Abstract
She is a respected older Creole woman from Wallaceville, Belize who could sense an answer to what future might be in store for her community, in a place that has gone crazy for cruise ship tourism. She did so through her encounter with numbers, while playing Boledo, the national lottery game. She called this number picking work an act of kampashan. Picking her precious numbers in a local world that has gone crazy for tourism was a powerful force of action that is deeply connected to striving and failing in an out-of-control, super-saturated tourist economy. Today, however, she acknowledges that kampashun, as an effort of embodied attention, while it is still the organizing force of predicting the future, now means living with tourism differently, more intimately and in deadlier earnest than before, and that has now brought her within an inch of her life: threatened, withdrawn, and exhausted. Using an assemblage of participatory short talks I venture into how kampashun may now actualize what it means to cross a threshold of endurance into exhaustion for her. These short talks are an experiment in keeping up with what is going on in this place that has become way too much and not nearly enough. As an exercise in relational thinking, they may help us instantiate an ethics of her dispersal beyond the obvious conclusion of her exhaustion, her sacrifice, and her dying. He takes up her life as an act of unbecoming, an unbearable life that she must now otherwise endure.
Presenters
Kenneth LittleProfessor Emeritus, Anthropology, York University, Canada, Ontario, Canada
Details
Presentation Type
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session
Theme
Changing Dimensions of Contemporary Tourism
KEYWORDS
AFFECTIVE ECONOMY OF TOURISM, GAMBLING, EMBODIMENT, EXHAUTION, SOCIAL MANEUVERABILITY, BELIZE
