Cultural labor and the defetishization of environments: connecting ethnographies of tourism in Venezuela and Chile.

Abstract

This paper compares the development of the tourism industry in two different Latin American locations: a municipality of Chile's Araucanía and Venezuela's Gran Sabana. In both locations, part of the indigenous population shows interest in the development of this industry, which presents potential as a source of locally generated income. This comparison focuses on examining how property rights and relations shape and are reshaped by the expansion of tourist activities in these locations, shedding light on two additional questions: first, the socioeconomic conditions that help explain the increasing participation of the indigenous population in the expansion of tourism in these regions; second, a cultural phenomenon that this expansion stimulates: the circulation of discursive representations of local environments as permanently inscribed with a particular form of collective labor. This paper will conceptualize this labor as "cultural labor" and, drawing from theorizations of the fetishism of commodities, will argue that the widespread appeals to this labor constitute a (paradoxical) form of discursive defetishization that is fostered by the logic of the tourist industry. This form of defetishization discursively subverts the principle of concealment that pervades commodity fetishism as theorized by Marx, but it is nonetheless a functional part of a social process that reinscribes and rearticulates capital as a social relation among the populations of these regions.