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250 pages, 6 x 9
8 B&W figures - 1 table
Paperback
Release Date:20 Jun 2023
ISBN:9780817360900
Hardcover
Release Date:20 Jun 2023
ISBN:9780817321642
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Oktoberfest in Brazil

Domestic Tourism, Sensescapes, and German Brazilian Identity

University of Alabama Press
Oktoberfest in Brazil: Domestic Tourism, Sensescapes, and German Brazilian Identity is one of the first ethnographies to analyze the tourism industry based on German cultural heritage in southern Brazil. Southern Brazil’s booming domestic tourism industry draws more than 500,000 people to events such as the Oktoberfest in Blumenau. Ricke investigates domestic tourism as sensescapes, focusing on the multiple and layered meanings associated with tourism’s sensory experiences and interactions. The author also introduces the “economy of aesthetics” as a new framework to capture how the sensescapes associated with domestic tourism are intertwined in the negotiation of ethnic, national, and transnational identities. These sensescapes also intersect with discourses on class and race, which are examined as well.

Oktoberfest in Brazil leads readers on a tour through German Brazilian home gardens, folk dance performances, and the largest Oktoberfest in Brazil. These sensory-rich spaces of interaction provide access to different perspectives and types of identity negotiation at multiple levels from the local to the transnational. Ricke illustrates how the emotions and sensory experiences of these sensescapes associated with German cultural heritage function as a means for German Brazilians to negotiate senses of belonging as Brazilians as well as their ethnic and transnational identities.

This book also provides historical and contemporary insights into the politics of citizenship associated with cultural heritage. As politics become more polarized, the need to analyze different ways of communicating through sensory experiences increases. The unique contribution of the economy of aesthetics framework is its ability to capture the influential power of sensory experience in the negotiation of identity and senses of belonging and citizenship more broadly. It provides new insights into how and why some sensory experiences within domestic tourism foster belonging and identity while other experiences reinforce social distinctions and national divisions.
 
Joining the small but growing scholarship on Brazilian identity that addresses the experiences of Brazilians who are not one of the ‘three races’ that have historically defined the nation, Ricke also shifts the focus to the historically, economically, and culturally important but academically neglected Southern region. Through a focus on domestic rather than international tourism, Ricke emphasizes sensory, embodied aesthetics to consider how ethno-racial and national identities are constructed for German Brazilians, and for the non-German Brazilians who live in and visit the Southern state of Santa Catarina.’
—Misha Klein, author of Kosher Feijoada and Other Paradoxes of Jewish Life in São Paulo
 
Audrey Ricke is senior lecturer in anthropology at Indiana University–Purdue University, Indianapolis.
 
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