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The purpose of this paper is to highlight the different realities blended together in community-based tourism, and how storytelling can help us understand the resulting entanglement of actors and power. This paper combines a discussion of power and empowerment in community-based tourism with storytelling.

The fictional narrative of Pandora’s box is used as a metaphor for power and empowerment in community-based tourism, which can leave communities worse off than before the introduction of tourism.

However, the last thing remaining in Pandora’s box after all hardships had flown out, was hope. This paper also presents a hopeful perspective for community-based tourism in the form of another metaphor: the rhizome, which puts power and empowerment in a more dynamic and holistic frame. Just like in the original story of Pandora’s “jar” which gave voice to Pandora herself, within a rhizome, other players are regarded as valuable sources of tacit contextual knowledge.

Storytelling and dialogue are recommended methods to obtain this knowledge. Using a storytelling perspective can encourage untold and unheard stories within a dialogue to be heard.

Using two years of ethnographic fieldwork and 17 in-depth interviews, I examine a college gaming group's identity work. Stigmatized as social isolates, gamers employed oppositional identity work to construct themselves as “communal gamers.” Gaming Council members signified an identity counter to prevailing stereotypes by collaboratively coding “communal” to promote member interaction, affirming communality through joking and member recognition, and policing to enforce proper identity presentations. This study contributes to identity work research by furthering our understanding of identity work as group process and how groups manage identity dilemmas.