Study abroad websites talk a lot about all of the chances you'll have to meet/interact with locals where you're studying. I guess maybe it's a little different since you'll be living there for 3+ months, but I wonder what's your take on this?

THE Dominican Family? Is there just the one?

The whole 'come meet a happy, native family!' is a perfectly normal practice - there is a quite significant tourist industry based upon white kids going backpacker-style in Latin America and wanting to see the 'real' culture. Youth hostels in Latin America are filled with advertisements like this, all with bright and colouful pictures of poor, but oh so joyful and authentic brown people.

But it isn't a real rum shack. It's a "Rum Shack." Sorry, I'm a stickler for the unnecessary quotation marks.

This kind of thing is really common in a lot of tourism media and literature. People and places are sold and resold as "authentic" representations of idealized histories. The work of the anthropologist Edward Bruner talks a lot about this. And there are tons more.

Ugh, another one of these. Pay for your "authentic" experience instead of actually getting out into the world and interacting with people as though they were people instead of gawking at them as though they are a museum exhibit. Go home and feel better about donating canned goods once a year to "the poor" and give yourself a big ol' pat on the back for all your hard work.

In a way, the tourists are the one's being played for fools here. It is suggested that one can learn something about a culture in this context, rather than telling truth that any real level of cultural familiarity requires months of intense study at the minimum, because that would be bad for business.

If I as a lower-class American could make more money than I do now by exploiting rich foreigners' ignorance and objectification of my "culture," I'd jump all over that opportunity.

Though, I do have to wonder to what extent this is already happening. I do sometimes see tourists from Japan, a wealthier nation than the US, visiting San Antonio and its historic sites. I can't imagine that they have any greater appreciation of Texan history and culture than these tourists visiting the Dominican Republic.

@Lisa,

I've been really enjoying this website. Truly. Most of the posts are interesting, surprising, thought-provoking.

This is the problem I have: the Avatar post about white guilt was posted rather closely to the article regarding "need" and the poverty in some third-world countries (http://thesocietypages.org/socimages/2010/01/03/need-and-the-standard-of-living/), the tone of which is also contrary to your "How not to write about Africa" post. Posting images of destitution to remind yourself of how good you have it is throwing a guilt-fest for yourself... publicly. Just because you aren't profiting off of it hand over fist doesn't make it right.

I'm fairly new to Sociological Images, but I appreciate your work and most of your posts have me nodding my head over my cup of coffee every morning. "MMMhmmm."

As we're all well-aware, tourism and indigenous populations is a socially, politically, and economically complicated subject (ranging the world over, nonetheless). I realize that it's unreasonable to expect a dissertation in one post, but I feel this is a somewhat thin treatment of complex subject matter. I find it interesting that we can criticize ourselves and other Westerners for the thirst for authenticity on one hand, while on the other hand we deem ourselves fit to judge the "natives" of the world for selling a valuable commodity and making a paycheck. I faced this tension when studying the Miao ethnic minority in China--a culture that faces similar commodification in the increasingly free market. Despite a bevy of complicated issues arising out of tourism (what Louisa Schein called 'internal orientalism') cultural tourism is the most lucrative and viable means for many Miao to make money. Hmmm...

There is also the "Polygamy Experience Tour". (scroll down).

I don't even know where to start with Irish equivalents for this kind of thing. During a summer in county Kerry one could be led to believe that it existed solely for the period May to September and folded up like so many circuses for the rest of the time.