ABSTRACT
An anthropological approach informs us of people's desires and experiences within tourism and thereby allows us to interrogate how it is that tourism is inevitably an important part of modernity wherever it takes place. NGO study tours in Cuba offer tourists an intense learning experience: people return home with an enriched view of development processes. Theoretical studies of transition rituals provide important insight into particular niche forms of tourism. The construct of authenticity operated on a number of different levels but also related to and overlapped with the other tourist motivational themes here of education and development. Solidarity through tourism could be considered an important tool for development agencies, social movements and NGOs in terms of new and explicit ways of promulgating issues of rights, social justice and good governance. Munt argued that new tourists were engaged in a hegemonic struggle for cultural superiority with each other in their search for an alternative to mainstream tourism.
