SPECIAL SECTION: TOURISM, ANTHROPOLOGY, AND QUALITY OF LIFE

Native Anthropology and Anthropological Tourism

Enrique Maestas

Native Anthropology provides an important critical lens for examining ethnographic fieldwork, especially as it intersects with tourism. The first part of this paper examines the intersection of anthropology and tourism as a closely aligned set of cultural practices and provides practical considerations of Native Anthropology and anthropological tourism of interest to practitioners. This article also discusses the ways that anthropology and tourism often comprise complementary activities, and offers important lessons regarding fieldwork and the negotiation of borders and relationships for anthropologists. The second part provides a literature review of methodological and theoretical writings about Native Anthropology as it has matured into a non-essentialist understanding of alliance, collaboration, and service among anthropologists and the communities in which they work. Specifically, this article addresses ideological boundaries that exist in the practice of Native Anthropology which distinguish its methods and relationships from tourism and anthropological tourism, based on a literature review and my own work in Apache, Hopi, and Danza Azteca communities in the U.S. and Mexico. In all, Native Anthropology and anthropological tourism is a productive set of overlapping fields that provides practical knowledge for doing ethnographic fieldwork and important theoretical implications for discussing the conditions of its existence.

The Applied Anthropologist, No. 1, Vol. 31, 2011, pp 15 - 22

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