240190 PR Life in a "Living Museum" (P1) (2013W)

The Field Practice shall be open for CREOLE Master students. It will therefore be held in English and offer the alternative possibility to work empirically in Vienna and Basel in cooperation with the students conducting research in Namibia. The Vienna and Basel (?) groups will accordingly focus on historical foundations of cultural tourism that forms a good deal of the overall touristic marketing in Namibia. Furthermore the field practice in Vienna will particularly focus on the visual anthropology aspects of the 'Ethno-marketing'. See for instance : http://www.jelldragon.com/theoldways/grashoek.htm The following quote comes from this webpage and gives an accurate image of what to expect when visiting Grashoek: 'There are no communications of any kind at Grashoek, therefore it is not possible to arrange a visit in advance, but the bushmen there are well organised and ready to receive visitors at any time of the day. Simply turn up at the village and a guide will come out to meet you. You will then have to wait half an hour while the bushmen get dressed up in their traditional attire and walk through the bush from their village.' Key questions will focus on the strategies of (self-)marketing cultures that Jean and John Comaroff have coined 'Ethnicity Inc.' (2009).

Apart from Himba communities in the Kaokofeld-Ovamboland many San villages and settlements in Namibia use concepts of community-based natural resource management for ecotourism projects. With its headquarters in the small town of Tsumkwe (close to the Botswana border) the Nyae Nyae Conservancy Board consists of 6 women and 13 men. It has entered into joint-ventures tourism agreements with the private sector and has turned at least some of the villages in the 9000 square kilometres area of the Conservancy into local collective entrepreneurships. They may thus serve as an interesting community-based form of commodification of 'ethnic cultures' that Jean and John Comaroff brilliantly describes as 'a new moment in the history of human identity'. The planned field practice in Namibia seeks to study comparatively this community-based organisation of Nyae Nyae Conservancy and its actual activities and forms of cooperation with the communities inside this large area with another culture commodification initiative, namely the Living Museum of Grasshoek about 80 kms away from Tsumkwe. Both areas lie within the historical Bushmen land and offer rich historical material to look into the genesis of today’s cultural marketing.