Tourism and environmental subjectivities in the Anthropocene: observations from Niru Village, Southwest China

ABSTRACT

The increasingly popular notion of Anthropocene urges us to reflect and review the role of the human, the Anthropos, as part of the planet earth. In this context, tourism has been singled out as a global industry that is driven by neoliberal economic principles and is inevitably intertwined in the production of the Anthropocene. At the same time, tourism has been adopted also as part of environmental governance and management, aiming for a more sustainable economy. Based on the idea that ecotourism contributes to the discourse of “nature” (and Anthropocene) disruptively as well as productively in unsettling the normative ideas of “nature” and “culture”, in this article I attempt to understand more specifically how ecotourism may enable individuals' subject formation in relation to the broader environmental discourse. Drawn on fieldwork in Niru Village, Shangri-La, Southwest China, I employ a political ecology approach and examine the ways individuals relate themselves to “nature”, through a process of negotiation and exchange with others engaged in ecotourism activities. The tourism encounters in Niru Village, therefore are also embodied encounters of different environmental subjectivities.

KEYWORDS:

• Anthropocene
• Shangri-La
• tourism encounters
• environmental subjectivities
• political ecology

Acknowledgement

I would like to than three reviewers for their insightful feedbacks and suggestions. Thanks also go to the research participants in Niru Village who took part in the fieldwork.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Swedish Research Council Formas under Grant “Mobilizing the rural: Post-productivism and the new economy [Grant Number: 2011-9018-18821-43].”

Notes on contributors

Jundan Zhang

Jundan Zhang is a post-doc researcher within the Department of Geography and Economic History at Umeå University, Sweden. Her current research focuses on relationships between environmental discourses and environmental subjectivities in the context of tourism in peripheral areas, in particular how individuals translate and appropriate broad ideas on “nature” into their exchanges with other human and non-human actors through tourism activities, and how these translations and appropriations in turn contribute to the discourses of environment.