Il secondo sguardo. Oltre le aspettative di ospiti e di visitatori nell'incontro turistico.

Focusing attention on hosts and guests’ bidirectional gaze, the paper explores how both hosts and guests challenge stereotypical representations imposed, circulated and managed by the tourist industry and non-specialised and scientific literature. Based on a recent fieldwork research in an indigenous eco-tourism enterprise in North Queensland, the paper documents how the indigenous managers, workers and guides redefine the roles of tourists and locals, observers and observed in several tourist activities and services. The possibility of a “second gaze” (MacCannell 2001) beyond appearances and reciprocal expectations emerges with the “smoking or welcome ceremony” performed at the beginning of the guided tours taking tourists into the rain forest. The ambiguity of this ceremony leads the author to reflect that the indigenous welcome extended to the visitors is conditional and needs to be negotiated by encountering the other somewhere between belonging and distance, inclusion and exclusion, participation and separation.