Ken Little’s research focuses on the analysis of society as spectacle, the critical turn in anthropology to the study of affect, social creativity and performativity. He has conducted research on the performative dynamics of tourist safaris in Kenya as spectacle productions and he is now conducting research on the rise of the tourist state in Belize. His Belize research attends to how tourism becomes a significant modality through which contemporary everyday life in Belize is organized and how tourist encounters open imaginative spaces that stimulate new subject productions, highlight new aspects of social relations and interactions with nature that actively ensure new “fantasies of becoming.” Some of his published work can be found in The Journal of Tourism and Cultural Change, Emotion, Space and Society, Semiotic Inquiry, and in the on-line journal In-Tensions and in book chapters in edited volumes such as Tourism Imaginaries through and Anthropological Lens, Emotion in Motion: Tourism, Affect and Transformation and The Varieties of Sensory Experience: A Source Book in the Anthropology of the Senses. In this work, Little explores new ways of thinking tourism through flows, processes, and bodily interconnections in touristic encounters, attachments, productions and narratives as a means of tracking the enactments of subject making under the pressures of emergent transformations of public culture in neoliberal Belize. He has also been committed to developing a generative poetics of tourism encounter that understands writing as inseparable from our engagement with the world; writing ethnography as an occurant art. In 2008 he was appointed a Visiting Research Professor at the Centre for Tourism and Cultural Change, an appointment he held for five years. He is now completing a book length manuscript on paradise encounters in the magical tourist state of Belize entitled The Other Side of Paradise in Belize.
Email: wkl@yorku.ca