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.