On the Nervous Edge of an Impossible Paradise

Affect, Tourism, Belize

Author: Kenneth Little Series: New Directions in Anthropology

On the Nervous Edge of an Impossible Paradise

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Description

There are beastly forces in Belize. Forces that are actively involved in making paradise impossible. On the Nervous Edge of an Impossible Paradise is a collection of seven stories about local lives in the fictional village of Wallaceville. Lives turn rogue in the face of runaway forces that take the form and figure of a Belize beast-time, which can appear as a comic mishap, social ruin, tragic excess, or wild guesses. Inciting the affective politics of life in the region, this fable of emergence evokes the unnerving uncertainties of life in the tourist state of Belize.

Critic Reviews

“Pushes anthropology to new levels, and in doing so argues profoundly for its relevance in an effort to understand the 21st century world as it is (troublingly) unfolding. This work pushes the reader to think in dense and complex ways about the tourism experience and all that it symbolizes.” • Julia Harrison, Trent University

“A pioneering work… ranks alongside such classic texts as Claude Levi-Strauss’s Triste Tropiques, Evans-Pritchard’s The Nuer, Paul Rabinow’s Reflections on Fieldwork in Morroco and Jean-Paul Dumont’s The Headman and I.” • Sally Ann Ness, University of California

About the Author

Kenneth Little is Professor Emeritus and Senior Scholar, Department of Anthropology, York University in Toronto. His research focuses on the analysis of society as spectacle, the critical turn in anthropology to the study of affect, social creativity, experiments in ethnographic writing, and performativity.