INDEV 401 Update: December 3, 2012

This sixth and final bi-weekly report of the term was submitted after my trip to Chachapoyas.  I'll get some photos up soon.

Dan Root

INDEV 401 Bi-weekly Report

December 3, 2012

Last week, I accompanied my coworkers on a trip to Chachapoyas, a city in the northern Amazonas region of Peru.  The impetus for this trip was the sixth annual national rural community tourism (RCT) conference, which took place over a three days period, bringing together RCT associations from all over Peru.  During this conference, I had the opportunity learn about RCT experiences taking place within an incredible variety of cultural and environmental backdrops, from the ecologically rich Amazon rainforest, to the austere mountain deserts of the central highlands, to the peculiar and colorful floating villages on Lake Titicaca.  Together, it was a poignant reminder of the incredible diversity of natural and cultural riches that can be found in a single country.

            The conference also provided me with an opportunity to reflect once more on the role that tourism can (or cannot) play in protecting these diverse permutations of human experience.  In a previous report, I discussed the ways in which RCT can provide a layer of economic protection to those aspects of human well-being that are often ignored when evaluating ‘development’ projects from a simple economic cost-benefit analysis.  I also posed a question regarding tourism and authenticity in cultural practices, roughly: does a cultural practice inevitably lose intrinsic value when it is transformed from an ‘authentic’ form of cultural practice into to just another special feature of a touristic product?

            At first glance, it does seem that unique cultural practices, based in centuries of expressive tradition, lose some sort of ‘authenticity value’ when transformed from pure manifestations of cultural expression to featured selling points for potential tour packages. This view encapsulates my immediate thinking upon hearing the words ‘tourism’ and ‘authenticity’ together in a sentence for the first time. It may be, however, that by fetishizing a naive concept of immutable authenticity, such a response fails to consider the true, dynamic functionality of many cultural practices. Traditional cultural practices cannot be understood as static activities whose forms remain fixed through time, regardless of internal and external influences.  As societies grow and change, so too do iterations of cultural practice, which respond as necessary to the needs and desires of their patrimonial cultures.

Recently, as has been the case throughout history, many unique, beautiful, and meaningful traditional practices, unable to adapt to the exigencies of a changing world, have been swept aside by the often banal and always growing monolith of capitalism’s ‘global society’.  Through RCT, which gives traditional cultural manifestations a tangible market value, cultural practices can adapt, (as they have for centuries), in order to continue as a vibrant part of that society, subsisting and thriving within a protective market niche.  Also, by instilling a tangible market value into cultural practices, RCT is often returning such practices to their utilitarian roots.  Many traditional practices that seem to modern observers to be pure examples of cultural expression, e.g. singing and storytelling, have traditionally been sustained, in part, because of important functional roles, in this example, as a form of recorded history and a means of spreading important information.  When one considers these facts, ‘authentic tourism’ may not seem like such a paradox after all.

To examine this question from an international development perspective, it may be useful to refer to the development theories of the ever-wise Amartya Sen, who argues that ‘development’ is fundamentally about freedom.  At stake in this case is the freedom of rural communities to determine the fates of their own traditional practices.  Through capacity building projects like that of GEA, communities are given tools to determine for themselves how exactly tourism will be managed, what elements will and will not be included, and ultimately, whether or not they personally want aspects of their culture to be made available as a tourist ‘product’.   

However beautiful, priceless, or irreplaceable a ‘pure’ traditional culture may seem, it is important to remember that the communities which guard over such practices are much more than interesting anthropological case studies.  They are, rather, communities of real people, confronting real problems in a really difficult world.  Ultimately, communities themselves should be deciding whether or not to embrace RCT.  Philosophical debate may continue, but if the diverse and impressive showing at the national RCT conference in Chachapoyas was any indicator, communities from throughout Peru have effectively chosen their own answer to this question, responding with an emphatic and wholehearted ‘yes’.

Thanks for reading

Dan