Ghodsee, Kristen
2005 The Red Riviera: Gender, Tourism, and Postsocialism on the Black Sea. Durham, North Carolina: Duke University Press.
Notes: xii, 226 p.: ill., map; 24 cm. ISBN: 0822336502Reviewed 25 Feb 2008 by:
Maria Milkova Stoilkova <stoilkov@anthro.ufl.edu>
Anthropology, University of Florida, Gainesville, Florida, USAMedium: Written Literature Subject
Keywords:Women - Employment - Bulgaria
Tourism - Bulgaria
Post-communism - Bulgaria
ABSTRACT: This ethnography of seldom-studied Bulgaria provides a stimulating perspective on the transition from socialism to capitalism, as seen through the lens of tourism.
In recent years Bulgaria has rarely been the focus of anthropological explorations. Unlike other countries in the Balkan region, a region notoriously known for its secessions and ethnic tensions, Bulgaria may have failed to offer any news-catching developments in this particular rubric. At the same time, due to its distinct geographic location and history, it is more challenging to compare research on Bulgaria with the more prolific study of Central European countries undergoing capitalist 'transitions'. Kristen Ghodsee’s ethnography is an exception, but moreover, it presents a stimulating perspective on the less well known undercurrents of Bulgaria’s thorny transition from socialism to capitalism. It offers an unexpected view through the lens of tourism on political, economic and social developments that began in the second half of the 20 century.Tourism and leisure, in general, do not sit comfortably in our entrenched views of communism, saturated by images of scarcity and restrained freedoms. During communist rule, Eastern Europeans were restricted both in their travels abroad and even within their own countries, where contacts with foreigners were also strictly controlled. Yet, Bulgaria, as Ghodsee explores in Red Riviera, has nurtured a flourishing tourist industry since the early 1950s with thousands of visits from around Europe flocking each year to its see coast and mountain resorts. It became one of the only places in the world where tourism was organized under central State planning while it also provided a backstage of cold-war espionage. While the official ideology of egalitarianism frowned at the concept of 'people serving other people' – socialist era tourism – this typical Western 'service' sector – resembled bureaucratic work with extensive development of managerial positions.
The appealing surroundings that the socialist resorts offered, standing in sharp contrast to the dull environment of the socialist urban landscape, as well as privileges, such as access to foreign currency and foreign visitors, and flexible work hours, made employment in this industry particularly prestigious. And it was women, in particular, with their perceived 'natural role' as nurturers, who were marked most suited to working in tourism. Throughout the socialist period, the number of women officially employed in this sector visibly outnumbered men. Women were encouraged to pursue degrees in geography and economics and learn foreign languages. And it was women, who after the fall of communism, managed to exploit to the full this industry’s benefits.
This engaging study gains rigor though a masterfully employed double-edged perspective on structure and agency. The book builds on the lives of a dozen women working in Bulgarian resorts and offers a fascinating and ethnographically crisp account of the unpredictable changes that these women faced in their personal and professional lives, as tourism begun restructuring from a state enterprise into a multi-faceted and privately-owned capitalist industry. Here we witness the kinds of choices they faced to keep their families intact, embrace new career opportunities, and fight the financial insecurities of this 'transition'. Swiftly we move to a more structural macro-economic perspective, which links developments in Bulgaria to wider effects of globalization and brings attention to macro-economic decisions, which the Bulgarian government was encouraged to introduce under the supervision of international financial organizations to meet structural adjustment goals in this area of the industry.
Ghodsee’s main focus remains on the impact of these larger macro-economic developments on women. One of her organizing arguments is set against the widely-shared understanding that the 'transition' in Eastern Europe has particularly disadvantaged women. She maintains that what appears as an overwhelming decline in women's status in Bulgaria, since 1989, should not be judged on gendered terms alone, but needs to be contextualized alongside occupational status, level of education, age, and region. A desegregated analysis of Bulgarian employment and income data for the period in question helps Ghodsee show that some women in the tourism sector specifically, have managed to thrive in a capitalist economy relative to men. Women’s superior human and cultural capital, secured in higher rates of general education, work experience with Westerners, fluency in foreign languages, and their advantageous work experience under communist rule, have helped their successful transition in the postsocialist period.
Building upon prior work by sociologists Gil Eyal, Ivan Szelenyi, and Ellen Townsley, Ghodsee asks why certain groups of the Bulgarian society were able to make the transition to capitalism more effectively. Given the rapid decline in employment, and, putting aside the obvious economic success of some elite formations, with connections to political and economic capital from socialism, her study suggests that certain skills, inculcated during socialism, were transferred more successfully into the postsocialist period than others. The particular set of cultural and human capital that women in the tourist industry carried is one such example.
Internal factors were also crucial to Bulgarian women’s success in tourism. In particular, the availability of hard currency in this sector provided an economic cushion. Privatization and marketization in this industry favored women more than men, especially through their ability to reach out to Westerners and attract a continued flow of money in tourism, while shortages and devaluation of local currency crushed other sectors of the economy, where no degree of transferable knowledge and skills could have enabled successful transition. However, there is no guarantee that the future generations of Bulgarian women will maintain this privileged position under market conditions that include a resurgence of local patriarchal discourse convincing younger women that they should not work.
Ghodsee also intervenes in another heated debate about the relationship between gender and tourism. Tourism for decades has been promoted by international institutions as the panacea of development. In many countries around the world this sector is feminized. Much anthropological research in the recent years has concentrated on whether tourism employment exploits women or provides them with valuable opportunities, especially in the context of economies with rampant unemployment rates. Ghodsee suggests that the character of tourism employment is culturally specific and formed in relation to the other opportunities available in the host economy. Thus in Bulgaria, the attractiveness of tourism in the postsocialist period may be explained in relation to deteriorating conditions of work in the other sectors, where women dominate (i.e. education, health, and law). Moreover, positions in this field have become recognized as privileged employment, on par with other white-collar professions, in which high symbolic status remained in the postsocialist period. And while salaries in the sectors of education and health faced steep deflation under new market conditions, in tourism they continued to grow.
Given Ghodsee’s detailed analysis of the history of tourism in Bulgaria, which privileged female employment, what can be said about discourses dominant among women NGOs that depict women under market economy as the overall 'losers' of the transition? The "real" dilemma, Ghodsee asserts, for the majority of these women in Bulgaria is not gender disparity, sexual harassment, or pornography, as the majority of local NGOs would claim under the dictate of their Western donors. It is unemployment and overall insecurities in the labor market. Yet, even so some women have done much better under market economy. Ghodsee suggests that NGO activity in Bulgaria is alienating many working women, and especially those that have managed to remain employed and even prospered. Borrowed feminism paradoxically may be strengthening a latent cultural discourse about women's "weakness" and "need for protection”, and may lead ultimately to hiring practices that exclude women. Western cultural feminism, or as Ghodsee frames it – 'feminism by design' – undermines the importance of the overall weakening of workers’ rights and opportunities throughout the economy. Ghodsee goes even further suggesting that the shift from a class-based analysis of oppression to one based on gender, as perpetuated by many NGOs in Bulgaria, has another unexpected and paradoxical effect on Bulgaria as a whole, suppressing class-based descent and keeping wages lower. This brings a more disadvantaged position for the country, as it strives to find a place in global capitalism.
Ghodsee’s work fits very well in the company of other anthropological studies on the economic dimensions of socialism and the transition to capitalism on par with such excellent work as that of Katherine Verdery, Daphne Berdahl and Elizabeth Dunn. The Red Riviera, however, is more than an addition to previous themes in the anthropology of postsocialism, its analysis just as well as its narrative is vivid, inspired, and precise, combining craftily an interdisciplinary perspective.
To cite this review, the American Anthropological Association recommends the following style:
Stoilkova, Maria Milkova
2008 Review of The Red Riviera: Gender, Tourism, and Postsocialism on the Black Sea. Anthropology Review Database. February 25. Electronic document, http://wings.buffalo.edu/ARD/cgi/showme.cgi?keycode=2812, accessed November 22, 2009.© Anthropology Review Database
(available online: http://wings.buffalo.edu/ARD/)