Add to ORKGThe role of anthropology in seeding tourism imaginaries is more extensive than most anthropologists want to acknowledge. In this article, I draw on ethnographic fieldwork in Indonesia and Tanzania to critically examine the circulation of outmoded scientific ideas and ideologies in tourism interpretation. A fine-grained analysis of local tour guiding narratives and practices in two popular destinations, Yogyakarta and Arusha, illustrates how out-of-date scholarly theories, including anthropological ones, prevail in the widely distributed imaginaries of global tourism. These conceptualizations are strategically (mis)used by tourism entrepreneurs to represent and sell places and peoples as authentic and static, untouched by extra-local influen...