Alienation of ethnic minorities in community-based tourism

ABSTRACT

The ‘traditional Sa Pa Love market’ of Dzao ethnic minority in Vietnam, had disappeared since the 1990s. What alienated and replaced this traditional culture with modern ones? How can we prevent the same things occurring worldwide? This study draws a research framework bringing major aspects of the ethnic minority’s involvement in tourism through literature review, then use a mixed analysis complex of the interaction processes between ethnic minorities and outsiders to provide patterns of the ethnic minorities’ assimilation. Research findings provide information about the alienation process and disappearance risk of ethnic minorities by the uncritical exhortation for community-based tourism, include: (1) the alienation of native representatives in communitas-based tourism ventures; (2) the paradoxes of the interaction between ethnic minority people and visitors; and (3) the alienation of ethnic-minority people in value production activities. From which, I propose a new methodological model and suggestions to fix the issues of the present community-based tourism, and prevent the alienation of ethnic minorities, especially the vulnerable ones.

GRAPHICAL ABSTRACT

KEYWORDS:

• Alienation
• ethnic minority
• touristic-paradox
• communitas-based tourism
• cultural identity
• interaction

Acknowledgments

I would like to thank the reviewers for their useful comments and I am also very grateful to Prof. Scott McCabe for his valuable suggestions and insights on this article.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Sa Pa Love market. Retrieved from https://originvietnam.com/destination/vietnam/sapa/sapa-love-market.html.

2 The ‘self-actualization’ term was first articulated in 1943 by Maslow (1943, p. 375).