Indigenous Tourism as a Transformative Process: The Case of the Emberá in Panama

In this chapter I discuss how Indigenous tourism has affected the representational self-awareness of the residents of an Emberá community in Panama. I approach Indigenous tourism as a transformative process that inspires the Emberá to experiment and creatively develop pre-existing cultural practices, but also to articulate their identity to audiences of outsiders. In line with the editors and contributors of this volume, I argue that Indigenous tourism has the potential to deeply shape the political representation of Indigenous societies, and as such deserves special attention as a distinctive variant of cultural tourism. Unlike top-down homogenizing processes that rely on national