William Kenneth Little
Professor Emeritus
Office: 2044 Vari Hall
Phone: (416) 736-2100 Ext: 22327
Email: wkl@yorku.ca
Not accepting new graduate students
My research focuses most generally on the analysis of society as spectacle, visual culture, and popular cultural performance in both Euro-North American and postcolonial societies. My earliest fieldwork with the European one-ring circus focused on politics and poetics of spectacle and performance in the making of an entertainment culture.
Kenneth Little’s research focuses on the analysis of society as spectacle, the critical turn in anthropology to the study of affect, social creativity, experiments in ethnographic writing and performativity. He has conducted research on the performative dynamics of tourist safaris in Kenya as spectacle productions and he is now conducting research on the rise of the tourist state in Belize. His Belize research 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.” Some of his published work can be found in The Journal of Tourism and Cultural Change, Emotion, Space and Society, Semiotic Inquiry, and in the on-line journal In-Tensions and in book chapters in edited volumes such as Tourism Imaginaries through and Anthropological Lens, Emotion in Motion: Tourism, Affect and Transformation and The Varieties of Sensory Experience: A Source Book in the Anthropology of the Senses. Little’s work explores new ways of thinking tourism through flows, processes, and bodily interconnections in touristic encounters, attachments, productions and narratives as a means of tracking the enactments of subject making under the pressures of emergent transformations of public culture in neoliberal Belize. He has also been committed to developing a generative poetics of tourism encounter that understands writing as inseparable from our engagement with the world; writing ethnography as an occurant art. In 2008 he was appointed a Visiting Research Professor at the Centre for Tourism and Cultural Change, an appointment he held for five years. He is finishing a book length manuscript on paradise encounters in the magical tourist state of Belize entitled On the Nervous Edges of an Impossible paradise: Affect, Tourism, Belize.
Degrees
Ph.D, Anthropology, University of Virginia, Charlottesville, Virginia. Dissertation Title: Inventing Circus Clowns: The Irony and Parody of Pastiche In the Modern European Circus. 1988M.A., Anthropology, McMaster University, Hamilton, Ontario. Thesis Title: Life History and Understanding Personal Meanings. 1979
B.A., Anthropology, University of Victoria, Victoria, B.C. 1975
Appointments
Faculty of Graduate StudiesResearch Interests
Not accepting new graduate students
My research focuses most generally on the analysis of society as spectacle, visual culture, and popular cultural performance in both Euro-North American and postcolonial societies. My earliest fieldwork with the European one-ring circus focused on politics and poetics of spectacle and performance in the making of an entertainment culture.
Kenneth Little’s research focuses on the analysis of society as spectacle, the critical turn in anthropology to the study of affect, social creativity, experiments in ethnographic writing and performativity. He has conducted research on the performative dynamics of tourist safaris in Kenya as spectacle productions and he is now conducting research on the rise of the tourist state in Belize. His Belize research 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.” Some of his published work can be found in The Journal of Tourism and Cultural Change, Emotion, Space and Society, Semiotic Inquiry, and in the on-line journal In-Tensions and in book chapters in edited volumes such as Tourism Imaginaries through and Anthropological Lens, Emotion in Motion: Tourism, Affect and Transformation and The Varieties of Sensory Experience: A Source Book in the Anthropology of the Senses. Little’s work explores new ways of thinking tourism through flows, processes, and bodily interconnections in touristic encounters, attachments, productions and narratives as a means of tracking the enactments of subject making under the pressures of emergent transformations of public culture in neoliberal Belize. He has also been committed to developing a generative poetics of tourism encounter that understands writing as inseparable from our engagement with the world; writing ethnography as an occurant art. In 2008 he was appointed a Visiting Research Professor at the Centre for Tourism and Cultural Change, an appointment he held for five years. He is finishing a book length manuscript on paradise encounters in the magical tourist state of Belize entitled On the Nervous Edges of an Impossible paradise: Affect, Tourism, Belize.
Degrees
Ph.D, Anthropology, University of Virginia, Charlottesville, Virginia. Dissertation Title: Inventing Circus Clowns: The Irony and Parody of Pastiche In the Modern European Circus. 1988M.A., Anthropology, McMaster University, Hamilton, Ontario. Thesis Title: Life History and Understanding Personal Meanings. 1979
B.A., Anthropology, University of Victoria, Victoria, B.C. 1975
