Includes bibliographical references and index.

Ethnographic context : the place and the people -- Modernity and primitivity : definitions and discourses in imagining alterity -- Fixing the tourist gaze : essentializing the primitive and the creation of desire in textual and visual media -- Spectacular culture : performance and festivals -- Producing and consuming experience : commoditizing "real life" -- Producing and consuming things : material culture as meaningful object -- Tourist photography : prefiguring and postfiguring the touristic experience -- Cashing in on culture : the meaning of money in tourist-Trobriand transactions.

This book provides an anthropological analysis of the encounter between local residents and tourists in the Trobriand Islands, a place renowned in anthropology and represented in various media as "culturally authentic." In such a place, how are ideas about authenticity implicated in creating and representing the self and cultural Others in the context of cultural tourism? To answer this question, the author examines four arenas of interaction between Trobriand Islanders and tourists: formal performances, informal village visits, souvenir shopping, and tourist photography. She employs symbolic/interpretive approaches and concepts drawn from economic anthropology to examine the relationship of tourism to the commoditization of culture, the ways in which local residents actively represent and enact "Trobriandness," and the ways tourists interpret and narrate their experience.

Description based on print version record.