Ethnicities result from social processes, positive tendencies toward identifying and including
certain individuals in a specific group. What distinguishes an ethnic identity is the way that its
characterization recurs to notions of common origin, history, culture, and even race. Originally,
there were two principle theoretical approaches for defining ethnic groups: one which was
essentialist to the degree that it looked to the substance of cultural and historical patrimony of
certain populations in order to discover the root of ethnic exceptionality, and another more
constructivist that focused on social interactions between groups themselves, noting the boundaries
that in effect divided or bounded ethnic groups whether or not they in fact shared cultural or racial
traits with their neighbors. The second of these approaches became favored. However, it should be
noted that if anthropology now focuses on the social interactions that in effect create ethnic
boundaries for members of different groups, ethnic discourse emphasizes, in the majority of cases,
content, that is, origin, history, culture or race, whether these have been constructed as objects for
discourse in the present for self-representation or for the representation of others.
It is thus important to underline the instrumentality of every cultural trait exhibited by an
ethnic group as a distinguishing feature, that is, as a characteristic cultural and historical trait that
defines them in opposition to other groups. It is important for ethnic groups to carry such marks to
the point that if they do not have them many times they will create them in order to strengthen their
ethnic distinction. Generally speaking, those cultural elements are thought of, treated and effected
as traditions, the notion of which indicates the constitutive substance of a people, which in practice
can be constructed situationally even with respect to the future (Grünewald, 2001, 2002b).
But how does ethnicity relate to tourism? Even though there are innumerable forms of tourism
that have nothing to do with questions of history, culture (strictly speaking), race, or origin, as for
example some kinds of recreational tourism, there are other forms that take up as desired object
aspects of identity or alterity. In the case of identity there is, for example, the historical tourism that
one would do in his or her own town, city, region or country, and in the case of alterity there are
those forms that seek out the exotic or foreign cultures. Van den Berghe (1994) has maintained that
tourism is always a form of ethnic relations, and that would be doubly true, according to van den
Berghe and Keyes (1984), in the case of so-called ethnic tourism, where the ethnic boundary itself
sponsors the touristic attraction. Let’s explore a little more this subject which constitutes the center
of our concern here.