The social life of scripts: Staging authenticity in China's ethno-tourism industry

The widespread attempts to build tourism sites as a means of development in southwest China have provided materials for the studies of representations of ethnic minority cultures through the theoretical lens of orientalism. Rather than analyzing new forms of orientalism through representations of ethnic minority culture in ethno-tourism, this paper examines the ways in which representations of ethnic minorities are created. In particular, I argue that one of the means of performing "internal orientalism" and staging "authenticity" is to mediate the ethnic minority culture through script-based representations. As demonstrated by my fieldwork in Pogang, a Buyi village in southwest Guizhou, a tourism development project includes the establishment of a museum exhibiting Buyi material culture. Exhibitions are collected from local Buyi households. In other words, items of everyday use are turned into exhibitions with accompanying written commentaries in the museum. On one hand, the use of Mandarin rather than Buyi language scripts lends symbolic capitals to these exhibitions, which in turn became "scientific," "recognized," and "legitimate." On the other hand, the separation between the script-mediated Buyi culture and current Buyi everyday life creates means of self-claiming and self-presentation for the local people. © 2012 The Institute, Inc.

Duke Scholars

Author Mengqi Wang DKU Faculty