eTropic: electronic journal of studies in the Tropics

Surrendering to the Tropics: Tristes Tropiques as Antidote to Tourism’s Bland Place Narratives

2026-04-11T11:50:52+10:00

The central idea in this article is that tropical landscapes are not uniform and that reducing such physical worlds to a set of generic material signifiers—as is the case in tropical tourism discourses—impoverishes place narratives. I base my attempt at increasing the multiplicity of tropical landscapes on the discussion of such landscapes in Lévi-Strauss’s famed Tristes Tropiques. The latter combines approaches not often associated with the anthropologist: namely, an autobiographical/confessional mode of writing and a materialist-cum-phenomenological approach to the physical landscapes encountered. I examine how Tristes Tropiques narrates the sensorial qualities of the contrasting “wet” and “dry” tropics of Brazil; and how the book disrupts the wet/dry binary in fascinating ways. The notion of “surrendering to the tropics” advanced here combines Lévi-Strauss’s account with the phenomenology of lesser-known sociologist of knowledge Kurt H. Wolff. In Surrender and Catch, Tristes Tropiques is cited as a forerunner to surrender as “total involvement”; and both books highlight the fusing of time, space, and felt experience in seeing the world afresh. In the last section, I document my own surrender processes to the dry tropics of North Queensland, Australia; and discuss the place narratives of regional organizations that either acknowledge or elide (through a tourist gaze) the “brownness” of the local landscape. The article concludes by highlighting how, what Denis Cosgrove terms the tropics as physical “encounter”, gives the narrating of wet and dry tropical landscapes an ontological and existential edge.

Living with Komodo Dragons: Wildlife and Tourism in Labuan Bajo, Indonesia

2026-04-11T11:51:07+10:00

Komodo National Park, a UNESCO World Heritage Site and habitat for the endangered Komodo dragon (Varanus komodoensis), is simultaneously a symbol of global biodiversity conservation and a leading tourist destination in the Labuan Bajo area of Indonesia. This dual role creates tensions between ecological protection and economic interests. Tourism provides a significant source of funding for conservation and regional development, but it also has the potential to transform wildlife and landscapes into tourist commodities that threaten the dry tropics ecology and local human-animal relations. This research focuses on the intersection between conservation, tourism, commodification, local communities, and development. The study shows that local beliefs regarding Komodo dragons as animal relatives plays a crucial role as a cultural conservation mechanism that complements state regulations. However, tourism development has driven the commodification of wildlife, turning Komodo dragons into a tourist attraction and Labuan Bajo into a tourism hub. The resulting economic, cultural, and ecological risks have been met by local community resistance.

Jarawa as Spectacle 2.0: Tropical Tourism’s Algorithmic “Human Safari” in the Andaman Islands

2026-04-11T11:51:09+10:00

Tourism bans and buffer-zone regulations sought to end “human safaris” along the Andaman Trunk Road, but tropical tourism’s voyeuristic demand has migrated online, where platform visibility makes illicit Indigenous encounters newly discoverable and actionable. Drawing on a digital ethnography of the tourism-platform landscape in the Andaman Islands, this paper synthesizes legal and policy documents, media investigations, and a structured audit of publicly accessible online content (search results, videos, posts, and itinerary cues) to trace how recommender systems and attention metrics circulate images of Indigenous Jarawa and “how-to” cues while softening the legal and ethical context. I show how content on YouTube and coordination through messaging networks, including Telegram, help convert curiosity into travel planning, undermining on-ground enforcement and extending colonial modes of looking into a post-millennial, monetized spectacle. The analysis identifies governance gaps between Indigenous territorial protections and platform logics and argues that effective regulation of tropical tourism’s harms must combine state enforcement with platform accountability and community-led consent regimes.

A Semiotic Critique of Neocolonial Visual Identity Branding in Seychelles Tourism

2026-04-11T11:51:00+10:00

Seychelles’ tourism branding, framed globally as a tropical island paradise, mobilises visual signs that risk reproducing a neocolonial imaginary of a “paradise without people.” While destination branding research has focused on strategy and image outcomes, less attention has been paid to the semiotic function of visual identity and its interpretation by diverse audiences. This study adopts a semiotic perspective to examine how four groups: local residents, tourists, designers, and a general audience, interpret the visual identity of Seychelles tourism branding through a single official promotional image. Using a survey-based design, participants evaluated a stimulus poster drawn from the Seychelles’ official Brand Guidelines (2022). Analysis covers meaning–making through logos, typography, colour, photography, composition, and people–nature content. Findings show that photography and colour dominated attention, with green and blue powerfully signifying nature and environmental purity. The slogan “Another World” achieved strong recall despite its typographic execution disrupting readability. Crucially, interpretations of the brochure diverged: tourists associated authenticity with pristine, people-free landscapes, while local residents sought cultural presence and everyday Seychellois representation. This study reveals the visual imaginaries through which different audiences interpret the same image, demonstrating how tropical tourism visuals mediate neocolonial, environmental, and cultural meanings.

Sacred Meaning and Tourism Branding in Khasi Festival Logos, Meghalaya, India

2026-04-11T11:51:08+10:00

Tourism branding across the tropics often extracts Indigenous symbols for exotic appeal, but also provides spaces for communities to assert cultural self-representation. This study examines three Khasi tourism festivals in Meghalaya, subtropical Northeast India, analysing how festival logo designs communicate Indigenous identity while navigating the tensions between sacred meaning and tourism economies. Using a blended methodology that combines semiotic and iconological visual analysis with an emic ethnographic approach informed by interviews with designers and cultural knowledge-holders, the paper decodes symbols from three major festivals: the Monolith Festival, the Na Thymmei Festival, and the Tri Hills Ensemble Festival. Symbols such as monoliths, textile patterns, traditional instruments, weapons, rice and sacred landscapes operate as Indigenous signifiers that embed ancestral knowledge into contemporary design. However, as they enter commercial tourism circuits through branding and merchandise, they risk commodification and reductive interpretation. The findings demonstrate that Indigenous festival branding operates as a critical site of cultural continuity and adaptation, where symbols are reinterpreted and circulated within tourism economies. It shows how cultural visibility can be sustained while managing the pressures of tourism consumption. Overall, the study positions festival logos as spaces where sacred meaning and public consumption are balanced, advancing debates on decolonizing Indigenous festival graphic design.

Paradise Contested: Tropical Tourism, Eco-landscapes, and Cultural Resistance in Goa and Kerala

2025-12-18T18:13:51+10:00

This article examines the paradox of “paradise” in India’s tropics through the cases of Goa and Kerala. These regions are central to India’s tourism identity; Goa as a coastal space of leisure, festivals, and nightlife, and Kerala as a spiritual and ecological sanctuary. However, they also face growing environmental stress, cultural commodification, and social contestation. Drawing on Lévi-Strauss’s Tristes Tropiques, postcolonial tourism theory, and the concept of tropicality, the study extends Said’s critique of the exotic gaze to tropical landscapes, foregrounding nature–culture entanglements and environmental imaginaries. Lévi-Strauss’s reflections on the Amazon provide a historical lens for understanding how long, steady processes of tourism reshape tropical regions globally. Empirical case studies trace how colonial imaginaries persist in neoliberal branding, digital tourism promotion, and wellness commodification. In Goa, coastal erosion, waste accumulation, nightlife economies, and fisher displacement expose the costs of pleasure-oriented tourism. In Kerala, backwater pollution, houseboat expansion, and the commercialization of Ayurveda complicate the image of “God’s Own Country.” Recent cases from 2023–2025 highlight grassroots mobilizations, fisher protests, Responsible Tourism initiatives, and emerging debates on ecological limits and degrowth. By reframing India’s tropics as contested rather than idyllic, this article contributes to critical tourism studies, tropical scholarship, and political ecology. It positions Goa and Kerala within global patterns of tropical tourism, emphasizing how power, ecology, and culture intersect across regions shaped by similar histories of extraction and mobility.

Bounded Performances: Cultural Tourism and Negotiated Authenticity in Northern Vietnam

2026-04-11T11:51:11+10:00

In tropical postcolonial regions, tourism has reconfigured cultural life through selective visibility. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork (2022–2024) in H’mong, Muong, and Kinh communities, this article examines how identity becomes choreographed for consumption yet remains bounded by community-set thresholds. Practices once sacred—bride-taking, stilt-house hospitality, Quan Họ singing, or Hầu Đồng trance—are transformed into choreographed visibility. Rather than cultural loss, such bounded performativization reflects a survival logic that preserves symbolic autonomy through partial exposure. Methodologically, the study integrates affective ethnography with media analysis to map how tropical materialities—humidity, light, and sound—mediate performance. Conceptually, it advances a framework that recasts performance as ethical endurance: identity lives on by learning how to be staged without surrender.

Tryst Troppo: Sex, Tourism, and Relationships on a Philippine Beach

2026-04-11T11:50:59+10:00

The village of Aplaya, Puerto Galera, on the Philippines island of Mindoro is renowned for its beach and scuba diving. Despite its reputation as an isolated tropical island paradise, Aplaya is also infamous for sex tourism––a legacy of a colonial and military history. Following imperial rule by the Spanish, the US colonized the Philippines and established military bases which expanded during the Vietnam War along with the rest and recreation (R & R) offerings in the base areas, including go-go bars and sex for hire. When the bases closed in the 1990s the sex clientele transferred from military to tourist, and red-light go-go bars opened up in Aplaya. In my ethnographic work on sex tourism, foreign male sex tourists narrate their desires for a Utopian paradise, a tropical beach that is imagined as uninhabited except for the welcoming natives and sexually available women. They nostalgically recount yearnings for a paradise that, lost in the West, is found in the sultry tropics. Colonial and military histories are elided in these imaginaries about the natural access and excess of the tropics. This cultural landscape of the complex relations of sex and tourism call up Lévi-Strauss’ reverie in Tristes Tropiques or Sad Tropics, of the degradation entailed in temperate and tropical encounters and the desire for a pure tropics. However, male sex tourist’s nostalgic imaginaries in reality are also a story of trysts gone troppo.

Pulling Warmth: Teh Tarik and Everyday Life in Malaysia’s Culinary Tourism

2026-04-11T11:51:12+10:00

This photo essay explores teh tarik [pulled tea] as an everyday practice through which cultural bonds, social encounters, and shared meanings are produced in Malaysia’s tropics. Rather than approaching teh tarik merely as a culinary tourism product, the essay understands it as a form of embodied communication shaped by gestures, heat, rhythm, sounds, and social presence. Drawing on visual ethnographic fieldwork conducted between 2024 and 2025 across sites in Malaysia, Singapore, and Indonesia’s Batam Island, the photographs presented here narrow our lens to the areas of Kuala Lumpur to capture moments of preparation, waiting, sitting together, and casual interactions in kopitiams, street stalls, markets, and urban spaces. The visual narratives reveal how teh tarik mediates everyday encounters among locals, migrants, and tourists, allowing diverse identities to coexist without formal negotiation. Through a reflective photo essay format, this work shows that culinary tourism experiences in the tropics often operate through intimacy, repetition, and a shared atmosphere rather than spectacle or promotion. In doing so, this essay highlights teh tarik as a living culinary heritage that connects bodies, spaces, and memories, offering insights into the emotional life of tropical urban streets and everyday cultural landscapes.

Street Art as Tropical Heritage in Semeling: Emplacing Rural Tourism in Kuala Muda District, Malaysia

2026-04-11T11:51:13+10:00

Serving as a form of aesthetic enhancement, street art encompasses artistic activities created on buildings within urban areas. Street art has become a drawcard for heritage tourism in Malaysia. This art frequently incorporates motifs of tropical flora and fauna, along with symbols from Malay and other ethnic groups, to accentuate its distinctiveness. The colours used are vivid and contrasting to highlight the tropical atmosphere as alive and fresh. Street art in Semeling, a town in Kuala Muda District in the northwestern state of Kedah, Malaysia, emphasises elements of history, culture, and nature that highlight tropical themes, as well as various popular culture characters and memes. However, Semeling, unlike, southern Peninsula Malaysia towns, receives few tourists. The town’s street art holds potential to enhance heritage tourism and cultural understanding in this more remote tropical rural landscape. Importantly, street art enhances the town’s sense of place with its tropical environment, history, and culture, thus offering a form of heritage tourism that is emplacing rather than displacing of local residents.

Tourism, Modernisation and Cultural Loss at the Brikama Craft Market in The Gambia, Africa

2026-04-11T11:51:09+10:00

Taking the Brikama Craft Market in The Gambia as its ethnographic field study, this paper examines a contemporary African manifestation of the “sad tropics” that Lévi-Strauss lamented: a once-authentic site of cultural production and sociality that is being rapidly altered by state-led modernisation and tourism-development initiatives. The recent relocation of the market to a purpose-built “modern” complex, intended to make it more attractive to international tourists, has paradoxically eroded its lived authenticity, displaced long-established artisans, and accelerated the commodification and standardisation of traditional crafts. Through this Gambian example, the study illustrates how the global tourism-modernity nexus continues to produce new “tristes tropiques” in the 21st century: spaces where economic “progress” and the tourist gaze jointly contribute to cultural loss, even as they promise development and visibility. The research, conducted through qualitative interviews with market stakeholders, uncovers a dual reality: infrastructural enhancements present possible economic advantages but also threaten to commodify cultural assets and marginalise traditional craftspeople. Modernisation theory was employed to evaluate these dynamics, emphasising the conflicts between advancement and conservation. The results emphasized the necessity of a culturally attuned approach to development. The Brikama Craft Market, notwithstanding its difficulties, persists as a vibrant repository of Gambian identity and creativity.

Tourisms’ Tristes Tropiques II: Cultural Landscapes

2026-04-11T11:50:50+10:00

In this second special issue on “Tourisms’ Tristes Tropiques” we explore “Cultural Landscapes” socio-culturally and ecologically to show how they are intertwined with historical, colonial, and neocolonial aspects of tourism. The anthropology of tourism and critical tourism studies recognize tourism as both an industry and a cultural phenomenon, and this dual approach provides a lens for exploring how cultural landscapes are created, transformed, activated, and morphed by tourism. In this Introduction, we discuss how such studies have contributed to a nuanced and careful understanding of tourism's effects on cultural landscapes. The title of this special issue pays homage to Lévi-Strauss’s Tristes Tropiques, a memoir that, in many ways, anticipated the subfields explored here. Although Tristes Tropiques remains a controversial text, on its publication in 1955, it presented an intrepid indictment of racism and colonialism, and of travellers whose very act of mobility contributes to both. In this second issue, we venture across a range of tropical landscapes, from South America and Northern Australia to the Seychelles and the Andaman Islands, through India, Southeast Asia, and finally to tropical Africa. The contributors examine how tourism shapes and is shaped by cultures, ecologies, heritage, and history. Their analyses reveal cultural landscapes that are not merely scenic backdrops but rich spaces that local people engage with to counter the touristic forces of commodification and inequality. This second part of the double special issue on “Tourisms’ Tristes Tropiques” complements the analysis established in the first issue on the subtheme of “Literary Travels,” and furthers that analytical journey.