1.

Record Nr.

UNINA9910166658403321

Autore

Huberman Jennifer

Titolo

Ambivalent Encounters : Childhood, Tourism, and Social Change in Banaras, India / / Jenny Huberman

Pubbl/distr/stampa

New Brunswick, : Rutgers University Press, 2012

New Brunswick, N.J. : , : Rutgers University Press, , 2012

©2012

ISBN

0-8135-5408-X

Edizione

[1st ed.]

Descrizione fisica

1 online resource (245 p.)

Collana

Rutgers series in childhood studies

Disciplina

331.3/18

Soggetti

Social interaction - India - Vārānasi

Tourists - India - Vārānasi

Tourism - India - Vārānasi

Child labor - India - Vārānasi

Lingua di pubblicazione

Inglese

Formato

Materiale a stampa

Livello bibliografico

Monografia

Note generali

Bibliographic Level Mode of Issuance: Monograph

Nota di bibliografia

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Nota di contenuto

Children, tourists, and locals -- A tourist town -- Conceptions of children -- Girls and boys on the ghats -- Innocent children or little adults? -- The minds and hearts of children -- Conceptions of value -- Earning, spending, saving -- Something extra -- Money, gender, and the (im)morality of exchange -- Conclusion.

Sommario/riassunto

Jenny Huberman provides an ethnographic study of encounters between western tourists and the children who work as unlicensed peddlers and guides along the riverfront city of Banaras, India. She examines how and why these children elicit such powerful reactions from western tourists and locals in their community as well as how the children themselves experience their work and render it meaningful. Ambivalent Encounters brings together scholarship on the anthropology of childhood, tourism, consumption, and exchange to ask why children emerge as objects of the international tourist gaze; what role they play in representing socio-economic change; how children are valued and devalued; why they elicit anxieties, fantasies, and debates; and what these tourist encounters teach us more generally about the nature of human interaction. It examines the role of gender in



mediating experiences of social change-girls are praised by locals for participating constructively in the informal tourist economy while boys are accused of deviant behavior. Huberman is interested equally in the children's and adults' perspectives; her own experiences as a western visitor and researcher provide an intriguing entry into her interpretations.