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![So, How Long Have You Been Native?](/assets/artwork/1x1-42817eea7ade52607a760cbee00d1495.gif)
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So, How Long Have You Been Native?
Life as an Alaska Native Tour Guide
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- 14,99 €
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- 14,99 €
Publisher Description
So, How Long Have You Been Native? is Alexis C. Bunten’s firsthand account of what it is like to work in the Alaska cultural tourism industry. An Alaska Native and anthropologist, she spent two seasons working for a tribally owned tourism business that markets the Tlingit culture in Sitka. Bunten’s narrative takes readers through the summer tour season as she is hired and trained and eventually becomes a guide.
A multibillion-dollar worldwide industry, cultural tourism provides one of the most ubiquitous face-to-face interactions between peoples of different cultures and is arguably one of the primary means by which knowledge about other cultures is disseminated. Bunten goes beyond debates about who owns Native culture and has the right to “sell” it to tourists. Through a series of anecdotes, she examines issues such as how and why Natives choose to sell their culture, the cutthroat politics of business in a small town, how the cruise industry maintains its bottom line, the impact of colonization on contemporary Native peoples, the ways that traditional cultural values play a role in everyday life for contemporary Alaska Natives, and how Indigenous peoples are engaging in global enterprises on their own terms. Bunten’s bottom-up approach provides a fascinating and informative look at the cultural tourism industry in Alaska.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Ethnographer Bunten's debut is an insightful though sometimes laborious look at the cultural-tourism industry in the coastal town of Sitka, Alaska. Required to conduct fieldwork in order to complete her graduate studies in anthropology, Bunten, a Native Alaskan, chose to work outside of her tribe, with a tourism company. She found employment as a guide for Tribal Tours, a Native-owned company run by the Tlingit tribe. The passages about Bunten's early days on the job are some of the book's strongest, filled with vivid snapshots of her coworkers and true to her anthropology background intriguing details about the tribe and what goes into working in cultural tourism. Moreover, she doesn't shrink from discussing the difficult and often offensive tourists she dealt with at work. Readers will also learn about the competition that exists between tour companies on Sitka's shores, the intricacies of Tlingit cultural practices, and the history of Alaskan tourism (considered by scholars to have started in 1874). Bunten has created an enjoyable mix of ethnographic study and personal memoir in this account of navigating the cultural contradictions and tensions of being a Native Alaskan tour guide and anthropologist.