This is a book that will appeal to scholars who focus on tourism as well as those who study friendship and reciprocity in relationships. For specialists, the highlight of this book is the way that Simoni synthesizes academic research on the informal economy with the phenomenology of relationship development.
American Ethnologist ...a truly ... Read moreengaging and pleasantly readable academic treatise. What emerges is a narrative that reflects common tourism experiences in a manner both intimate and philosophically revealing while crafted so that his protagonists are never exposed or ridiculed... this remains the outstanding strength of this contribution as well as the broader research it draws on: opening rather than closing debates and leaving space to be surprised: thus Simoni, as a tourist researcher, actually manages to be a seasoned traveller while joyfully riding the ambiguities this entails. The book is witness to the productivity of such a skill. Researchers of tourism and mobilities will benefit greatly from this book.
Journal of Tourism and Cultural Change The book is very exciting and I look forward to the waves it will make in the Anthropology of Tourism, since it takes us beyond old debates about lines in the sand between tourists and hosts. Simoni nicely articulates... that there are multiple desiring agents at work in Cuban tourism and it isn't so cut and dry as 'us' and 'them'.
L. Kaifa Roland, University of Colorado This is an important work on the ambivalence of encounters with a priori strangers in the field of tourism, an aspect of social life that has been neglected in recent anthropological literature on tourism and in general, which often remains schematic and categorical.
David Picard Show Less