Flight to Lima tomorrow…
As the realization that I am actually going to Peru sets in at last, I am beginning to switch my brain off of vacation mode; as should be evident from my last blog post (lol!), I have been leaning heavily into the time off. I want this blog post to serve as a sort of warm-up exercise for my brain, which I need terribly, while also allowing me to put my excited, nervous, and other forms of thought to paper. After reading one of Jon’s earlier blog posts (it may have been his first?), the notion of tourism – and we students as those tourists – has been stuck in my head. I like to think that I have always been wary of my role as a tourist when visiting different places, but I imagine that this wariness certainly has its limits. I am terribly excited to learn about the concept of tourism as it relates Indigeneity and colonialism. As Jon has alluded to, this will certainly have implications for the tourism we as a group will be conducting, ones which may be hard to hear. However, I feel this will be learning that I have to understand to pursue both my personal and academic goals later in life. Is it possible to reconcile wanting to travel and experience new places while also respecting the land and culture of different groups throughout the world? I hope to find at least a partial answer to this question through my learning in Peru.
One reply on “Final burning questions”
Tourism is often one of those irregular verbs… “You’re a tourist, I’m a traveller.” Often we don’t want to admit that we, too, are tourists. For good and ill. An (as a book I was just reading in fact makes plain) in fact anthropologists are in some ways kinds of tourists, and vice versa… both have investments in the idea of the other.