Introduction to precarity and hope

In this special issue of Tourist Studies, we are excited to bring together four articles that explore case studies from the global south from Cambodia to the Caribbean to South America. All four authors are anthropologists, so it will come as no surprise that each article is based on extensive ethnographic fieldwork, and as a result, each author paints a vivid picture of a local grass-roots scenario. Mediated through the lens of attentive anthropological interlocutors, the reader gets to see these tourist settings from local points of view as people negotiate their way through their complex social milieus in a risky and rapidly changing world. While each case study is unique, all four pieces are brought together under the banner of “precarity and hope,” two concepts that at first glance might seem like unrelated opposites, a sort of Levi-Straussian binary. But throughout the articles, and in this brief Introduction, this special edition of Tourist Studies illustrates the ways in which hope exists within precarity, and precarity within hope. Risk and contingency loom over each unfolding scene, but serendipitous opportunities and possibilities also present themselves to people as they negotiate their circumstances. Here, we very briefly touch on how these two concepts intersect and interact and highlight how each of the authors in this collection engages with them.

Given the state of the contemporary world with its seemingly endless series of crises, the notion of “precarity” is having a moment. The origins of the word can be traced back to Foucault and Bourdieu in their critiques of the increasingly domineering forces of what we now call neoliberal capitalism (see Masquelier, 2018 for a thorough discussion). In this early form, it was an analytical concept that took on a particularly economic hue. Later though, Judith Butler rounded out the concept to extend beyond economics in their 2004 book Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence, and in later works (e.g. Frames of War: When is Life Grievable [2009], Notes Toward a Performative Theory of Assembly [2015], etc.). Han (2018) very succinctly illustrates how this concept has been explored within the discipline of anthropology in particular. She makes a distinction between two types of precarity. One frame of analysis has focused primarily on labor and economics in an increasingly changing world due to globalization, neoliberal capitalism, and the erosion of social welfare. The other frame is ontological. We all naturally experience a form of precariousness since we are inherently social beings. No one survives on their own: we are interdependent economically, socially, and politically. However, this general form of social precariousness does not capture the ways in which contingent vulnerabilities are unfortunately doled out in much larger quantities to some people and some groups, but not to others. The inherent inequality of the contemporary world, in which structural violence and globalized neoliberal economics renders whole populations worth less (or even worthless), requires a much more fully developed understanding of precarity. In other words, this structural violence that renders whole populations worth less and worthless is not the “typical” precariousness that stems from the normal or expected vicissitudes of everyday life. It is an altogether different and far more insidious precariousness. Given that the concept puts a name to structural inequalities that manifest themselves at global scales, precarity has become an apt socio-political concept for our contemporary world. As we see in the contributions to this special edition, precarity is a theoretical lens through which we can more fully understand the daily struggles and negotiations that real people leading precarious lives must make to survive and perhaps even thrive someday in the future.

One of the contributions we hope to make with this collection of essays is to illustrate how precarity and hope are intertwined in many social circumstances. We certainly do not want to take this too far. Clara Han ends her 2018 review of the notions of precariousness and precarity with a sober cautionary statement about the recent call in anthropology to turn towards an analysis of “the good” as a way to avoid a totalizing frame focused on the “suffering subject” (Robbins, 2013). She writes that, “in these dark times, an adequate response is not to simply swap one master concept for another, but rather to pay attention or attune to the textures of vulnerability. . . so that we can see the diverse forms of politics that are already before us” (2018: 341). We take this warning to heart and would never intend to downplay the suffering of the subjects described in the following articles. At the same time, hope does manifest throughout the analyses presented here. The tourism laborers described in the following articles are often desperate and displaced and dismissed, but their labor is not always for mere survival; often, the subjects here are acutely and hopefully attuned to better possible futures. Their struggles do not reflect a totalizing sense of hopelessness in other words. Hope, too, is therefore a key aspect to the social and economic situations of the people whose lives are so richly described. In fact, as Margaret Byrne Swain has pointed out, the very same cosmopolitan conditions that make tourist settings sometimes-risky, sometimes-confusing social spaces also open up new world-making possibilities (2009: 517–9). Following Han’s warning, we do not endorse a simplistic swapping of one frame for another, but instead follow Swain’s approach that is critical of the world’s ongoing inequalities but also hopeful about how we might help create better futures. Fortunately, one of the central strengths of the ethnographic method is to show all the contradictions and complications of life as lived by real people—the “both/and” nature of the human experience. As the reader will see, both precarity and hope are at play.

All of these peoples’ lives occur, of course, in contexts of tourism. Tourist sites are perfect places to examine the relationship between precarity and hope because so much economic and social exploitation and opportunity result from the cash flow and intercultural power dynamics at work. It is often said that tourism is one of the world’s largest industries (Gmelch, 2018: 1). It is a slippery category to be sure, but this claim is true if we include travel in all its various forms from domestic and international vacationing, business travel, educational study abroad trips, and so on. The economic and social (and environmental) impacts are therefore enormous and worth our careful attention. Since so many people are on the move at tourist sites, there is often a sense of contingency and ephemerality to the social scene—depending on one’s positionality and perspective of course. Many tourist locales—and certainly the ones described in this special edition—are also sites of intense intercultural interaction where individuals and groups run up against one another from widely varying cultural and linguistic backgrounds, and different social and economic circumstances. Everyone in scenes like these carries with them their own set of cultural lenses through which their experiences are refracted. Tourist sites are therefore examples par excellence of what Rosaldo called the “busy intersections” of social life (1989: 20) that are often partial and confusing instead of patterned and clear. As a result, power dynamics abound, and tourism geographies are always contested spaces.

Now we turn to our contributors’ articles.

In his “Belonging between Precarity and Hope: Im/migration, tourism, and violence in the Dominican Republic,” Keegan Krause draws the reader into a rich case study at the liminal edge of sea and sand, and at the borders between several cultures: Haitian laborers, Dominican business owners, and international tourists. It is perhaps Krause’s article that most poignantly illustrates the interconnection between the concepts of precarity and hope. Boundaries, borders, and liminal spaces are naturally places of risk, but also opportunity. Here, we find young Haitian men trying to navigate their way through multiple layers of structural violence and discrimination—economic, national, and racial—in order to eke out a living at the margins of the tourism industry. Choices become limited not just from these varying forms of precarity, but also by the multiple ways that beach laborers are surveilled. Krause implicates tourism in this context as a willing partner in what he calls the “immigration industrial complex” that functions to violently dominate whole populations and amplify racisms, xenophobias, and hyper-nationalisms, all of which work against the Haitian laborers he interviews. These are not just economic forms of precarity, but also cultural and political ones. In the face of so much pressure, some are understandably hopeless about their futures. One interlocutor explains that since he cannot do anything to improve his situation all he can do is “cry and scream.” And yet, as Krause documents, most of the time these laborers are in fact driven by feelings of hopefulness—hope that they can better themselves economically in the present, or even one day acquire a marriage visa and a promising new life somewhere else in the future. Throughout it all, Krause is interested in what he calls “the politics of belonging,” which, he argues, help produce both hope and precarity.

Turning now to Celia Tuchman-Rosta’s “The Promise and Precarity of Tourism Development for the Lives of Siem Reap Dancers,” we are confronted with new ways to think about and experience precarity and hope. Tuchman-Rosta examines the implementation of new tourist industry developments in Siem Reap, the “gateway” city to the vast array of structures and sites that make up Angkor Archeological Park, included on the UNESCO World Heritage List in 1993. This has become an important symbol of the Cambodian nation and an important generator of tourist income in the region. Tuchman-Rosta reports that in this region, prior to the COVID pandemic, tourism constituted an impressive 75% of the labor market, and a newly implemented masterplan intends to further increase tourism’s market share. Siem Reap also boasts of a strong intangible heritage dance tradition. Hope and precarity collide at the intersection of these different forms of heritage—the immobile buildings and the fluid dancing. The masterplan lays out six new “priority zones,” which will be sustainably developed to enhance the tourist experience, yet the goal of sustainability also creates challenges for the people currently living in the protected zones of Angkor National park—including some of the dancers. Tasked with taking care of the tangible and intangible heritage of the region, the people living in these villages also pose a problem for the preservation of the archeological site and have been relocated to an area outside the protected zones. For the dancers affected by this relocation, deep feelings of ambiguity have set in. The masterplan requires physical relocation to unfamiliar ground, yet there are plans for new theaters and performance opportunities to further their fortunes. Precarity abounds as the changes brought by the new masterplan upends the dancers’ lives, and yet, threads of hope are woven into these changes as well.

Not only does Tuchman-Rosta topically present the reader with a rich case study in one of the world’s most iconic heritage tourism settings, she does so in a manner that illustrates precarity and hope as well. Tuchman-Rosta’s piece has to be contextualized in an extended “moment” in the discipline of anthropology in which we are questioning older forms of writing and presenting our ethnographic data and the ethnographic stories we collect from the field. Renato Rosaldo, among many others, critiqued objectivist ways of writing as far back as the late 1980s and suggested that we look to novels, memoires, poetry, and other genres of writing for inspiration in order to better and more completely capture the impartialities and complex rhythms of social life as it is truly experienced in the moment. Fast forward to the meetings of the American Anthropological Association in Toronto in 2023, where a call for papers sent out by Susan Frohlick (one of this Journal’s editors) and Laura Meek on the theme of “Storytelling Otherwise” that explored alternative narrative styles, led to a quadruple panel and rooms that spilled out into the hallways. Tuchman-Rosta takes up the call to tell her story “otherwise” in the form of poetry and photography that accompany her more traditional ethnographic descriptions. There is precarity and hope in this very presentation style. Poetry is at least partly defined by what is left unsaid as much as what is written on the page, and photos of course speak volumes with a single glance. It is in the white spaces and in the sometimes-blurred images-in-motion that the precarious and fluid rhythms of a rapidly changing social life are glimpsed. And in the beauty of the phrasing and the composition we also see hope.

Lizz Melville’s article, “Unmixing: Race, space, and ethnicity in the making of a Brazil’s multiethnic capital,” also explores precarity in the cultural tourism landscape. She traces the “rhizomatic ripple effects” that tourism has on community as a generative space to examine the articulation of power, space, hope, and precarity through her ethnographic exploration at the Casa Afro ethnic house, one of 13 at the 11-day multiethnic festival Festa Nacional das Culturas Diversificadas (FENADI) located in Ijuí, Brazil. Melville builds on scholarship on community based ethnic tourism development in Brazil that simultaneously strengthens economic autonomy for rural communities and produces “unchanging authentic ethnic subjectivities.” The small Brazilian city of Ijuí is an ideal locale to analyze these processes further given its rather unusual demographic make-up as a majority white city in Brazil. In Ijuí, 19th century land distribution policies that privileged European migrants to the area relegated already existing Black and Indigenous communities to the margins. This resulted in a racial hierarchy that created the conditions for the precarious experience of the Black community in the FENADI documented by Melville. Melville’s integration of Peircean semiotic theory with the analysis of economic and power disparities provides key insight into the potential precarities of tourism development. The spatial indexing of the Casa Afro, hidden behind the other, more elaborately decorated Casas echoes the marginalization of the Black community in Ijuí. The Casas are also financially independent institutions that rely on voluntary labor. The ethnically European Casas can depend on donations and volunteer work from wealthier local families, but this is not as easy for residents from the Black community, mirroring and, as Melville argues, magnifying “the inequalities inherent in daily life.” The European ethnic groups are more likely to be able to increase cultural programming and support renovations of their Casas, a feedback loop that also increases tourist consumption and dollars during the festival and potentially creating conditions that normalize racial disparity. Regardless, Melville highlights the “de-regimentation” of the tourism project in Casa Afro arguing that the programming provides a challenge to FENADI’s cultural tourism. The organizers of Casa Afro use their cultural programming to build community rather than to draw the tourist dollar with workshops and discussions focused on “racial justice and counter-history,” the only Casa to have such programming. Thus, while spacial-indexing enhances the marginalization of the Ijuí’s Black community, the organizers are able to work towards a space of hope for the community by repurposing the tourism landscape to support community needs.

Joe Quick’s article, “Defending against Out-Migration: Rural Precarity, Tourism, and Hope in Quilotoa, Ecuador” provides another look at the precarious nature of community-based tourism projects. The focus on Indigenous rural community development in Ecuador provides a contrasting ethnographic case study to Melville’s exploration of racial marginalization in a white majority city in Brazil. In Quick’s case, community-based tourism was developed as a potential solution to the precarity of rural Indigenous life in the wake of Ecuador’s 1964 Agrarian Reform Law that sought to dismantle the Hacienda system. Breaking the cycle of debt and labor that resulted from the hacienda system ultimately decreased the level of stability for former Hacienda workers since they received small land grants insufficient for their needs on undesirable and unproductive plots of land—similar, in a way, to the relocation faced by Cambodia’s Angkor zone village residents mentioned in Tuchman-Rosta’s work. In Ecuador, the Indigenous laborers no longer had assistance from landlords and had much smaller land plots to work with leading to increased economic precarity and the trend toward out-migration in search of wage labor to fill financial gaps. In the 1990s, a few of the settlers had bucked this trend towards outmigration and turned instead to the potential income revenue of tourism. Quick examines the formation of indigenous Green Lake Quilotoa Center for Community Tourism (CTC Quilotoa) located within the rim of the Western Cordillera volcano. During Quick’s 2014 to 2015 fieldwork, the association used mingas (compulsory work parties) that were also common in the Haceinda system. In the CTC Quilotoa voluntary association, the compulsory work includes tasks like keeping up trails for tourists and participation gives association members access to the resources created by the minga to earn a profit from tourism. As quick put it, this community-based tourism activity “became a means to escape the precarity of circular labor migration,” and a source of hope for future generations. As we see with other contributions in this issue, the COVID pandemic has had a major impact on the stability of tourism. Quick notes the re-emergence of a trend towards outmigration in search of wage labor and the irony that this work has been less precarious than might have been expected. Despite a decrease in minga participation and that “hope has dwindled” with the realization of the precarity of tourism, should tourists return this hope may yet be rekindled.

This very brief introduction can only allow a glimpse into the complexities of the relationships between precarity and hope. The two notions might often seem at odds, but as the following articles illustrate, they are caught in each other’s orbit. We think there are rich opportunities to explore this relationship theoretically in much more depth in the future, but for our present purposes in the special edition of Tourist Studies, we think it is powerful to analyze the complex binary of precarity and hope ethnographically, in situ, and “from below” as it is experienced on a daily basis by laborers in tourist settings.