In the last 50 years, the tourist has emerged in scholarship as that which epitomizes modern man, as postmodernity incarnate. In geographic scholarship, tourism is increasingly seen as a space of consumption in which contradictions of global uneven development are moderated temporally. The compression of time and space by technological advance has transformed our ability to understand other cultures and places by connecting people personally, whereas their engagement would have been restricted to literature and media in earlier decades and eras.;Man's alienated condition is provoked by life in modernity, particularly by the complex associations that result from capitalism's influence on society and culture. Some tourists who live in advanced capitalism seek respite from the stresses and mundanity of everyday life by visiting remote regions of the world that are not easily reached by traditional transportation means. These places are characterized by heightened biodiversity, cultural isolation and sometimes by extreme temperatures.;But in this pursuit, how is the tourist affected? How does the tourist make sense of the disjuncture in time and space? The goal of this research is to examine what happens when tourists visit a remote place and culture where people still live close to the land and sea, depending on both for food, shelter and medicine. In this case study, the principal research questions explore what draws international tourists to the San Blas archipelago, what satisfies these tourists and what they take away from the experience. This is accomplished via participant observation and ethnographic research based in phenomenological methods.;Philosophically, this dissertation reviews Martin Heidegger's definitions of inauthenticity, locating a yearning to rebel or revolt against a hospitality industry that masks, controls and blinds tourists as they seek to evade the theatrical quality of spectacle common in ethnic tourism today. It draws upon literature from cultural studies, anthropology, development, sociology and the emerging field of critical tourism studies. It has application to cultural theory and the emerging field of sustainable tourism. The theoretical contribution of this work is that it explains the satisfaction of certain types of tourists experiencing existential authenticity while on tour. This is accomplished via analysis of the perceptions they bring to their experience within a global and temporal context of capitalism and modernity.
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