This book provides an anthropological analysis of the encounter between local residents and tourists in the Trobriand Islands, a place renowned in anthropology and represented in various media as “culturally authentic.” Through an examination of four arenas of interaction between Trobriand Islanders and tourists (formal performances, informal village visits, souvenir shopping, and tourist photography), this monograph explores the relationship of tourism to the commoditization of culture. A critique of concepts of authenticity, tradition, primitivity, and cultural commodification shows how thes ... More

This book provides an anthropological analysis of the encounter between local residents and tourists in the Trobriand Islands, a place renowned in anthropology and represented in various media as “culturally authentic.” Through an examination of four arenas of interaction between Trobriand Islanders and tourists (formal performances, informal village visits, souvenir shopping, and tourist photography), this monograph explores the relationship of tourism to the commoditization of culture. A critique of concepts of authenticity, tradition, primitivity, and cultural commodification shows how these notions, which have particular meanings as analytical concepts in anthropology, are appropriated and strategically deployed in the discourses of both Trobriand Islanders and tourists. These tropes are employed in ways that fit with prevailing metanarratives which each side holds about the other, and are reproduced both in individual narratives of tourists’ and Trobrianders’ experiences and in their interpretations (often misconstrued) of the lives of cultural others with whom they interact. I argue that cultural commodities in this type of tourism are conceived of as singularities, a special category whose commodity status is downplayed in order to generate an increased sense of authenticity and to perpetuate the myth of a “primitive” economy and way of life more generally. In touristic encounters, experience itself is a sort of commodity, but relationships (real or imagined) are central to investing these experiences with meaning and value. This analysis brings new understandings of the role and significance of authenticity in the anthropology of tourism, as well as how meaning and value are ascribed to the cultural products produced and consumed in the cultural tourism encounter.