Abstract
This article intends to show that the tourism experience developed in the community of Anã /Santarém /Pará involves several relations of exchange and reciprocity, according to Mauss's conception (1925/2017). For this author, the gift is ambivalent, because it is both interested and disinterested, voluntary, and obligatory. The ambivalent character of the gift was understood by the notion of interest postulated by Bourdieu (2011). Field research followed the assumptions of anthropological ethnographic research and the methodological path was constructed from the conception of Lanna (2000) on the “ethnography of exchange”. The data were collected by direct observation and interviews, in two periods: August 2016 and January 2017. We highlight the main results: the observation of five exchange relationships between the internal and external agents from the Anã community, involving several types of “services” as defined by Mauss (1925/2017); the interpretation of tourism as a gift in social environments that it promotes the exchange of goods and spirituality in an ambivalent way; the finding that the community does not have autonomy over the management of tourism in its territory. We consider that the enterprise in Anã has not yet reached the condition required to be considered, in fact, community-based tourism.
Keywords:
Community-Based Tourism; Gift; Ethnography of exchange
Source: The authors
