Ethnography as a backdoor to critical tourism studies: insights from an ethnobiology study of Indigenous-bird relations in the Altiplano region of Perú and Bolivia

Indigenous-based tourism can alleviate poverty, yet its socioecological trade-offs remain poorly understood. This ethnobiology study examines the Uro people of Lake Titicaca, historically marginalized fishers once confined to floating islands made of totora sedge, to illustrate how tourism reshaped their livelihoods and environments within a couple of generations. It reveals how the Uro strategically leveraged their Traditional Ecological Knowledge (TEK) and biocultural diversity to achieve economic prosperity through tourism. However, while this partially preserved these resources, it simultaneously eroded them, reducing their TEK and biocultural practices to a curated “pastiche” for tourist consumption. Based on 221 semi-structured interviews, participant observation, archival research, and quantitative surveys, our novel methodological framework “injects” ethnography into an increasingly interdisciplinary collaboration, enriching our understanding of complex socioecological dynamics. Our initial team of ethnobiologists and local Indigenous researchers iteratively integrated ethnographic methodologies while expanding collaborations to include psychologists, anthropologists, ecologists, and tourism scholars. The resulting Injection of Ethnography and Collaboration framework facilitates reflexive discourse among researchers, expanding an originally narrow focus to broader collaboration and developing deeper insights into underlying socioecological dynamics. This framework unveils opportunities for ethnobiology and tourism scholars to engage in interdisciplinary collaboration to better understand the socioecological and biocultural effects of tourism.