ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the diverse effects and dynamics of tourism in the Andes in ecological, political-economic, and sociocultural fields of power. While promising sustainable development and cultural empowerment, tourism is often accompanied by inequalities and complex reconfigurations of local ethno-racial, class and sex/gender landscapes, with often unpredictable, undemocratic, undesired, or contradictory results. Local notions of development are ignored or bypassed in the interest of particular representations, performances, and spectacles that serve non-local audiences. Viewed as a capitalist market intertwined with the region’s larger history of capitalist colonialism, Andean tourism continues the pattern of seeking value extraction from the region’s ecological and human resources, creating tourist spectacles even of past forms of exploitation in the region. More responsible, sustainable, or fair tourism will require confronting and deconstructing such persistent and destructive patterns.
