The Good Holiday is a study of the Mozambican village of Canhane, home to a rustic lodge which has become a symbol of the merits of community based tourism on the global stage. Drawing on ethnographic work, Baptista shows how tourist-consumers cultivate a moralised and benevolent self during their ‘good holidays’ in Canhane; meanwhile, Canhane residents conjure ‘horizons of hope’ amid an influx of ethical tourists (17). Throughout, Baptista emphasises how ‘community’ becomes a ‘commodified simulation of authenticity’ (227) ripe for ‘developmentourism’ by tourists who hail largely from the global north. The book contributes to critical scholarship on tourism, tracing the imaginaries and geographic asymmetries that drive it.

The strongest chapters in the book are Chapters 2, 4 and 5. Chapter 2 shows, step by step, how Canhane became a standardised ‘community’ eligible and available to an NGO for development tourism. Tracing the interactions of development experts, the Ministry of Tourism, and Canhane residents, he shows how ‘community’ was imposed on uneven local topographies, and how residents subsequently took it up to draw boundaries of exclusion – ousting a fisherman tourist guide from an NGO-organised English language workshop because he did not live in Canhane, for example. In Chapter 4, Baptista reads ‘failure’ as open-ended site of potential rather than foreclosed opportunity. Foregrounding the incessant breakdown of a water supply system funded by the NGO, he shows how a communal resource was reorganised and politicised when it became an ‘object of measurement’ (128). The seemingly banal water tank and system, whether cast as failure (in its inability to provide water) or success story (in its performative role as evidence of development to tourists), he shows, is a technology co-constituted by social, cultural and historical relations and meanings. In Chapter 5, Baptista illuminates the ‘stroll in the village’, an activity sold to lodge visitors. Drawing on his experience taking this tour and informed by discussions with tourists, he reflects on the sensorial politics of commodified sites such as a water well, a medicine man, a school and the aforementioned water tank. Whereas tourists seem to uncritically assume they are gaining a rare glimpse of real ‘village life’, Baptista shows how the stroll proleptically matches their pre-existing notions of the really real: he reveals, for instance, how the ‘medicine man’ alters his performances iteratively based on previous tourists’ reactions, and how watching women fetch water from a well resonates with tourists’ aestheticisation of poverty.

The Good Holiday presents many opportunities for fruitful future inquiry. Most notably, although the author suggests repeatedly that, for example, ‘tourists can expand the moral significance of their lives by consuming ‘for good’’ (230) and that in Canhane tourists are one and the same as ‘agent[s] of community development’ (98), the reader gains little sense of the specific ways in which the tourists are ‘becoming’ other than they were in the liminal space of the good holiday: perspectives from tourists themselves would bring important detail to these moral, existential and economic becomings. Further, Baptista argues that ethical tourism gives new entities, including tourists themselves, the power to govern and ‘conquer … new territories and people’ (216), and concludes the book with ruminations on how ‘developmentourism’ is a form of ‘recolonization’ that allows appropriation of new lands and population for capitalist growth. Given this, I was surprised at the absence of race and racialisation as analytics in The Good Holiday. Whiteness is centrally enacted in touristic encounters in Africa, and the tourist is a racialised position in north/south global political and cultural economies: in scenes where Canhaners perform and package their material deprivation for tourists, for example, material benefit is assumed to come through proximity to whiteness as formation, if not phenotype.

The Good Holiday is an ambitious book; at times, exhaustive literature review subsumes the ethnographic examples that are the strength of it. Nonetheless, in demonstrating how Canhane itself became a ‘mythical local community’ and tourism commodity (212), the book invites us to reflect on how ethical tourism is a formation and practice that reveals the core of who we may wish to be.