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Accepted Paper:

Interest, Sentiment, and Hybridity: Mapping Competing Approaches to Intimacy in Touristic Cuba  
Valerio Simoni (Geneva Graduate Institute)

Paper short abstract:

The paper examines three prevalent ways of approaching intimate touristic encounters in Cuba – alternatively foregrounding interest, sentiment, and a hybrid mix of both – and considers their purposiveness, moral foundations, and implications for anthropological research on North-South intimacies.

Paper long abstract:

In touristic Cuba, intimate encounters between foreign tourists and members of the Cuban population are fraught with controversies over their interested and/or sentimental nature. The way in which material exchanges between partners in a relationship occur and are conceptualized (as gift or payment for instance) informs the way these relationships are experienced and interpreted. Notions of morality, gender, class, and race, also intervene in the discrimination of different relational idioms, which range from commercial sex to romance. The paper draws attention to the three prevalent approaches that are deployed to make sense of these relationships by the protagonists involved, in public and institutional discourses, and in the academic world. These approaches, which alternatively mobilize notions of interest (foregrounding the instrumental and commoditized nature of relationships), of sentiment (highlighting friendship, love and romance), and of hybridization resulting from a mix of sentiment and interest, circulate in Cuba as well as in the tourists' countries of residence and the global media-scape. Their joint examination highlights current convergences and overlaps in frames of legibility and moral assumptions operating at various levels and spheres - convergences that call for anthropological research to be duly unpacked and reflexively accounted for. By problematizing and relocating these three approaches in their specific contexts of emergence and circulation, the paper helps understand their purposive character and moral foundations, sheds light on their affordances and limits, and provides a more general theoretical and methodological framework to map out competing interpretations of intimacy in touristic encounters across difference and inequality.

Panel P16
Gênero, moralidades, sexualidades e estéticas afetivo-sexuais: pensando a produção e circulação de pessoas, objetos e ideias na contemporaneidade (PT/ES/EN)
  Session 1