The Impact of Tourism on A Minority Area of Southwest China
This paper is concerned with the spectacular rise of mass tourism in the small town of Lijiang on the Sino-Tibetan frontier. The author is an anthropologist with 18 years experience in the region, and presents the essay as an ethnographic reflection on the economic and cultural dimensions of the tourism encounter between local Naxi natives and Han and non-Chinese “others”. Despite massive infusions of tourist wealth, some locals are little better off than they were 20 years ago, and for others tourism has led to an intensification of social and ethnic cleavages. Of particular interest are the changing images of “Naxiness” produced in the encounter for tourist consumption, and the ways in which the images become important in the refiguring of Naxi identities.