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Programme: accepted abstracts

Abstract ID: 823

Part of Session 192: Margins vs Megapoles (Other abstracts in this session)

Designing Tujia: Ethnicity, Heritage Tourism and Authenticity in China

Authors: Wang, Xuan
Submitted by: Wang, Xuan (Tilburg University, Netherlands, The)

This paper presents a case of ‘the invention of tradition’ from the margins of the globalization processes in China. It focuses on Enshi, an officially established autonomous minority prefecture that is populated predominantly by the ethnic minority group known as Tujia, and a place that is undergoing rapid transformations from a ‘backward’ area to an upcoming destination of heritage tourism during China’s economic reform and modernization. In order to satisfy the tourist-consumerist quest for an authentic cultural experience, the local authorities and institutions of Enshi engage themselves in a series of highly rationalized efforts of cultural semiotics (re)invention (e.g. ethnic dance, cultural artefacts, city layout). With particular attention to the discourse and metadiscourse of designing a unique set of ‘authentic’ Tujia outfit that can serve as both a tourism brand and an ethnic emblem, this paper interrogates the meanings of authenticity in such acts of invention, and whether or how these inventions can be understood without being simply reduced to ‘staged authenticity’ and faked identities driven by the economic changes. These questions probe into not only how authenticity is constructed in terms of the new economy of tourism, but more importantly, in relation to the state politics of ethnicity and multiculturalism, since the product for tourist consumption – the ‘realness’ of Tujia in the case of Enshi – has to be produced from within the system of why and how the ethnic minorities should make themselves recognizable as authentic in the first place. This perspective calls for a historical understanding of the asymmetrical mismatch between what Tujia means locally and how it is imagined and constructed differently in the process of nation-state building. The paper argues that the explicit exploitation of symbolic semiotic resources in Enshi for projecting a particular kind of authenticity of ethnicity underscores a bottom-up initiative of ‘awakening ethnic consciousness’ and asserting a minority self-identity as much as its heightened anxiety of identity status in the eyes of the state.

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