Revisiting the impacts of tourism from the perspective of social space production: an ethnological study of the Muslim community in Sanya, Hainan Province, China

ABSTRACT

‘Tourism’ has been regarded as an essential driving force behind destination changes. On reflection, it is essentially not tourism, but the mechanisms underlying destination development process that lead to the changes. However, very few studies have explored these mechanisms with the majority of work simply comparing the pre- and post-tourism stages to conclude the effects of tourism on destinations. The current study builds on Lefebvre’s social space production epistemology to establish a conceptual framework to decipher the mechanisms. It was illustrated using the context of the Muslim community in Sanya, Hainan Province, China. Results demonstrate that the dynamic relationship between capital, culture and power initiated the production of the community space. Capital facilitated the production of ‘spatial practices’, which interacted with the ‘representations of space’ dominated by the (administrative) power and the ‘representational space’ produced by the Muslim culture. Theoretical implications of the framework for social changes are also discussed.

KEYWORDS:

• Tourism impacts
• destination change
• space production
• capital
• power
• culture

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Correction Statement

This article has been republished with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Notes

1 The Production of Space was published in 1974 as the Production de l’espace in France and first translated into English in 1991.

2 The authors published an extensive article regarding space production in Muslim communities that included further details.

3 Source: Economic statistics of Sanya (1994–2015).

4 Muslim in China belongs to a specific ethnic group named Hui, the terms Hui community, Hui individuals, and Hui ethnic group in this study all refer to the Muslim community.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Major Project of The National Social Science Foundation, ‘Conservation and Utilization of Traditional Ethnic Minority Villages in Southwest China’ [grant number 15ZDB118]; and the National Natural Science Fund, ‘The Production of Social Space in the Process of Community Participation in Tourism Development: Interdisciplinary empirical study of Multiple cases’ [grant number 41171124/D010202].