Indianism

Welcome to Anthropology of Tourism!

Although there is a good deal of literature on the anthropology of tourism, it tends to take for granted the strict opposition between culture and nature, commodity and habitus, the spectator and the performer, the colonizer and the colonized. My point of departure is different: I look at American Indians traveling across Europe and industrial North America with Wild West shows and fairs (see below George Catlin’s painting of dancing Ojibwe in England in 1843-4 and a photo of Blackfoot Indians in Baltimore), and on European Indianists staging Native American cultures in front of a lay people audience. From these hybrid forms I proceed into more conventional forms of tourism, including ethnic (indigenous) tourism.