Analysis Of The Article 'Sharing Culture Or Selling Out'

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The article written by Alexis Celeste Bunten called “Sharing culture or selling out?” talks about the theory of “commodified persona” or the “self commodification” of a tourism worker in Sitka and how capitalism has influenced the way a tour guide is presented. Chapter eleven in Charles C. Mann’s book called “1491, New Revelations of the Americas before Columbus” is a slight summary of the second half of the book which talks about how similar Indians were more advanced than the colonists and that we should accept the fact that indigenous people and their societies have influenced American culture. Alexis Bunten based her information on personal experience such as working as a staff member for Tribal Tours in Sitka. She is able to provide information about how the tour guides are not at primitive as the tourist may think. Most of what the tour guides are doing is entertainment, which requires them to use commodified personas. Commodified personas can be defined as changing your character into what may be perceived by others. In the article she talks about a storyteller who is a native of Sitka who works as a tour guide. He tells a story but due to having to please the tourist he has added things in and changed the way the story is told. According to the reading “ the tourism worker expresses free choice
Bunten states and argument from an anthropologist name Greenwood saying that “ he argues that local culture in made inauthentic: “Altered, often destroyed by the treatment of it as a tourist attraction . . . it is made meaningless to the people who once believed in it”. According to Bunten Commodified persona gives provides the chance for the host to chose between knowingly changing their identities to what is accepted by the governing society in order to please the tourist or work to keep their own social norms and ideas of

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