Indigenous Tourism Movements is a compelling compilation of global case studies that locate ethnic tourism at the intersection of social and philosophical movements. Emerging from a 2009 University of California Berkeley Tourism Studies Working Group Symposium and a special edition of the London Journal of Sport and Creative Activities, Indigenous Tourism Movements is a collaborative venture among scholars in anthropology, folklore, and tourism studies. It is a unique blend of Western and Indigenous perspectives and is the first collection on this topic to be edited by an Indigenous scholar. The people, places, folklore, and creative arts described in this book are deeply complicated by colonial legacies and reveal both the formation and contestation of political Indigenous identities that are mediated by cross-cultural interactions with Westerners.
The book presents a tourism framework through which Indigenous peoples are agents of hospitality. The authors unpack the meaning of indigeneity and agree that Western notions of indigeneity are colonial products that heavily invest in beliefs about biological racial differences. The concept of indigeneity was first exported by settlers, secondly by anthropologists, and most recently by tourism industry opportunists. Thus, Indigenous identities became dependent upon contact with non-Indigenous peoples for validation within the larger context of identity politics.
Resonating throughout the book is the theme of cultural difference negotiation, especially when either necessity or convenience encourages tourism managers to manufacture static representations of Indigenous culture. Part one of this volume demonstrates the inclusion and exclusion of Indigenous actors in their own representation at tourist sites. Such destinations reproduce Western stereotypes about Indigenous peoples while also occasionally seeding opportunities for creative expression and undermining of dominant political systems. What quickly becomes evident is that Western tourists do not visit Indigenous sites in order to gain new knowledge or challenge their existing worldviews because tourists seek encounters that affirm and reinforce what they already believe is true about Indigenous peoples. Western tourists understand their experiences within dominant Western narratives about race, gender, nature, and cultural progress instead of challenging themselves to learn about Indigenous frameworks, and tourists are proven to prefer predictable environments that mirror other forms of Western leisure.
Alexis Celeste Bunten’s chapter about Australian Indigenous living history museums emphasizes how museums stage imagined Indigenous worlds where costumed actors perform a static and sanitized vision of Indigenous culture. The predictable format of these living heritage performances resembles an American theme park, beginning with a friendly greeting by a tour guide, followed by scripted demonstrations of Indigenous language, fire-making performances, choreographed dances, and the final depositing of tourists at a souvenir shop. These culture museums feed on Western nostalgia for returning to an untouched naturalized past and the trope of the happy native who exists outside of contemporary society.
Interactions between tourists and Indigenous hosts are shown to be mediated by tourist demands, and Indigenous communities have learned to publically present themselves in visual ways that outsiders understand to be Indigenous. While cultural tourism often misappropriates cultural heritage and invades intellectual property, it also has potential to enable economic, social, and political empowerment. The chapters in the second part of this book explore the legitimization of Indigenous identities and their political and economic rights. The authors show avenues for Indigenous agency in the appropriation of Western tourism models to create jobs within their communities, to advocate for the protection of their land, and to increase public awareness of their disenfranchisement.
For example, Rachel Giraudo’s chapter on Indigenous Tourism in Botswana underscores how San heritage tourism gives them a political voice and a platform to talk back to their oppressors. But similar to other case studies in this volume, a significant hindrance to Indigenous control of tourism is the lack of business knowledge and the historical isolation from local, national, and global economies. But there certainly are outliers to this general trend, and the third portion of the book highlights Indigenous exploitation of the tourist trade for their own economic gain. Kathryn Bunn-Marcuse’s study employs farming metaphors to explain how local artisans developed effective strategies to create products that appeal to demographic shifts throughout the tourist season.
The book ends with an excellent epilog by Nelson H.H. Graburn that calls for more equitable relations among Indigenous people and ruling cultures. Graburn is hopeful for increased social, cultural, political, economic, and environmental stability among the communities described in the previous chapters. He ties the previous three sections of the book together by focusing on the perceived entitlement to Indigenous people’s physical and intellectual space, and presents a vision for the future in which Indigenous minorities gain the power to control when and under what conditions outsiders interact with their communities. Indigenous Tourism Movements concludes with the final argument that the next necessary stage of cultural tourism is to increase the political agency of Indigenous peoples by letting them fully determine when and how their voices are heard, what they do or do not say, and the power to say no.
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[Review length: 820 words • Review posted on May 6, 2019]