Paper short abstract:

In this paper I elaborate on the concept of 'cultural labour' to discuss how tourist activities affect social relations in Gran Sabana, southern Venezuela. I use this concept to shed light on the crystallisation of new forms class-based stratification among the local population.

Paper long abstract:

In this paper I elaborate on the concept of 'cultural labour' to discuss how tourist activities affect social relations in Gran Sabana, southern Venezuela. For approximately a decade (2004 to 2014), before economic crisis struck the country, tourist activities expanded very rapidly in this region, and land enclosures accompanied this process. These enclosures entailed the emergence of private ownership claims over land that the indigenous Pemon had previously treated as a common pool resource. Claimants of these private rights were often Pemon people who developed tourist projects in search of a local source of income (in a region that lacks employment opportunities outside mining and civil service jobs are very scarce). People involved in this process linked to tourist expansion have articulated a discursive strategy that involves appeals to what I call 'cultural labour'. Appeals to this type of labour present the environment of Gran Sabana as permanently inscribed with (Pemon) labour, and thus contribute to strengthen land ownership rights for the whole of the Pemon people in face of continuing threats of territorial dispossession (indigenous land titles are still an exception in the region). But, in parallel, those appeals to (Pemon) collective labour disguise a growing erosion of (Pemon) collective rights over land and other resources, in a process that finds manifestation in the aforementioned enclosures but, more generally, in the crystallisation of new forms class-based stratification among the local population.