ABSTRACT
In this chapter, I examine stance-taking among tourists, conservation volunteers and sea turtles at a popular sea turtle tourism destination in Hawai‘i. The analysis brings the concept of ecocultural identity in environmental communication into dialogue with activity-based research in sociolinguistics that examines the communicative practices shaping tourism destinations around the world. Building on this interdisciplinary research, I examine how tourists and volunteers produce, negotiate and contest ecocultural identities through stance-taking, and situated within a fast-growing, global ecotourism industry that targets “charismatic wildlife”: species that generate wide popular appeal such as whales, elephants and, in this case, green sea turtles. I argue that unpacking the ecocultural identities that emerge in the encounters and relationships among people and sea turtles at this beach sheds light on how and why, in recent decades, wildlife ecotourism destinations have become key sites of interculturality: sites where people with multiple and often conflictive interests converge around wildlife and, in the process, generate relational human and nonhuman identities of sameness and difference, and inclusion and exclusion.
