Ecotourism and Authenticity: Getting Away from It All?

Anthropologists have paid substantial attention to the environment and to tourism. However, they have paid less attention to their conjunction in ecotourism. This article focuses on Western ecotourism in relatively poor countries, approaching it as an expression of certain important Western values concerning the natural world and the people who live there. It places ecotourism within its broader political-economic context--neoliberalism and the institutions that reflect it, which foster its spread in the countries in question. Ecotourism may be seen as an exercise in power that can shape the natural world and the people who live in it in ways that contradict some of the values that it is supposed to express.