Description
This ethnography illuminates the trajectories and life experiences of young Napo Kichwa men who have worked as tour guides in the Ecuadorian upper Amazon, in the wake of the "ecoprimitivist" tourism boom of the early 1990s. Anthropologist Ernesto J. Benitez analyzes the socioeconomic situation of these men and the motivations and desires that drive them to seek service-based employment. Importantly, the book engages with two bodies of scholarship that are rarely put in conversation with one another: literature that looks at Western discourses about nature and the environment and how those underpin and shape tourism imaginaries in local and Indigenous communities, and relevant scholarship on women who engage in sex tourism.