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An immersive ethnography uncovering how sensory experience, tourism, and heritage performance shape German Brazilian identity across local, national, and transnational landscapes.

Oktoberfest in Brazil: Domestic Tourism, Sensescapes, and German Brazilian Identity is one of the first ethnographies to analyze the tourism industry based on German cultural heritage in southern Brazil. Southern Brazil’s booming domestic tourism industry draws more than 500,000 people to events such as the Oktoberfest in Blumenau. Ricke investigates domestic tourism as sensescapes, focusing on the multiple and layered meanings associated with tourism’s sensory experiences and interactions. The author also introduces the “economy of aesthetics” as a new framework to capture how the sensescapes associated with domestic tourism are intertwined in the negotiation of ethnic, national, and transnational identities. These sensescapes also intersect with discourses on class and race, which are examined as well.

Oktoberfest in Brazil leads readers on a tour through German Brazilian home gardens, folk dance performances, and the largest Oktoberfest in Brazil. These sensory-rich spaces of interaction provide access to different perspectives and types of identity negotiation at multiple levels from the local to the transnational. Ricke illustrates how the emotions and sensory experiences of these sensescapes associated with German cultural heritage function as a means for German Brazilians to negotiate senses of belonging as Brazilians as well as their ethnic and transnational identities.

This book also provides historical and contemporary insights into the politics of citizenship associated with cultural heritage. As politics become more polarized, the need to analyze different ways of communicating through sensory experiences increases. The unique contribution of the economy of aesthetics framework is its ability to capture the influential power of sensory experience in the negotiation of identity and senses of belonging and citizenship more broadly. It provides new insights into how and why some sensory experiences within domestic tourism foster belonging and identity while other experiences reinforce social distinctions and national divisions.
 

With stunning original photographs, an Antarctic scientist and explorer takes us to one of the most sublime, remote, and pristine regions on the planet.
 
The interior of Antarctica is an utterly pristine wilderness, a desolate landscape of ice, wind, and rock; a landscape so unfamiliar as to seem of another world. This place has been known to only a handful of early explorers and the few scientists fortunate enough to have worked there. Edmund Stump is one of the lucky few. Having climbed, photographed, and studied more of the continent-spanning Transantarctic Mountains than any other person on Earth, this geologist, writer, and photographer is uniquely suited to share these alien sights.

With stories of Stump’s forty years of journeys and science, Otherworldly Antarctica contains 130 original color photographs, complemented by watercolors and sketches by artist Marlene Hill Donnelly. Over three chapters—on the ice, the rock, and the wind—we meet snowy paths first followed during Antarctica’s Heroic Age, climb the central spire of the Organ Pipe Peaks, peer into the crater of the volcanic Mount Erebus, and traverse Liv Glacier on snowmobile, while avoiding fatal falls into the blue interiors of hidden crevasses. Along the way, we see the beauty of granite, marble, and ice-cored moraines, meltwater ponds, lenticular clouds, icebergs, and glaciers. Many of Stump’s breathtaking images are aerial shots taken from the planes and helicopters that brought him to the interior. More were shot from vantages gained by climbing the mountains he studied. Some were taken from the summits of peaks. Many are of places no one had set foot before—or has since. All seem both permanent and precarious, connecting this otherworld to our fragile own.