ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the anthropology of island tourism using Iceland’s relatively recent tourism boom as a key example. Here, I explore how islands fit into global and local touristic imaginaries, and I work to unveil some of the motivations and outcomes of travel and tourism as a cultural force on islands. The first micro-essay explores the concept of authenticity as it relates to the perceived cultural capital of Iceland as it is imagined as a prime location of touristic value and intrepidness. The following three essays unpack the role of the tourist as ethnographic subject, and the ways that they/we function as key components of the Icelandic/islandic ethnoscape (Appadurai 1990), and how tourism becomes a vehicle for anthropological and archipelagic understanding and awareness, a means of re-attunement and a site for the production of forms of cultural capital.
