The staging and performativity of ethnic tourism in Los Altos de Chiapas

Abstract

This paper reflects on the ethnic tourism and the selective and particular visions that tourists have about the indigenous population, described as different and exotic. The constructive look of the tourist is combined with the need to experiment with the otherness to authenticate the travel. This implies deepening the processes that make up the ethnic imaginary within the global leisure market, but also in analyzing the role that performance activities acquire as a tourist attraction. The work wants to explore the exhibition of the indigenous body in the tourist market from two visions: on the one hand, the interest of the body as cultural heritage; on the other, the moving body on the tourist stage. For the analysis I will use the ethnographic data of the region Altos Tzotzil Tzeltal of Chiapas (Mexico) with great influx of ethnic tourists. The purpose is to observe how in these tourist spaces, built as exotic and outside the world economic and cultural system, they become precisely transnational places of exchange of glances, and in places where it is exhibited, observes and commodified a body qualified as ethnic.