"All travel is to some extent the quest for difference, and the more different (or exotic, or wild) a place is, the better. That is why we get annoyed when we go camping only to find the woods full of yahoos with radios and coolers of beer, and why it can be a bit depressing...

"A healthy culture is like a healthy person: it is constantly changing, growing, and evolving, yet something persists through these changes, a ballast that keeps it upright and recognizable no matter how much it is buffeted by the transformative winds of trade. We can even expand the analogy a bit, and think of a culture...

"Just about every place worth visiting makes a point of promoting a preserved form of its supposedly pure and undiluted cultural past to tourists. Often it involves aboriginal groups: singing and drumming by the Cowichan people on Vancouver Island, for instance, or Maori dancing in body paint and traditional clothes in New Zealand. But you...