Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Intimate Alterities: Shifting Indigenous Masculinities And Sexualities Within Amazonian Ecotourism In Napo, Ecuador, Ernesto Javier Benitez

FIU Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation offers an ethnographic account of how indigenous Kichwa tour guides in Napo, Ecuador, the vast majority of whom are young men, negotiate the demands and expectations of the ecotourism industry and how, in the process, they produce and enact new understandings of their ethnic, gendered, and sexual identities. These new understandings are reproductive of outsiders’ expectations and fantasies about indigenous Amazonians, as well as personally and culturally meaningful. I engage with a variety of anthropological literatures, including the anthropology of race and gender, the anthropology of indigenous Amazonia, the anthropology of tourism and sex tourism, and the more …