Encounters between foreign tourists and people of different cultural background become very common in a globalized world. The nature of this exchange in cultural terms relates questions of... Show moreEncounters between foreign tourists and people of different cultural background become very common in a globalized world. The nature of this exchange in cultural terms relates questions of identity construction and the emergence or creation of difference. This article addresses tourist-'native' encounters in a semiotic perspective, which helps to reveal its essentially contested aspects. The empirical study relates to the Suri people of southern Ethiopia, a small ethnic group of agropastoralists only recently 'discovered' by tourists and displaying notable aggression towards them. Suri reject their role in the 'tourist game' of creating a realist experience of the Other, and staunchly assert their own identity and would-be equality vis-á-vis these affluent visitors Show less
This chapter describes responses to the ecological crisis and political changes in Ethiopia in the early 1990s among the Suri, an agropastoral group in K„fa Region, southern Ethiopia. Data are... Show moreThis chapter describes responses to the ecological crisis and political changes in Ethiopia in the early 1990s among the Suri, an agropastoral group in K„fa Region, southern Ethiopia. Data are derived from fieldwork carried out in the area after the change of regime in 1991. Attention is paid to environmental conditions and the Suri subsistence system, relations between the Suri and neighbouring ethnic groups, drought and famine in the area, in particular in the 1980s, and the Suri attitude towards the interventions of outside agencies, interethnic conflict in the period 1984-1993, Suri recovery and adaptation in the early 1990s, and the effects of drought, famine, and political upheaval on Suri socioeconomic organization, local political relations, and ethnic identities and interethnic relations. Bibliogr., notes, ref Show less
