MODERNIST ANTHROPOLOGY AND TOURISM OF THE AUTHENTIC

Tourism, in addition to being big business, is a strategy for framing and interpreting cultural difference. The driving ideology behind tourism is a form of exotopy, or appropriation of otherness. It shares this exotopic function with anthropology, which is Western culture's official discourse of alterity. Semiotically, tourism and modernist anthropology are oppositionally linked. That is, while their experiential and narrative strategies are opposed, they can both be mapped onto the same general space, by means of semiotic square, and can be shown to overlap. In the postmodern era, both anthropological and touristic ideologies are breaking down, as ethnographic and touristic practices increasingly overlap.