Selling culture? Between commoditisation and cultural control in Indigenous alternative tourism

Indigenous cultures are significant for tourism but their owners have been systematically excluded from its benefits and control. To counteract this tendency, some indigenous organisations are becoming tourist agents offering alternative eco-cultural tourism. Their niche market has social and ecological consciousness but, based on postcolonialist ideologies, still expects culture to be “authentic”. To succeed, indigenous organisations need to manage tensions between their own culture and identities, and what the market demands. Applying the notion of cultural control, in this article I evaluate how alternative projects in Mexico and Peru deal with the challenge of commoditising culture and nature on their own terms. To understand the paradoxes they face, I analyse their cultural representations, organisational identities and alliances through an ethnographic reading of their Web-stories.