ABSTRACT
Ecotourism-travel that preserves the environment and promotes the welfare of local people-has gained new popularity in the past decade.1 From Costa Rica to Gabon, a growing number of countries have turned to ecotourism as a strategy for economic growth.2 It is believed that ecotourism is a way of wedding local needs and environmental conservation into one financially prosperous initiative. While this strategy economically benefits the state, international relations (IR) scholars have also regarded the “greening” of indigenous activism as a means of transcending state hegemony: transnational alliances between environmental and indigenous networks have been able to open a political space for voices that have been historically marginalized by the state. In short, ecotourism practices are seen as socially and politically liberating. Whatever the upsides of ecotourism, and there are indeed many, in this chapter I argue that the success of ecotourism relies largely upon discursively constructed notions of nature and indigeneity, performatively called into being through ecotourism practices.3 Employing Giorgio Agamben’s descriptions of the “state of exception” and “bare life,” I argue that the discourses that make ecotourism financially viable work to reaffirm, and not transcend, the state. Moreover, ecotourism practices are necessarily maintained on the essentialized and commodified indigenous body. Instead of just being a source of liberation, ecotourism practices also echo the desires of the state apparatus to assimilate, manage, and construct productive members of society. Ironically, ecotourism practices can also be seen as another strategy, in a long history of strategies, of Latin American states to “solve” the socalled “Indian problem.” Through the use of both theoretical and empirical research, I examine
the following questions: How do ecotourism and, more broadly, the “greening” of indigenous discourses reinforce state power and statecraft? How does ecotourism help to construct spaces like “Amazonia” as the “exception” and indigenous groups as “bare life?” If we accept that these discourses are never complete or closed, then how are these constructs renegotiated or resisted on the local level? To better engage these questions, I employ the specific example of ecotourism campaigns in the Napo region of Ecuador.4
