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When tourists visit cultural tourism destinations, the primary form of interaction between visitors and local residents is in the exchange of money for material objects and performances. While purchase of cultural commodities in tourism contexts may appear to be simple market transactions, they are often in fact morally fraught sites of ambiguous interaction, invested with disparate meanings by different participants. Drawing on Bloch and Parry's (1989) analysis of the symbolism of money and its relationship to culturally constructed ideas about production, consumption, circulation, and exchange, this article examines the conflicting and contested views of cash transactions and other types of exchange in meetings between tourists and Trobriand Islanders in Papua New Guinea. I argue that intercultural exchange in tourism is not necessarily a straightforward commodity exchange, but evokes social relations that are often quite differently conceptualized by the producers and consumers of touristic products.When I travel, I want to see daily life. When we went to [a certain Trobriand village] I didn't like it so much, because I felt like a customer instead of a visitor. Everyone had something they wanted to sell. (Douglas, 1 a retiree from the USA in his 70s, travelling on a group tour) ethnos, vol. 80:4, 2015 (pp. 448-471), http://dx.

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