Tourism in the twenty first century is a way of communicating tradition and accumulating capital. People travel around the world to see these traditions and different cultures to see the unique nature of different people. Most of the time, this does not come with out a price. As we will see throughout this paper, indigenous cultures as did many other capitalist societies are jumping on the bandwagon per say to achieve a better life. By better life I mean that with the intrusion of money, indigenous people now can buy food and materials instead of having to spend most of their time during the day to hunt or gather such things. I will show examples of this through an article and different texts that we have read over this semester.
The article is called Creating Huaorani Discourse on Tourism, which is by Scott Braman. Scot Braman is a writer for the Cultural Survival Quarterly. The article is about a group of indigenous people located in the Amazon. These people are just in the beginning stages of tourism. What I mean is they are not a capitalist dependant culture, yet. They still hunt and gather to survive. The article is Bramans accounts on tourism with Huaorani. Braman speaks of two different times tourists had vested them during his time there. The first time it was a few Americans who came and went without any problems. They interacted with the huaorani pleasantly. They did not take photos, but instead talked with these people to try and get a sense of how these people lived. .
The second tourist group, who were Europeans, didnt quite interact with the Huaorani as well as the Americans. The Europeans wanted a show and a good one at that. They were willing to pay for it. There were disputes over how much which displeased the Huaorani, but they put a show on anyway. The show seemed to be just a group of the huaroani having fun with song and dance, but the Europeans were not impressed.
