Andean Translations: New Age Tourism and Cultural Exchange in the Sacred Valley, Peru

In: Latin American perspectives, Band 39, Heft 6, S. 68-78

Abstract

Since the end of the civil war in the early 1990s, Peru's tourist industry has been organized around an obsession with the Incan past. One rapidly growing segment of the industry aims to allow tourists to experience the Q'ero mysticism of the highlands in a somewhat "authentic" context. A case study of a center of this spiritual tourism in the Sacred Valley of the Incas that focuses on the transmission of energy healing rites raises questions about the possibility of real cultural exchange under conditions of asymmetry and about the impact on indigenous communities of this appropriation and commodification of their spirituality. [Reprinted by permission of Sage Publications Inc., copyright holder.]