Kimbra L. Smith , Practically Invisible: Coastal Ecuador, Tourism, and the Politics of Authenticity (Nashville, TN: Vanderbilt University Press, 2015), pp. ix + 254, £49.50, hb.

Abstract

care for the residentse.g., they produce ethnographies explaining how the people's 'degenerate' lifeways are a functional response to the city context; they deliver healthcare education; and in the past IPAC employed local residents and lobbied for them. But they also displace themthe data scientists collect provide evidence of 'degeneracy'; the data inform governance mechanisms that include relocations and evictions; the police harass and even kill residents. Residents, for their part, participated in these processes in order to further their own ends. This was partly a matter of engaging with and manipulating the 'data' that they perceived were so important to IPAC, whose workers carried out endless surveys. It also meant recognising themselves as objects of special scientific and patrimonial interestquasi-sanctified (hence the 'saints' of the title) or what Collins calls 'properly historical subjects'and using this status to make calls on the state, and to claim status not just as patrimony but also as patrimonialists and researchers. A second argument is that, as researchers, we need to pay attention to the specificity of the material techniques or mechanisms by which people make meaningful connectionsbetween people and the past or presentand think about belonging and identity. It is not only the categories and meanings themselves, in some abstract sense, that matter, but the techniques people use to know them. This means paying ethnographic attention to the diversity of people's everyday practices. It is not easy to illustrate briefly what concrete difference is made by approaching things this way. One example is that the creation of 'culture heritage' is a specific technique that inflects a category like 'race'which posits relations between external signs and interior qualitiesallowing people in the Pelourinho, who actually live through patrimonialisation, to construct connections and senses of belonging that construe race as property, just as 'culture' is property. In the Pelourinho, while this is going on, the particularities of the property regime therewhere people carve out tenuous living spaces in the interstices of ruined colonial mansions, competing with others for roomalso work against such proprietary essentialism, and mesh with the social conventions that discourage open talk about race. This argument fleshes out the common observation that race is becoming more essentialised and polarised in Brazil, alongside the continuing reticence about race that resonates with ideologies of mixture and 'racial democracy'. Collins' book is a Caribbean pepperpot stew, an ongoing accretion of ingredients simmered for long periods. It is mature, flavourful, surprising and rewarding. Its constant reflexive re-framings and maze-like progressions fascinate, and occasionally produce an Alice-through-the-looking-glass sense of (not unpleasurable) disorientation.