization of the sensed can establish the field within which tourists constitute their own subjective moral value as agents of local development; or, better put, it shows that the character of developmental benevolence in tourism can be related to specific ways of experiencing destination landscapes and societies, namely through walking, smelling, listening, touching and directly sensing. The circumstances of Canhane and the stroll suggest that more attention should be paid to the ‘interaction agency’ (Baptista 2016)

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and the corporeal and nonrepresentational engagements that actually happen in tourist environments. Being as it is a privileging field to access the ideological constitutions of ourselves and the Other, I argue that exploring ‘the politics of bodies in action’ (Krause 2011) is an important step towards a better understanding of how we all (whether as ‘tourists’, ‘guests’, ‘citizens’, ‘cosmopolitans’, ‘locals’ or otherwise) conceive of important subjects, such as morality, difference,6 ourselves and others, and articulate these with ideas of social development and poverty. Finally, a focus on modes of knowing originated in sensory walking practices in contrast with less active bodily manners of producing knowledge at a distance, such as those of most academics installed at the desks of their offices, can lead to a fruitful field of (self-)research. This may enrich our overall knowledge of how one comes to know about herself/himself and others, as well as the material life of her/his surroundings.

Notes   1. As is common in all anthropological research, my analysis of the whole event must, however, be understood as embodied, interventional and limited.   2. On the inequality effects of community tourism see, for example, van den Berghe (1992), Archer and Cooper (1994), Smith (1994), Butler and Hinch (1996), Blackstock (2005), Mbaiwa (2005), Butcher (2007), Goodwin and Santilli (2009), Harrison (2010) and Salazar (2012).   3. By mentioning ‘perspectival sensing’, I expand on Paolo Favero’s (2007: 57) concept of ‘perspectival seeing’, and thus extend the perspective of tourist selectivity beyond the modality of vision.   4. By sensing knowledge I mean the bodily ways of gathering, producing and articulating information.   5. Wilfrid Noyce, an author and member of the 1953 expedition that made the first ascent of Mount Everest, wrote ‘Many who go out from the crowed routine claim that they escape into reality, not from it’ (1958: 92, in Fletcher 2014: 169, emphasis added).   6. It is now well-known that since the Enlightenment, ‘difference became the primary organizing principle’ of perception, action and culture (Langerman 2012: 177).

6 Problematizing Poverty

This chapter is about a problem, but also about its solution. Extending it beyond the village of Canhane, I analyse the constitution of a ‘South-wide’ problem and its solution by regimes of development. Moreover, I approach the ways those whose situation is framed in terms of a problem to be solved appropriate and reproduce it in attempting to achieve their own solution. The problem is poverty; the solution is tourism. In this section, I participate in the debate about the power of global ‘circulating references’ (Latour 1999) in the disposition of peoples and spaces. My contribution to this debate is mostly conceptual. Indeed, this chapter is the least ethnographic of all the chapters in the book. Yet my goal remains the same: to make sense of Canhane. I look for answers to the spatial and social dynamics in the village outside of the village. This choice comes from an understanding of Canhane as necessarily part of a broader system of travelling representations and intentions originated in and energized by what various authors call ‘Aidland’ (e.g. Fechter and Hindman 2011; Mosse 2011); a land beyond national and continental borders. More than is the case for any other sections in the book, I wrote this chapter as a direct continuation of the previous chapters. Reading it in isolation from the rest of the book may lead to scepticism because it might seem lacking in ethnographic support. This section requires the reader to have in her/his mind the ethnographic information included in the previous chapters.

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The Value of Poverty Concerns about poverty and the poor have long been at the core of conceptualizations of society. Still, it was only in the latter part of the Industrial Revolution that poverty became firmly placed and problematized as a serious social problem. Michel Foucault (1984: 389–90) provided a laconic explanation of problematization. He said that it refers to how clusters of subjects are converted into a set of problems. Extending Foucault’s point closer to the matter at stake here, the process of converting something into a problem does not come in isolation from the way potential solutions to the problem are equally defined and institutionalized. In this kind of interpretation, the problematization of problems respects a principle of synchronism or dual constitution: the constitution of objects of thought under the label problems supports the constitution of something else as solutions. In other words, problems do not stand alone. They imply, at least, the attempt to overcome them. This principle of synchronism or dual constitution characterizes the historical emergence of poverty as a transnational and transcontinental problem. As addressed by Arturo Escobar, ‘One of the main changes that occurred in the early post-World War II period was the “discovery” of mass poverty in Asia, Africa, and Latin America … [which provided] the anchor for an important restructuring of global culture and political economy’ (1995: 21); that is, historically, the realization of poverty implied the realization of something else, something that came into being specifically to counteract poverty. Since then, standardized and uniform techniques of measurement have become the prime authority in characterizing poverty (Hagenaars and de Vos 1988). For many authors and for many institutions, poverty became ‘the result of the lack or failure of government’ (Mosse 2013: 239; see World Bank 2011) and, therefore, it became a global statistical process of knowledge that appears to require a solution via nongovernmental expert intervention: a category that validates a certain type of interference and, moreover, that has the capacity to render populations workable or even governable non-governmentally. Overall, far from being an unequivocal condition of destitution, poverty is a controversial construct, a ‘problem’ entangled in social, political, economic and historiographical struggles, which unsurprisingly originates new identifications and values. The modernized category of poverty surpasses mere communicative practice. It encompasses powerful ideological systems that shape perceptions, produce workable subjects and, ultimately, make ‘realities’. Can poverty be a

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value for those categorized as poor? And if so, what does the crediting of value to being or becoming poor tell us about the very idea of poverty? My aim is to approach poverty as a socially constructed category of practice within which and according to which some people strategize their lives. As we will see, the institutionalization of certain social and spatial configurations as expressions of poverty in ‘Orientalized’ worlds (Said 1978) can foster new practices in those same worlds. It can fuel local performances of neediness and new dispositions of dependence on delocalized solutions (Ferguson 2013). In this process, the ‘peripheral Souths’ are progressively incorporated into a vast web of economic and ideological interests as specialized products and producers of the sort of poverty that represents a comprehensible problem, fundamentally, in the Western cultural imagery; the sort of poverty that is capable of generating or feeding a broader economy of solutions to it. One of the obvious corollaries of such a specialized integration is that those included in this poverty-as-problem order seek solutions that are predominantly assigned to non-governmental expertise, the same imperial legion that problematized and, furthermore, institutionalized them as poor. Yet non-governmental regimes can also elicit new capacities in the individuals categorized as poor, and therefore can be ‘productive’ in the Foucaultian (1978) and Bourdieusian (1993) sense. Put differently, the globalization of the imaginary of poverty as an ‘engaged universal’ (Tsing 2004) can provide historical subjugated peoples with new opportunities. One of my goals in this chapter is precisely to show that the spreading of the development, humanitarian or aid rationale, which has as its centre the making of poverty in technocratic and universalistic terms, is more about the inculcation of new values and meanings than the enforcement of explicit actions to control human beings. The appeal of these new values and meanings for those labelled ‘poor’ is that they are associated with new opportunities. This is why, I contend, the ways in which poverty spreads in historically marginalized areas and societies as a technical, discursive and imaginative object of universal sensitization can stimulate new ‘fields of production’ (Bourdieu 1993) and creative agency in those same areas and societies. Put another way, to remain ‘poor’ under global development regimes of intervention can bring favourable conditions to those named ‘poor’; conditions that are the antithesis of ‘capability deprivation’ or ‘life within limits’, as poverty is commonly conceptualized in social choice theory (e.g. Sen 1999) and other interventional frameworks of thought, including my own field of anthropology

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(e.g. Jackson 2011). My thesis is that poverty, being poor and what Jim Butcher (2006) calls a form of ‘de-development’ – the preservation of local people and landscape in their ostensibly ‘natural’ states – can mean inclusion, connectivity and new economic opportunities. An important question that I therefore want to explore is how those categorized as poor react to and try to capitalize from the non-governmental ‘problematization’ of their poverty condition. Ultimately, I intend to show that poverty can be apprehended as a category of potentiality and practice for some of those externally categorized as poor. The global diffusion of representations of poverty as a problem in the Global South1 and the social implications of this diffusion for those categorized as poor are explored here through the lens of community tourism in Canhane, which at this stage should be very familiar to the reader. Geographically speaking, however, in this chapter I am more ambitious. To understand the value, the inherent potentiality of poverty or to be considered poor in community tourism, one must look at the large-scale ideologies, economic systems and webs of meanings in which such values and potentialities are nourished. One must delocalize the local. Therefore, the next pages are about questioning and analysing the broader processes that make it possible to ascribe value to poverty for the accredited ‘poor’, turning it into development touristic capital – the capitalization of poverty in developmentourism.

The Order of Display Canhane is an extraordinary case to study the ways in which ideas of development have consequences for the lives of local residents, the careers of development and tourism professionals and the moral ‘selfing’ of the tourists. As I began to reflect on the complexities intrinsic to development conceptions of poverty while living in the village, poverty became an ethnographically significant idea (see also Bornstein 2003; Ferguson 2006; Li 2007b). In Chapter 1, I describe and explain how Canhane was targeted by the development industry to develop the first community-based tourism project in Mozambique. The village became not only a site of tourism but simultaneously also a site of poverty eradication. Its community tourism project was elaborated and implemented by the Swiss NGO Helvetas, with funds coming from USAID. Therefore, Canhane and its residents emerged in the tourism industry as part of a broad framework of intervention headed by the Swiss NGO,

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which, as I was told repeatedly at the NGO’s offices in Maputo, ‘has as its main institutional goal to alleviate poverty and generate maximum benefits for the rural impoverished communities’. And so, in the name of empowerment, development and poverty eradication, Canhane embraced a trade-market solution (tourism) to a major social and material problem externally diagnosed as existing in the locale (poverty). As corollary of the local accommodation of tourism-as-solution to poverty, since the Covane Community Lodge opened its doors to tourists, the words ‘tourist’ (turista), ‘community’ (comunidade), ‘development’ (desenvolvimento) and ‘poverty’ (pobreza) became part of residents’ common vocabulary. These words, always uttered in Portuguese, a foreign language in Canhane, are more than just vehicles or compounds of empty talk: these words embody the emergent values and sense of possibility in Canhane. As I addressed in the previous chapter, the stroll in the village represents the main form of encounter between the international tourists and local residents. The stroll is a tourist sensorial service that promotes the ‘front side’ (Goffman 1959) of Canhane. It promotes the institutionalization of certain materialities, such as ordinary places, physical infrastructures and even humans as (material) tourist attractions. However, the touristification of specificities in the village, namely Canhane’s material poverty and Canhane’s material expressions of triumph over it, were not random. They were deliberately and strategically planned. The matters accessed sensorially by the tourists represent a cartography of interests with a purpose. In the stroll, poverty and the potentialities to solve it through community tourism predetermine the physical and emotional itinerary to be toured. That is, the interdependent relation between poverty-asthe-problem and tourists-as-the-solution determines the provisional order of display in Canhane for tourism. But Canhane is (also) a collective replete with self-entrepreneurship initiatives – projects and enterprises developed by the residents for the sake of their individual or collective melioration. However, tourists are not led to such expressions of local accomplishments. The only manifestations of improvement that they have access to are those to which they directly contribute. That is, sites/sights of community development that were endowed by the profits of community tourism. These are the most convincing material expressions in suggesting and confirming to the tourists that local poverty solutions are possible and being implemented because of them. Indeed, as we saw before, the two sites/sights embodying developmental solutions that tourists visit are the primary school and the water tank. They

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share a decisive feature: both display a way of ‘developing the community’ in which the revenues of ­the tourists are morally justified. Yet, and perhaps even more effectively, Canhane can be acknowledged and realized by local manifestations of development not associated with tourism in various places and in different circumstances. For example, I met a man who implemented a system close to his house that allows other residents to watch international football matches. He was born and raised in Canhane, but at the age of seventeen he migrated to South Africa. Five years later, in 1994, he returned to Canhane and came to be known for his spirit of initiative. ‘When I moved back here,’ he explained, ‘I wanted a house like the one I had in South Africa, so I started making business with cows to earn money for this [pointing at his brick house behind him].’ His ambition continued to grow, and he materialized it through successive accomplishments. Among other initiatives, he acquired a boat for renting to local fishermen; obtained one of the biggest agricultural fields in Canhane’s lands; gained funds from an NGO to build round cement latrines in order to sell them to the other residents at a special reduced price; and he became one of the leaders at the Assembly of God church in the village. At one point, when we talked about the lack of electricity in Canhane, he said in a vigorous tone: ‘I already tried to convince them [local residents] that we should cut some trees, and install lamp posts from here to the town of Tihovene. Then, we go to the administration office and say to them: “Now you just have to put up cables.” But they [local residents] are hardheads.’ Father of six children and married with two wives, he epitomizes what seem to be the ultimate goals declared in development and community tourism discourses: local empowerment, critical initiative and local development. In one of his latest initiatives, he acquired a generator that provides power for a colour television, which is inside a mud hut with a parabolic antenna outside. This is an infrastructure of achievement, technological connectivity and triumph over the lack of networked electricity. In the hut, there are plastic chairs to sit in, music to listen to, a TV screen to watch and most of the time food to eat and juices to drink. It is a place of social joy. Both the technology attribute and the atmosphere of well-being in the place can be seen as an expression of social empowerment; or more concretely, it has the potential to represent, in contrast with most of the sites/sights visited by the tourists, social exuberance resultant from Canhaners’ own initiatives and accomplishments. However, no tourist had ever visited this place, even though the tourists who opt to stay in Canhane are highly

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celebrated as sensitive and interested in local everyday life – keen to experience the real, the absolutely real. The question that therefore arises is: why are the tourists persistently led, for example, to the hole dug in the centre of the village that allows residents to access water and not to the mud hut where the population watches television? I believe the answer to this simple question not only offers evidence about the structural and structuring logic operating behind the tourism venture in Canhane, but also helps to unveil the emergence of many other community tourism settings in the Global South.

The Constitution of a Problem and the Homogenization of Differences The supranational agencies of development and aid have been on the front line of a new globalizing representation of poverty and the poor, targeting what came to be popularly labelled as the ‘developing world’. There is a growing body of literature, the so-called aidnography (Mosse 2011), critically addressing ‘the role of development institutions in constituting poverty as the key development problematic’ (Green 2006: 2). Most of these critics support their view by resorting to the importance of categorization and the agency of concepts in the ordering of social worlds (Law 1993). Among other influential scholars in this matter, Escobar (1995) stresses that the historical advent of development brought about a new powerful regime of representation that shapes the reality to which it refers. For other authors, such as Akhil Gupta (2012) and Richard Rottenburg (2009), the social production of numbers and statistics of comparison, which definitely characterizes translocal development planning, strips out context. The point is, the traffic of meanings that such a politics of the real promotes has led to the public diffusion and universalization of poverty as an organizing technical concept, and simultaneously as the object of regional and local problematization. The incorporation of poverty as the main development object came to be a mechanism by which influence could be gained over peoples and spaces. It discursively generated a developing geography as a space of thought, problems and intervention in which development is necessary and empowered with the expertise of the solutions; a form of governing ascendancy over a vast geography in need; a form of intervention that in making out the poverty-problem appropriates it. Yet the constitution of the subject of poverty in terms

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of the economy of discourse fails to integrate much of the everyday experience in the project that it promotes. It subjugates the relative and nonrepresentational to the totalitarian power of universalism and representationalism. To put it another way, by rendering poverty to a technical and transnationally applicable modality of knowledge, the discourse of universal poverty becomes an impoverishing reading of life. It ‘misses the importance of concretion’ (Mazzarella 2003: 43), context, historiography and everyday life. Foucault warned that, although misleading, such technocratization and tyranny of comparison are the dominant ‘procedure[s] by which one obtains the constitution of a subject’ (Foucault 1988: 253). Accordingly, it is largely in this way that Africa as a category ‘enters Western knowledge and imagination … through a series of lacks and absences, failings and problems’ (Ferguson 2006: 2), and ‘where a “traditional African way of life” is simply a polite name for poverty’ (21). International NGOs, donors and national ministries with a vested interest in development and aid all share a conceptual framework that allows them to identify one common, joint goal. From the UK Department for International Development (DFID) to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Norway, poverty appears as the core problem to be ‘fought’, ‘reduced’, ‘combated’, ‘overcome’ or ‘eradicated’ in the field that is consistently mentioned as being the ‘South’.2 However, this shared framework owes its character and power of unanimity to the way it promotes a single authoritarian version of poverty. The unilateral production of the meaning of poverty sets the parameters and determines what should be done to eradicate it – and, importantly, by whom. As such, poverty is mostly drawn upon to make a certain type of policy of intervention; it serves to identify and legitimize targets for such policies and, consequently, to dispose authorities. In the late morning of a rainy day, a Mozambican who was a member of the staff administering the Great Limpopo Transfrontier Park told me: ‘Like all the travel agencies, NGOs depend on raising money, otherwise they close the doors. The “NGOers” are experts in creating problems around poverty. For them, every rural inhabitant here [in Mozambique] is poor. So they go and ask for money from the donors saying that they know how to solve that’. In his opinion, informed by two decades of working for the Mozambican state and for development and tourism international organizations, the way the development professionals objectify poverty implies the reduction of areas, populations and their needs to instrumental categories. Such an objectification, according to him, produces mapped

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market opportunities that favour the ascent of an appropriate industry of solutions. As Thomas Yarrow and Soumhya Venkatesan say, ‘in their discursive construction of ideas of “poverty”, development institutions objectify an un-differentiated and passive “third world”’ (2012: 2). More importantly, such normative efforts contribute to the constitution of a vast ‘South-wide’ market of poverty begging for a solution to be explored. The technically required homogenization of poverty is evident in the way the experiences of the poor are promoted in development discourse as similar across differing social backgrounds and geographical areas. This framework is well illustrated by Deepa Narayan (2001), the co-author of an instrumental World Bank study from 1999 that was used to inform the 2000/01 World Development Report on poverty. In the author’s own words, ‘there is a commonality of the human experience of poverty that cuts across countries, from Nigeria to Egypt, from Malawi to Senegal’ (Narayan 2001: 40). Specifically in Mozambique, Arnall and colleagues say, ‘Following the civil war, the perceived “neutrality” of international NGOs by the donor community provided foreign agencies with the necessary legitimacy to enter’ the country and, in turn, to conceptualize it in terms of a comparative ‘technical rationale’ (2013: 317). What is important to highlight within this framework is that poverty is not only promoted as the development problem in the postcolonial world. Fundamentally, such a framework refers to poverty as if it represents, unequivocally, a universalized thing in itself; a homogeneous and tangible entity; an object; a ‘total social fact’ (Mauss 1990) that can be globally located, assessed, measured and compared. In this framework, poverty is basically an absolute ‘numericized inscription’ (Rose 1999: 212) in accounts of everyday life, and so it becomes accountable, auditable and governable; it becomes visible (or legible) to the scrutiny of delocalized, external experts. Chris Shore and Susan Wright refer to this as ‘a defining feature of our times’ – as they call it, ‘governing by numbers’ (2015: 22). The obvious problem that arises from this approach – the universality of truth in technocratic terms – is that since developmental conceptions of poverty must necessarily be matched up with a set of quantifiable measurements (e.g. dollar-a-day poverty line), non-quantifiable aspects of poverty, particularly informed by local reasonings, tend to be excluded (Tache and Sjaastad 2010: 1169). At the heart of this exclusion is a politics of omission. As Sian Sullivan (2002) argues, the credibility of global discourses of development rests on the omission of local complexity and local differences.

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Experiences and conceptions of poverty differ from culture to culture, from one region to another, within individuals from the same society, and across time. The conception of poverty may also differ according to which perspective we take: whether material, spiritual, political, economic, social, situational, urban, rural, relative, absolute, comparative and so forth. Still, as James Ferguson notes, ‘the ranking of individuals and households according to their degrees of wealth and poverty is commonly performed as an untheorized, commonsense kind of operation’ (1992: 56). Referring to the Borana Zone in southern Ethiopia, Boku Tache and Espen Sjaastad say that ‘Livestock holding, particularly of cattle, is the node that ties different aspects of wealth and poverty together’ (2010: 1171). In studying thirty-five villages in Rajasthan in India, Anirudh Krishna states that poverty is locally defined and measured in terms of four stages: having food, sending children to school, possessing clothes to wear outside the house and paying off debt in regular instalments (Krishna 2004). According to my own research in Mozambique, the relative migratory lifestyle of the fishermen in southeastern Mozambique, settling provisionally in accordance with the location of fish, affects their perspectives on poverty. As I was told by a twenty-five-year-old fisherman, ‘The house is not important; it is only for sleeping at night.’ In other words, for him and also for his fishermen friends that I talked with, housing conditions are not part of the fundamental criteria that define poverty and the poor. However, not far from them, Oliver Mtapuri’s (2008: 41) research in the West Province of Zimbabwe indicates that the material conditions of dwellings are crucial in local conceptions of poverty. This shows how physical infrastructure or even the material dimension in life can have different meanings and play radical different roles in defining what it is or is not to be poor. These two examples of radical disparity come from neighbouring areas, which demonstrate that proximity per se does not validate the homogenization of the meanings of poverty. Similarly, in a comparative study between two villages no more than fifteen kilometres apart in western Kenya, Mary Nyasimi and colleagues observe that ‘each village had its own indicators of wealth and poverty … characteristics of poor homesteads in Ainamoi village could feasibly be considered wealthy by the residents of Kanyibana’ (2007: 48). Finally, in his study in the village of Mashai in Lesotho, Ferguson attempted to determine which households were rich and which were poor. He then faced an obstacle, which he called ‘the problem of the incomparables’. Basically, Ferguson concluded, local residents are ‘not

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only rich and poor in degrees, but rich and poor in entirely different ways’ (1992: 57). Difference seems to be a central social problem for the professionals of development. David Mosse says that international development ‘narratives of progress impl[y] that difference is a deficit to be overcome’ (2013: 228). The global industry of development does, indeed, legitimize most of its work from assessments of difference between spaces and peoples. This is why, among other authors, Tania Li (2007a) contends that at the core of the activity of development institutions is the rendering of societies technical. This process of technocratization allows societies to be measured, evaluated, compared, indexed and, therefore, differentiated, which ultimately produces justifications for intervention; justifications for solving the problems that ratified difference comes to mean. But what makes human difference an obstacle to progress, as Mosse suggests? What makes difference a deficit to be overcome through the industry of development? To the point, Vandana Shiva says: ‘subsistence economies which satisfy basic needs by means of self-supply are not poor in the sense that they are wanting. The ideology of development, however, declares them to be poor [thus, different] for not participating significantly in the market economy and for not consuming goods produced in the global economy’ (Shiva 2005, in Mowforth and Munt 2009: 336). In Shiva’s view, while turning the ‘under-utilized poor’ (Dolan 2012) into objects of difference and intervention, the politics of poverty promoted by the development industry aims to create consumers. With commodity consumption becoming a definition and quality of social progress, the poor of today are those who do not consume commodities. Zigmund Bauman (2008: 147) clarifies this matter with questions: is not growth propelled by the activity of consumers? Is not the official index of the nation’s well-being – GNP – measured by the amount of money changing hands? All of these empirical accounts and argumentative opinions pose an intense challenge for convergence discourses on poverty. They do not necessarily determine the privileging of global analytical forms, the objective over the subjective or the categorical over the contextual as entirely wrong. Development discourses that explicitly grade populations and countries on a scale from wealthy to poor, from more to less developed may at least expose in popular mediatic ways circumstances of socioeconomic dissimilarity, possibly rooted in conditions of material deprivation. Rottenburg goes so far as to say that the ‘technical game’ of comparisons that arises in development work

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came to be ‘the only code available for carrying out transcultural negotiations under postcolonial conditions’ (2009: 142). However, such a totalitarian comparative perspective, leading to poverty becoming a techno-discursive instrument, immediately raises a number of problems. Obvious ones are that people and cultures are transformed as abstract statistical figures to be moved up and down in the charts of progress (Escobar 1995: 44); it invalidates pluralized understandings and meanings; it ignores contextual economic strategies and tactical resource management; it does not integrate relationships between materiality, consumption and individual aspirations other than those acknowledged by the dominant rationale; and it homogenizes different subjectivities. The uniformization of poverty not only determines the authoritative representation of the problem in and with the Global South but also institutionalizes such a representation as a way of seeing, perceiving and imagining the entire ‘developing world’: it also generates a reality. This state of affairs contributes to the creation of cultural expectations mainly, but not exclusively, in the ‘North’ about the ‘South’; about the latter’s rural communities and urban slums. Furthermore, and in line with the principle of synchronism or dual constitution, not only is stereotyped imagery of poverty produced, but so also is its solution. It is here that tourism plays its role in generating new hopes for modernity.

The Recovering of a Hope: The Tourist Academic approaches to tourism began during the 1960s. Tourism was then described largely in terms of economic development, and was seen almost entirely in a positive light (Crick 1989: 314). Under such an optimistic vision, the United Nations (UN) declared 1967 to be the International Tourism Year. However, ‘despite the early hopes, tourism as a “passport” to macroeconomic development did not pan out quite as planned’ (de Kadt 1979, in Stronza 2001: 268), and pessimism about tourism became common in academia. Particularly in the 1970s and 1980s, poor people in non-Western countries were said to be typically excluded from or disadvantaged by international tourism development (Hall and Page 2009: 8). Tourism started to be described as ‘a major internationalized component of Western capitalist economies’ (Britton 1991: 451). The deceptive character of the industry became entrenched in various domains, in diverse spheres of the social world, surpassing the

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critical field of social sciences. The words of the former executive director of the world’s largest tourism-related NGO (Ecumenical Coalition on Third World Tourism) epitomize this: ‘tourism, especially Third World tourism ... does not benefit the majority of the people. Instead it exploits them, pollutes the environment, destroys the ecosystem, bastardises the culture, robs people of their traditional values and ways of life and subjugates women and children in the abject slavery of prostitution’ (Srisang 1992: 3, in Mowforth and Munt 2009: 55). Rather than alleviating poverty, tourism was generally declared to be one of its causes. Yet, more recently, societies all over the world have been presented with a radical ideological shift, and the harmful character of tourism has been replaced by one that is more benign. The alarmist insights and the general antipathy towards tourism have led to contemporary calls for ethics in the industry and the consequent incorporation of development pro-poor principles by the travel sector. As addressed by Martin Mowforth and Ian Munt, ‘the start of the twenty-first century has seen efforts to stimulate development through tourism’ and the overriding goal of poverty alleviation has generated ‘a long line of terms and types to attract attention, funding and energy’ (2009: 335). Especially in postcolonial contexts, tourism activity has now been integrated into the mechanisms of a solution to the problem of poverty, and it became inscribed into the discourse of good governance. This has led authors, such as Anita Lacey and Suzan Ilcan, ‘to consider tourism not as leisure activity, but as a powerful technology of postcolonial governance’ (2015: 44). Accordingly, Francesco Frangialli, the Secretary-General of the World Tourism Organization of the United Nations (UNWTO), states that ‘the African tourism success story is particularly important for the fight against poverty’ (UNWTO 2006, in Lacey and Ilcan 2015: 45), which has been declared one of the main goals of global governance in the Millenium Development Goals. In practice, the re-emergence or recovery of tourism as a solution to poverty has contributed to the birth and expansion of new types of tourism that operate under the patronage of an ethics of local empowerment. The community tourism in Canhane is one of them. As a new hope for fighting poverty, community tourism became the new panacea for international development agencies, which started to canalize funds to finance NGOs in promoting it (Butcher 2003: 9). Like many others, David Weaver has no doubt about this relationship: community tourism, undoubtedly, remains the first option of choice for most non-governmental organizations and

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governmental agencies that include tourism in their developmental solution portfolio (2010: 206).3 As a corollary of the positive significance that community tourism has gained in the last years, a great number of travel agencies have moralized their businesses by associating their commercial enterprises with the virtues and solutions that community tourism came to embody. Following the marketing approach of many other companies around the world, Asia Adventures says that it ‘is proud to be supporting community-based tourism in South East Asia, helping those less fortunate help themselves, and [thus] alleviate poverty’.4 Backyard Travel attracts customers with the message: ‘Immerse yourself in local culture with an insightful exploration … in Northern Vietnam on a community-based tour.’ Then, the company reveals, ‘We’ll make a donation on behalf of every traveler … to women enduring poverty in the region.’5 Wildlife Tours in Rwanda says, ‘we organize cultural and community-based tours’ and ‘The Dream of the company is to … alleviate poverty.’6 The point is that travel agencies everywhere have been increasingly embracing the term ‘poverty’ and, related to this, community tourism to legitimize their plans. In this way, these companies allude to the notion that their businesses and moral public interest are one and the same. Finally, meaningful participation also came to appear at the heart of the model of coalition between ‘hosts and guests’ (Smith 1989) in community tourism: the sale, production and consumption of meaningful participation by the tourists in helping the poor Others in their own ‘habitat’. This participation can take many forms, and the subject of poverty (eradication) is one of the most conspicuous moral motivations for it.

Poverty and the Attraction of the ‘Slum’ Approaching the subject of poverty in tourism inevitably drags us to one other speciality. Perhaps even more than ‘rural communities’ in Africa, ‘slums’ are defined in public discourse almost solely in terms of poverty and precariousness (Frenzel and Koens 2012; Frenzel, Koens and Steinbrink 2012). Such a discourse channels the ‘slum zone’ as different, as a place that typifies the predicament of governmental unwillingness to improve local socio-economic conditions. Yet this general presumption facilitates the emergence of a new cartography of power and intervention: slums as non-governmental kingdoms.

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One of the most influential theses of Michel Foucault (2001) is that mechanisms of power cannot function unless a knowledge supporting them is formed, organized and put into circulation; that is, some aspects have to be selectively acknowledged and then they have to circulate in order to substantiate the legitimacy of some institutions to exercise power. Tourism is a privileged field with which to attest to such a thesis. Taking Foucault’s view in consideration helps us comprehend why in slum tourism, for example, poverty is not the only selected subject on display: charitable and development projects are popular destinations for slum tours as well. Referring to the politics of township tourism in Cape Town, Manfred Rolfes says, ‘the tour operators intentionally present the poverty and developmental potentials of the townships at the same time’ (2010: 430). Like Rolfes, various scholars have noted that the negative preconceptions associated with the ‘slum’, ‘township’, ‘favela’ or ‘ghetto’ are challenged and nuanced by the tourists when they visit the local developments taking place (e.g. Freire-Medeiros 2007; Meschkank 2011). Such developments are commonly run by NGOs using tourism incomes to support their activity. Poverty in these cases is converted into an incentive for tourists’ meaningful participation in developing what they tour, which can take the form of donations to the organizations running the development projects, or the consumption of products and services displayed at the locale. In this way, slum tours gain the aura of non-governmental solidarity, while tourism becomes a catalyst for poverty eradication and local development. Clear examples of this are the NGO Reality Gives created by the Reality Tours and Travel with the purpose of channelling the profits from slum tourism into charitable work; or the non-profit Salaam Baalak Trust, which uses the revenues coming from slum tours for funding medical care and schooling projects in India. Under such a politics of display (of both poverty and development), the humanitarian non-governmental sector became the one with the ability and power to legitimately operate in the slums which, although informed as spaces neglected by the governments, are then converted into spaces of hope. The aestheticization of urban poverty is fashionable, and has attractive force beyond the realm of tourism. The experience and imaginary of urban precariousness, adversity and marginality have inspired many artists in their work, originating what has been widely called as ‘slum chic’. Lorraine Leu, for example, notes that the imaginary of the favela and its peculiar culture of impoverishment are used in advertising campaigns of varied products internationally

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(Freire-Medeiros 2007: 64). Why, it seems reasonable to ask, has the symbol of poverty become so influential and valued? One possible explanation is that the charm of destitute spaces and populations comes from people’s desires for the unmapped, different, illegal and disordered, which would contrast with their home societies of material abundance and routines of safety. In this interpretation, the fascination with the poor lies less in the pleasant experience of a poverty per se than in the sense of inversion that it offers to its consumers. This is particularly evident in tourism activity. As Nelson Graburn says, tourism ‘is one of those necessary breaks from ordinary life that characterizes all human societies’ (1983: 11), which means tourism is a privileged field for the ‘ritual inversion’ of everyday life. This might explain why situations of social, spatial and economic disadvantage, as the ‘slum’ in urban contexts or the ‘community’ in countryside Africa, have become so markedly competitive tourism products. The slum and the rural community provide the experience of difference for the wealthy tourist. Put in this way, more than the field of exoticism, pleasure, authenticity, liberty, responsibility, education or awareness, the contemporary and ethical ‘new tourisms’ (Mowforth and Munt 2009) that explicitly deal with poverty in destination societies can be seen as spheres of consumption and production of difference. Moreover, in such spheres, and through their supportive acts of consumption and presence, tourists can gain or enrich their selves in moral ways. This perspective, I think, offers the most appropriate avenue for understanding why negative conditions such as the poverty of the slum or the poverty of the local community in the Global South have become so powerfully aestheticized and turned into tourist attractions in North Atlantic societies. In this process of aestheticization and attraction, preconceived expectations of poverty influence the sort of reality that tourists come to experience. In the same way that celebrity tours in Beverly Hills are driven by tourists’ imaginary of wealth, slum tours and most of the community tourism in Africa are imbedded in a homogeneous version of poverty that can be toured. This version of poverty, the poverty recognized by the tourists as such, negates particularity and accrues totalitarian meaning. In fact, as in development discourse, the narratives of poverty dealing with slums and African communities in the domain of tourism rely on the assumption of inter-societal homogeneity without much regard for their internal specificities. Hence, poverty is standardly and semantically charged with slum and community culture in the Global South, and the discourses and

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performances that arise from this stereotyping fail to integrate versions and signifiers other than those resulting from an authorized preconceived idea of poverty and the poor. As troubling as the idea might be, the modern economies of expectation and the production of uniformity from which the concept of poverty draws in international development and tourism discourses point at a regression to a colonial order. Homi Bhabha says that ‘An important feature of colonial discourse is its dependence on the concept of “fixity” in the ideological construction of otherness’ (1994: 18). ‘Likewise the stereotype,’ he continues, ‘[fixity] is a form of knowledge and identification that vacillates between what is always “in place”, already known, and something that must be anxiously repeated’ (Bhabha 1994: 18). For Bhabha, fixity and stereotype were privileging ordering modes of colonial discourse, knowledge and power, leading ultimately to the constitution of meanings. This very process of constituting meanings through ‘fixity’ informs the making of poverty in the non-governmental era of today, a process of making that is progressively taking over most of the postcolonial human geographies on the planet. In contrast to the acknowledgement of internal discrepancies and variations, the uniformed, stereotyped and ‘fixed’ slum or local community opens up a space for interventions. The types of interventions that I refer to here are those that arise in the form of the solutions that integrate transnational and local development in tourism activity. In this framework in which development and tourism share the same moral goals and techniques for the eradication of poverty, the stereotyped and ‘fixed’ idea of slum and community occupy an important role in nurturing the non-governmental governance of the ‘South’. This, as we see in more detail in the last chapter, cultivates a pervasive rationale that fosters the deviation of the national states from the governance of the subjects associated with, in particular, ‘slum’ and ‘community’. And so, new technologies of ruling arise in the exercise of ‘governance without government’ (Hardt and Negri 2001: 14). My thesis is that ethical tourists have become important participants in this process.

Social Moral Order and Community Tourism Since the beginning of this book, I have been insisting on the concept of the imaginary to interpret and explain the power that the globalization of certain ideas has in the production of the moral

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rationale that validates developmentourism intervention in postcolonial worlds. As Arjun Appadurai famously put it, imaginaries can be a potent ‘fuel for action’ (1996: 7) in the same way that they can legitimize such action. Accordingly, the ‘community’ of Canhane in Mozambique, I argue, has to be understood within the political imagination induced by the expanding non-governmental regimes that hover over most of the ‘Souths’. It is a product(ion) of the imaginary and, in turn, modern moral order – an order which induces the capitalization of (the imaginaries of) community, poverty and solutions in tourism. The background that allows individuals to make sense of any given act is limited, for the simple reason that it does not encompass everything. Among other sources, human mechanisms of perception are based on circumscribed images through which life is understood. This is not to say that the background images of each individual are static, permanent or necessarily in conformity with the established social order. They may also invalidate the social order from which the individual builds her/his identity, and may even instil disorderly practice, helping the incessant constitution of new meanings. Nonetheless, societies still have a basis or mechanisms that provide their individuals with some sense of alliance. ‘Within this outlook,’ Charles Taylor says, ‘what constitutes a society as such is the metaphysical order it embodies’ (2002: 115). That is, the actions of individuals in any society and the meanings they attribute to their own and other actions are allocated within a metaphysical framework that binds them together. A crucial part of this framework is what Taylor calls the ‘moral order’. Drawing on the work of Hugo Grotius and John Locke, Taylor says that the modern idea of moral order has become omnipresent in people’s actions as ‘one in which our purposes mesh, and each in furthering oneself helps the others’ (2002: 96). Taylor (2002: 93) notes that there is a dominant moral order that has undergone an expansion in extent (more people live by it) and in intensity (the demands it makes are heavier and more ramified). In the wake of his thought, I would suggest a third expansion: the capitalization of the very ideal of such a moral order. This last expansion is the outcome of late capitalism forces and ‘neo-liberal’ ideologies, some of them driven and applied by global development institutions that revolve around accessing funds for intervention, which are morally justified by a politics of anticipation: activities, affairs and methods that address novel and potentially efficient solutions to problems such as poverty.

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The principles of moral obligation and rights that individuals and societies have in regard to one another have generated new fields of agency and market opportunities. The vigorous emergence of ethical modes of tourism derive from such new fields, from the third expansion in which a certain moral background is used to justify commodity consumption, production and business. But what makes Taylor’s idea of a common moral background – the ‘metaphysical order’ that ‘constitutes a society as such’ – relevant for the argument of imaginary is that it did not result from human invention: rather, ‘it was designed by God,’ he says (2002: 96). Taylor’s analysis leads us to an obvious conclusion. Underlying people’s ways of constituting society and making sense of the modern world is the ethics of human coexistence – the moral order – which draws on social imaginary as constructed by a greater being. In the same direction, Castoriadis argued that a ‘fundamental creation of the social imaginary, the gods or rules of behaviour are neither visible nor even audible but signifiable’ (1997: 183). Imaginaries are thus presented as crucial determinants in the way we signify our worlds and constitute subjectivity. They support ‘the articulations and distinctions of what matters and of what does not’ (Castoriadis 1975: 465). Among other determinants, these articulations and distinctions are closely related to the prescribing of what is to be moral. Hence, imaginaries inform social moral order; they are normative; they constitute and are constituted by society; they provide the cognitive structure that allows humans to make sense of, lead to and justify benevolent action; and, finally, they are important contemporary attributes for doing business. Castoriadis restated it in this way: ‘to understand a society means, first and foremost, to penetrate or reappropriate the social imaginary significations which hold this society together’ (1991: 85). I suggest we keep the imaginary as the determining factor in modern moral order in mind when analysing poverty and community tourism, especially in Africa. Why? Because, in the context of community tourism, poverty, like the idea of community, is largely an institutionalized imaginary that constitutes and is constituted by the moral order in tourists’ societies. The institution of groups of people as communities and poor in or through tourism projects embodies, materializes and animates this moral order. Put succinctly, this means that programmes of community tourism in the ‘South’ gain their value precisely because of their association with the imaginary of community and poverty, which derives from the modern moral order in the visitors’ societies.

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Tourism and Poverty in the Non-Governmental Order Having said all that, I believe the answer to the leading empirical question – why are the tourists in Canhane persistently led to the shallow well and not to the hut where the residents watch television – is now easier to see. The shallow well incorporates convincing aesthetic and sensorial characteristics to connect Canhane and its residents to poverty in the visitors’ minds. There, the tourists encounter one of the most immediate expressions of shortage that matches their imagery of the ‘world of want’ (Jackson 2011). The experience of being at the shallow well validates a knowledge of Canhane and its inhabitants through, and inseparable from, a particular imaginary of poverty. The residents are conscious of tourists’ version of poverty. However, that version is essentially different from theirs. For most Canhaners the shallow well does not mean poverty. Rather, it means sociality. In his ethnography of ‘urban acupuncture’ in Kinshasa, Filip de Boeck conceptualizes poverty as a condition which ‘reduces or “cuts away from” the capacity of one’s language to reveal, demystify, clarify, or explain the unsteady ground of one’s life’ (2015: 147). In this view, the shallow well is not a place of poverty. It is precisely at the shallow well that local residents better and more openly disclose and explain both crises and triumphs in their lives. This is a place of revelations, gossip and clarifications in which one’s capacity to articulate and externalize her/his own perspective is promoted. Basically, the shallow well in Canhane is a site of social interaction, therefore locally associated to conviviality, while spaces and circumstances of social aloneness signify, in their own words, pobreza (poverty, in English). Nevertheless, the residents are well aware of tourists’ understandings of the shallow well area as poverty, understandings which the Canhaners reproduce as their own in the ambit of tourism. This appropriation of a foreign representation to themselves is the outcome of the new politics of uni-versality of the local that emerges from their integration in the developmentourism extensive web. More concretely, Canhane’s integration into the development global market of developmentourism, an integration that happens through their role in tourism for development and for poverty reduction, challenges local collective meanings of the shallow well and informs the residents about the same area in a different way: it re-makes it as a space of perceived poverty. Yet the interplay between situated significations and the reproduction of delocalized representations of poverty exceeds the question of

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space and the characteristics of the infrastructures inscribed in it. It also includes people. In the later stages of my fieldwork, I was often teased by the local residents about my not having any children. To give an example, once, in a group of seven men and four women, someone cried out loudly to me: ‘After all, you are poorer than most of us.’ What surprised me about this social moment of provocation was not the comment in itself, but the collective reaction to it: no one laughed afterwards. Some people looked seriously at me, probably to see my reaction, others lowered their heads. This was not a joke. During the previous months, various residents referred to the number of their children (and cattle) with pride. This pride came associated with their sentiment of security for the future, the same type of security which many people in Northern Atlantic societies associate to their saving accounts in banks. ‘No children,’ a woman in the group said later, ‘then you are poor. Doesn’t matter if you have a good roof, good walls, good chairs. You still are poor.’ Another woman added vigorously, ‘but with many children and a husband you are a rich person.’ In this moment of collective familiarity (all of the people at the gathering had been interacting with me for a year on a daily basis), material deprivation did not feature as central in their definitions of poverty. After some thirty minutes of discussion about meanings of wealth and poverty in the village, I challenged their views: ‘But you know that most of the tourists that come here don’t have many children. Some of them don’t have children at all. They might own cars, brick and colourful houses, and even private boats. But some of these people might have no children.’ This was the moment when the laughs arose. Four days previously, the man that was seated next to me on my right said in an anguished voice to a Canadian tourist who he met during the stroll in the village, ‘I have eight children. Life is difficult for me, so many mouths to feed.’ His message was effective. A few hours after the stroll, when I met the tourist who, I learned then, worked in ‘mine-detection rat technology’ for an NGO in the Mozambican city of Maxixe, he referred to the Canhane resident as an example of poverty in the village. ‘These people,’ the tourist generalized to me, ‘how can they leave poverty behind with so many children to feed? Glad that they have tourists donating money to help them against poverty.’ At the gathering, with this episode still fresh in our heads, I told the man on my right that the Canadian tourist he had met did not have children. ‘What does this mean to you then?’ I asked him. After more laughs and hesitations, he said timidly, ‘But if he came here, it is because he knows we are poor.’

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As addressed at the beginning of this chapter, non-governmental humanitarian regimes can elicit new capacities and statuses to historically subjugated people. However, to be successful within these regimes, these same people have to experience themselves through such capacities and statuses. What I am trying to say is that the functional prerequisite of the community tourism project in Canhane requires residents’ recognition of themselves as poor. To some extent, this resonates with Didier Fassin’s biolegitimacy thesis. Fassin says that in France during the 1990s, and under pressure from NGOs, the national state created a new criterion to legalize, integrate and benefit undocumented immigrants who suffer from a severe disease that cannot be treated in their home country. ‘This clause,’ he notes, is ‘known as “humanitarian”’ (2009: 51). Fassin explains that this is why deterred asylum seekers now often try to get their documents by putting forward their health status and express their despair when told that their case is not serious and problematic enough to be considered relevant for them to benefit from legalization and national integration. In this sense, being officially recognized as underprivileged gives access to new opportunities. To some degree, Fassin’s biolegitimacy presents some parallels with the way poverty has become a value of life in Canhane. Just as illness and disadvantage became a condition of opportunity in France,7 being poor is now an opportunity in the Mozambican village. Poverty was appropriated as a category of practice by the local residents, and produced and reproduced as a general, ordinary understanding of the world and their place within it. For the purposes of both community tourism and development, Canhane’s poverty is normalized in accordance with strategies and interests. The new norms and representations that result from the tourism business in the village are to some extent moulded to the locale and then incorporated as part of a new system of practice, a way-of-being for the residents. In this process of representational reformation and ‘strategic essentialism’, the actual spatial signifiers of local poverty – corrals empty of cattle; small agricultural fields; households without children or with few individuals living there – are removed from the representations of the village’s poverty in and for community tourism. At the same time, emblems of poverty coming from the global technocratic order are integrated. On these grounds, in Canhane, poverty as a category of practice became about space-making, connection and social alignment. But more fundamentally, it became about potentiality; a project of ‘anticipatory development’ (Green 2012: 322), ‘not a secure accomplishment’ (Li 2007b: 10). As the category of poverty is incorporated,

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Canhaners not only subject themselves to but also valorize themselves in accordance with the global politics of calculation that homogenize them. This is a politics that, as Anand Pandian suggests, encourages local residents to identify and capitalize on ‘their own nature as a problem’ (2008: 159). For this reason, to return to the leading question, the shallow well was chosen to be a tourism sight/site in Canhane. Its potential to match an imaginary of poverty and, simultaneously, to induce in tourists’ consciousness a sense of moral duty to ‘support and help the community’, as an elder resident mentioned when she justified why tourism is appreciated in the village, enables the shallow well to become a local resource. That is, not only does the power of matching an imaginary convert the shallow well into an expression of poverty, it also converts it into an asset. Following the same logic, the inoperative water tank built by the residents (Chapters 4 and 5) also gains currency in the community tourism enterprise because it was monetarily supported by developmentourism funds. It represents the local (residents’) and delocalized (developmentourists’) efforts against poverty. Therefore, both the shallow well and the water tank are resources that are informed by subjectivities that gain social power, fundamentally, due to their non-market moral logic, but which paradoxically serve and gain visibility within the market of developmentourism. In contrast, the television hut is an initiative of a local resident. It has the characteristics to represent a case of community development through self-entrepreneurship without any support from external development organizations and tourists. It does not have the potential to link tourism and development intervention with social improvement. For this reason, the social television hut is kept out of the community tourism experience. Erving Goffman would certainly call it the backstage, ‘where no member of the audience [developmentourists] will intrude’ (1959: 113). Indeed, contrasting with many other places and situations in the village, the television hut was a convivial area where I had to worry about having a chair to sit in, like any other resident. In this hut and in its vicinity, Canhaners ‘can drop [their] front, forgo speaking [their] lines, and step out of character’ (Goffman 1959: 112). As in many other localities categorized as poor in the imaginary of developing, the residents of Canhane adopt and appropriate for themselves the ‘in need’ attributes of the poverty recognized in the non-governmental order as a way to be eligible for funds and, more specifically, for tourism income. Representing not only a global

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homogeneous version of poverty but also the potentials to solve it became a value for these historically subjugated people. Martha Honey’s ‘stakeholder theory’ might be appropriate here. She contends ‘that people will protect [and secure] what they receive value from’ (2008: 14). This is why Canhaners participate in and try to capitalize on a dominant system of meaning and valuation derived from a transnational discourse. And this is why their new rhetoric of poverty and of themselves came to be informed by a reflexive selfvalidating quality in accordance with a higher order that induces such a condition as a market opportunity: a form of social self-positioning in non-governmentalism. To put it more conclusively, by strategically incorporating and exercising their position as the ‘ones who need to be helped’, Canhaners express their aspiration to membership and inclusion in a broader ‘neo-liberal’ web where they could be, at least, placed as producers and reproducers of an otherness and of a difference already intrinsic to a global imagery; they became the significant poor Other. Clearly, the global imaginary of poverty is used as a value for their ambitions. It serves as an attribute, not a limitation, for the community tourism business. However, this leads to a further set of problems. First, it reproduces processes of Orientalization that serves to essentialize local residents’ status and to subordinate them to a transcendent politics of domination. Second, while it gives hope for inclusion in wider socio-economic systems, by adopting processes of representation that others ‘them’ as homogeneously poor, they become reduced to commodities and specialized producers and reproducers of imaginaries. On the other hand, by using stereotypes and icons brought by nongovernmental market ideology, Canhane’s poverty becomes simultaneously a problem with regard to which ‘you – the tourist – must act’ and for which ‘you – the tourist – are the solution’. Third, as in every specialized system of production and niche market, Canhaners emerge to the world as dependents of tourist-consumers’ desires and development visions, which increments their vulnerable condition. Fundamentally, it induces their dependence on extraneous imaginaries of poverty and on idealized solutions to such a foreign version of poverty. As addressed by Escobar, the modernization of poverty and the consequent transformation of the poor into the assisted signifies the setting in place of new mechanisms of control over those categorized as poor (1995: 22). Ultimately, Canhaners are being organized and constituting themselves not only as a market product but also as specialized producers

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in the developmentourism industry. Therefore, in Canhane, some social and infrastructural traits of the village are promoted and performed (e.g. the shallow well) while others are not (e.g. the television hut). Such a selection is not innocent: it authenticates and realizes an imaginary of poverty that supports the advancement of ethical worthy causes in accordance with the ‘modern moral order’ in North-Atlantic societies; furthermore, such a selection indicates the capitalization of the moral order of the visitors to Canhane.

Conclusion Community tourism put Canhane on the map of global modern existence. In this chapter, I have continued the analysis of such an integration. I have dug through the appearances, performances and ‘fronts’ of moralized community tourism down to the routes through which the village is integrated into the web of interests that is spreading throughout the Global South. My point is that such a process – Canhaners’ inclusion through tourism – could not have happened without the sharing of some principles by all the participants – local residents, tourists, development professionals and international aid funders. In particular, the value of Canhane in the global developmentourism market relies on a tacit agreement between all the participant-interveners; the agreement on the idea of what poverty and being poor are, and also on what the solution for poverty is. Canhane became internationally known to and relevant as the embodiment and confirmation of these ideas. Under the aegis of such agreement and ideas, the projection of distinctive landscapes of poverty-problems by development organizations and travel agencies produces mapped market opportunities. In this context, the term poverty is reduced to an expression of ‘traveling rationality’ (Craig and Porter 2006) that elicits positive moral intention: besides NGOs’ benign character, tourists too are converted into agents of moral solutions. However, the mention of a poverty and the promotion of solutions in the tourist experience are most often marketing manoeuvres that use moral appeals and good reasons in their market segmentation. Indeed, such a marketization of poverty meets an emergent social and market tendency in modern society: the ethical consumer. It suits the individual who aims to solve problems with her/his consumption behaviour. It is in this sense that the tourist-consumers who consciously choose to go to community-based lodges and to consume products through which their money goes to

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the improvement of the local community have come to be referred to as inherent components of development programmes. Yet this is not a unidirectional process. In the late modern world, the globalized doctrine of poverty that results from and feeds out of homogeneous representations of poverty and the solution to poverty is appropriated and reproduced at the international, regional and local level as an opportunity. Hence, the way the Canhaners speak about their poverty must be understood within the broader situational context that gives it relevance and meaning. Involving as it does varying degrees of dependency on dominant and extensive systems of knowledge, the appropriation of the imaginary of poverty as a recognizable way of being by those categorized as poor constitutes an aspiration to inclusion in a world dominated by ‘the commodification of everything’ (Edensor 2001: 79); a world in which the embodiment and consequent commercialization of every matter, such as a certain imaginary of poverty and its solution, can mean a chance of membership, acceptance and interconnection. For this reason, as Canhane demonstrates, the mythical local community and some of its specificities (e.g. the shallow well, the water tank) are produced, reproduced, sold, consumed, valued and, by extension, trademarked for their potential to allude to poverty eradication through tourism.

Notes  1. It is not my intention to suggest that poverty is a problem attributed solely to the Global South by a development industry entirely driven from the ‘North’. There is a new wave of interesting anthropological literature exploring how poverty and the power of global development in intervening in marginalized places and populations are no longer governed by Northern countries. As Monica DeHart says, today, ‘the subjects of IFIs [such as poverty eradication] are likely to include Greece and Italy’ (2012: 1360).   2. Just to mention a few examples, A: the DFID establishes as its main purpose, ‘to get rid of extreme poverty [in the] developing countries’. B: The German Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development (BMZ) identifies ‘sustainable poverty reduction’ as their first priority. C: The French Development Agency (AFD), which is the institution working on behalf of the French government, states that its main goal is to reduce poverty. D: The Canadian International Development Agency (CIDA), announces its mission as being to ‘lead Canada’s international effort to help people living in poverty’. E: The Swedish International

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Development Cooperation Agency (SIDA) affirms that its ultimate objective, ‘is to help creating conditions that will enable poor people to improve their lives’. F: The government of Ireland’s programme Irish Aid declares, ‘poverty reduction, to reduce vulnerability and increase opportunity’, as its overarching objective (in the mission statement ‘poverty reduction’ are the only words emphasized in bold). G: The aim of Australia’s aid program is stated as being, ‘to assist developing countries reduce poverty and achieve sustainable development’. H: The Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Norway says its goal, ‘is to fight poverty and bring about social justice’. The list is long. A: http://www.dfid.gov.uk/About-DFID/Quick-guide-to-DFID/Whowe-are-and-what-we-do, accessed 21 September 2010. B: http://www.bmz.bund.de/en/what_we_do/principles/aims/index. html, accessed 21 September 2010. C: http://www.afd.fr/jahia/Jahia/lang/en/home/Qui-Sommes-Nous, accessed 21 September 2010. D: http://www.acdi-cida.gc.ca/acdi-cida/ACDI-CIDA.nsf/eng/NIC5493749-HZK, accessed 21 September 2010. E: http://www.sweden.gov.se/sb/d/11962, accessed 21 September 2010. F: http://www.irishaid.gov.ie/about_mission.asp, accessed 21 September 2010. G: http://www.ausaid.gov.au/about/default.cfm, accessed 22 September 2010. H: http://www.regjeringen.no/en/dep/ud/selected-topics/development_cooperation.html?id=1159, accessed 21 September 2010.  3. There is a vast body of literature explicitly and unproblematically approaching, ‘community tourism as a means to reduce poverty in developing countries’ (Spenceley 2008: 286; see also Timothy 2002: 150).   4. http://www.asia-adventures.com/activities/community-tourism-southeast-asia.php, accessed 3 November 2010.   5. http://www.backyardtravel.com/tours/north-vietnam-community-tourism-cultural-experience, accessed 17 May 2016.  6. http://www.wildlifetours-rwanda.com/about.html, accessed 17 May 2016.   7. In the context of Mozambique, Ramah Mckay (2012) develops a similar argument to that of Fassin (2009). Referring to NGOs’ welfare programs and to AIDS in Morrumbala, a rural district in central Mozambique, Mckay says, ‘Today, however, instead of providing care along lines of national belonging, care is increasingly extended through categories of vulnerability through which groups (such as women, children, or patients with particular diseases) and individuals qualify for selectively distributed supports’ (2012: 290). In the fashion of humanitarian governmentality, the embodiment of vulnerability by individuals or groups of people is a valuable means for them to ‘become beneficiaries’ of international care in Mozambique.

7 Non-Governmental Governance

Two decades ago, Lester Salamon wrote, ‘we are in the midst of a global “associational revolution” that may prove to be as significant to the latter twentieth century as the rise of the nation-state was to the latter nineteenth’ (1994: 109). Ten years later, shortly after the tsunami hit the coastlines of the Indian Ocean in December 2004, the president of the non-profit association Pacific Asia Travel, Peter de Yong, made a global appeal: ‘Tourists, if you want to help us, book your trip now.’ As he clarified later, ‘the money you spend and, importantly, the hearts you touch will make a difference.’1 More recently, in January 2011, Mohan Munasinghe, who shared the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize with the former Vice President of the United States, Al Gore, introduced the Millennium Consumption Goals at the United Nations. The idea was simple: in the face of the perils that consumption presented to sustainable livelihoods, instead of viewing the consumers as a problem, they would be converted into the solution. What sense can we make of this sequence of events? Much has already been said about consumption and consumers. For over a century, ‘humans-turned-consumers’ (Bauman 2007: 101) have been variously described by academics and in public discourse as passive dupes, dopes or the heroes of everyday life. The late nineteenth-century economist J.A. Hobson, for example, argued that ‘consumption was an agent of “aesthetic and moral advance”’ (Freeden 1988: 100). In the same epoch, the French political economist Charles Gide referred to consumers as a ‘reign of truth and justice’ (Hilton 2008: 212). Yet the perils of consumption were never as central as they are today. The global advent of the ideology of

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sustainability and the recent globalized financial crises have animated politicians, activists and professionals from a wide variety of backgrounds and generated a burgeoning field of criticism of consumer capitalism. Hence, it was no surprise that ‘consumerism’, as Richard Wilk  (2001: 249) observes, ‘became the major theme of a critique of modernism in general.’ Apart from the debate over the character of consumption and consumers, John Stuart Mill  (2007/1844) stated in the nineteenth century that the desire to consume is a ‘general principle’ – meaning that it is universal, irreversible and intrinsic. This statement remains as true now as it was then. Inevitably, the same tactics that threaten the consumer system can be appropriated and reformulated in such a way as to benefit or even reinforce the system. A clear example of this occurs when ‘buycotts’ emerge to reverse movements, such as boycotts, designed to disrupt the consumer system. In contrast to a boycott, a buycott occurs when people explicitly consume products or services in moral support of certain corporations, countries or politics. Despite counteracting one another, buycotts and boycotts share a structural basis: both use the market in an attempt to ethically regulate society. In doing so, the anonymous individual attempts to exercise social power, not through votes, but rather through consumer behaviour. There may be an existential cost, however, for consumers collectively exercising social power. As Jean Comaroff and John Comaroff observe, consumption not only is about indexes of wealth and prosperity, but it also constitutes a privileged site for the ‘fabrication of self and society, of culture and identity’ (2000: 294). In other words, consumption of commodities is becoming the purpose for human existence and thus a major determinant of both identities and selfcultivation, at least in most North-Atlantic societies (e.g. Belk 1988: 139; Miller  1995: 15; Campbell  2004: 27; Barnett  et al.  2005; Russ 2005: 142; Bauman 2007). This line of thought leads to a reasonable and extensive area of inquiry. What creates meanings in consumption? Further, what does the consumption of these meanings induce the consumer to be(come)? In this final chapter, I explore answers to these questions by focusing on ethical consumption in tourism. During my fieldwork in Canhane, I encountered an unusual subject in tourism research, namely ethical tourism consumption legitimizing new modes of governance by non-governmental agents. Accordingly, ethics in tourism can invest delocalized non-governmental entities with the power to govern, and thus may become an enabling mechanism for

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conquering new territories and peoples. Canhane attests to this new development. Under the umbrella of globalizing ideas concerning climate change, a ‘Common Future’ (Baptista 2014a), and sustainability, the integration of ethics into consumption has become increasingly central to conceptions of lifestyle and society. Ethical consumption and the consumption of ethics are a matter of identity expression and self-cultivation, but they are also a way for individuals to participate in new governing rationalities that consider the entire planet. In methodological terms, the analysis of the apparatus behind the constitution of ethical subjects and the forces dragging these subjects into the market provides us not only with answers about the identities of ethical consumers, but also with information about the mechanisms governing the realities in which the ethical consumers participate. In other words, it elucidates the ways in which consumers exercise social virtue – such as spending holidays in community-based enterprises in Africa – and the realities they intend to fix through consumption, specifically the local societies they visit. These events are part of and lead to an emerging governing order (Foucault 1982, 2008; Dean 1999; Rose 1999; Blundo and Le Meur 2009). In this new order, governance is not gained and exercised through coercive power, military intervention or democratic elections. Rather, it is gained through the use of an ethics that sensitizes and therefore mobilizes consumers. In this new governing order, the duties of funding, auditing, regulating, educating, monitoring, disciplining, conducting and developing social subjects, particularly in the postcolonial Global South, are self-assigned to non-governmental agents. Mobilized ethical tourists fill this role. In this chapter, I make a final and conclusive approach to local communities in the ‘South’ as the subject of moral concern, and community-based tourism as the practice through which the consumer exercises ethical duty and, in turn, participates in nongovernmental governance. Ultimately, the developmentourists are participative agents of non-governmental governance and share its responsibilities. They participate in the worldwide expansion of such a governing order by consuming in distant localities under the aegis of a particular ethics. Therefore, they are not passive: they do things with that ethics. As we will see, the developmentourists demonstrate how consumers can be more than merely the subject of governance, and simultaneously participate as governing agents in their own right.

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Community-Based Tourism Although this is the last part of our journey into the intricacies and outcomes of community tourism in Canhane, I need to go back and approach the preliminary situation and the beginnings of the project, as well as to explain the antecedents of my ethnography in Mozambique. In 2006, while lecturing for one semester at two universities in Angola, I made a visit to the Peace Parks Foundation in Stellenbosch, in South Africa. I was considering possibilities for developing a research project. At the South African foundation, I was introduced to ‘an interesting win-win case of community development and empowerment through tourism in Mozambique’, as I was told by the head of the department working with rural populations. At the end of our meeting, I was given a few essential contacts necessary to receive authorization to research such a win-win case. These contacts were all persons working for the delegation of the Swiss NGO Helvetas in Maputo, the capital of Mozambique. One month later, I went to Mozambique to meet the NGO staff. In short, all the information and authorizations I needed for starting the research in the village operating the ‘win-win’ case of community tourism were provided during the meetings with Helvetas – all except one: ‘You may also have to speak with the community leader, but that is just a mere matter of politeness, for them not to be offended.’ I was even asked at the NGO’s office if I wanted to rent a hut. ‘Isn’t it better to ask the local authorities about that?’ I suggested. ‘If you prefer,’ the Mozambican head of the project replied, before clarifying another issue: ‘but if you wish to stay also at the Covane Community Lodge, closer to the tourists, speak first with us or with the manager of the lodge, not with the community.’ After the acceptance of my research proposal, I returned to Canhane to conduct fieldwork; to return I only needed permission from the NGO professionals. All the protocols required for developing the research dealt with international non-governmental institutions and not with any ministry of the Mozambican government. Such requirements indicated something that became conspicuous later in my research: the introduction of community-based tourism in Canhane fostered a new form of governance over the local society. Prior to 2002, the area where the Covane Lodge was later built was treated with indifference by the local populations. If the issue did not yet deserve particular consideration, when the Swiss NGO Helvetas publicly declared its interest in finding a space for the

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lodge, the location became the subject of dispute between two villages, Canhane and Cubo. This matter remains a source of conflict today, and I experienced it. ‘Where does Cubo begin?’ an elder in the village of Canhane asked, reflecting my own question back at me. ‘Pay attention,’ he continued in a serious tone, ‘in this direction there is a baobab which marks the limits of Canhane. If you proceed from there toward the river, after a while you’ll see a lot of hedges concentrated in one spot. That’s the other limit of Canhane.’ However, according to the community leader of the neighbourhood village of Cubo, the baobab tree he mentioned only started to be a border reference after Helvetas informed Canhane’s residents about the lodge. ‘Our lands go further than the baobab,’ he said in an irritated mood, ‘Canhane only starts after the path that goes down to the river, which is far after the baobab that they indicate.’ In his version, the lodge’s location is therefore on Cubo lands. More than disputing historically important marks and spaces of collective identity, the desire to be included in the tourism project underlined the quarrel between the two populations. For the residents of both villages, a cartography of hope was being drawn. However, in a world in which it greatly matters who controls the terms of negotiations (Errington and Gewertz 2010: 93), the inhabitants’ campaigns for land recognition did not play a decisive role. The introduction of a novel form of moral tourism in the region – a ‘novelty of sensation’ for the tourist, as Daniel Bell (1978) would have called it – brought legitimacy to the decisions of the new delocalized arbiters. In March 2003, the area for the lodge’s implementation was formally recognized by Helvetas to be in the jurisdiction of Canhane (Helvetas  2002). The regulatory character of the international NGO throughout this process represents a broader theme that is at the core of this chapter: non-governmental agents play an increasing role in constituting subjects according to how people make their lives. More important, the escalation of nongovernmental authority over the locale came from the introduction of a special type of tourism into the region – a morally superior form of vacation travel that carried the missionary flag of ethics, poverty eradication and sustainable development. Communitybased tourism expedited the non-governmentalization of governance over Canhane. In practice, by introducing new spatial limits and definitions (e.g. community borders, community tourism, development, empowerment), the non-governmental institution is producing new spatial and sociological realities. That is to say, the NGO was effectively

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‘structur[ing] the possible fields of actions of others’, to use Michael Foucault’s (1982: 21) famous definition of governing. Helvetas’s attribution of the area of the lodge to one village – Canhane – does, indeed, structure and enable new possibilities, actions and, ultimately, realities. It enables the residents of Canhane, in the same way that it fails to enable the residents of Cubo, to derive income from tourism. It enables a new field of ethical agency for tourists. Moreover, it enables a field of non-governmental regulation and opportunity, in particular for the consultations, courses, workshops and expertise intervention that followed. As pointed out in Chapter 2, during 2008 I observed a series of eight externally driven courses for Canhane’s residents, designed to facilitate ‘community capacity-building’, as their proponents called it. The funding for these courses went to the institution directing their implementation ‘on the ground’, which was the Mozambican NGO Lupa. To restate, at the beginning of 2008, this organization took charge of all monitoring of the tourism project because Helvetas decided to close its delegation in Maputo. The transition was an internal process, mainly because the founders of Lupa were part of the staff working for Helvetas-Maputo, who were then redeployed after its cessation. Consequently, at least up until the end of November 2008, most of the residents in Canhane did not know about the passage of leadership between the NGOs. ‘Is that so?’ a man over forty commented after I mentioned it. ‘Strange that I never heard about that: maybe it is because it is not important.’ Another man who had remained quiet during the entire conversation raised his voice and said: ‘The community leader must know nothing as well, otherwise we all would know. Maybe his son knows. But they [the professionals from Helvetas and Lupa] should come here and tell us these things, for us not to be diminished.’ Ironically, in the era of globalizing democracy, as conspicuously advocated in development discourses by NGOs, interventions such as those in Canhane represent the emergence of new modes of regulating societies through unelected agents rather than strengthening democratically elected institutions and officials that are at least in some form controlled by the people. The public face of Canhane presents a picture of virtue. However, the predominant narratives that connote the village to an exemplary new solution model of community development (e.g. Calane 2006; Spenceley 2006a; Helvetas 2002a, 2007; Norfolk and Tanner 2007; Salomão and Matose 2007; de Wit and Norfolk 2010) are informed by a broader context. The significance of the local tourism project

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lies in the fact that it was the result of a form of globalizing politics that allocates moral status to transnational consumers. Canhane attests to the expansion of such a form of politics from ‘the society of consumers’ – a kind of society that interpolates its members primarily in their capacity as consumers (Bauman 2007: 52) – onto rural societies in the postcolonial Global South. The introduction of community tourism in Canhane, where tourists’ consumption is celebrated for having a higher moral purpose, serves to facilitate this expansion of consumer politics. Although it is the ethical umbrella that shelters this activity, community tourism is also an enabling tool of modern globalization. As a consumer intending to do good, the ethical tourist is a vehicle for the international expansion and moralization of products as disparate as holidays, coffee, air flights, pharmaceuticals, handicrafts and even soft drinks like, as we see later, Coca-Cola. Through community tourism, these products are ideologically transformed from destructive capitalist choices to benign moral choices.

Consuming for Good In an article entitled ‘The Non-Governmental Order’ in the news magazine The Economist (1999), the outcome of the Earth Summit in 1992, which led to contemporary calls for the incorporation of global principles of ethics into the tourism sector, is described as ‘the beginning of a series of victories by NGOs’. The tourism project in Canhane is part of these victories. Nonetheless, we should bear in mind that what makes tourism in Canhane, and all other ethical forms of tourism2 in the postcolonial Global South, a field of moral agency is undoubtedly tourists’ consumption. In concrete terms, the revenues generated through consumption in the Covane Community Lodge are what make the tourists’ presence at the village intimately bound to community development, and thus morally worthy. In such a view, tourism in Canhane not only is said to help those most in need, but also allows tourists to become better individuals. It gives them a role informed by virtue – the responsibility of improving the lives of others while spending on holidays to redress economic inequalities. I must clarify, though, that some tourists staying at Canhane do not fit this model: some explained, ‘We came by accident. It was late and the kids needed a bed to sleep in, so I turned when I saw the sign [pointing at the direction of the lodge] on the road.’ This family,

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for instance, was from South Africa and had no interest in Canhane beyond ‘a bed to sleep in’. Nonetheless, they represent a minority. Most of the tourists I met at the village, particularly the North Americans and Europeans, had chosen to spend their holidays at the Covane Lodge as a way to engage in a conception of ethical duty leading towards idealized community development. Take the following example. It was one of the hottest days I experienced in Mozambique. ‘Today burns,’ said an elder of Canhane. A Mozambican from the city of Maputo passed by the village that day. He worked for the Limpopo National Park in the Conservation Department. He met me together with two residents, in the shade of the biggest tree in Canhane. At one point he said, ‘Today is impossible, and it is catastrophic not having anything cold to drink close by.’ He had arrived by car, so I informed him about the Covane Community Lodge, which was seven kilometres from there. ‘I know about that,’ he said, ‘but it’s immoral the prices they charge in the lodge. I can’t accept that they charge in a one-star place the same for a beer as in a chic restaurant in Maputo.’ Despite his complaints, we ended up going to the lodge where we met a tourist who was in the restaurant drinking a Coca-Cola. The subject of drink prices came up, once again initiated by the Mozambican, who returned to the expression ‘immoral’ to classify them. However, this time he encountered a counterargument: ‘Immoral?’ the tourist exclaimed, raising his eyebrows at him, ‘To the contrary! I don’t mind paying more if that money is for community development. Immoral is to pay this price in a restaurant in Maputo, but here it is moral.’ Just after he said this, he grabbed the Coca-Cola, put the bottle to his mouth, closed his eyes and swallowed the rest of the liquid. He ingested more than just the liquid: he filled himself up with morality. ‘Sign value’ is an important component of commodities produced in the postmodern economy. It provides consumers with symbolic resources they can use to construct, change and reinforce identitarian issues, as projects for their selves. In this view, ‘what is being sold [and consumed] is not just the direct use of a commodity, but its symbolic significance as a particular ingredient of a cohesive lifestyle’ (Watson and Kopachevsky 1994: 656). This is why, under the effects of the politics of developmental benevolence that animates the constitution of knowledge in and about Africa (Mbembe 2001; Ferguson  2006), a globally ubiquitous product like Coca-Cola – often acknowledged for its imperialist attributes (e.g. Cultural Anthropology 2007, vol. 22, n. 4) – is loaded with the character of a

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moral commodity at the lodge in Canhane: as the tourist said, here it ‘is for community development’. The Coca-Cola episode informs the new face of tourism in the postcolonial Global South. It says much about how particular niches embedded in a global industry such as tourism can gain the aura of non-capitalocentricism (Gibson-Graham 2006). In particular, the idea of community-based tourism is accompanied by moralistic assertions that attest to the replacement of a language of fun, relaxation and hedonism with a language of virtue and moral duty. This language transition in tourism informs the specificity of a market. A market in which the ethical prefix community allows the tourism industry to improve its own image. A market whose products are not just any kind, but specifically moral ones. A market that integrates the ‘problems of the South’ (Escobar 1984) as the attractive product that needs to be resolved through tourists’ consumption and aid. A market directed at the cultivation of consumer-selves. A market that treats tourists’ self-cultivation itself as a site of accumulation (Harvey 2000). A market that, ultimately, rests on a politics of righteousness and solutions based in consumption. Along with many other consumption practices at the Covane Community Lodge, the Coca-Cola episode epitomizes an expression of care, guidance and responsibility. This tourist represents the new moral agents attending Canhane who seek self-affirmation in the consumption-for-local-development practices through which they constitute themselves in moral terms. He used his purchasing power to manifest virtue within an idealized conception of how to act for the good of the local society. Canhane is, indeed, a site stimulated by an ideal and by the reproduction of the ethics of that ideal: community-based tourism is not just about purchasing during vacations, but also about the consumption of the ideal that supports and animates these acts of consumption. Through this process, which can be described as the consumption of ethics promoted by the ethics of consumption, the tourist-purchaser not only acquires and fortifies her/his moral self but also engages in a developmental role in the society where she/he stays. For example, in addition to conscious spending at the Covane Community Lodge, tourists often make donations in a box at the reception. As I witnessed many times, just before or during the placement of money in the box, the tourist-donors stated where that money should be applied: ‘this is for the water supply’; ‘for the school’; ‘for you to buy T-shirts for the football team’, among many other examples. Similarly, in the guestbook, tourists recorded their opinions about the lodge, the

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village, the residents and, most importantly, about what should be done for the good of the local population. In Canhane, the tourists are more than simply tourists. The air of virtue that hangs over them stimulates in them a guiding role over the local and its people. ‘You must save money to buy solar panels because they allow you to have energy, and then you can fish more, have milk for the children and meat for the adults because you can have a fridge to conserve the aliments,’ an Italian tourist who was working in Maputo told a group of women at Canhane. They were pilling corn when he arrived. The women smiled at him. At the end of the encounter, he said in a friendly but also didactic tone, ‘I hope you have taken me seriously and memorized what I said, because this is for your own good. I’ll come here next year to see you again,’ and he winked at them. What role does the village population play in empowering tourists?

‘Go and Gain More from Our Village’ When tourists arrive at the reception desk of the Covane Community Lodge, they inevitably encounter two phrases that are prominently posted on the wall closest to the balcony: Your presence contributes to the improvement of the livelihoods of the population of the village of Canhane. Kanimambo a lot!

‘Kanimambo’ means ‘thanks’ in Shangane, the language spoken in the region. The greeting is posted with thumbtacks over a mat of straw on the wall. Its modest outward aspect is coherent with its content. The asymmetries between ‘hosts and guests’ (Smith 1989), between Africa and the rest, are announced. Implicitly, the village is presented as the embodiment of necessity, while tourists are endorsed as leading agents of improvement. Who, it seems reasonable to inquire, are the authors of this welcome? Answering this is not as easy as it might sound. I questioned the residents, the manager and sub-manager of the lodge, and the staff of the Helvetas and Lupa NGOs about the message’s authorship. There was no agreement. In the first place, the NGOs’ staff decentralized the authorship. The head of Lupa said, ‘We and the community have decided on that.’ However, the Canhaners mentioned the community leader or the general population of the village as the authors

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of the text. After all, one of the virtues of the tourism enterprise is that, on paper, it is community-based, which means it is managed, controlled and produced by the members of ‘the community’. As various scholars have pointed out, the ethical force of this structure is that it alludes to the spirit of self-mobilization and democracy (Blackstock 2005; Fletcher 2014: 149). But despite the Canhaners’ assertion, evidence gathered during my fieldwork indicates that the residents’ answers were instead a rhetorical performance supporting and justifying the community-based ideology and, therefore, the virtuous aura of the tourism project. Put simply, Canhaners did not write or idealize this or any other text in the lodge, instead they authorized them. Just like the entire tourism project, they participated in the process by approving what they were told by Helvetas and Lupa, not by creating what was to be shown or done. Yet when they claimed for themselves, or for the figure of the community leader, the authorship of the text, they were participating in the reproduction of a reality that verifies the tourists’ presence, spending and moral agency. In other words, Canhaners authenticate the community-based character of the project by performing stakeholderness in the same way they embody simplicity, commitment, purity and need. Subordination here works not through domination but by consent. Take the following text, also displayed at the reception and in the booklets placed in the chalets, as another example: The women wake up at 5:00 a.m. and goes to fetch water in an bore hole. After that she goes to the field. At 10:00 a.m. she comes back home carrying firewood for cooking and to clean the house. In the afternoon, if is rain season she goes back to the field to remove the grass. The husband and the children wake up at 6:00 a.m. The man normally goes to the field to help the wife or he can go to carry firewood, fishing and house maintenance. In the afternoon the man can repair some small things in the house and visit friends. The children go to school from 7:30 – 12:00. In the afternoon they help the parents with domestic jobs. The man takes the family decisions. But first, consulting the wife particularly related with the marriage of the kids, school education and allocation of land. Go and gain more from our village. Stay well.

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This text fosters the idea that the everyday life of the village is part of what is offered to tourists. It reproduces a harmonized image of the social structure of Canhane. The inhabitants are organized into a vision of homogeneity, self-contained in an expected unit for the tourists and, therefore, tractable. The stereotyping of the village and its members reinforces the visitors’ imagined sense of the economic asymmetry between them and the residents, which consequently validates the tourists’ aspirations in assisting, supervising and guiding the local population. However, perhaps more importantly this text shows the central role of the interrelationship between the tourists and the residents in the tourism program: ‘Go and gain more from our village.’ Among other things, the text indicates the importance the residents’ conduct has in the tourism experience. To that end, the actions of the residents of Canhane are essential in informing, if not confirming, the tourists’ role in community development. To demonstrate this better, let me go back to September 2006 and relate the story of the water supply endeavour in Canhane. As I described in more detail in Chapter 4, about two years after Covane Community Lodge opened to tourists, Canhaners started digging a long ditch and burying flexible plastic pipes to be used to provide water for the village. The construction materials were manifestly exposed throughout what might be called the ‘community front’ of Canhane, as if they were part of the tourist experience itself. The lodge’s truck, which is used to transfer tourists, was also often busy transporting the Canhaners or the equipment related to the water-supply work. Thus, whenever the tourists requested to use the truck, they were included in the process of community development by experiencing and testifying to the work operation. In fact, the tourists could not have experienced the lodge and Canhane without supervising the residents’ efforts. It was a museumization of work; a community ‘work display’ (MacCannell 1999: 36). The costs of the water-supply initiative were covered by the profits from the lodge. The money generated through tourists’ consumption in the lodge was then used by the residents towards their social betterment. The tourists could see and experience for themselves the commitment of the Canhaners – which was powerfully aestheticized – to the proper allocation of that money, and in turn justify their own contribution. Hence, Canhane was constituted as a comprehensive dramatic landscape in which the duty to reduce local poverty and improve social conditions was implicitly transferred from the traditional mechanisms of governance, such as the state,

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to a special consumer and non-governmental category: the ethical tourist. ‘Tourism is good,’ the community leader told me as he led me to a pile of black tubes for the water supply exposed across his hut. This comment flowed from our previous conversational topic; I had asked him about the water-supply efforts without approaching the issue of tourism. It was his initiative to link both subjects. While I was looking at the tubes, another man who accompanied us commented in a mild manner, ‘We want tourists to see us because they help us and advise us what to do: they are good.’ Canhaners were much more than just the subject of a tourist gaze (Urry 2002). They participated in the reproduction of a reality that both attests to and calls for the determinant role of tourists in transforming, directing and monitoring the local society. In this Mozambican village, as the resident with whom I started this book revealed,3 the process of auditing the locale and its population is assigned not to government ministries, experts or state agents of any sort, but to the domain of a niche market activity, specifically to the ethical tourist-consumers. They are represented by the Canhaners through the rationalities, activities, duties and responsibilities commonly attributed to those determining the appropriate ‘conduct of conduct’, to use Foucault’s (2008) other definition of the art of governing. Fundamentally, the residents’ representation of tourists shows how the implementation of community tourism in Canhane introduced the local population to new models of leadership run by external agents and by a set of ethics coming from elsewhere. To return to the water-supply endeavour, the Canhaners’ commitment and the accompaniment of their work were at the heart of what was being sold: it was a commodified simulation of authenticity in which not only was tourists’ consumption moralized but the processes of auditing and participating in developing the local/locals were implicitly commodified as well. Among other aspects, this is evidenced by the fact that the application of tourism revenues to the improvement of the local population was announced as a product at the lodge’s reception. [Tourism revenues] Used for: • Construction of one conventional schoolroom in the village of Canhane • Construction of a water supply system in the village of Canhane (ongoing)

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• Acquisition of improved beehives for twelve villagers • Creation of a savings fund for the Covane Lodge This text was positioned alongside the other tourist products offered at the lodge.4 Its explicit alignment within the recognizable tourist offerings confirms tourist consumption as developmental, purposeful and influential. This consumption model and its endorsement by the tourists seem to be in direct contradiction with exclusionary visions of tourism as ‘conspicuous consumption in front of the deprived’ (Crick  1989: 317), or with consumers as merely the embodiment of ‘personal entitlement [rather] than a commitment to society’s collective well-being’ (Cohen 2003: 387). On the contrary, in Canhane, social virtue and the legitimacy to mentor local development are acquired precisely through consumption. Consumerist behaviour is the paramount marker of ‘regard’, which subsequently qualifies the tourists to perform rulership. Community tourism is, therefore, wrapped in the idea that is for more than simple enjoyment, relaxation and entertainment. It is the field of ethical responsibility where those who have more oversee and care for those who have less.

The Non-Governmentalization of Governance The performances of community-based entrepreneurialism and community development by the Canhaners do more than just enact moral subjects for the tourists: they authenticate tourists’ virtue by making their option of consuming vacations in Canhane an attribute of good governance in the Global South. Tourists are provided with a local reality capable of being improved by consumption and therefore governable by them as the consumers:5 ‘We are in your hands,’ one schoolteacher said to a couple of tourists when showing them a classroom. Shortly after this comment, a local resident brought up what is repeatedly addressed at this place and moment in the tourist walking itinerary. He pointed to a canhoeiro (marula tree) and revealed to the tourists, ‘Children used to go there for classes.’ He allowed them a few seconds to imagine that situation. Then he concluded by pointing to the sign inscribed at the entrance of another classroom behind them, ‘but now we have this’. As I mentioned in Chapter 5, the sign says in Portuguese, ‘Primary School of Canhane. Enlargement of the classroom. Contribution of the Covane Lodge and of the community. 2005’. The signage re-emphasizes the causal

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relationship between community tourism and community development. By being shown the sign, the visitors were presented with development in Canhane, a development that was confirmed to them as explicitly bound with their ethical spending at the Covane Community Lodge. More importantly, I think, the construction of the classroom with the revenues from the lodge was in line with tourists’ wishes. ‘As you have been telling us,’ the resident said looking at them, ‘the education of our children is a priority.’ His comment, however, could have not been in more contradiction with what a teacher told me on another occasion: ‘The worst battle I have every morning is to bring the children to school, because their parents want them to help at home instead, grazing cattle, or in farming.’ The construction of the classroom was, indeed, more in line with visitors’ ethics than with residents’ aspirations. Although they share it as a value in the presence of tourists, Canhaners relegate such materialization of ‘community development’ to a minor matter through their daily practices. One could say that the presentation of moral everyday life to the tourists in Canhane is part of the emergence of transnational forms of governing resulting from the increasing role of consumers who are self-conscious about their responsibilities for social improvement. The consumption of fair-trade products, ethical banking and holidays in community-based schemes are examples of explicit choices based on consumers’ considerations of justice and ethics. However, these choices reflect a latent normative context that (in) forms subjectivities. More directly, at the same time as tourists participate in non-governmental governance in Canhane, they are also governed by a broader politics of subject-formation, which induces their self-aspirations. What I am implying here is this: the governing tourist-consumer is a subject of governmentality (Dean 1999; Foucault 2007; Baptista forthcoming). As manifested by many tourists in various ways, their desire to ‘help the community’ is related to a final subject: their selves. What this means is that consumption by tourists in Canhane is emotionally linked with a sense of ethics and possibility, in particular for local development, but also for self-realization. This, Nikolas Rose argued, is emblematic of the era of advanced neo-liberal governmentality in which ‘governing through society’ has shifted ‘to governing through individuals’ capacities for self-realization’ (Barnett et al. 2008: 626). Zygmunt Bauman says, ‘The secret of every durable social [governing] system … is making individuals wish to do what is needed to

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enable the system to reproduce itself’ (2007: 68). If we agree with these arguments and add to them Colin Campbell’s idea that ‘individuals consume principally out of a desire to engage in creative acts of self-expression’ (2005: 24), we then arrive at an unavoidable conclusion: governance can be exercised through the circulation of incentive structures inducing consumers’ self-aspirations. The ethic of community-based tourism in Canhane is a product of such structures. The exercise of foreign governance over the village is cloaked in moral sensitization towards the needy population and tourists’ self-realization. In Canhane, tourists can expand the moral significance of their lives by consuming ‘for good’ while the act of governing the Other dissolves into the activity of community tourism. In the name of ethics, local empowerment, development and poverty eradication, tourism can become a powerful locus of postcolonial governmentality (Kalpagam 2000; Lacey and Ilcan 2015).6 With the concept of governmentality, Foucault (2008) emphasized the ways in which subjects could be made to internalize governance through self-regulation. He stressed, for example, the technologies of the self, leading ‘individuals to effect, by their own means, a certain number of operations on their own bodies, on their souls, on their selves’ (Foucault 1993: 203). Accordingly, one of the main points of this book is to show that the moral duties exercised by the tourists in Canhane, which lead to the cultivation of their moral selves, occur under the auspices of a neo-liberal regime masked by a set of ethics. As such, neo-liberal governmentality in the Mozambican village involves a process whereby the tourists co-exercise governance over the local Other while they are themselves under a subtle regime that influences their own conduct. The ethical tourists are both agents of and subjected to a governing order. Contrary to what neo-liberal economists claim, Foucault (2008) explained, neo-liberalism should not be identified with laissez-faire but, rather, with vigilance and intervention. It involves systematic forms of control exercised over and by individuals mostly through inducement. ‘Neo-liberal’ governmentality authorizes external incentive structures – that is, structures beyond the state, beyond the ‘general apparatus (dispositif) of governmentality’ (Foucault  2008: 70) – to motivate desires and, by extension, manipulate the conduct of self-interested individuals through incentives and ideals. In this view, conventional forms of governance have been replaced by stimulation (Bourdieu 1990) and ‘sensibilization’. Robert Fletcher exemplifies this when stating that, within a neo-liberal governing framework, non-governmental ‘conservationists would simply endeavour

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to provide incentives sufficient to motivate individuals to choose to behave in conservation-friendly ways’ (2010: 176). Jim Igoe also signals that, ‘without resort to authority or compulsion’, the success of non-governmental conservation campaigns ‘depends on their seductive allure … without the inconvenience of long-term commitment’ (2010: 384). They inspire passion and induce ethical agency mostly in Western consumers concerned about environmental problems. The outcome is the emergence of a moral ‘we’ composed of consumers who consequently become participants in regulating societies. Here, ethical conduct is not just a question of submissiveness to a moral code but of a strategic relation to the self in the name of a eudæmonics of existence. Following this perspective, the structure of feeling of the tourism project in Canhane is driven by a set of moral incentives as well as by tourists’ self-aspirations. What this means is that the local community tourism is not unilateral. Rather, it is a meaningful setting that tourists consume but that they also help to produce. More than just consuming the products of others’ labour, these ethical tourists commonly value their presence and spending in terms of productivity – the production of local development. The village of Canhane thus exemplifies a broader modern paradigm by showing the way in which, as Don Tapscott and Anthony Williams observe, ‘the gap between producers and consumers is blurring’ (2006: 125). Tourist-consumers are considered here as active participants in the production of what they consume – a process commonly called ‘prosumption’ (Humphreys and Grayson 2008). Along these lines, consumption of meaningful tourism experiences in Canhane requires tourists’ endeavours. Curiously, this resonates with the direct linguistic relation between ‘traveller’ and the French word travailleur, which means worker. The tourists of community tourism travail to the social setting that they visit. As such, the tourism ‘prosumers’ in Canhane do more than collect: they provide in accordance with a moral framework – ‘They help us,’ to use a common Canhaners’ expression – and, subsequently, they lead. Ethical prosumption in Canhane entails the tourists to draw on the universal in detriment to particular cultural forms and ideals for what constitutes a good society. Ethical tourists’ agency fits into a delocalized model of ethics and an empowering process that nevertheless makes the promotion of a politics of local potentialities its main attribute. Indeed, community-based tourism is generally presented as providing a range of new possibilities for solving ‘the problems’ that other ways of governance have not solved. It represents

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a new belief, a new beginning, a new hope, a new approach for a future better than the present and the past. After several months in Canhane, I was often told by the residents of their disregard for the postcolonial Mozambican government. In an informal gathering an elder said, ‘We were promised a lot with the independence of the country but nothing happened.’ He was immediately corrected by another, ‘No, no, no, let’s speak the truth, and the truth is that we won freedom from the big noses [the Portuguese]. This was good. The problem is we continued to be poor and with more diseases.’ In the heart of the discussion, a new subject emerged as if it was part of the same sequence. ‘Well, we have the tourists now,’ the driver of the lodge’s truck said, ‘and they can be our way out of the hole we are in.’ Viewed from a wider perspective, the opening of African villages to international consumers under the aegis of community tourism, as in Canhane, represents a novelty: a new solution to African predicaments. This is the corollary to the pressing necessity to replace what is not new anymore and the hostility of repetition; a necessity which as many scholars have indicated can be seen as a prevalent characteristic of the consumerist era in most of the North-Atlantic societies (e.g. Bell 1978; Campbell 1987; Bauman 2000; Trentmann 2012). The morality implicit in the local community-based enterprise is a trump in a continually expanding market society. Canhaners, on the other hand, take this as an opportunity to position themselves within a global sociocultural order that values them due to their perceived need for guidance from others, the ethical tourists. Through this process, the residents of the village hope for revenues, access to development, and a connection to modern society. Nevertheless, the virtue inducing tourist agency in Canhane cannot be interpreted apart from the broader productive forces that generate it. What I have in mind here is one of Foucault’s (2008) most sound ideas: power and governance are exercised not only through the restriction of actions but also positively by inducing actions; that is to say, not through inhibition but through enabling. What are the guiding forces informing the ethics of consumption in Canhane, and thus inducing tourists’ agency?

On Ethical Duties Systems of consumption inevitably generate questions about how society should be, as they are an essential component of

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social practices and of relationships between selves and others. Consumption ‘always and inevitably raises issues of fairness, self vs. group interests’ (Wilk 2001: 246) and is therefore an inherently moral matter (Barnett et al. 2005: 26). At present, as global critiques of the disparities between ‘Northern’ abundance and ‘Southern’ scarcity have become entrenched in popular discourse, consumers are thrown into the core of ethical and unethical processes. Doing good or simply not caring for the Other came to be informed by consumption choices. Hence, the question of the moment has become this: ‘how you as a consumer can show that you care?’ (Brinkmann 2004: 130). The Other that emerges from these developments is both the object and subject of an ethics of consumption. Just as Max Weber  (2005) credited the advent of ‘the Spirit of Capitalism’ to an underlying moral system – ‘The Protestant Ethic’ – so could the spirit of consumption in the emergent non-governmental governing order in the Global South be credited to a particular ethic: this ethic is informed by a myriad of policies, ideologies, campaigns and personal experiences that enlist the ethical tourists in practices of good governance. Here I draw on anthropologists such as Joel Robbins (2004), Michael Lambek (2010), Didier Fassin (2011), James Faubion (2011) and Jarrett Zigon (2014), who argue that ethics ‘can never be consider as a total and unified concept but rather can be found in the social world[s we study] in the various … institutional and public discourses, as well as embodied moralities’ (Zigon 2014: 18). Yet, as David Fennell warns pragmatically, whether in a totalizing, contextual or territorialized dimension, ‘ethics too can be wrong in its support of ideologies and utopias that have more to do with the agendas of a few’ (Mowforth and Munt 2009: 87). Jacques Ellul also suggested that what constitutes a notion of right and wrong – the recurrent anthropological ‘analytic question of what counts as morality and ethics’ (Zigon 2014: 17) – always emerges ‘in the interest of a few’. These interests, Ellul argues, are what ultimately ‘provide the individual with a clear vision of moral duty’ (1969: 121). So the question that still requires an answer is: who are the ‘few’ ascribing the ethical meanings to tourists’ consumption in Canhane? This is where the industry of development, once again, enters the field as the point of reference. As part of the vision of empowerment that hovers over community-based organizations in the Global South, the management of the entire tourism business in Canhane was formally attributed to the Canhaners by the NGO Helvetas. On paper, the management of

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tourism was assigned to a committee of ten representatives elected by the residents in 2002 (see Chapter 1). However, this was impractical. Just to offer a brief example, at the end of January 2008, I attended a meeting held in Canhane for its residents. Several subjects concerning the village were discussed. When the topic of the lodge came up, its executive manager, who is neither from Canhane nor a resident, took the lead. He presented the lodge’s expenses and incomes to the audience. At the end, I asked a nearby teacher why the president, or any other member, of the Social Management Committee was not presenting the financial report to the population, as the official statutes of the community-based business required. He said, ‘How can they, if they don’t know how to read the numbers?’ Indeed, how can the committee be responsible for the management, planning and financial administration of the lodge if its members do not have skills in basic math, do not have access to computers, Internet or newspapers, do not know the principles of international currency and are inexperienced in commercial business activities? After spending several months in Canhane, the answer became quite evident: by resorting to, being dependent on and living under the rule of external providers. During my presence in the village, as the community tourism project diminished the illusion from which it gains empowering and moral significance, I came to understand the terms of its own impossibility – the impossibility of being a full endeavour and outcome of local residents’ priorities, skills and projects of emancipation. On one occasion, I raised the issue of the lack of skills on the part of the Canhaners who constitute the committee to a member of the NGO staff that implemented the tourism project. ‘That’s why we have to develop more training sessions in Canhane. This is the way to empower them,’ he answered. As mentioned before, the training sessions that he referred to, which had become common in the village since the implementation of community tourism, were all sponsored by international organizations donating to the NGOs he worked for, namely Helvetas and Lupa. What this means is that, rather than empowering ‘them’ (the local residents), the community-based tourism in Canhane empowers the NGOs. Pragmatically speaking, at the time of the lodge’s construction, Helvetas’ staff asked Canhaners to list their main priorities for use of the revenues from the lodge. The answers were water supply, a health centre and access to electricity. Yet, when I left the village in December 2008, almost six years after their responses and four years of tourists’ visits to Canhane, none of these priorities had been accomplished.

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Put plainly then, by representing the underdeveloped community, Canhaners are drawn into a system where they become producers and partners in generating funds in and for development. As such, Canhane is integrated into tourism as a neo-liberal economic opportunity for the development sector. In this process, Canhaners emerge as governable subjects by a new ruling order of non-governmental agents. This should not be surprising, but it is the obvious consequence of the increasing role of the aid industry, not only in Canhane, but also in the entire region of Southern Africa. As it infiltrates almost all spheres of social life, the non-governmental development ideology actively contributes to the production of new markets and new delocalized governing arrangements. In these arrangements, individuals from distant geographies – tourists – are induced to engage in meaningful activities, relationships and commitments as ethical consumers. Indeed, ethical tourists participate in a peculiar activity in the sense that the consumers are the ones who travel (travail) to collect and produce the goods. Basically, the emergent non-governmental order taking over Canhane draws on consumption as a realm through which transnational agents can participate in governing projects, and community tourism is the apparatus used for that purpose. However, these regulatory practices are only able to spread successfully throughout the Global South because they are masked by ethics. This is implicit, for example, in the Entrepreneurship Award the residents of Canhane won ‘In recognition’, as it is stated on the award, ‘of outstanding entrepreneurial spirit’. The prize aimed at ‘Making Markets Work for the Poor’ and it was organized by the international development organization Voluntary Service Overseas (VSO) in October 2010 in Blantyre, Malawi. The use of the market, a set of ethics and the tourist-consumers for making a better world and ‘changing lives’, as described in the award’s slogan, reflect the NGO’s ultimate goal: ‘Participation and Governance (P&G) in Africa, Asia, the Pacific, Latin America and the Caribbean’ (emphasis added).7 Overall, what seems obvious in Canhane is that behind the labyrinthine practices carried out at the local level, the residents have become subjugated allies of the non-governmental development rationale. How? By performing a governable and consumable reality in which non-governmental institutions and ethical tourists can exercise ruling authority. The involvement of development in tourism is to a certain degree a response to both a global humanitarian order and the existing consumer expectations. But let us not forget that, to be effective, this

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involvement depends on the protagonists of the encounters at the local level: the hosts and guests. Their actions exhibit a strong commitment to the developmentalization of tourism – developmentourism – and foster the means by which tourism becomes a moralizing tool of consumption and the tourist a participative agent of globalizing non-governmental governance. As I mentioned above, by also being co-producers of ‘community development in the Third World’, tourists are an operational resource for non-governmental development institutions. As part of this process, and with the hope of benefiting from the commoditization of ‘local regimes of life’, Canhaners capitalize on the potentialities brought by the globalization of an ethics as a way of being included in the network of global existence. For the local inhabitants, community tourism is a way of gaining access to and becoming represented in the global by being an expression of the Global South: that is, in need, moral, seeking development and thus governable by non-governmental agents. Canhaners are orientalized (Said 1978) and self-orientalize themselves in tourism. Bauman notes that the most salient causal factor in the neo-liberal revolution in governmental activity was the ‘“subsidiarizing” or “contracting out” more and more of the functions previously politically directed and administered [by state governments] in favor of explicitly non-political market forces’ (2007: 144). In Canhane, these new governing forces are non-governmental institutions, their professional employees and transnational tourist-consumers. In this framework, consuming (while on) holidays and embodying virtue are not contradictory because consumption means providing benevolent assistance. As Neil Lawson says, ‘as there is nothing else to fall back on, it is likely that people then give up on the whole notion of … a democratic society and fall back on the market as the arbiter of provision’ (2000: 18). However, more than the market itself, the increasing non-governmental governing order in Canhane is based, to quote Frank Furedi, ‘on the premise that unelected individuals who possess a lofty moral purpose have a greater right to act on the public’s behalf than politicians elected’ (Bauman 2007: 146). That said, the ethics and moral purpose that legitimize unelected NGO leaders and the ethical tourists participating in the governance of Canhane are ultimately ordered by the rationalities of the development sector, which campaigns around issues of community well-being in the Global South. Such an ethics provides the incentives and validity for the tourists to perform co-governance through consumption. This is an ethics that gains its force not only from individuals’ commitment to it but also, as I discussed before, from its

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public dimension. It is an ethics from the outside-in that connects with the being-for-others from the inside out. Whether propagating humanitarian justification for consumption in deprived societies, or by self-representing the problem solving in these same societies, development here operates as a technique of recolonizing historically subjugated people by inducing the ethical aspirations in tourist-consumers’ selves.

Conclusion Let me start this final section with a clarification of purpose: it was not my intention to generalize the accounts presented here to all NGOs and to all tourists visiting community-based enterprises. Any effort to provide reliable conclusions about these subjects must be careful in view of the heterogeneity of the development sector, its non-governmental institutions and the nature of ethical tourists. Yet tourism in Canhane does provide evidence about the way the advent of new ethical models of consumption draws in broader development forces that help to constitute what it is to be moral, as well as how the Global South is used in this process. NGOs and ethical tourists, which belong to a sector that obtains legitimacy by performing selflessness, are at the vanguard of this movement. However, this book demonstrates that the consumption practices derived from and in line with such an ideology of selflessness represent instead one of the key sites of moral self-formation in the contemporary era of neo-liberal governmentality. Canhane exemplifies how the institutionalization of being ‘in need’ can work as a lever for the appropriation of populations and public subjects by translocal agents. The ethical paradigm inherent in community-based arrangements, in contexts of scarcity, allows development and tourism industries to marry with each other and, empowered in this union, to legitimately appropriate new areas and expand capitalist growth.8 In turn, ethics becomes a vital subject in consumers’ attempts to develop and affirm their meaningful selves, as well as in the process of degovernmentalizing governance. To put it succinctly and conclusively, what I suggest is that African states’ progressive dissociation from governing (Ferguson 1994, 2006; Mbembe 2001) is directly associated with the neo-liberal non-governmentalization of governing public spheres. Tourists play and perform a participating role in governing Canhane. The value they gain from spending holidays in the village

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is more than simply the enjoyment of contributing to local development: they derive personal moral gratification and engage in the role of co-governance. However, as particularly revealed by the results of the water-supply endeavour and Canhaners’ negligence of the classroom built with the lodge revenues, my empirical work exposes the outcomes of the tourists’ governing task as transient and illusory. Most of all, besides being producers and consumers (prosumers), the ethical tourists are also involved in this process as products. They move out of ethical anonymity to become a product of their selfaspirations, ruled by the disciplinary ethics of development. This is in line with the tacit practice of regulation that Bauman called ‘the commoditization of consumers’ (2007: 24).9 Nevertheless, regardless of the illusory character of their agency, while performing guidance and rulership, tourists contribute to the fading agency of institutions democratically elected to govern and help replace them with non-governmental institutions. Understood along these lines, the contemporary emergence of new models of ethical tourism consumption in the Global South seems to replicate the relationships of power exercised in the advancement of colonization rather than actually accomplishing the principled aspirations rhetorically celebrated by their advocates. This time, however, recolonization is disguised as being ethical, most significantly through the intermediary of non-governmental agents. Consumer capitalism is not dead, as the former president of Brazil, Lula da Silva, declared in February 2011 at the World Social Forum held in Dakar. Rather, it can take different faces and masquerade as ethical. While positioned as both the object and subject of a global ethics of responsibility, the Other in the community-based tourism of Canhane is reduced to being at once the instrument of touristconsumers’ self-investments and the subject of non-governmental governance.

Notes  1. ‘Tourists: If You Want To Help Us, Book Your Trip Now’, PR Newswire on behalf of Pacific Asia Travel Association. http://www.prnewswire. co.uk/cgi/news/release?id/137424, accessed 4 November 2011.  2. There is a flourishing body of work that engages in discussions of morality and ethics in tourism (e.g. Butcher 2003; Smith and Duffy

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2003; Macbeth 2005; Fennell 2006; Jamal and Menzel 2009; MacCannell 2011; Caton 2012; Smith 2013).   3. I am referring here to the woman who explained to me why Canhane receives tourists: ‘tourists want to see what we are doing with their money.’   4. That is, a menu of meals and drinks, accommodation and what were listed as ‘tourist products’: ‘local dances’, ‘the stroll in the village’, ‘boat trip’, ‘medicinal plants’ and ‘visits to the Limpopo National Park’.   5. The concept of governance that I imply here resonates with Julia Eckert and colleagues’ (2012: 14-15) idea of governance as a mechanism of provision of development through interaction.   6. Although these authors apply the term governmentality in relation to the hosts, I use it in relation to the tourists.   7. ‘Participation and Governance’, VSO International. http://www.vsointernational.org/what-we-do/participation-and-governance.asp, accessed 8 November 2011.   8. Here I apply the idea of tourism as not merely a capitalist practice but fundamentally a practice that sustains and expands transnational capitalism (Fletcher 2011) in the context of developmentourism.   9. Zygmunt Bauman argues that instead of the separation of the individual from the commodity purchased, the distinguishing feature of the society of consumers is ‘the transformation of consumers into commodities’ (Bauman 2007: 12, italics in the original).

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Index

abundance, 202, 233 agency, 12, 21, 72, 82, 169, 205, 232, 238 creative, 189 interaction 184 ethical/moral 24, 180, 220, 221, 225, 231 of concepts 193 agenda 21, 7 aid, 2, 3, 11, 82, 99, 103, 105, 106, 110, 112, 116, 117, 118n6, 127, 187, 189, 193, 194, 211, 223 agencies, 11, 116 global, 1 industry, 81, 235 money, 68 ancestors, 90–91n3 cult of, 63 animals, 31, 44, 107, 113 anthropology, 17, 19, 20, 26n11, 73, 122, 143, 168, 189 assemblage, 153–54 assimilados, 139 audit, 195, 217, 227. authenticity, 158, 159, 202, 227 existential, 156, 158 performed, 172 staged, 172 Baudrillard, Jean, 5, 25n7 Bauman, Zygmunt, 16, 64, 71, 75, 100, 107, 159, 197, 215, 221, 229–30, 236, 238, 239n9

benevolence, 2, 3, 4, 13–15, 25n4, 30, 76, 82, 105, 116, 148, 155, 160, 168, 169, 178, 179, 183, 184, 205, 222, 236 biodiversity, 12, 30 body, 3, 6, 17, 173, 175 corporeality, 6, 173, 185 borders, 2, 30, 66, 74, 100, 112, 150, 163, 187, 219 borderless, 78. Bourdieu, Pierre, 1, 87, 167, 189, 230 canhu, 59–61, 135, 173 Capitalism, 16, 24, 160, 198, 204, 216, 221, 233, 237, 238, 239n8 care, 82, 168, 169, 179, 213n7, 223 cattle, 33, 41, 64, 196, 207, 208, 229 children, 1, 59, 60, 63, 85, 96–97, 105, 106, 174, 176, 192, 196, 199, 207–8, 213n7, 224, 225, 228, 229 Civil War (Mozambique), 39, 68, 105, 140, 195 civilization, 164 Coca-Cola, 221, 222–3 colonialism, 19, 20, 37, 203 Dutch, 143 French, 138 neo-, 9, 84 nostalgia, 41 Portuguese, 5, 37–41, 55–56n6, 56n9, 98, 123, 138–40, 151n3 commodity, 4, 5, 16, 17, 25n6, 180, 197, 210, 222, 223, 239n9

274  ◆ Index

commodification, 2, 4, 24, 108, 116, 117, 148, 156, 158, 212, 227, 236, 238 consumption, 1–2, 3, 4, 15, 16, 108, 197, 205, 216, 239n9 dispensation, 73 non-commodified goods, 25n6 production, 72, 205 commons, 135, 138, 145, 146, 149 communitas, 159, 174 comparison, 193, 194, 197 conduct, 1, 11, 79, 82, 103, 134, 138, 161, 217, 226, 227, 230, 231 conflict, 13, 23, 60, 88, 107, 108, 121, 123, 129, 134, 148, 149, 150, 219 connectivity, 31, 190; technological 192 consumption, 2, 5, 15, 16, 24, 25n6, 25n7, 108, 156, 172, 180, 198, 200, 201, 202, 211, 215–16, 221, 223, 226, 228, 229, 231, 232–3, 235, 236, 237 commodity (see commodity consumption) conspicuous, 5, 228 ethical, 2, 3, 5, 6, 24, 216, 217, 227, 233, 236, 237, 238 of ethics (see ethics consumption) Millennium Consumption Goals, 215 corporations, 30, 33, 112, 216 corporate aid agency, 82 corporate social responsibility, 112 cosmopolitan, 65, 185 cosmopolitanism, 143 Couto, Mia, 73, 103, 105, 107 creative destruction, 16 culture, 73, 85, 93, 101, 113, 123, 139, 140, 142, 143, 150–1n2, 185n6, 196, 198, 199, 201, 202, 216 commoditization of, 158 counterculture, 168 global, 188 in community tourism, 8, 9, 12 local, 20, 129, 160 dance, 133, 239n4

Dasein, 16 decision-making, 7, 32 dedifferentiation, 100–113, 115, 117, 180 democracy, 70, 85–6, 220, 225 water, 148 dependency, 9, 72, 84, 105, 106, 117, 189, 210, 212, 234 development, 1, 3–13, 15, 17, 21–24, 25n7, 26n11, 33, 34, 38, 39, 41, 42, 46, 47, 53, 54, 56n11, 57n17, 63, 65, 66–68, 70–72, 75, 76, 79, 81, 82, 84, 85, 88–90, 93, 98– 100, 102–18, 118n1, 118–9n7, 121–2, 126, 128, 129, 131, 144, 150, 155, 159, 163, 169, 175, 178, 180–5, 187, 189–91, 193–5, 197, 199–201, 204, 206, 209–12, 212n1, 219, 233, 235–7 and governance, 3, 236 community, 2, 9, 13, 29, 30, 34, 48, 49, 63, 66, 74, 78, 82, 86, 94, 96, 98, 107, 110, 114, 116, 122, 125, 147, 150, 154, 156, 169, 175, 176, 183, 191, 209, 218, 220, 222, 223, 226, 228, 229, 236 de-development, 190 discourse (see discourse development) knowledge, 102, 103 local, 2, 3, 9, 10, 107, 154, 155, 158, 167, 175, 180, 181, 184, 192, 201, 203, 223, 228, 229, 231, 238 Millenium Development Goals, 199 participatory, 122, 145 postdevelopment, 114 sustainable, 8, 219 developmentourism, 12–13, 22, 23, 24, 93, 108, 109, 111, 115, 117, 118n1, 150, 155, 156, 160, 175, 178, 181, 183, 184, 190, 204, 206, 209, 211, 217, 236, 239n8 difference, 168, 185n6, 202, 210 and community, 63,74, 117 and development, 197 between tourists and anthropologists, 21

Index  ◆  275

discourse, 10, 14, 21, 31, 40, 45, 48, 74, 84, 85, 88, 89, 98, 99, 101, 104, 106, 107, 109, 130, 165–6, 167, 169, 175, 192, 194, 199, 200, 215, 233 analysis, 2 colonial, 203 community, 86, 88 development, 8, 11, 63, 70, 71–72, 74, 82, 102–4, 106, 107, 112, 113, 127, 148, 195, 197, 202, 203, 220 on poverty, 197, 202–3 transnational, 210 donation, 4, 105, 106, 108, 115, 131, 170, 182, 200, 201, 207, 223, 234. See also donor. donor, 9, 10, 31, 53, 67, 70, 72, 105 –7, 129, 144, 194, 195 tourists as, 22, 95–97, 99–102, 108– 10, 112, 115, 117, 223 dwelling, 158, 173, 179, 184 ecology, 30, 31, 33, 74, 145 ecologists, 31 ecotourism, 14, 30, 53, 167, 179 education, 85, 116, 139, 168–9, 202, 217, 225, 229 empowerment, 8, 11, 13, 45, 48, 66, 84, 137, 139, 147, 154, 191, 193, 218, 219, 224, 233, 234, 237 community, 23, 45, 53, 67, 78, 82, 117, 176 local, 3, 8, 52, 82, 192, 199, 230 enlightenment, 64, 164, 185n6 Escobar, Arturo, 11, 25n7, 102, 188, 193, 198, 210, 223 ethics, 2–5, 9, 10, 15, 17, 23, 25n7, 33, 76, 79, 114, 139, 159, 161, 162, 169, 179, 199, 205, 211, 216, 217, 219, 221, 222–5, 227–33, 235–8 commodification of, 2 consumption, 2, 3, 5, 6, 24, 110, 118, 211, 216, 217, 223, 229, 232, 233, 235–8 presumption, 23 relations, 162

Tourism, 9, 16, 24, 111, 179, 202, 203, 216, 217, 221, 227, 230–3, 235–8, 238n2 translocal, 2 unethical, 233 ethnicity, 75 ethnography, 21, 23, 31, 55n6, 72, 91n4, 111, 123, 133, 155, 164, 187, 190, 206, 218 ethnographers, 16, 41 sensorial, 6 event, 31, 60, 84, 143, 144, 158, 163 moral, 16 public, 47, 143–4 everyday, 5, 16, 35, 60, 74, 85, 101, 111, 112, 122, 135, 144, 145, 171, 193, 194, 195, 202, 226, 229 exclusion, 102, 129 of festivals, 143 politics of, 182 social, 88 expatriates, 29 expert, 80, 81, 84, 188, 195, 227 development, 47, 66, 67, 68, 70, 71, 85, 86, 87, 99, 110, 111, 116, 131, 147, 194 expertise, 51, 189, 193, 220 face-to-face, 19, 156, 160 fair-trade, 229 Ferguson, James, 11, 25n7, 41, 101, 102, 103, 104, 194, 196–7 festival, 143–4 Foucault, Michel, 47, 101, 145, 149, 150n2, 188, 189, 194, 201, 217, 220, 227, 229, 230, 232. FRELIMO, 38–40, 144, 151n3 future, 30, 31, 33, 43, 46, 47, 74, 207 and infrastructure, 42 common, 217 gaze, 23, 163, 227 embodied, 159 Gemeinschaft, 73 gender, 8, 19, 128, 129, 131, 132, 133, 135, 146, 147, 172

276  ◆ Index

globalization, 3, 42, 54, 74, 75, 103, 189, 193, 203, 212, 216, 217, 220, 221, 236 governance, 3, 6, 24, 31, 38, 139, 140, 188, 193, 195, 217, 226, 227, 230, 231, 232, 239n5 agents of, 3 by numbers, 195 co-, 238 good, 199, 233 non-governmental, 2, 17, 203, 216– 20, 228–30, 233, 235–8 governmentality, 70, 213n7, 229, 230, 237, 239n6 gross national product (GNP), 16, 197 grupos dinamizadores, 140 habitus, 88, 167 handicrafts, 66, 82, 221 Heidegger, Martin, 16, 158–159, 173, 184 Helvetas (NGO), 7, 29, 34, 35, 41, 42, 43, 45, 49, 50, 52, 53, 54, 57n17, 70, 98, 121, 125, 129, 130, 161, 190, 218, 219, 220, 224, 225, 233, 234 historiography, 36, 98, 145, 153, 188, 194 HIV/AIDS, 104, 169, 213n7 hospitality, 4, 8, 161 inhospitality, 75 Hume, David, 14, 122 imaginary, 4, 9, 13, 22, 40, 45, 46, 51, 65, 67, 73, 90, 103, 145, 155, 171, 174–5, 183, 194, 198, 201, 203, 204, 205, 209, 210, 226, 228 of community, 67, 75, 84, 85, 86, 88, 89, 90, 204, 205 of poverty, 189, 204, 205, 206, 209, 210, 211, 212 radical (Castoriadis), 45, 56n12 inclusion, social in local social life, 44 in neoliberalism, 210 in the global market, 90

in wider socio-economic systems, 210 through community, 88 through development discourse, 106, 107 through ethics, 236 through poverty, 190, 212 through touch, 161 through tourism, 211 internet, 52, 234 intimacy, 19, 164, identity, 3, 5, 43, 46, 64, 89, 108, 144, 158, 181, 184, 204, 216, 217, 219, 222 Dutch, 143 ethical, 114 value of, 1 indigenato, 138–139 individualization, 64, 146, 181 infrastructure, 22, 39, 42, 51, 98, 127, 159, 175, 176, 177, 179, 191, 196, 211 water supply, 127, 131, 135, 147, 154, 155 Ingold, Tim, 154, 160 insatiability, 16 interaction, 12, 47, 60, 101, 133, 158– 61, 163, 165, 169, 173–4, 179, 207, 239n5 agency, 184 face-to-face, 156, 160 International Monetary Fund (IMF), 105 intrasubjectivity, 39 Kenya, 9, 162, 196 knowledge, 5, 17 –18, 48, 51, 52, 66–67, 72, 94, 101–4, 107, 141, 158, 159, 168, 171, 178, 179, 188, 194, 201, 203, 206, 207, 212, 234 anthropological, 17, 26n11 bodily, 6, 185n4 colonial, 203 development, 102, 103, 113, 194 production of, 72, 102, 103, 107, 185, 201, 222

Index  ◆  277

sensory, 23, 159, 173, 178, 179, 185, 185n4 technological, 147, 194 transnational, 194 walking, 179, 183, 185 labour, 37, 56n7, 231 emotional, 170 law, 139 Latour, Bruno, 2, 8, 154, 187 law, 75, 76, 78, 129 colonial, 37, 139 land, 35 Mozambican, 55–56n6, 76, 77 Lefebvre, Henri, 145 Lesotho, 102, 196 Levinas, Emmanuel, 162 lifestyle, 117, 181, 217, 222 light, 164 livestock, 196. See also cattle lobolo, 60, 62, 84 Lupa (NGO), 45, 49, 50, 52, 53, 54, 57n17, 66, 68, 70, 80, 84, 86, 130, 131, 160, 161, 220, 224, 225, 234 MacCannel, Dean, 74, 165, 172, 226, 238–9n2 machamba do povo, 39 machanganas, 35, 56n8 Malawi, 40, 195, 235 Maputo, 29, 30, 45, 53, 57n17, 66, 68, 76, 77, 78, 79, 86, 87, 104, 108, 116, 131, 132, 167, 175, 191, 218, 220, 222, 224 market, 4, 15, 16, 32–34, 78, 79, 88, 100, 108, 109, 116–8, 191, 195, 197, 205, 209–12, 216, 217, 223, 227, 232, 235, 236 global, 2, 89, 90, 110, 206 non-market, 209 marketing, 13, 33, 55n1, 78, 88, 200, 211 sensory, 180 Massingir, 18, 34, 68, 123, 140; Dam 38, 113, 123, 150n1, 155

materiality, 2, 65, 154, 155, 160, 191, 198 media, 8, 114 mediatic, 197 medicine, 96 man, 156, 163–70, 175 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, 6, 159 migration, 13, 35, 56n7, 63, 132, 192, 196 modernity, 3, 5, 40, 64, 73, 74, 75, 90, 90n1, 165, 179, 198. See also postmodern monitoring, 1, 11, 33, 50, 217, 220, 227 music, 59, 192 myth, 46, 47, 73, 122, 212 mythological, 143 native, 9, 139 natural resources, 35, 51, 121, 122, 146, 183 community-based natural resource management (CBNRM), 122 privatization of, 148 nature, 77, 88, 123 neo-liberal, 5, 9, 33, 70, 84, 108, 148–9, 204, 210, 229, 230, 235, 236 governmentality, 229, 230, 237 network, 4, 32, 236 analysis, 133 of governance, 31 non-governmental, 189, 190, 199, 200, 201, 203, 204, 206, 208, 209, 210, 218, 221, 227, 235, 237, 238 conservation, 231 expertise, 188, 189, 216, 230 governance, 2, 17, 24, 188, 203, 216, 217, 219–20, 229, 233, 235, 236, 237, 238 market, 210 neo-liberal, 237 state, 104 Non-governmental organization (NGO), 7, 9, 11, 29–32, 34, 41, 43, 45, 50, 52–54, 57n17, 65, 66, 68, 70, 71, 79, 80, 84, 86, 87, 96, 98, 104, 105, 107, 110, 111, 114, 118n6, 125, 129–31, 160,

278  ◆ Index

178–80, 190–2, 194, 195, 199, 201, 207, 208, 211, 213n7, 218, 219–21, 224, 234, 235, 237 professionals/staff , 29, 34, 35, 53, 66, 68, 70, 121, 194, 218, 224, 233, 234, 236. See also nongovernmental nonrepresentational, 24n1, 185, 195 North, 10, 17, 51, 88, 117, 169, 198, 212n1, 233 Atlantic, 5, 14, 15, 16, 51, 64, 72, 73, 159, 184, 202, 207, 211, 216, 232 nostalgia, 39–40, 56n11, 73 colonial, 41 novelty, 35, 162, 219, 232 economy of, 7 Organização da Mulher Moçambicana, 140 orientalism, 210, 236; self- 90, 236 Other, the, 8, 13, 15, 16, 24, 46, 64, 88, 90, 109, 110, 114, 116, 160, 161, 162, 167, 169, 174, 179, 180, 185, 200, 210, 230, 233, 238 dedifferentiated, 100 heterogeneous, 73 homogeneous, 72 internal, 88 local, 230 otherness, 103, 165, 203, 210 parks, 31 Gonarezhou National, 30 Great Limpopo Transfrontier Park (GLTP), 30–34, 91n4, 194 Kruger National, 30 Limpopo National, 29, 30, 34, 141, 222, 239n4 Peace Park, 30 participation, 2, 8, 11, 15, 52, 56n11, 68, 78, 82, 90, 107, 122, 127, 145, 148, 150, 154, 175, 178, 180, 182, 200, 201, 210, 217, 227, 229, 235, 236, 237 Peace Parks Foundation, 33, 218. See also parks performative understanding, 2, 24n1

perspectival sensing, 178, 185n3 place, 74, 91n4, 137, 160 policymaking, 71 polygamy, 132, 135 poverty, 11, 23, 170–4, 180, 181, 182, 187–91, 193–212, 212n1, 212– 3n2, 213n3, 219, 226, 230 postcolonial, 19, 29, 39, 40, 41, 56n11, 78, 100, 114, 123, 126, 140, 141, 160, 195, 198, 199, 203, 204, 221, 223, 230, 232. See also colonialism postmodern, 100, 112, 154, 222 potentiality, 12, 13, 14, 23, 30, 33, 34, 73, 86, 88, 96, 109, 110, 148, 154, 178, 183, 188, 190–1, 192, 201, 204, 208, 209, 210, 212, 231, 236 power, 3, 6, 17, 78, 82, 112, 139, 141, 145–6, 147, 148, 149, 150, 187, 194 colonial, 40 development, 81, 102, 118–9n7, 193 gender, 128, 132, 133 language of, 86, 134 of community, 65, 87–88, 89–90, of discourse, 85, 102, of materiality, 24n1 of the gaze, 23 precarity, 74, 171, 175, 200, 201 privatization, of natural resources 148 of water 137, 147, 148, 149 problematization, 187, 188–90, 193 prosumption, 231 reality, 10, 17, 22, 24n1, 24–25n3, 40, 67, 71, 72, 90, 93, 100, 101, 102, 103, 107, 158, 159, 171, 181, 185n5, 188, 193, 198, 202, 217, 219–20, 225, 227, 228, 235 reflector engagement, 169 reflexivity, 144 RENAMO, 39 representation, 17, 23, 89, 98, 103, 109, 145, 148, 149, 173, 187, 193, 206, 208 of community, 88, 122 of poverty, 190, 193, 198, 210, 212

Index  ◆  279

of space, 137, 172 of tourists, 22, 93, 110, 117, 227 production of, 93 resistance, 98, 140, 145 rite of passage, 171 Said, Edward, 104, 189, 236 self-cultivation, 2, 14, 15, 17, 178, 181, 182, 217, 223 secretário de bairros, 140; See also village secretaries senses, 23, 155, 159 –63, 167, 171, 172, 174, 178–80, 182–4 multisensory, 159, 160, 165, 178, 182 perspectival sensing, 178, 185n3 sensation, 6, 23, 155, 158, 162, 164, 165, 168, 172, 173, 175, 180, 182, 184 sensescape, 180 sensing knowledge, 179, 185n4 sensorial, 6, 21, 24n1, 160, 167, 174, 177, 180, 181, 183, 184, 191, 206 sensory, 2, 23, 34, 155, 159, 164, 171–3, 175, 177, 180, 182, 185 sensory marketing, 180 sexual, 60, 135 silence, 76, 159, 163 slum, 24, 198, 200–203 social order, 43, 44, 112, 133, 146, 149, 183, 204 local, 145 South, 15, 51, 64, 117, 187, 189, 194, 195, 198, 203, 204, 233 Global, 3, 4, 10, 11, 16, 17, 22, 24, 64, 65, 71, 77, 79, 82, 100, 114, 190, 193, 202, 205, 211, 212n1, 217, 221, 223, 228, 233, 235, 236, 237, 238 South Africa, 29, 30, 31, 33, 35, 51, 56n8, 88, 109, 112, 129, 144, 148, 192, 218, 222 space, 2, 22, 144, 149, 173, 187, 193, 197, 201, 202 -making, 208 and community, 66, 161 and consumption, 5

and culture, 123, 150–1n2 and gender, 172 and light, 164 of exception, 37 of poverty, 206–7 production of, 145, public, 137–8, 148 Stakeholder Theory, 210 story, 41, 43, 45–47, 54, 103, 105, 130, 142 subjectivity, 2, 3, 5, 22, 24–25n3, 85, 172, 182, 184, 198, 205, 209, 229 sustainability, 8, 12, 30, 34, 48, 82, 131, 212–3n2, 215–6, 217, 219 global, 7 symbolism, 45, 133, 143, 145, 178, 183, 222 Tanzania, 38, 148 technical, 3, 82, 102, 125, 127, 130, 131, 148, 177, 189, 193, 194, 195, 197 language, 80 rationality, 122, 178, 195 See also technocratic technocratic, 195 development professionals, 72 poverty, 23, 189, 208 television, 59, 192, 193, 206, 209, 211 Third world, 102, 104–5, 107, 116, 195, 199, 236 touch, 161–2, 177, 178, 179, 184. See also senses tradition, 7, 8, 9, 55–56n6, 56n10, 64, 67, 70, 115, 122, 129, 133, 138, 141, 145, 148, 149, 174, 194, 199, 226 local, 44, 139 travellers, 15, 231 truth, 24–25n3, 40, 45, 72, 164, 195, 215, 232 Turner, Victor, 159, 171, 174 underdevelopment, 10, 82, 89, 103, 104, 108, 109, 110, 117, 172, 235 imaginary of, 171

280  ◆ Index

universal, 31, 100, 117, 122, 164, 189, 194, 195, 216, 231 universalization, 11, 193 Urry, John, 100, 113, 154, 155, 163, 227 USAID, 29, 30, 34, 53, 190 value, 4, 7, 23, 24–25n3, 37, 73, 100, 109, 141, 150, 160, 165, 171, 176, 177, 180, 191, 229, 231, 232, 237–8 consumers, 180 cultural, 14 discourse, 85 hierarchies of, 10 identity, 1 moral/ethical, 7, 10, 122, 179, 180, 184 of community, 6, 75, 85, 86–89, 205, 212 of difference, 168 of poverty, 188–90, 202, 205, 208, 210–2 of underdevelopment, 89, 110 self, 14, 47

sign, 5, 222 traditional, 199 village secretaries, 55–56n6, 140, 141 villagization, 38, 39, 78, 123 vision, 159, 162, 164. See also senses walk, 23, 155, 156, 158–60, 178–9, 183, 184, 185 Weber, Max, 75, 122, 128, 233 well-being, 7, 15, 16, 192, 197, 228, 236 community, 8 wilderness, 167 witchcraft, 63, 134 women, 60, 132, 140, 162, 171–3, 199, 225 and water, 123, 125, 128, 132–5, 147, 172 see also gender World Bank, 30, 55n3, 65, 105 on poverty, 188, 195 World Tourism Organization, 11, 84 World Wild Fund (WWF), 30, 55n3 Zimbabwe, 30, 123, 126, 147, 196

EASA Series

Published in Association with the European Association of Social Anthropologists (EASA). Series Editor: Aleksandar Bošković, University of Belgrade Social anthropology in Europe is growing, and the variety of work being done is expanding. This series is intended to present the best of the work produced by members of the EASA, both in monographs and in edited collections. The studies in this series describe societies, processes and institutions around the world and are intended for both scholarly and student readership. 1. LEARNING FIELDS, Vol. 1

9. KNOWING HOW TO KNOW

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Fieldwork and the Ethnographic Present Edited by Narmala Halstead, Eric Hirsch and Judith Okely

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Anthropological Perspectives from Home Edited by László Kürti and Peter Skalník

Current Policies and Practices in European Social Anthropology Education Edited by Dorle Dracklé and Iain R. Edgar

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10. POSTSOCIALIST EUROPE

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13. POWER AND MAGIC IN ITALY Thomas Hauschild

14. POLICY WORLDS Anthropology and Analysis of Contemporary Power Edited by Cris Shore, Susan Wright and Davide Però

15. HEADLINES OF NATION, SUBTEXTS OF CLASS Working Class Populism and the Return of the Repressed in Neoliberal Europe Edited by Don Kalb and Gábor Halmai

16. ENCOUNTERS OF BODY AND SOUL IN CONTEMPORARY RELIGIOUS PRACTICES Anthropological Reflections Edited by Anna Fedele and Ruy Llera Blanes

17. CARING FOR THE ‘HOLY LAND’ Filipina Domestic Workers in Israel Claudia Liebelt

18. ORDINARY LIVES AND GRAND SCHEMES

25. FLEXIBLE CAPITALISM Exchange and Ambiguity at Work Edited by Jens Kjaerulff

26. CONTEMPORARY PAGAN AND NATIVE FAITH MOVEMENTS IN EUROPE

An Anthropology of Everyday Religion Edited by Samuli Schielke and Liza Debevec

Colonialist and Nationalist Impulses Edited by Kathryn Rountree

19. LANDSCAPES BEYOND LAND

Student Participation, Democracy and University Reform in a Global Knowledge Economy Gritt B. Nielsen

Routes, Aesthetics, Narratives Edited by Arnar Árnason, Nicolas Ellison, Jo Vergunst and Andrew Whitehouse

20. CYBERIDENTITIES AT WAR The Moluccan Conflict on the Internet Birgit Bräuchler

21. FAMILY UPHEAVAL Generation, Mobility and Relatedness Among Pakistani Migrants in Denmark Mikkel Rytter

22. PERIPHERAL VISION Politics, Technology and Surveillance Catarina Frois

23. BEING HUMAN, BEING MIGRANT Senses of Self and Well-Being Edited by Anne Sigfrid Grønseth

24. BEING A STATE AND STATES OF BEING IN HIGHLAND GEORGIA Florian Mühlfried

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29. MOVING PLACES Relations, Return and Belonging Edited by Nataša Gregorič Bon and Jaka Repič

30. THE GOOD HOLIDAY Development, Tourism and the Politics of Benevolence in Mozambique João Afonso Baptista