Cultural impact of modernization and tourism on Dai villages in Xishuangbanna, China

Abstract

The development of tourism can have a considerable sociocultural impact on ethnic communities, but few studies have attempted to separate the unique impact of ethnic tourism from the overall impact of modernization and describe its mechanism clearly. This paper describes a quasi-natural experiment performed in three typical Dai villages in different stages of tourism development. A crosswise and longitudinal comparative study was performed on Dai village culture. The study indicates the following: (1) spiritual culture has been transmitted relatively unchanged across generations in three Dai villages, but material culture has undergone various degrees of change. (2) The changes in material culture and some parts of institutional culture have been caused primarily by the pressure of overall social modernization. (3) Currently, the overall thrust of modernization in mainstream Chinese society has driven some ethnic cultural practices out of use, while the endogenous driving force of tourism development in ethnic communities has pulled them back into use. (4) Under the influence of modernization, the issue of whether ethnic tourism communities can be developed in a sustainable way depends on both bottom-up and top-down factors: the leading role played by community elites internally, developing useful parts of ethnic culture and discarding useless parts during repeated games in the tourism field, and government policy and guidance facilitating planning.

Keywords:

• sociocultural impact
• modernization
• ethnic tourism
• ethnic community
• Xishuangbanna
• Yunnan
• China
• Dai minority

Acknowledgements

The author would like to thank her Ph.D. supervisor Ning Wang of the Business School and School of Sociology and Anthropology of Sun Yat-Sen University, Guangzhou, China for his altruistic guidance and help with this project. We thank LetPub (www.letpub.com) for its assistance with the manuscript preparation.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by China National Tourism Administration planning project [grant number 14TACG022] and Guangzhou University [grant number CLK1-2221].