Discussion and Conclusion

Abstract

Globally circulating ideas and practices engender different meanings, and are adopted and mobilized in contradictory ways, often simulta-neously. Ecotourism is no exception. The reason why I chose to frame and design my research as an ethnography of ecotourism (rather than ethnography of Kichwa negotiating ecotourism, or an ethnography of tourists visiting Kichwa) was because I was fascinated by the epistemological possibilities of ecotourism as—as I came to think of it—an amalgam object, of sorts, explicitly integrating of the concepts and fantasies of “nature” and “culture” and forcing articulations of where the boundaries between the two lie; bringing together progrowth capitalist ideologies and “cosmologies of capitalism” (Sahlins, 1994); neoliberal conservation and indigenous mobilizations.