El éxito de los nuevos chamanes: Turismo místico en los andes ecuatorianos

Abstract

The results of a multisited ethnography developed between 2015 and 2016 among the Saraguros indigenous group of Ecuador allow for the description of nine factors that intervene, paradoxically, in Andean mystical tourism. Essentialist “neo-Incaism,” the concept of pristine nature with “energetic” places, the rise of the ancestral medicine, the idealization of the community as opposite the Western way of life, the institutional recognition of the interculturality and indigenous cultures, the international growth of a “neo-Indian” network, New Age syncretism, the cultural capital of yachaks (shamans), and the possibility of marketing the spiritual in a “fast ritual” format, all these show the multidimensionality of a tourism that eludes a simple categorization as authentic or simulacrum to help us understand—in light of the “glocal” phenomenon—the place in the world that many indigenous groups in Latin America currently occupy.