Landscape of travel: Tourism, media and identity in southwest China

In 2006, the Chinese state announced plans to "Build a New Socialist Countryside," while the China National Tourism Administration launched the Year of Rural Tourism. This dissertation unravels the assumptions and expectations in this seemingly straightforward association between rural socio-economic development and rural tourism from the perspective of rural communities in Guangxi and Guizhou provinces. In my ethnographic account of the social changes and cultural politics at work in Ping'an and Upper Jidao villages, I analyze the changing subjectivities of village residents to argue that tourism as a practice allowed them to claim belonging in processes of national modernization, while reconfiguring the value of ethnic distinctiveness.This study utilizes two intertwined concepts---mobility and visuality---to demonstrate how being mobile and being seen are integral to understanding the perils and possibilities latent in tourism. Through interviews with returned migrants, I show that mobility is morally ordered by expectations about who can, and cannot, travel. Moreover, because appearances were posited as central to tourism success, the onus of representation fell upon village residents to look, and by extension to be, rural and ethnic. To explore what I call the visual expediencies of tourism, I used video-recordings to elicit residents' opinions on what it means to "look good" in rural China. The visual strategies employed in tourism---in architecture, costume, and vernacular landscapes like terraced fields---reflect the tensions between local and state approaches to ethnic difference, opportunity, and national unity.Mobility and visuality shape a "landscape of travel," in which rural communities negotiate between the visual sensuousness of landscape and the mobile sensibility of travel. This project contributes to the anthropology of tourism by highlighting the contested meanings of travel for those whose lives and livelihoods are most at stake in the tourism industries. I contend that tourism is made meaningful by village residents as a chance to transform their villages not only into better places to tour but, ideally, into better places to live. Their experiences thus extend beyond momentary encounters with tourists to encompass learning how to be distinctly modern as rural and ethnic subjects in contemporary China.