Ecoturismo in Ecuador: An Ethnohistorical Account of Rainforests, Indians, and Oil

Abstract

Ecuadorian ecoturismo is an institution that emerged in a specific national and regional context. It is productively, although at times ambivalently entangled with indigenous struggles for economic and environmental sovereignty. It is connected to social movements struggling for certain forms of political and legal recognition, but at some junctures it has also been a Trojan horse of sorts for new forms of exploitation in Ecuadorian indigenous communities (for instance, although a full discussion of this is beyond the scope of this book, in some communities ecotourism has also eased bioprospecting and biopiracy—one example of that in the village of Chichico Rumi is discussed in chapter 7). In other instances, it has been a powerful economic alternative and political platform for its adopters in the con-text of Ecuador’s history of petrocolonialism and blangueavniento or “whitening” (Rahier, 1998; Muratorio, 1991)—a disassociation or alienation from one’s indigenous cultural resources through, among other things, urban migration, and a residual stigma against the indigenous lifestyle, metonymically linking traditional living with “back-wardness.” This chapter focuses on the ethnohistorical realities of ecoturismo emerging as a force in Ecuadorian indigenous ecopolitics.