TOURISM, HERITAGE AND INDIGENOUS COMMUNITIES

While it's true that capital impacts the diverse relationships that exist in commerce, it must be remembered that the community that inhabits whichever space where this commerce is generated has had different transformations throughout time in search of it's needs, creating social mediums of commerce from the nature which surrounds them (Marx, 1971, p. 37). One of the economic activities that generates transformations and impacts is the phenomenon of tourism which, despite its intensively productive orientation, carries with it an important sociological connotation, given the possibility of symbolic interaction between the vision of the tourist consumer and that of the receptor subject, generating complex cultural exchanges and transformations in the local relationships due to the growing need to know the unknown, and rediscover others, as a form of materializing tourism, and industrializing culture. The economic benefits of tourism are not converted into social benefits since they are designed without knowing the reality of the communities, just like the inevitable change in general behaviours due to the transformation of the cultural structure as a consequence of social exchanges. Tourism is what determines how they must act, behave, dress, and what they must show and can sell, to which the communities react, in the majority of cases by painting their bodies and seeking to recreate the narrative of the good savage, through dance, songs, aboriginal languages, and an air of submission. Due to the abovementioned, the objective of this research is, broadly speaking, to understand the impacts that tourism activities generate in indigenous communities, from the colonial perspective, which continues to be reproduced as a form of selling a tourist product called culture and heritage, representing the different indigenous communities of the country.