Kenneth William Little » Members’ Directory

Biographical Info

Kenneth Little is an Associate Professor of Anthropology in the Department of Anthropology at York University, Toronto. Most generally his research focuses on the critical turn in anthropology to affect, social creativity, and performativity. Currently, he is conducting long-term research on the rise of the tourist state in Belize. His work attends to how tourism becomes a significant modality through which contemporary everyday life in Belize is organized and how tourist encounters open imaginative spaces that stimulate new subject productions, highlight new aspects of social relations and interactions with nature that actively ensure new “fantasies of becoming.” He is also committed to developing a generative poetics of tourism encounter that understands writing as inseparable from our engagement in the world; writing ethnography as an occurant art. Favouring a non-representationalist, assemblages, productivist-materialist approach to critical tourism studies, as a way of augmenting a dialectical, representationalist one, means developing ethnographic work in tourism studies that is meant to engage the anthropology of tourism with a literature that it mostly doesn’t think with, namely critical post-humanist debates concerned with how encounters “matter” and how matter is thought and constituted through entanglements, refrains, knots, and figures of human and non-human bodies, affects, objects, and practices. He most recently completed a book on this subject entitled On the Nervous Edge of an Impossible Paradise: Affect, Tourism, Belize, Berghahn Books 2020.