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The chapter focuses on the tourism encounter at Parara Puru—an Emberá community at Chagres, Panama—the exotic images that publicise it, and the contradictory expectations of the tourists. Naturalised images of the Emberá in tourism advertisements—dressed in exotic garb, with their bodies largely uncovered—provide the promise of experiencing wild, tropical South America. Tourist expectations are rooted in such naturalised imagery and reproduce, on their part, contradictory remarks that communicate an ambivalence about the degree to which indigeneity should remain ‘uncorrupted’ by Western values and commodities. This type of exoticisation, to which I refer as ‘unintentional primitivisation’, relates to the expectation that indigenous people may benefit from some Western civilisational provisions—such as education for children and hospital care—while at the same time remaining unaffected by other Western influences or technologies. In this respect, unintentional primitivisation shapes indigenous tourism, posing dilemmas that fuel the ambivalence of the Emberá.

The chapter examines the accounts of two early twentieth century authors, Verrill (1921) and Marsh (1934), who provided us with detailed—idealising but also stereotyping—descriptions of Emberá clothes (and from their point of view, Emberá nudity) in the 1920s. The accounts of Verrill and Marsh are two nostalgic anchors that haunt this ethnography. The chapter analyses the romanticised but infantilising narratives of these two Western traveller-explorers, their exoticisation of the Emberá, and their desire for exclusive contact with Otherness. Their ambivalence about indigeneity and Western modernity fluctuates from admiration of indigenous spontaneity to imperialist nostalgia and sentimental pessimism, a combination of exoticised contradictions that is not so vastly different from that of contemporary tourists.

The concluding chapter brings together some of the theoretical concepts introduced earlier in the book in a unified analysis. It employs the notion of indigenous disemia to describe the simultaneity of indigenous-and-modern elements in the identity of the Emberá. It also employes the notion of ‘ethnographic nostalgia’ as a vehicle to problematise the authentic and the exotic, as these are conceived in relation to Emberá representation. Every new ethnography, it is argued, structures nostalgia and authenticity—not merely via the authority generated by the writing process—but also by extending the bibliographical ‘record’ a bit deeper into the past. The resulting feeling of incompleteness—the realisation that we cannot really contain change in our writing—inspires ethnographic nostalgia, but also facilitates its demise. How can we prioritise the narrative we record—one authenticity—over the many that unravel in incomplete form in front of our eyes? Nostalgia, exoticisation, and the search for a singular indigenous authenticity are the ghosts that haunt our efforts to understand social change. But without them, and without the exotic recognition they have provoked—the challenge of new knowledge—we would not have had the opportunity to contest previous conventional views—including our own. Ethnographic nostalgia—however irredeemable it may be—has provided the ethnographer with the opportunity to recognise and contest the exotic.