Catarina Moreira

Wine Magic: Consumer Culture, Tourism and Terroir

This article explores strangeness-familiarity relations in the context of global wine consumer culture. While observing wine as a deeply familiar foodstuff and consumer commodity that is part of their quotidian life-worlds, wine consumers equally emphasize the particularity, hence implicit separation and distance with symbolically elevated wine production areas and terroirs. Our argument is that wine therefore belongs to a wider class of magical stuff believed to transform the qualities and powers of a specific place of origin into ordinary consumer life contexts. We suggest that the tension between strangeness and familiarity points to the persistence of magic as a wider relational idiom fundamental to modern consumer culture.

Boys go fishing, girls work at home: gender roles, poverty and unequal school access among semi-nomadic fishing communities in South Western Madagascar

Abstract Drawing from data gathered in South Western Madagascar in 2011, the work explores the combination of poverty and traditional gender roles as a critical factor in determining unequal school access among young people from semi-nomadic fishing communities. It demonstrates that from the age of early puberty, most boys go fishing with their fathers and brothers whilst most girls from the same families work at home. In contrast to the school systems observed in many developing society contexts, which demonstrate female marginalisation, in South Western Madagascar both boys and girls are marginalised. Instruments of global policy designs, such as positive discrimination for girls, seem ill-suited to resolve the problem. Instead, the authors call for a more tailored and context-specific approach to address the particular challenges amongst semi-nomadic fishing communities in Madagascar.

Colonial memory, hospitality and tourism in southwestern Madagascar

Drawing on ethnographic data collected in a coastal village in southwestern Madagascar, the work explores the concept of memory through a study of contemporary hospitality practices aimed towards western tourists and other outsiders. The key observation is that memory is shaped by the interactions between two forms of colonial legacy. One is defined by the socially inscribed memory of past relations with powerful outsiders, mediated through myth and oral history. The other is defined by socially incorporated practices formed in the pre-colonial and colonial realms of the 19th and 20th centuries (and hence constitute a memory of such pasts in the present), and that today shift in the context of contact with western tourists and other foreigners. The main argument is that socially inscribed memory provides a highly flexible operational metaphor to mediate and also reproduce the socially incorporated practice-memory of hospitality, especially when historical symbolic functions - for example domesticating royals, colonial administrators, settlers, merchants or clerics - are shifted into contemporary contact zones with western tourists.

Hospitality and dispossession in Madagascar

Drawing on ethnographic data collected among a group of coastal villagers in Southwest Madagascar between 2006 and 2011, this article looks at the relationship between hospitality towards strangers and land dispossession, a major issue of concern in Madagascar, especially given the comparatively recent mineral, energy resource, and stone mining rush in the country. Belief in spirits plays a role in this.