MODERNIST ANTHROPOLOGY AND TOURISM OF THE AUTHENTIC

Tourism, in addition to being big business, is a strategy for framing and interpreting cultural difference. The driving ideology behind tour ism is a form of exotopy, or appropriation of otherness. It shares thi s exotopic function with anthropology, which is Western culture's offi cial discourse of alterity. Semiotically, tourism and modernist anthro pology are oppositionally linked. That is, while their experiential an d narrative strategies are opposed, they can both be mapped onto the s ame general space, by means of semiotic square, and can be shown to ov erlap. In the postmodern era, both anthropological and touristic ideol ogies are breaking down, as ethnographic and touristic practices incre asingly overlap.