Molding Dai-ness on China's periphery: Ethnic tourism and the politics of identity construction in contemporary Xishuang Banna

This dissertation investigates power interactions among the state, regional governments, capitalist entrepreneurs, and ethnic locals in ethnic tourism and the resulting negotiation processes of constructing Dai-ness in an era of market economy and achieving modernization in contemporary Xishuang Banna Dai minority nationality autonomous prefecture in Southwest China. The dual nature of China's ethnic tourism, as an officially promoted agenda for modernization and a form of the market economy, opens a new ground to explore the politics of identity construction in contemporary Chinese minority regions. On this ground, the state interacts with the local (regional), the official meets the market, and national "Others" wrestle with the commercializing power of the tourism industry. This dissertation undertakes an ethnographical reading of this rich meeting ground to study the ways regional governments and capitalist entrepreneurs, as alternative agents of control in an era of market economy, cooperate with the state in representing and crafting ethnic cultures through localized governmental policies and business management on the grassroots level. By hearing gendered and ethnic voices at a village-based tourist site, the dissertation also explores how ethnic members as heterogeneous subjects, including Dai women and Buddhist elites, actively engage more accessible, flexible, and legitimate "opportunity spaces" of tourism to diversely interpret Dai-ness and further produce new narratives of gender, class, and nationality in local social landscapes. The dissertation shows that ethnic tourism, an industry based on power relationships between different groups or forces, generates a meaningful extension of reading power dynamics between the center and the periphery in China's ethnic politics. It emphasizes the complexity of power interactions among multiple agents of control in the center and the significant alternative hands that mold ethnic identities in today's era of market economy and modernization. It also complicates the framing of the periphery by downplaying its simplified image of being perpetual, static, or the absolute opposed margin of the center. Rather, it is a centered margin where ethnic members draw upon forces from various core areas to develop its own distinctive features by standing within the net of power relationships.