Tourism Anthropology And China

In Tourism and Prosperity in Miao Land, Xianghong Feng focuses on the intersection of tourism, power, and inequality in the southern interior of China. In this region, capital-intensive and elite-directed tourism has reshaped the social and cultural patterns of the ethnic Miao and other local residents. Using ethnographic fieldwork conducted over the course of a decade, Feng examines the cultural reconstructions of space, ethnicity, gender, and morality within changing power structures. This book is recommended for scholars of anthropology, sociology, economics, political science, Asian studies, and tourism studies. For more information, check out A Conversation with Xianghong Feng.

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 for its potential to bring wealth and modernity to rural ethnic minority communities, but the policies underlying the development of tourism obscure some complicated realities. 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 people whose lives and livelihoods are most at stake in China’s rural ethnic tourism industry: the residents of village destinations. Drawing on ethnographic research conducted in Ping’an (a Zhuang village in Guangxi) and Upper Jidao (a Miao village in Guizhou), Jenny Chio analyzes the myriad challenges and possibilities confronted by villagers who are called upon to do the work of tourism. She addresses the shifting significance of migration and rural mobility, the visual politics of tourist photography, and the effects of touristic desires for “exotic difference” on village social relations. In this way, Chio illuminates the contemporary regimes of labor and leisure and the changing imagination of what it means to be rural, ethnic, and modern in China today.

Twenty years ago, commercial tourism in the People’s Republic of China hardly existed. Today, China has a burgeoning tourist industry, characterized by a unique style with deep roots in traditional Chinese culture. Scenic Spots is an engaging exploration of why Chinese tourists pursue certain kinds of experiences, what they make of them, and how their experiences and interpretations are shaped by the state. Working from within a Chinese cultural framework, Pál Nyíri argues that China’s brand of tourism is distinct from the traditions of both Western bourgeois tourism, which values authenticity, and Soviet tourism, with its emphasis on rugged and selfless experience. In China, tourism development is guided by the state, and “scenic spots” (jingdian) and theme parks are used to demonstrate China’s heroic past and as tools of patriotic education and modernization – or as forms of “indoctritainment.” The tourist site is perceived as a product, and, as such, it is bounded, approved, rated, and consumed. In a style both straightforward and provocative, Nyíri argues that the uniformity and undisguised commercialism of Chinese tourist sites are a direct result of the state’s ultimate authority to determine the meaning of landscape and to control culture. Scenic Spots serves as a lens through which to explore mechanisms of cultural control and resistance in a highly commercialized sphere of everyday life in contemporary China.

This book is the first book on the history of Chinese traveling culture. It reviewed the history of Chinese traveling culture, and revealed the cultural significance of China's traveling phenomena and the underlying principles of its changing traveling culture.It has the following features: First, it divided the history of Chinese traveling culture into six periods to create a system to explain the phenomena and changes of traveling culture. Second, it emphasized the significance of travelers in traveling culture, and revealed the influence of zeitgeist on traveling culture. Third, it explained phenomena through investigations of the artifacts, institutions, behaviors and attitudes of traveling culture, and the dynamic interactions between the subjects, objects and media in traveling. Fourth, it expanded the theory of traveling by building upon extant ideas.Published by SCPG Publishing Corporation and distributed by World Scientific for all markets except China

This book examines the complexities and dynamics in the relationship between intangible cultural heritage (ICH) and tourism, taking as a focus the ICH at the World Cultural Heritage site in Lijiang, China. It explores the tensions between the protection of authenticity of ICH and the use of ICH in tourism commodification, and considers the perspectives of governmental officials, experts, local ICH practitioners and community members. The volume aims to redefine the concepts of authenticity, integrity and continuity from the perspective of the ICH practitioners and to provide theoretical guidelines for developing a sustainable ICH tourism using a people-based approach. It will be a helpful resource for students, researchers and practitioners in heritage studies, tourism, anthropology, cultural management and Chinese studies.

Contemporary Perspectives on China Tourism is an innovative and engaging collection which presents unique approaches and critical insights into the policy, development and management practices of tourism and hospitality in modern China. This volume consists of nine independent research reports overarching the consequences of tourism from economic, sociocultural, community, and humanistic perspectives. The book addresses generic issues such as tourism demand, mega events, leisure, tourist experience, cultural representation, community development, and quality of life through tourism, as well as strategies and techniques specific to the tourism and hospitality industries. Contemporary Perspectives on China Tourism draws on methodological traditions of anthropology, business, communication and media studies, geography, linguistics and literature, sociology, and critical tourism studies. Seven of the nine chapters in this book were originally published in a special issue on "Methodological Innovations in China Tourism Research" of the Journal of China Tourism Research.

​This monograph analyzes current cultural resource management, archeological heritage management, and exhibitionary practices and policies in the People’s Republic of China. Academic researchers, preservationists, and other interested parties face a range of challenges for the preservation of the material past as rapid economic and social changes continue in China. On the one hand, state-supported development policies often threaten and in some cases lead to the destruction of archeological and cultural sites. Yet state cultural policies also encourage the cultivation of precisely such sites as tourism development resources. This monograph aims to bring the concepts of world heritage sites, national tourism policies, ethnic tourism, and museum display together for a general cultural heritage audience. It focuses on a central issue: the tensions between a wide range of interest groups: cultural anthropologists and archeologists, tourism officials, heritage proponents, economic development proponents, a new class of private rich with the means to buy artifacts, and a fragmented regulatory system. Behind all of them lies the political role of heritage in China, also addressed in this monograph.