Eating the food of the ancestors: place,tradition,and tourism in a Chinese frontier River town

Abstract

This essay explores the development of tourism as a local cultural production in a remote region of south-west China. It offers a case study in the contests over how landscapes are represented and reconstructed for tourist consumption. Two issues underlie the analysis: One is the relationship between broader cultural discourse and its local appropriation and manipulation. In this case, that broader cultural discourse is one dominated by ideals of Chinese tradition, civilization, and refinement. The other issue is the way tourism gets mixed up in this process of local appropriation, rendering its development as much a local cultural product as it is an external force linking specific localities to much broader circuits of exchange and capital accumulation. The goal is a more culturally complex rendering of tourism’s ‘consumption’ of places, one that sees not merely a globalizing force bearing down upon a once-isolated community but also the dynamic ways local cultural meanings wrap the tourism experience in an envelope of local meaning.