Organizer and Chair: Tim Oakes, University of Colorado, Boulder
Discussant: Kathleen M. Adams, Loyola University, Chicago
Research on the relationship between tourism and socio-cultural processes has come a long way since the initial concerns about "hosts," "guests," "tourist impacts," and the preservation of "traditional ways of life." Increasingly, tourism is regarded less as an external agent acting upon a rather passively conceived "local culture" than a cultural process itself-one being played out on multiple geographical scales. This panel brings together four diverse examples of research where tourism serves as a terrain upon which the cultural claims of particular local groups are articulated and negotiated. All highlight the new spaces offered by the tourism experience for defining new parameters of identity and meaning. Especially intriguing are the numerous geographical scales at which these spaces are found. Two of the papers focus on tourism in China's non-Han minority regions of Yunnan and Guizhou, exploring the ways tourism provides a space in which state boundaries, concepts of authenticity, and collective nostalgia are redefined and negotiated. The other two papers offer a comparison by focusing on Nepal and exploring the tourism-mediated negotiations of identity among women crafts producers, and among members of the low (untouchable) castes. Together, they offer not only useful comparisons of tourism in Nepal and China, but also break new ground in examining the complex socio-cultural dimensions of the tourism experience in Asia.
Commodifying Film Nostalgia: Ethno-Tourism in Southwest China
Beth Notar, University of Michigan
This paper explores the role of film nostalgia in the promotion of ethnic tourism to a burgeoning Chinese tourist market. By far the fastest growing consumers of China's southwest are domestic Chinese tourists from coastal areas: Beijing bureaucrats scheduling some relaxation time into their meeting monotony, cosmopolitan urbanites escaping the heat and congestion of Shanghai, Cantonese capitalists with money to burn. The coastal tourist demand for ethnic nationality areas of the southwest can be partially explained by films featuring ethnic subject matter produced prior to the Cultural Revolution. This paper traces the history of one popular film in particular, Five Golden Flowers (Changchun, 1959), from its initial role as entertainment propaganda to its current role in providing tourist industry advertising in Dali, Yunnan. The film has both created and sustained Chinese tourist interest in Dali and the Bai nationality living there. Tour guides, singers and souvenir sellers assume tourist familiarity with the film and base tour narratives, performances and sales pitches upon this familiarity. This familiarity not only appeals to an ethnic "exoticism" but to a nostalgia for that time when tourists first viewed the film. To trace the history of this film is to trace a trajectory from "revolutionary romanticism" to "romantic nostalgia" as China has moved from early socialist Idealism to current market capitalism.
Domestic Tourism at the Boundaries of the State
Louisa Schein, Rutgers University
This paper argues that domestic tourism constitutes a key site for negotiating the boundaries of the post-Mao Chinese state. This inquiry takes place at two levels. First, Chinese practices of representing and consuming ethnic others are examined. Data is drawn from fieldwork among the Miao between 1982 and 1993. Elite/urbanite fascination with non-Han cultures is investigated as nativist practice which is only partially market-driven. Participation at ethnic festivals, "outback" travel to minority regions, the production and collection of handicrafts and visual images, etc., reveal themselves to be as much about a yearning to experience a pre-Mao, even pre-state phantasm of cultural purity as about finding new avenues to profit and conspicuous consumption through ethnic culture. The pursuit of these yearnings, furthermore, is seen to have another valence: that of demarcating a space delinked from the state-dominated sphere of cultural production. In this space, variants of nationalism can be produced that depart from that of the marketizing reform ethos. This leads to the second level of inquiry, one which suggests that the state has been overprivileged in Western sinology of the post-Mao era. Micro-ethnography of domestic tourism enables an envisioning of cultural politics in China which are relatively autonomous from, rather than simply oppositional to or complicit with, state initiatives. These instances need to be refigured on the landscape of contemporary Chinese studies, for they indicate a burgeoning domain not reducible to state-society binaries.
Where the Buffalo Speak English: Tourism and Caste in Pokhara, Nepal
Marie Norman, University of Pittsburgh
This paper will examine ways in which members of low (untouchable) castes in Lakeside, Pokhara have employed relationships with tourists to manipulate social status and gain advantage in a society that continues to marginalize them on the basis of caste. Through sponsorship by and intermarriage with tourists, members of Nepal's formerly untouchable castes have gained access to education, travel, and economic opportunities otherwise unavailable to them, improving their class, if not caste, standing and disrupting a social system in which economic and ritual status have generally operated in tandem. Furthermore, interaction with tourists has provided access to extra-local ideologies used by low caste Nepalis to reevaluate and challenge their positions within the caste hierarchy. While higher castes in Nepal have historically employed caste exogamy and the cultivation of patron-client relationships as a means of accessing channels of social and economic power, these strategies have been largely denied to untouchables. Patronage-style and marriage relationships between tourists and low caste Nepalis represent a new opportunity for low caste Nepalis to use these strategies of status manipulation for their own benefit.
Developing Sisters: Maithili Craft Producers and the Construction of Feminist
Identity Through Tourist Art
Coralynn Davis, University of Michigan
Tourism and the production of "ethnic" goods for export constitute the two most profitable industries for Nepal, while the international development industry ironically accounts for its greatest debt. It is in this context that for the past seven years, the Janakpur Women's Development Center has been producing crafts, primarily for sale in retail tourist shops in Kathmandu but increasingly for export. Approximately 50 women of the Maithili cultural group of Nepal's eastern Terai region have received salaries, training, and materials through support to JWDC from international donors such as UNIFEM, USAID, and Save the Children of Japan. The express dual charter of JWDC has been to empower Maithili women and to preserve their artistic tradition.
Based on ethnographic, interviewing, and questionnaire methods of research, this paper explores questions of identity-gender, ethnic and especially feminist-as they are negotiated through the processes of project funding and appraisal, promotional documentation, production and consumption of crafts, and everyday living and working. I focus especially on multiple and cross-cultural manifestations of the fictive kinship trope of "sisterhood," as it is used to articulate and disarticulate global and local relations among women whose lives have been variously impacted by this project. I conclude that consumption of JWDC crafts by tourists and expatriots recreates simultaneously Western liberal feminist discourses of sisterhood and superiority over "Third World women," while Maithili craft-producing women create alternative and conflicting discourses using the apparently same trope.