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There are beastly forces in Belize. Forces that are actively involved in making paradise impossible. On the Nervous Edge of an Impossible Paradise is a collection of seven stories about local lives in the fictional village of Wallaceville. They turn rogue in the face of runaway forces that take the form and figure of a Belize beast-time, which can appear as a comic mishap, social ruin, tragic excess, or wild guesses. Inciting the affective politics of life in the region, this fable of emergence evokes the unnerving uncertainties of life in the tourist state of Belize.
“Pushes anthropology to new levels, and in doing so argues profoundly for its relevance in an effort to understand the 21st century world as it is (troublingly) unfolding. This work pushes the reader to think in dense and complex ways about the tourism experience and all that it symbolizes.” • Julia Harrison, Trent University
“A pioneering work… ranks alongside such classic texts as Claude Levi-Strauss’s Triste Tropiques, Evans-Pritchard’s The Nuer, Paul Rabinow’s Reflections on Fieldwork in Morroco and Jean-Paul Dumont’s The Headman and I.” • Sally Ann Ness, University of California
List of Illustrations
Acknowledgments
Introduction: Writing Stories of Make-Belize
Chapter 1. “For the Time is at Hand”: Beast-Time Somet’ings
Chapter 2. Impossible Tropics
Chapter 3. Richie’s Tourists
Chapter 4. Nowhere Paradise
Chapter 5. Belize Ephemera
Chapter 6. Belize Blues
Chapter 7. Parca’s Picks
Epilogue: Belize Fabulations
Glossary
References
Index