Description
Book SynopsisAlternative Tourism in Budapest: Class, Culture, and Identity in a Postsocialist City analyzes the particular imaginaries of Hungarian culture that are produced and circulated through alternative tourism a generation after state socialism. Susan Hill records the everyday work of business owners and tour guides at four Budapest alternative tourism companies that lead tourists to areas not typically visited by travelers, and she considers the significance of alternative tourism work for processes of identity-making and cultural production in Budapest. This ethnographic study is recommended for scholars of anthropology, cultural studies, and political science.
Trade ReviewSusan Hill offers an original take on tourism, one that is equally interested in the production of the imaginary of a place and its producer, the tour guide. Alternative Tourism in Budapest is fascinating, provocative, and entertaining, if also troubling in the depiction of how the business of ‘going off the beaten path’ can seamlessly melt into the logic of neoliberal urbanism. -- Judit Bodnár, Central European University
Table of ContentsPreface Acknowledgments Introduction: Ethnography in the “Hidden” Budapest Chapter One: Sketching an Illiberal Budapest Chapter Two: Tourism in Budapest and Its Imaginaries Chapter Three: Alt-entrepreneurship and the Meanings of Alterity Chapter Four: Alt-guiding on the Pericapitalist Edges Chapter Five: Touring the Post-socialist, Transcendent Conclusion
