Dr Naomi Leite wins fifth book prize

11 December 2020

The Ethnography of Tourism: Edward Bruner and Beyond edited by Dr Naomi Leite, Reader in Anthropology has won the 2020 Edward Bruner Prize from the Anthropology of Tourism Interest Group.

The Ethnography of Tourism: Edward Bruner and Beyond addresses the ethnographic study of tourism, examining the theories, themes, and concepts that drive contemporary research. Focusing on the experience-near, interpretive-humanistic approach to tourism studies widely associated with anthropologist Edward Bruner, contributors draw on their fieldwork to illustrate and build upon key concepts in tourism ethnography, from experience, encounter, and emergent culture to authenticity, narrative, contested sites, the borderzone, embodiment, identity, and mobility. It was published by Rowman and Littlefield in 2019, co-edited by Naomi Leite, Quetzil Castañeda, and Kathleen M Adams.

In reaction to the award, Dr Naomi Leite, Reader in Anthropology said:

'I’m humbled to have had such a positive reception to this book. The entire volume was a labour of love, many years in the making, exploring the theoretical and ethnographic contributions of the American anthropologist Edward Bruner—a true giant in the field. Winning the award is made all the more poignant by the fact that the Anthropology of Tourism Interest Group established it some years ago in his honour, and also that he passed away earlier this year, shortly before the 2020 winners were announced. I’m grateful to my co-editors and all the authors who contributed to making it such a broadly useful text, and above all to Bruner himself for the inspiration.'

Dr Leite’s previous book Unorthodox Kin: Portuguese Marranos and the Global Search for Belonging published in 2017, also previously won four awards including:

• Stirling Prize for Best Published Book in Psychological Anthropology, 2018
• Graburn Award for Best First Book in Anthropology of Tourism, 2018
• Douglass Prize for Best Book in Europeanist Anthropology (Honourable Mention), 2018
• National Jewish Book Award Finalist, 2017

Unorthodox Kin: Portuguese Marranos and the Global Search for Belonging tracks the emergence and transformation of a novel identity category — descendants of fifteenth-century Portuguese Jews who were forcibly converted to Catholicism — in contemporary urban Portugal. The book explores a set of issues that are broadly relevant in the world today: how people come to understand themselves individually and collectively in terms of ancestral/racialised pasts; how divergent senses of self develop and change over time, in response to human interaction; how global interconnectivity provides opportunities for belonging, and even feelings of profound interpersonal connection, to emerge as a counterweight to exclusion in one’s immediate social sphere; and how tourism increasingly provides a venue through which people express, enact, and cement abstract feelings of peoplehood.