Exploring Nature, Making the Nation: The Spatial Politics of Ecotourism in Lebanon

This article explores how Lebanese ecotourism sites and excursions present a spatial narrative marked by aspirations for a consolidated nation that connects the rural and the urban across a diverse ecological terrain. Employing several ecotourism projects as case studies, I argue that ideas about nation-making that are rooted in embodied interaction with and awareness of the natural landscape engender a form of national territorialization that relies not upon staying "in place" but rather through the very mobility of the citizen-traveler across the national space. A central aim of my analysis of ecotourism, in a country strained by geographical divisions entangled with complex issues of national belonging, is to broaden the conversation within anthropology about the political life and spatial dimensions of domestic tourism within the Global South.