Lexington Books
Pages: 202
•
Trim: 6 x 9⅛
978-0-7391-7543-9 • Hardback • October 2013 • $114.00 • (£88.00)
978-1-4985-2525-1 • Paperback • October 2015 • $54.99 • (£42.00)
978-0-7391-7544-6 • eBook • October 2013 • $49.00 • (£38.00)
Akbar Keshodkar is assistant professor of anthropology at Moravian College, in Bethlehem, PA. His research interests include movement of identities in Muslim communities across the western Indian Ocean.
Acknowledgments
1 Introduction: Conceptualizing Movement and Identity in Zanzibar
2 Historical Articulations of Being Zanzibari: Negotiating Religion, Ethnicity, Race and Civilization
3 Movements in Post-Socialist Zanzibar: Identity Politics in the Era of Tourism
4 Moving Through the Tourism Landscape: The Struggle for Work and Pursuit of Prosperity
5 Contesting Models of Modernity: New Landscapes of Consumption, Mobility and Islam
6 Movement of Haya and Heshima: Emerging Discourses of Gender, Dress and Intimacy
7 The Role of Kinship: Movement in Family Relations and Marriage Strategies
8 Conclusion: The Struggle for Civilization
Glossary
Bibliography
Index
About the Author
Keshodkar (Zayed Univ., Dubai) delivers a wonderful anthropological volume highlighting Zanzibaris' struggle for identity as the country embraces change in a postsocialist government and economy. Since the 1980s, Zanzibar has focused its economic development efforts on establishing tourism, which has resulted in unsustainable numbers of tourists and migrants flooding in from Tanzania, Kenya, and other mainland African countries. Through case study analyses and numerous narratives among stakeholders, Keshodkar points out that with a diverse population in Zanzibar, the local landscape has been modified and has impacted local constructions of belonging, whereby residents feel a sense of strangeness. Topics include movement, Islamic religion, politics, work and prosperity, consumption, mobility, gender, dress, family relations, and marriage. Needless to say, this text touches on many social aspects of community, and would be most appropriate for advanced undergraduate- and graduate-level collections focusing on the impacts of tourism, tourism planning, community tourism, and the anthropology of tourism. Readers will not be disappointed, especially as they read the eye-opening stories of struggle and courage among the Zanzibari people. Summing Up: Highly recommended. Upper-division undergraduates and above.
— Choice Reviews
Tourism and Social Change in Post-Socialist Zanzibar ...does an excellent job of documenting the ways in which Zanzibari women continue to navigate social spaces and redefine heshima up to the present day. . . . [It gives] a much more nuanced view of the possibilities women had in moving through Zanzibari society, and [it provides] much needed scholarly attention to the changing forms of women’s respectability and empowerment throughout the last two centuries.
— African Studies Review