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Parara Puru, an Emberá community in the Chagres National Park in Panama, is a site where tourists from economically powerful nations have an opportunity to experience aspects of an Amerindian culture. The tourists meet the Emberá inhabitants of the community in the context of half-day organized trips, during which the residents of Parara Puru offer a standard ‘cultural package’that includes a music-and-dance presentation, a traditional meal, and a display of handmade Emberá artefacts. This cultural package is adaptable, and the Emberá hosts are prepared to provide extras to meet additional expectations at the request of their visitors: a tour in the rainforest, some guidance on Emberá medicinal knowledge or informal instruction on other aspects of indigenous lifestyle. In this respect, the varied and particular types of tourist encounter provide opportunities for the Emberá to investigate the expectations of their guests and, in an effort to satisfy those expectations, explore additional dimensions of their culture and enhance its representation.

In this chapter I am concerned with how the residents of Parara Puru investigate and anticipate the expectations of their tourists. I pay particular attention to questions asked by the tourists during the tourists’ encounter–for example, those that indicate ‘a quest for the authentic Indian’(Ramos 1998: 84) or an ambivalence about the position of indigenous people in the interface of tradition with modernity–and the attempts of the Emberá hosts to understand