Dissertation Research: Tourists and Amazonian Host: Impacts on Economy, Values and Forests

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Eco-tourism, where first-world tourists travel to ecologically attractive places in the developing world, is a relatively new development to a major world industry. This dissertation research project involves a cultural anthropology student from the University of Florida, studying an eco-tourism project in the Peruvian Amazon. The focus of the research is to analyze how the commercial tourism alters the economic activities and ecological values of the host community, a society of native Americans. The student will examine the effects of eco-tourism wage labor on farming and foraging. The hypothesis to be tested is that wage work will divert time away from farming and foraging, while new income will lead people to by new technologies and intensify their foraging. The project will also examine whether natives who participate closely in eco-tourism will adopt notions of cultural and identity and nature that differ from their non-participating peers. The hypothesis to be tested is that participants in tourism will perceive and define cultural identity and the natural environment in ways that more closely match the expectations of tourists. The methodology involves participant observation, semi-structured interviews with a sample of household heads previously interviewed in 1997, and in-depth interviews with a sample of community members. This project will provide fine-grained ethnographic information on the impact of eco-tourism on the people who are permanently in charge of the forest. The results will shed light on the controversy over whether the commercialism of eco-tourism harms the resource by over-exploiting it, or maintains it by facilitating local management and conservation.