Tourism,Gender,and Ethnicity

Ethnic Tourism and the Pursuit of Authenticity

The differences between hosts and guests are an important reason for Western tourists to travel to Latin America and the Caribbean. MacCannell (1973; 1999 [1976]) has argued that Western tourists come from homogenized modern societies that have lost their traditions and authenticity. In his words, it is primarily the mass tourist-sending countries’ middle class “that systematically scavenges the earth for new experiences to be woven into a collective, touristic version of other peoples and other places” (MacCannell, 1999 [1976]: 13). In their search for an authentic experience, tourists are willing to travel to faraway places. Van den Berghe (1994) calls tourism by Western travelers to remote places in the South a form of ethnic relations because it leads to the interaction of people of different cultures and subcultures. Those who travel are searching for authentic encounters with exotic Others. The natives become the spectacle. It is not their schooling, their service provision, or their helpfulness or bilingualism that are their main resources for entertaining tourists but their supposed authenticity (van den Berghe, 1994: 8–9). Nevertheless, indigenous people who are attractive to tourists are often in a disadvantaged position and have difficulty benefiting directly from the situation. They often have to leave their remote communities to meet tourists in markets, city centers, and other places where the “dominant representatives of national culture” are in control (van den Berghe, 1994: 13). The latter often act as middlemen in the relations between the natives and the tourists. Tourism superimposes itself on existing ethnic and gender relations, inequalities, and power hierarchies (Kinnaird and Hall, 1996; van den Berghe, 1994: 13–15).

Tourists’ appreciation of the “authentic” and “colorful” local costumes, customs, rituals, feasts, and handicrafts may lead to their commoditization. According to Cohen (1988), they become touristic services or commodities as they are performed or produced for tourists’ consumption. The provision of sexual services in the form of tourist-oriented prostitution is a major example of commoditization (Cohen, 1988: 372). The commoditization of people and their cultural traits and customs may alter cultural meanings and destroy their authenticity. Instead of the “real” thing, the commoditization of cultures leads to a fake or a “staged authenticity”(MacCannell, 1973; see also Cohen, 1988: 372; van den Berghe, 1994). The authenticity that the tourist seeks, however, is not fixed but negotiable, a cultural construct. In the negotiations about what an authentic experience is (Cohen, 1988), all three parties (tourists, middlemen, natives) have their moments of power. From the perspective of the local community, the commoditization of cultural products and staged authenticity may not always mean the loss of meaning or the destruction of culture as some scholars assume (Cohen, 1988: 381; van den Berghe, 1994). They may also lead to a renovation or revival of ethnic identities, self-representations, and customs (Meisch, 2002).

Whether the commodification of ethnic arts and performances leads to a decline in quality and meaningfulness or to a cultural renaissance has been widely discussed (e.g. Cohen, 1988; Errington, 1998; García Canclini, 1995; Graburn, 1976; Greenwood, 1989; Kirtsoglou and Theodossopoulos, 2004; Shepherd, 2002; Stephen, 1993). Researchers may have different takes on commoditization while studying the same community. For example, Stephen (1993: 47) claims that the weavers of Teotitlán del Valle, Oaxaca, refused to incorporate Asian designs into their work, preferring to retain those of their Zapotec heritage. In contrast, García Canclini (1995: 172) reports from the same village that weavers have been producing tapestries “with images by Picasso, Klee, and Miró” since 1968, after a visit from tourists who worked at New York’s Museum of Modern Art. Thus, incorporation of “foreign” designs by ethnic producers is selective.

Cohen (1988: 379) speaks of an “emergent authenticity,” proposing that

a cultural product, or a trait thereof, which is at one point generally judged as contrived or inauthentic, may, in the course of time, become generally recognized as authentic, even by experts. . . . Thus, for example, an apparently contrived, tourist-oriented festival (such as the Inti Rami festival in Cuzco, a “revival” of an ancient Inca custom) may in due time be accepted as an “authentic” local custom.

The same is true, according to Cohen (1988: 379–380), for craft production. For example, in Ocumicho, Chiapas, the creation of ceramic devils, begun in the 1960s after negative impacts on the community’s agricultural lands, is now touted as a traditional activity of local potters (García Canclini, 1995: 158–161). García Canclini holds that a number of cases in Mexico in particular and in Latin America in general show that “reelaboration of traditions can be a simultaneous source of economic prosperity and symbolic reaffirmation.” Indigenous people may learn to strategize the way they appear to and approach tourists as part of their claims to a niche in the tourist economy (Little, 2008).

Nonetheless, middlemen, cultural brokers, and touristic entrepreneurs from outside the local community exert their power by initiating processes of commoditization that may lead to the exploitation of local communities and their members. They often skim off some of the profits of craft producers by buying low and selling high. As van den Berghe (1994: 15) argues, middlemen, in control of local economic resources, are in a position “to manipulate indigenous cultural symbols for commercial gain (such as decorating hotels or restaurants with indigenous crafts), indeed, even to alter indigenous culture for tourist marketing (for example, by creating setting of ‘staged authenticity,’ such as ‘native dances’ for tourist consumption.” Middlemen may also “advise” tourists about the authenticity of cultural products: on the island of Taquile in Lake Titicaca on the border between Peru and Bolivia, guides from outside of the island tell tourists not to buy weavings on the island because they are supposedly much more expensive than those that can be bought on shore in the Peruvian city of Puno (Ypeij and Zorn, 2007). Tourists, in their turn, participate actively in the social construction of authenticity as they pass judgment on the attractiveness of tourist centers and the local people. Places may be perceived as too crowded, too modern, and too touristic to be authentic (see Cohen, 1988: 378). Through travel guides and Internet communications, tourists’ information on the “authenticity” of certain localities may seriously affect the flow of tourists toward those places.

The pursuit of the authentic Other, then, involves a power struggle among tourists, local communities, entrepreneurs, middlemen, and cultural brokers with definitions of “authentic” at its core. Indigenousness and Indianness can be an asset for local men and women but also a basis for exploitation, depending on who controls the processes of defining and representing. Marisol de la Cadena (1995) has argued that women are more Indian than men (because men leave their community for labor migration and military service and are thus more often subject to processes of mestizaje). This could mean that indigenous women have more opportunities to benefit from their ethnic identity but also that they are more often subject to exploitation by more powerful actors in the tourism project.

Gender and Tourism

The many differences between hosts and guests are an important reason for Western tourists to travel to Latin America and the Caribbean. Basing her argument on Henriette Moore’s A Passion for Difference (1994), Swain (2001) argues that the attraction of difference on which tourism is built links it profoundly to gender. Perceiving gender as a system of culturally constructed identities that are expressed in ideologies of masculinity and femininity and that interact with socially structured relationships in divisions of labor, leisure, sexuality, and power between men and women, she makes a plea for a gendered approach in tourism studies as an important tool for disentangling power asymmetries and differentials. As a multidimensional and dynamic concept, gender is embedded not only in the direct social interaction between hosts and guests but also in the daily interaction between local people in their communities, in their relations with regional and national governments, and in the structures of markets, policy plans, and the development of the tourism industry as a whole. Our focus in this issue is on the divisions of labor and power among local men and women—the ways in which they may control tourism projects, play with the tourists’ gaze, and eroticize their bodies to appeal to tourist sexual desires. Analyzing tourism from the local perspective makes it clear that seemingly obvious divisions between hosts and guests, powerful and powerless, and men and women should not be taken for granted (Aitchison, 2001). Tourism development can produce profound economic, cultural, political, and social changes. It may reconfirm existing gender constructions, but it may also offer opportunities and challenge local communities to initiate changes, reorganize their daily lives, and question existing gender constructions and hierarchies. For example, indigenous women’s craft production for the tourist market is heavily influenced by gender relations, and its implications vary across time and space. As among the Kuna of Panama, women may remain on relatively egalitarian terms with men who market for them or as marketers themselves (Swain, 1989; 1993). They may initially gain power through their economic independence but perhaps be punished for this with a violent male backlash, an intensification of patriarchal relations within the household (as among the Maya potters of Amatenango del Valle, Chiapas [Nash, 1993]), or conflicts between husbands and wives (Eber and Rosenbaum, 1993). Alternatively, they may straightforwardly gain economic power and increased autonomy, challenging “patriarchal” or, better, “neo-patriarchal” (Wilson, 2005: Chap. 7) privilege (Nash, 1993; see also Little, 2004; van den Berghe, 1994).

Tourism can promote changes in gender relations though the demonstration effect of the behavior of individual women and family travelers. In the latter case, family dynamics may differ from those of the local population, with, for example, husbands holding hands with their wives in public. Changes also occur because of the expansion of jobs for poor, working-class, and middle-class women, though these are often in the low-waged service sector or part of the informal economy (Kinnaird and Hall, 1996). Generating an income permits women in general to escape unhappy marriages or to avoid marriage altogether and may contribute to the increase in number of female-headed households (Chant, 1991; 1997; Nash, 1993; Wilson, 2008b). Tourism may alter gender relations between men and women, husbands and wives, at the level of the household and the daily interaction. The multidimensionality and dynamism of the relation between gender and tourism become even more apparent when they intersect with ethnicity and sexuality.

Sexuality: Exotic, Erotic Others

The othering and exoticization of Third World people was initially and aptly analyzed by Edward Said (2001 [1978]; see Ypeij in this issue). Imagining of exotic, erotic, and hypersexualized local people is common among both male heterosexual and homosexual and female sex tourists. As Kempadoo (2004: 125) argues concerning the Caribbean, “Caribbean men and women alike are construed in tourist imaginations as racial-sexual subjects/objects—typically the hypersexual ‘black male stud’ and the ‘hot’ brown or black woman—whose main roles are to serve and please the visitor.” That women are of color is a major attraction for sex tourists in the Dominican Republic, Cuba, and elsewhere (e.g. Cabezas, 1999: 111; Fernandez, 1999). They are exotic and hence erotic. Although Western Hemisphere tourism has been most studied in the Caribbean region (e.g., Kempadoo, 1999; 2004; Pattullo, 1996; Pruitt and LaFont, 1995), the insights about sex tourism gleaned there are applicable to Latin American tourist destinations as well.

The local men and women who engage in sex tourism have various expectations, ranging from money received for a one-night stand to what has been called “romance tourism,” in which a relationships may last for some days to some years and even end in matrimony (Brennan, 2004: Chap. 3; Cabezas, 1999; Davidson and Sanchez Taylor, 1995; Meisch, 1995; Pruitt and LaFont, 1995a; 1995b; 1995c; 1995d). In Sosúa, the Dominican Republic, for example, “Many of the women procure relationships with tourists that involve elements of friendship, sponsorship, and obligation. They enter into relationships with tourists that will provide them with monthly remittances long after the tourist has left his vacation heaven of Sosúa” (Cabezas, 1999: 99). Female tourists may take on similar obligations toward the men they romance during their tourist ventures, some even helping the men to migrate (e.g., Pruitt and LaFont, 1995: 424).

Unequal economic power is constitutive of the relationships between tourists and the prostitutes or romance partners that they engage. Speaking of prostitution in the Third World generally, Davidson (1998: 79) notes that “such prostitutes are often under very intense economic duress. On the whole, sex tourism flourishes in countries where a large percentage of the population lives in poverty, where there is high unemployment and no welfare system to support those who are excluded from the formal economy.” The structural adjustment programs promoted by the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank since the late 1970s led to greater unemployment and pushed large numbers of men and women into the informal economy and into prostitution (for the Jamaican case, see Campbell, Perkins, and Mohammed, 1999: 125–126; for Barbados, see Phillips, 1999: 186). In the Dominican Republic males called Sanky Pankies service both women and homosexual men (Cabezas, 1999: 100–101). Male prostitutes are somewhat less vulnerable than female prostitutes, partly because women’s role as caretakers of children, the infirm, and the elderly makes their economic situation more fragile (Davidson, 1998: 79). Both male and female prostitutes represent a reserve army of labor in waiting, as does the informal economy in general (Davidson, 1998: 97; Wilson, 1998: 7–8).

Although power relations between male tourists and female prostitutes (or poor women being romanced) are the prototype of dominance/submission relationships, female tourists also exploit their greater economic power in interactions with the men they romance in tourist centers in Latin America and the Caribbean. “While these relationships do not reproduce the power relations of male dominance and female subordination, they do perpetuate other power relations, namely between First World and Third World nationals and between whites and people of color” (Mullings, 1999: 76). Thus both men and women tourists are consumers of the eroticized, exoticized sexuality of host country people (Kempadoo, 2004: 129).

Both male and female children (defined as those under age 16) may be exploited for sexual purposes. Children are among the most powerless and vulnerable populations and often engage in prostitution for self- or family survival. They may be eroticized by pedophiles who seek them out or be exploited by “situational abusers” who just happen to select children for sexual purposes (e.g., Davidson and Sanchez Taylor, 1995d). Researchers affiliated with End Child Prostitution, Child Pornography, and Trafficking of Children for Sexual Purposes, established in 1990, have documented the existence of child prostitution and exploitation by tourists in Cuba, Costa Rica, the Dominican Republic, and Venezuela, among other countries (Davidson and Sanchez Taylor, 1995a; 1995b; 1995c; 1995d).

Though prostitution may involve excesses, we do not want to imply that the power hierarchies and inequalities within sex and romance tourism always come down to the Western sexual abuser who victimizes and exploits local men, women, and children. The acknowledgment of local agency leads to the recognition of moments of power reversal in cases in which local men and women actively seek out tourists as objects of sexual seduction. In Cuzco, for example, local men and women often attempt to seduce tourists for fun, pleasure, a few free nights out, and perhaps short- or long-term benefits or migration opportunities (Vich, 2006).

Although not touching upon all aspects of host and guest interactions with an ethnic, gender, or sexuality overlay, the papers in this issue address at least one of each. Examining three occupations that appeal to the tourist in pursuit of the exotic Other, Annelou Ypeij concentrates on the Cuzco–Machu Picchu region in Peru. She shows that the economic success of street vendors—often harassed by the police—hinges on their presentation of self as culturally unique and authentic. Bearing a history of repression and discrimination, they may be able to embrace a positive Other identity by wearing a traditional costume admired by tourists (Figure 1). The same holds for members of the indigenous community—mainly women—who allow themselves to be photographed alone or with tourists for a small payment. Although the money they earn is necessary for family survival, these women are often looked down upon in their communities of origin. Male tourist guides, usually mestizos, present themselves as descendants of the Inca and give glowing, sanitized accounts of Inca history. All three groups are engaged in constructing an authenticity that is believed to attract tourists.

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Figure 1.

Marleni Callañaupa, president of the Awana Wasi weaving association. (Photo Annelou Ypeij)

Looking at cultural tourism in various sites in Peru and Chiapas, Mexico, Florence E. Babb shows how the tourist industry and the government exoticize indigenous people as the ethnic Other and the indigenous appropriate these images in their self-presentations. She explores the reasons that, while women are considered “more Indian” than men, men are pushed to the fore in interactions with tourists in Peru. In Chiapas, indigenous women have become more empowered because of the Zapatista movement’s inclusion of gender justice issues in its programs. In neither Peru nor Chiapas is prostitution of women to tourists common, though young men emphasizing their indigenous roots may engage in romance tourism with female tourists in Cuzco and other population centers in Peru. Babb stresses the importance of both using and creating an indigenous identity for tourist consumption as a form of empowerment.

Ávila and Luna discuss the appropriation and privatization of land, water resources, and beaches by tourist development programs enacted in Costa Alegre in the state of Jalisco. Under neoliberal development policies, privatization of ejido lands and beaches (the latter still supposedly prohibited by the Mexican Constitution of 1917, though ejido lands have not been so protected since 1992) in the economic interest of transnational and national investors has become common. Ávila and Luna point out that tourist development and the expropriation of lands and waters that results are imbricated in the processes of capital accumulation and involve accumulation through dispossession, often of indigenous people. Among the dispossessed are campesinos, whether indigenous or not, and fishermen. Furthermore, among the externalities of capital accumulation rooted in tourist centers is the degradation of the natural environment. Elite tourism is often ecological tourism and can be seen in some cases as a form of “ecocolonialism.”

Although religious and spiritual tourism has a long history, New Age spiritual tourism has expanded over the past few decades (Sharpley, 2009). Gómez-Barris addresses the phenomenon of “spiritual tourism,” often initiated by expatriates, in Andean Peru. Focusing on Diane Dunn’s spiritual retreat in the Sacred Valley (Figure 2), she asks whether interactions between natives, including local shamans, and the tourists who seek them out have a negative impact on indigenous communities. She argues that for three decades neoliberal tourist development policies have emphasized the appropriation of indigenous “authenticity” in the interest of economic gain. Despite Dunn’s well-meaning emphasis on bringing together people from around the world in a search for world peace, Gómez-Barris concludes that there is little cultural exchange between hosts and guests, partly because of linguistic differences between the Quechua- and Spanish-speaking natives, on the one hand, and the “spiritual tourists,” on the other, and partly because a New Age, hybridized and fantasy version of the local culture is presented to draw in tourists and their economic contributions.

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Figure 2.

Q’ero guides Francisco and Juana at a spiritual tourism center in the Sacred Valley. (Photo Macarena Gómez-Barris)

Also examining religious and spiritual tourism, Bell appraises the cultural revitalization among the Kaqchikel Maya of Guatemala that has been spurred by potential and actual tourists’ interest in the Maya calendar and its predictions of change on December 21, 2012. This new beginning has been misinterpreted as heralding the end of the world as we know it rather than, as the Maya stress, the end of a calendar cycle. Discussing this interest in what she conceives of as Maya “cultural property,” Bell reports that the Maya are reappropriating their cultural knowledge by reacting negatively to the incorrect interpretations of 2012 promoted by the international tourism industry. She points out that the tourism industry often perpetuates an “ideology of violence” through the commidification of indigenous culture. She holds that in engaging tourists who seek out Maya spirituality and practice the Maya are claiming authority over their heritage.

Wilson presents a photo essay on beach vendors in Puerto Vallarta, Jalisco, and beach/marina vendors in Cabo San Lucas, Baja California, Mexico. She emphasizes that the wares the beach vendors sell may be imported from afar and that the vendors represent one of the last retailers in an international value chain. They also add value to what is imported, turning Indonesian cloth into dresses for sale.

Wilson, Gámez, and Ivanova consider the marginalization of women beach vendors in the tourist center of Cabo San Lucas, Mexico. Part of the informal or semi-informal economy, women vendors are economically marginalized in that they may earn nothing on a bad day. They are also marginalized as concerns their thwarted aspirations for more education and by their residential segregation from the more luxurious tourist zones. Nonetheless, their earnings can help overcome their marginal position within (neo-) patriarchal households.