ABSTRACT
While social scientists have long taken a critical stance toward the concept of community, it remains widely popular in the tourism planning and development discourse. Although not often acknowledged, one of the reasons why community-based tourism (CBT) programs are hindered in their success is because those organizing it ignore the problematic assumptions embedded within the community concept itself (Tosun, 2000). Not surprisingly, the fuzziness of the notion is cleverly exploited in tourism marketing. While CBT is intended to empower people, the representations deployed in constituting the targeted “communities”, be they imagined or real, remain largely unexamined. Because of the communicative power of tourism, representations of destinations have direct and potentially significant influences on the people who are being presented, represented and misrepresented, as well as on those (sub)groups who are absent from such representations. It is still common for ethnic minority groups to be depicted as the “exotic Other” in exhibitions, postcards or tourist literature (Smith, 2003).1 When the tourismified definition of a community identity prevails, the group is frozen in an image of itself or museumized (MacCannell, 1984).
