ANTH 212 Lecture Notes - Lecture 13: Slum Tourism, Neoliberalism, Tripadvisor
1 May 2018
School
Department
Course
Professor
ANTH 212
28 March 2018,
Slum Tourism
Melissa Nisbett – Empowering the empowered? Slum tourism and the depoliticization of poverty
• Looks at slums in Mumbai, home to 1 million people, living in spaces that are 10 metre
square
• Examines slum tourism and experiences/perceptions of Western visitors (questions the
way Westerners see slums)
• Examines poor sanitation, lack of clean water, squalid conditions and overcrowding =
ignored/replaced by vision of resourcefulness, hard work and diligence
• Visitors might overlook/deny poverty – e.g vistitors might say ‘these are not the worst
kind of slums’
• Western visitors transformed by ‘life changing, eye opening and mind-blowing
experiences’
• Potential of slum tours as form of international development = limited
o Enable wealthy middle-class Westerners to feel ‘inspired’, ‘uplifted’ and
enriched, but with little understanding of need for change
• Slum dwellers oppressed – need to travel to obtain basic human resources
o Work for very little, but spend a lot on essential services
o To understand these injustices, need to have the proper analytical tools
• Impact is limited, but help make Westerners feel inspired/rich
• Looking at youth development projects as being part of a wider niche, a part of which is
being commoditised
• Larger criticism is that such projects belong to a certain sector, and don’t look at
development holistically
Slums
• Slums are defined as:
o Where people have an insecure residential status
▪ Actual land of slums is valuable as it is located near Mumbai’s important
▪ Value of land important in creating insecurity
▪ Squat on this land – to resist eviction is their power through numbers
▪ State unable to figure out land
o Inadequate water access, sanitation, poorly built homes, overcrowding
▪ High levels of toxicity because people live where they work as well
o 1 billion people worldwide
▪ 1/3 of urban dwellers – living in urban areas living in less developed
countries
▪ Slums are expanding at a faster rate than those living in urban cities
o Result of dominant models of development/rampant capitalism (the real
development, slum tourism only being a tiny niche)
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