A LANDSCAPE OF TRAVEL:
THE WORK OF TOURISM IN RURAL ETHNIC CHINA
2014, University of Washington Press (Series: Studies on Ethnic Groups in China)
OPEN ACCESS
THE WORK OF TOURISM IN RURAL ETHNIC CHINA
2014, University of Washington Press (Series: Studies on Ethnic Groups in China)
OPEN ACCESS
Synopsis
While the number of domestic leisure travelers has increased dramatically in reform-era China, the persistent gap between urban and rural living standards attests to ongoing social, economic, and political inequalities. The state has widely touted tourism development as a solution that can bring both wealth and modernity to rural ethnic minority communities, but such policies obscure the complicated reality of what tourism entails. In tourism, after all, one person’s leisure is another person’s labor.
A Landscape of Travel investigates the contested meanings and unintended consequences of tourism for those whose lives and livelihoods are most at stake in China’s rural ethnic tourism industry: the residents of village destinations. Drawing on long-term fieldwork conducted in Ping’an (a Zhuang village in Guangxi) and Upper Jidao (a Miao village in Guizhou), I analyze the myriad challenges and possibilities confronted by villagers who are called upon to “do tourism.” Through a detailed ethnography of the shifting significances of migration and rural mobility, the visual politics of tourism and photography, and the impact of touristic desires for exotic difference on village social relations, I argue that there is a newly emergent regime of labor and leisure in rural China today. Village residents are confronted with new possibilities for and challenges to individual aspirations and senses of community belonging, and thus, my book offers a critical perspective on the changing imagination of what it means to be rural, ethnic, and modern in China today.
This research was funded by grants from the Fulbright-Hays Doctoral Dissertation Research Abroad program, Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research, and various units at UC Berkeley including the Graduate Division, Institute for East Asian Studies, Center for Chinese Studies, and the department of Anthropology. It was administratively supported by Yunnan University. Follow up visits were funded by the China Research Center, University of Technology, Sydney. Publication of the book has been made possible through subvention funds from Emory College, the Laney Graduate School at Emory University, and the Association for Asian Studies First Book Subvention Program.
Reviews: American Anthropologist 118(3), 2016; Pacific Affairs 89(1), 2016; China Review 16(1), 2016; Rachel Carson Center 2016; Anthropological Quarterly 88(3), 2015; The China Quarterly 223, 2015; Journal of Cultural Heritage 16(1), 2015
The Australian Journal of Anthropology 26(3), 2015; Material Culture 47(2), 2015
While the number of domestic leisure travelers has increased dramatically in reform-era China, the persistent gap between urban and rural living standards attests to ongoing social, economic, and political inequalities. The state has widely touted tourism development as a solution that can bring both wealth and modernity to rural ethnic minority communities, but such policies obscure the complicated reality of what tourism entails. In tourism, after all, one person’s leisure is another person’s labor.
A Landscape of Travel investigates the contested meanings and unintended consequences of tourism for those whose lives and livelihoods are most at stake in China’s rural ethnic tourism industry: the residents of village destinations. Drawing on long-term fieldwork conducted in Ping’an (a Zhuang village in Guangxi) and Upper Jidao (a Miao village in Guizhou), I analyze the myriad challenges and possibilities confronted by villagers who are called upon to “do tourism.” Through a detailed ethnography of the shifting significances of migration and rural mobility, the visual politics of tourism and photography, and the impact of touristic desires for exotic difference on village social relations, I argue that there is a newly emergent regime of labor and leisure in rural China today. Village residents are confronted with new possibilities for and challenges to individual aspirations and senses of community belonging, and thus, my book offers a critical perspective on the changing imagination of what it means to be rural, ethnic, and modern in China today.
This research was funded by grants from the Fulbright-Hays Doctoral Dissertation Research Abroad program, Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research, and various units at UC Berkeley including the Graduate Division, Institute for East Asian Studies, Center for Chinese Studies, and the department of Anthropology. It was administratively supported by Yunnan University. Follow up visits were funded by the China Research Center, University of Technology, Sydney. Publication of the book has been made possible through subvention funds from Emory College, the Laney Graduate School at Emory University, and the Association for Asian Studies First Book Subvention Program.
Reviews: American Anthropologist 118(3), 2016; Pacific Affairs 89(1), 2016; China Review 16(1), 2016; Rachel Carson Center 2016; Anthropological Quarterly 88(3), 2015; The China Quarterly 223, 2015; Journal of Cultural Heritage 16(1), 2015
The Australian Journal of Anthropology 26(3), 2015; Material Culture 47(2), 2015