Introduction tourism and re-created ethnicity

This collection of papers by sociologists and anthropologists focuses on the effect of tourism on the maintenance, transformation, and re-creation of ethnic boundaries. Tourism is seen as a special form of ethnic relations, particularly that form of tourism in which the cultural exoticism of the host population is the principal attraction for the tourist. This type of tourism leads to the formation of three main roles: tourist, touree, and middleman. The authors address different aspects of the marketing of ethnicity, such as the role of the state in the development of ethnic tourism; the modification and recreation of ethnic attributes and consciousness as the result of tourism; the transformation of art forms through the tourist trade; the role of the tourist agent; and the formation of ethnic stereotypes in tourist interactions.     

Problematising ‘Festival Tourism’: Arts Festivals and Sustainable Development in Ireland

This paper problematises the term ‘festival tourism’. It conceptualises festivals as socially sustaining devices and argues that while they frequently function as tourist attractions, their social significance extends far beyond tourism. Using empirical material gathered in two case study arts festivals in Ireland, the paper demonstrates how festivals can contribute to arts development by inter alia creating demand for the arts, enhancing venue infrastructures, encouraging local creativity and animating local involvement. The paper contends that arts festivals, irrespective of their initial objectives almost inevitably develop tourist profiles over time and it proceeds to examine how changing tourism priorities in the two festivals studied impact upon sustainable festival practices. The findings suggest that tourism emerged as a key force promoting festival growth and expansion. It was found to be associated with increased revenue flows but also with increased arts activity on a year-round basis and with an improved venue infrastructure in both places. However, problems were identified with respect to the quality of the relationship forged between the festivals and local populations in the respective places. The paper concludes by arguing that festivals’ engagement with tourism needs to be carefully managed in the interests of promoting the socially sustaining function of festivals and of encouraging sustainable approaches to tourism development.     

A (home)land with a sea: the leisure and tourism in the Western Balkans of Kosovan migrants and their children living in London

This paper focuses on the trips to the homeland and the embedded tourist practices of Kosovan migrants in the Western Balkans. Drawing from the diasporic tourism literature, it emphasises the role of (material) space and place in these movements and tourist practices. Findings show that return trips to Kosovo involved for the participants leisure mobilities in the context of Albania and other Albanian-speaking areas in the Balkans. The paper concludes by questioning the strong connection in the existing literature between diasporic tourism and ethnicity, arguing that the former is also affected by material space – in the Kosovan case, more specifically, the sea – as an aspect of migrants’ experiences. Migration, leisure mobilities and tourism in the case of Kosovan migrants and the (West) Balkans region, at least, appear to have their historical, temporal and spatial specificities.     

Come to Tana Toraja, “land of the heavenly kings”: Travel agents as brokers in ethnicity

This paper examines the role of tourist literature in the genesis of ethnic stereotypes. Considering the case of the Toraja of Sulawesi (Indonesia), it is suggested that travel agents are brokers in ethnicity, travel brochures being the tools of their trade. In the process of marketing images of exotic places and peoples, travel brochures draw upon a small set of indigenous ethnic markers, elaborating upon them to provide a mental grid through which the tourist filters his perceptions while abroad. These travel brochure images become indices of “authenticity” and the ethnic stereotypes generated by them become reified during the course of the tourist's visit abroad.     

Tourism as ethnic preservation: The Cajuns of Louisiana

This paper addresses the impact of tourism on the preservation of ethnic identity with specific reference to the Louisiana Cajuns. Tourism has helped the Cajuns retain a separate identity by reinforcing the differences between Cajuns and outsiders. Cajuns are increasingly relinquishing their traditional culture in favor of standard U.S. values, but they retain a strong sense of identity and ethnic pride. A growing tourist industry was institutionalized at about the same time as the development of ethnic pride, and the two phenomena have profoundly influenced each other. Cajuns have become tourists in their own culture, joining outsiders in seeking and celebrating their brand of “local color” Cajun culture is now enacted on a “tourist stage” for the benefit of locals and their visitors. The tourist stage is an arena for the expression of ethnic differences, and it helps perpetuate an ethnic boundary that might otherwise disappear due to acculturation. Using the Cajuns as a case study, this paper proposes a model for the process of ethnic preservation through tourism.     

Reconstructed ethnicity tourism and cultural identity in third world communities

The thesis of this paper is that ethnicity is produced by group-level interactions and ethnic forms evolve as a result of changing structural relations between groups and rhetorical explanations and accounts of inter-group similarities and differences. The evidence for this argument is composed mainly of statements made by leaders and representatives of one group about other groups, and responses to such statements. These statements and associated behaviors are analyzed semiotically in that no distinction is made between the words of movement leaders and such matters as the wearing of an Afro hair style: they are both read as statements about group structure and the history of inter-group relations, although one may be in a more accessible idiom than the other. The paper concludes that the institutions associated with modern mass tourism also function as powerful shapers of ethnic identity.     

旅游利用下历史街区文化景观符号意义与建构——以北京前门大街为例

历史街区承载了城市的历史信息和文化印记，主要表征为特色鲜明的文化景观。过去40年，快速城市化和工业化改变了城市面貌，也影响了历史街区保护利用的进程。历史街区一旦变成旅游景观，符号化就成为了历史街区进行旅游发展和空间重构的主导逻辑。本研究以前门大街为案例地，通过对马蜂窝网站中游客分享照片的检索和整理，利用符号学和扎根理论方法分析了旅游利用背景下历史街区文化景观符号的意义表达，并对此过程中的符号建构与解读机制进行剖析。本研究从主客体两视角出发，深化既有研究并得出以下结论：前门大街通过指索符号、建筑符号、街道符号和商业符号共同表征这一空间。街道功能多样化和城市地位转变是符号建构与解读的具体语境，符号系统的建构存在多个权力主体，不同价值的符号其建构方式也有所不同。符号的解读需要旅游者的身体参与，当旅游地建构的符号与旅游者获得的符号存在一致性的时候，意味着文化景观符号意义被正确地接受和解读。     

旅游对恩施土家族居民民族认同感的影响——基于个人生活史的视角

民族认同感是族群意识的基本组成部分。在旅游影响下,少数民族地区的民族认同呈现出多维度和不同方向的发展轨迹。文章通过对一位土家族青年女性个人生活史的记录,分析了在旅游发展进程中族群个体的民族认同感的演化过程,发现旅游对民族认同的影响在于:旅游引致的经济增长提高了民族文化的"势位";旅游产品创造了民族的集体记忆和文化景观;文化旅游的发展使民族认同的层次不断深化;民族旅游的盲目开发和过度开发将误导民族认同的方向。研究将为民族旅游地社会文化影响研究提供新的视角。     

云南石林景点导游作为景观的旅游建构

文章在人类学田野调查基础上,以云南石林景点导游作为旅游景观的建构为切入点,梳理20世纪80年代以来政府对民族身份、性别在导游准入、导游管理中的认识和变化,以及导游自身的文化展演和符号行为等,以此呈现人、人的景观被规范到自然景现中,从而成为共同旅游景观的这一实践过程,并透过这一过程反映当地人的旅游实践.同时,在中国的文化背景和脉络下,对大众旅游表现出的不同意涵,该个案希望能提供一些有意义的启示.     

Differentiating education and training needs

This paper adds to the understanding of tourism human resources by the inclusion of culture and ethnicity perspectives. Through examples drawn from a multiethnic environment in Malaysia, the implications of ethnic-driven policies on different ethnic groups' involvement in tourism are examined and the appropriateness of the current approaches to tourism education and training are assessed. The views of tourism students of different ethnic backgrounds are presented with their education needs and employment expectations. The significance of culture, religion and ethnicity factors that affect different ethnic groups' perception and choice of tourism employment are discussed.     

A different interpretation from Cornet's on tourism development in an ethnic minority village in China

There have been tensions as ethnic tourism develops in western China leading to various responses from local people, including resistance. Cornet discussed Dong villagers’ responses to tourism development in Zhaoxing using concepts such as livelihoods, resistance, agency, and ethnicity. This paper aims to reinterpret these responses and extend the scope of discussion through multiple case studies using primary data collected in our fieldwork. This study showed that the issues involving ethnic minority groups mentioned by Cornet commonly appear in Han areas and ethnicity is less significant in local responses to tourism development. In addition, we found that villagers have little voice in tourism development and their rights and interests are often ignored by local government. These findings have important implications for increasing our understanding of the issues arising from ethnic tourism.     

Tourism in Malaysia competing needs in a plural society

Tourism development in Malaysia is constrained by certain socioeconomic and political factors which require planning considerations beyond the traditional concerns for growth and promotion. Apart from the New Economic Policy which calls for racial-spatial economic restructuring and indigenization of control, tourism development in Malaysia requires reconciliation with the less than liberal religious and cultural orientations of the populace. This paper presents an overview of the socioeconomic impacts of tourism with particular reference to the role of ethnicity in the development of the tourist industry.     

Ethnic tourism,the state,and cultural change in Southeast Asia

International tourism in Southeast Asia increasingly involves a restructuring of the relationship between the state and local cultures. A typology identifies the roles that culture and ethnicity play in Southeast Asian tourism. Tourism involves the state in new relationships with local cultures—as planner of tourist development, as marketer of cultural meanings, as arbiter of cultural practices displayed to tourists, and as an arena for new forms of politics. The state's role is contradictory and complex, as tourism leads to increased state intervention in local cultures and, at the same time, provides cultural groups with new means of pressing claims against the state.     

Political implications of Chinese tourism policy

This study is an examination of the political objectives and probable consequences of the decision to open the People's Republic of China to mass tourism. Through personal interviews and other reports, this article traces the organizational and political dimensions of the abrupt reversal of nearly three decades of restricted and selective foreign access. The author found several anomalies: more “market” oriented cost structure than in most non- socialist developing nations; a hierarchy of tourist classes in a supposedly classless society; liberalization in tourism itineraries along with a freezing of contacts between tourist and Chinese. The article concludes that while China has reaped few tangible political benefits and has incurred some new political vulnerability with its new tourism policy, Chinese tourism has avoided many of the social and economic costs associated with tourism development elsewhere.     

Tourism development and resistance in China

In 2013, the Dong villagers of Zhaoxing in Guizhou province expelled a Han-managed tourism company from their community and from their tourist enterprises. Far from being passive and homogeneous, ethnographic data reveal ethnic populations negotiate tourism development in a variety of ways. Using concepts of livelihood, resistance, agency and ethnicity, this article reveals: villagers responded to tourism development differently according to their livelihood strategies; villagers sided with local authorities of their own ethnic group in order to resist Han-led higher levels of government and villagers responded to non-local stakeholders’ infringement rather than to the presence of tourists. These findings point to the necessity of detailed ethnographic case studies to understand the context within which tourism development occurs in China.     

Food and Tourism: Towards an Understanding of Sustainable Culture

Studies of the social significance of food and eating have mostly been left to social anthropologists and social historians. Often it has not appeared as part of the cultural environment that is offered as a tourist package. If a culture is to prove sustainable in the face of tourism, then traditional and ethnic foods must be preserved along with other art forms. This pilot study shows that in a tourist area of Bali (a) visitors are not necessarily being offered what they want, and (b) traditional food is not being preserved.     

Maori and Tourism: A Relationship of History,Constitutions and Rites

This paper describes developments in Maori tourism. It argues that such developments cannot be understood without reference to a socio-political and ethical context of the history and ethical structures of Maori. It draws attention to Maori as an indigenous people as defined by the conventions on such peoples as adopted by the United Nations, and the recognition of ownership of cultural symbols. Maori claims of ownership of the symbols and practices adopted by tourist operators are thus sanctioned by international and national rights, but are equally tempered by Maori notions of hospitality to guests. However, Maori notions of gifts require respect and proper usage of gifts, and it is with this accord that Maori become involved with tourism. Furthermore, economic realities mean that Maori tourist operations will tend to be at an individual or extended family level, and hence the recognition of Maori ownership may be said to be more important. However, a further complicating issue is that Maori society is traditionally a tribal society; the Maori tourist 'gaze' is thus fractured by this consideration.     

关于旅游景区公司上市争论的几个问题

本文论述了在旅游上市公司的几个被混淆的基本概念，澄清了旅游上市公司的“公司上市”，而非国家风景“资源上市”，阐述了旅游开发与资源保护的相互关系，探讨和比较了旅游景区公司的几种经营模式，从而得出了旅游景点公司上市是一项兼顾各方利益利大于弊的制度安排这一结论。     

Carving and tourism: A maori perspective

Maori retained high levels of self determination under the Treaty of Waitangi in 1840, although much of the subsequent history of the 19th century involved attempts both formal and informal by the colonial powers to subvert the Act. Therefore, while tourism has brought significant economic advantages for some tribes (iwi), and promises economic returns for others, Maori are insistent that they retain control over the process. The paper describes some of the significant impacts of tourism on Maori culture, but it is concluded that the truths of tourist impacts are plural, and can only be understood within an understanding of Maori cosmology. As such, Maori are adept at distinguishing between the signs and symbols of tourist artifacts.