Ethically, Stanley Brandes study of the Mexican village of Tzintzuntzan's fiesta cycle's pitfall is that it poses a strict dichotomy between observer and observed. Coupling the ethical and the epistemological problems, one sees that Brandes must ignore the tourist ritual because it undermines his interpretive stance. The tourist practices undermine his stance because they expose the fact that tourism is different only in degree from ethnography. Both fields of practice‹tourist and ethnographer‹construct an exotic other and then draw a strict dichotomy between observer and observed, between "reader" and "read" (or maybe better yet, between photographer and photographed).

     Both tourism and the ethnographic method tend to pose the "native" as a cool nonthinking actor who mimes out a "primitive" cultural prewritten "script" that only the thinking ethnographer can "read (or which the tourist can photograph). This interpretive method does not take into account the strategies of practice that actors (native, tourist, and ethnographer ) employ in a lived world. It ignores the power relations not only within the field of study, but also between the observer and observed.