Editorial - 6.3

According to a recent ABC News Closeup, "Swords, Plowshares, and Politics", the Human Rights Division of the United Nations has spent US $10.5 million in the past two years. Only five percent was spent on field investigation of human rights violations. The rest of the money went to travel, salaries, printing and conferences.

The Cultural Costs of Tourism

INTRODUCTION: WHO BENEFITS?

The Caribbean Experience

In the twentieth century there has been a decline of European jurisdiction in the Caribbean and a corresponding rise of American influence as the United States has come to see the region as vital to its military, geopolitical, and economic objectives. The tourist industry has also grown rapidly. There is a direct connection between American involvement and the rise of tourism.

Introduction - 6.3

Tourism is the world's second largest export earner, generating approximately US $79 billion annually. Only the oil business generates more. In 1980, 285 million tourists reached destinations throughout the world, with 85% originating from North America and European countries. This represents an eleven-fold increase since 1950.

Tourists and Balinese

In the past decade, tourism encouraged by the Indonesian government, the World Bank, international corporations and local entrepreneurs has become important on the famed isle of Bali. What are the effects of an annual onslaught of nearly a half million tourists on the island ecosystem already inhabited by over two million Balinese?

Tourism to Greenland: Renewed Ethnicity?

Tourism to Kalatdlit Nunat (Greenland) is being promoted as a "New Adventure in Tourism" and eyed by the government as a source of much-needed outside revenue and local employment to support the new economic demands generated by the 1980 semi-independence from Denmark.

Tourism in the Seychelles: A Counterfeit Paradise?

Newly independent and socialist, the Seychelles are striving for social reform and nationalized industries. Yet tourism, Seychelles' major industry, threatens nationalist ideology and socialist ambitions. It has spawned an array of economic, social and cultural contradictions.

Tourism and Native Americans - 6.3

Tourism and prosperity are generally seen to go hand in hand. The prosperous tourist has surplus funds for food, clothing, lodging, travel and material goods.

"What You Don't Know, Won't Hurt You."

There is an old saying, "What you don't know, won't hurt you." Too often, it has been proven false.

Tourism and Change in a Brazilian Fishing Village

Regional tourism has triggered profound cultural changes in Coqueiral, a fishing village of 1,200 inhabitants in Northeast Brazil. Traditional patrons have lost their grip on the community yet socioeconomic inequality is increasing. Male-female relationships are changing.

Tana Toraja: A Decade of Tourism

The Indonesian island of Sulawesi, or Celebes, was once famous as the homeland of Buginese traders and pirates. Until recently, however, little was known in the West of the hundreds of thousands of Toraja people who lived in the mountainous interior of the island.

Settling Down: Bedouin in the Sinai

On April 25, 1982, a profound change occurred in life in the Sinai desert. Under the Camp David accords, Egypt resumed control of the final third of the 26,000 square-mile peninsula from the Israelis, who had taken the area in the Six-Day War in June, 1967. At that time no paved roads penetrated southern Sinai.

Selling Hawaiian Culture

In the past thirty years, Hawaii has become a tourist Mecca, a coveted vacation spot for residents of the mainland and, increasingly, for Japanese. The economy depends upon tourism, and specifically upon the marketing of a particular cultural ambience, which idealizes and invents the culture of native Hawaiians.

Kindling Self-determination Among the Kuna

The San Blas Kuna of Panama are an indigenous population of 30,000 people. Their reserve, the Comarca de San Blas or Kuna Yala, is a strip of land between the Caribbean coast and a mountain chain which runs from Colombia to approximately 60 miles east of the Panama Canal.

Cultural "Authenticity"

No culture sees itself as having one among many possible versions of "reality." Cultural systems create genuine, authentic worlds that are experienced as "real." If this "reality" comes to be questioned seriously, it is a certainty that the culture is on the way to major transformation or collapse.