The Social And Cultural Change Of Xiahe Under The Background Of Tourism Development

After the 1980s, along with the world tourism's rapid development, our country's tourism has gagradually gained much attention from state to local governments and has rapidly developed. The unique natural environment and folk custom of ethnic groups prove to be appealing, but fragile tourist attractions. Minority's culture always change easily and quickly. Social and cultural change of minority area in tourism development has received concern of anthropologist, ethnologist and sociologist. The research of social and cultural influence in the travel destination has been the subject of tourism anthropology.Labrang Monastery is open to people in 1980, Xiahe County is listed as the historical culture city of Gansu Province in 1996. The tourism of Xiahe County has made grate development. As the main way to moderniazation, tourism should not be developed only for economic reasons. Tourism development has also accelerated capital flows, population migration and information exchange. Alien culture poured in Tibetan area, which was an isolated area in old days. Today, Xiahe County has changed and is changing a lot. In fact, culture changes all the time, but the directions and characters of those changes are the important for Tibetan people. Therefore, this article main analyze Tibetan social and cultural changes in tourism development, which will have much practical significance to tourism development in future. How to connect tourism development with cultural inheritance in order to conserve and inherit Tibetan traditional culture and promote Tibetan modernization is my thesis' destination.In order to find out the current situations of Tibetan cultural changes, the author had done fieldwork twice by answering question and chatting in Xiahe, form July to August in 2006. The investigation covered the following aspects. The first is about the impact of tourism…on Tibetan people's daily life, which include material life and mental life. The second is focused on the commercialization of Tibetan culture, Tibetan food, folk songs, dances, handicraft, and folk festivals. The third is the impact of tourism development on Tibetan women's social cole and status. Residents were surveyed for opinions to these changes. The analysis of survey is distributed in chapters, and the questions and the conclusions are in the appendix.This thesis is constituted of introduction, conclusion and six chapters. The introduction includes study background and current significance, correlated studies and articles, and the author research method and chapter arrangement. The main body of this thesis is composed of six chapters. Chapter 1 described the current tourism development condition of Xiahe, and set a framework for the whole text. The second chapter discuss tourism citilization of Xiahe. The third chapter discuss the changes of Tibetan social culture with the theory of cultural acculturation and demonstration effect. The fourth chapter analyzed Tibetan culture commercialization with Weaver and Oppermann's culture commercialization theory and MacCannell' s frontstage and backstage theory. The fifth chapter described the changes of Tibetan women's social cole and status. The sixth chapter analyzed the relation of tourism development and Tibetan traditional culture changes, then discuss the direction of Tibetan traditional culture in the future.