Tourism and Indigenous peoples in South America: reflections on experiences in Argentina and Chile

Abstract

Since the 1990s, the participation of Indigenous peoples in tourism has been fostered as part of global development policies to address rural poverty in Latin America. In this article, our aim is to examine the promotion of indigenous tourism in relation to multicultural transformations and local inter-ethnic relations in South America, taking two experiences, one in southern Chile’s Araucanía Region and the other in the General San Martín Department of northern Argentina’s Salta Province. We reflect on the relevance of institutions–state and non-state–which promote these development perspectives and the links that Indigenous people establish with them for the understanding of indigenous tourism. First, we consider the promotion of indigenous tourism in both countries within the particular dynamics of multiculturalism transformations in each one. Then we focus on the two experiences of indigenous tourism, to think about the relations between Indigenous people, institutions and interethnic relationships in these projects. We suggest that the definition of community tourism should not be considered as a reified field, but rather as a definition that is determined through negotiations and inter-ethnic disputes.