ABSTRACT
This chapter approaches tourism through the register of “invisible” economic actors who are crucial to the everyday working of tourism, mediating social and economic anxieties that entrepreneurs face as they participate in the tourism economy. Focusing on tourism around the Taj Mahal in Agra, India, this chapter explores how “convincers”—mediator actors in local tourism—help forge commission-based alliances among travel agents, showroom owners, and tour guides, to mitigate anxieties that emerge from the uncertainty of getting tourist clientele. Tasked with managing competition and collaborations, and conducting surveillance, convincers also allay anxieties that emerge from within these alliances, primarily of cheating and opportunism among partners. Analyzing the ethnographic material about the work and place of convincers in Agra’s local tourism, this chapter suggests that mediators and brokers must also be considered from the standpoint of affective management of risks, relations, and associated anxieties. Convincers are not only crucial to the everyday machinations of Agra’s tourism but also encapsulate the local and still emerging market that is in flux, filled with new opportunities but also beset with innumerable risks.
