Conference: Thursday 28^th November 2024 (10:15), PER 21 - Room D230

A conference by Prof. Hana Horáková, Dept. of Sociology and Cultural Anthropology, Faculty of Arts, Palacky University Olomouc, Czech Republic.

Abstract: Places and people are inseparable. Places exist only with reference to people, and the meaning of place can be revealed only in terms of human responses to a particular environment (Violich 1985). In the same vein, though dwelling as the essential feature of subjective life is the most taken-for-granted aspect of human existence, its forms, shapes, and histories play a fundamental role in the way certain environment is perceived, imagined and represented.

Of all the places on the planet, Africa has suffered the longest and most pejorative representation of both people and places (Saunders 2019). The construction of the so-called Dark Continent had a devastating impact for Africa and Africans. Arguably, the metaphor of Dark Africa continually (re)makes and represents an entire continent as Other through diverse “pathways”, including the tourism industry, which enables to reimagine Africa as an “empty meeting place” (Van Beek and Schmidt 2012: 13) removed from the everyday realities of postcolonial Africa’s socio-economic problems. The prime example is a recent phenomenon of the so-called living museums located throughout Namibia, allegedly showcasing “real” Africa. Theoretically, I conceive of the living museum as a tourist bubble with an imagery that is built along the global–local nexus. The basic conceptual and methodological framework derives from the premises of a multi-sited ethnography. I argue that the tourist bubble constituting Namibia’s living museums enables the involved stakeholders to retain a myth of authentic Africa that is incommensurate with local performers’ everyday life. Yet a certain permeability of the bubble allows for the creative and diversified response of the local population.

Dr. Hana Horáková is Associate Professor of Social Anthropology at the Faculty of Arts, Palacky University in Olomouc, Czech Republic. She holds a habilitation degree in Social Anthropology and a PhD in African Studies from Charles University, Prague. She is Vice-President of the Czech Association of African Studies. Currently, she is Head of the Scientific Committee organizing a biennial ECAS 2025 (European Conference on African Studies) in Prague.

Her research activities include anthropology of tourism and rural studies, anthropology of sub-Saharan Africa focusing on politics of identity and nationalism, and theories of culture. She has conducted anthropological fieldwork in South Africa, exploring culture in the making and the nation-building process in post-apartheid South Africa. Her recent research activities include cultural tourism in Namibia and Botswana, and memory politics in Namibia.

She has published on aspects of the above research topics in various international journals. She has written and/or edited more than nine books within African Studies and Social Anthropology. She also published numerous book chapters for high-ranking publishers, such as Brill, Palgrave Macmillan, CABI Publishing, or LIT Verlag.