The Good Holiday: development, tourism and the politics of benevolence in Mozambique by João Afonso Baptista (review)

The Good Holiday is a good read. Written by Portuguese anthropologist João Afonso Baptista, it is an important contribution to several scholarly fields that are productively brought into one field of analysis: Mozambique studies, tourism, and development studies. This fine-grained, thoughtful ethnography is based on fourteen months of fieldwork he conducted between 2006 and 2008 in the Mozambican village of Canhane and is concerned with community tourism as a form of development – or rather what Baptista creatively calls 'developmentourism', which involves the 'absolute blending of the two domains of activity into each other: development is tourism, and tourism is development' (p. 12). While development strategies based on tourism are very much at the heart of neoliberalism in the so-called 'Third World', the case of Mozambique is a particularly salient one. Baptista shows that the development industry (with a startling 180 international NGOs established between 1984 and 1985) is the 'main ruling force' and 'mechanism of opportunity in Mozambican society' (p. 106). In other words, international economic development strategies (both imagined and real) have to be taken into consideration as a form of non-governmental governance when understanding the real Mozambique of today; they also produce and give rise to specific forms of poverty alleviation and tourism strategies and, as Baptista's ethnographic approach demonstrates, complex power relations between tourists, managers, community leaders and locals.

The Good Holiday can be read on two levels: on the one hand, it is a theoretically sophisticated monograph that contributes much to ongoing debates on the distinction between the anthropologist and the tourist, benevolent tourism, and changing ideas of community and subjectivities. On the other hand, it is a richly nuanced portrait of a dynamic Mozambican village and its complex relationship with community tourism as a potential form of livelihood. It is very much written from the perspective of a self-reflexive white Portuguese anthropologist who makes the case for suggesting 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' (p. 19). In Chapter 5, entitled 'The walk', Baptista invites his readers to join a sensorial stroll around the village of Canhane: I could easily imagine myself on the same path as these well-intentioned tourists as they visit the five ordered 'moments' or spots – the community leader, the medicine man, the shallow well, the school, and finally the water supply system, which, interestingly, the author shows is simultaneously a development failure (little used by the villagers for a variety of reasons outlined in Chapter 4, fittingly entitled 'The enigma of water') and a tourism success story, since it is the tourists' most visited sight. It is through this leisure activity and walking experience that Canhane becomes a tourist site caught up in cultivating a logic of moral participation on the part of its tourists, or what the author refers to as 'walking knowledge' (p. 179). This last point showcases the expanding subfield of infrastructure studies in anthropology (such as recent work by Richard Rottenburg, Antina von Schnitzler and Nikhil Anand), and the way in which technologies – a water system in this case – act as a pivot point for revealing insights into social complexity and notions of private and public goods. Here, ethnography does the hard work to show that development is not always good and tourism always bad; instead, the author is able to show the complexity of their relationality in a specific time and place.

Baptista's book will have widespread appeal to a range of readers with different levels of expertise. Specialists of tourism and development studies will be interested in using it for both research and teaching. If I can offer one criticism, it would have been for the author to include other comparable examples (not...