Revitalization and counter‐revitalization: tourism, heritage, and the Lantern Festival as catalysts for regeneration in Hội An, Việt Nam

Abstract

When employed for development purposes, tourism often elicits a fundamental tension between locals’ desire (and need) to both change and to stay the same. Like other development projects, it is often paradoxically conceived as a means of empowering and ‘bettering’ hosts that necessarily rests in the hands of the guests. After briefly tracing the historical conjunctures between development discourses and tourism, the author argues for the adoption of an alternative theory, one that eschews development’s tautologies and evolutionary notions: Anthony Wallace’s classic revitalization theory, a ‘deliberate, organized, conscious effort by members of a society to construct a more satisfying culture’. He contends that this paradigm is a more totalizing set of processes, since it accounts for environmental, religious, psychological, and biological pressures stemming from extra‐cultural challenges. Using ethnographic fieldwork to explore the emergence of Hội An from a sleepy Vietnamese town into the country’s most popular destination, the author shows that, while the impetus for the adoption of tourism may have been the intervention of outsiders, locals perceiving a variety of pressures on their way of life truly shaped the manner in which the town regenerated itself. In particular, they respond to the tension between transformation and tradition by implementing a monthly Lantern Festival that ritually refreshes their sense of communitas and reinforces the unique temporality in which they live. More importantly, it urges both practitioners and theorists to consider the productivity of adopting a revitalization paradigm to better understand and implement urban regeneration projects that focus on tourism and festivals.

Keywords:

• tourism
• development
• revitalization
• festivals
• Vietnam
• Hội An

Introduction: the problems with tourism development

Tourism – today’s largest and fastest‐growing export industry, surpassing even that of the oil trade (UNWTO, 2007) – has long been considered a central means for economic development, employment, and poverty alleviation (de Kadt, 1979; Muhanna, 2007; UNESCO, 1976), especially when places have ‘outlived their usefulness’ (Kirshenblatt‐Gimblett, 1998, p. 151) as many ‘developing’ countries, like Việt Nam, have. Yet well‐supported skepticism concerning tourism’s positive potential for change has existed for just as long, and rich case studies reinforce claims that touristic pressures create undue ‘stress’ on a host society (Murphy, 1985, pp. 1, 3) by fostering economic and social disparities akin to modern colonialism (Nash, 1977), ‘museumification’ of resources and self‐representation (Dellios, 2002; Kirshenblatt‐Gimblett, 1998), and unsustainable environmental and cultural practices (Kolata, 2007; Winter, 2003). Some of these issues are related to general inadequacies of the development paradigm, while others emerge from the disconnect between development and tourism.

When employed for development purposes, tourism often elicits a fundamental tension between locals’ desire (and need) to both stay the same and to change. Like many other development projects, tourism is viewed as a means to better a society in the face of numerous socio‐cultural pressures. ‘Betterment’ does not simply mean economic improvement and increased employment, although that is often the case; it also includes psycho‐social aspects such as ‘empowerment’ (Kane, 1993; Rist, 1997, p. 130), ‘integration’ into the global system (Truman, 1949; UNWTO, 1974), and valorization on the international level (Di Giovine, 2009; Dure, 1974; UNESCO, 2005, p. 9) that can emerge precisely by adopting a newly introduced, globally networked industry such as tourism. Often considered a form of ‘recreation,’ it becomes a method of re‐creation, of revitalizing or re‐vivifying a place and people through a complex process of interaction among a variety of stakeholders. Yet paradoxically, tourism is often contingent on those very practices that are the intended objects of change; tourism celebrates a culture’s traditions – often perceived as its very ‘underdevelopment’ – that will necessarily be transformed through its implementation and ‘modernization.’ This problem was evident early in the post‐war tourism movement, as the United Nations World Tourism Organization (UNWTO) makes clear in its inaugural publication:

In the second half of the 20th century we are seeing an increase in the number of nation states all seeking to preserve their individualism while at the same time all wanting to benefit from new technologies and new institutions which operate on a global scale across all national boundaries. To weld together the common interests of all without interfering unduly with the individual and particular interests of each is the task of this growing community of specialized international agencies of which WTO is the most recent member. (UNWTO, 1975, p. 248)

Tourism development also achieves this through a very evolutionary model of linear progress: I will attempt to show that what could be dubbed a ‘development paradigm’ is predicated on claims that all humankind is inevitably traveling across a single, linear trajectory towards a ‘modern’ capitalistic culture of production and consumption. The necessary corollary of this, therefore, is that ‘modern’ Western people must be the agents of change, the knowledge‐brokers, the deliverers of civilization. Indeed, the UNWTO – a global yet immanently Western institution based in Madrid, which traces its roots to the International Congress of Official Tourist Traffic Associations (ICOTT) in the Hague and the British International Union of Official Tourist Publicity Organizations (IUOTPO) (Jafari, 1975, pp. 237–238) – goes on to state its mandate is to contribute to the alleviation of problems affecting the ‘world society’ (1975, p. 248). This is the tautological telos of tourism development: it is a means of empowering hosts that necessarily rests, perhaps more so than other industries, in the hands of guests. And although initiatives that aim to create sustainable tourism – such as ‘pro‐poor tourism’ (Ashley, Boyd, & Goodwin, 2000), eco‐tourism (Honey, 1991; Stronza, 2001), ‘volunteer tourism’ (McMillan, Cutchins, Geissinger, & Asner, 2009), and ‘community tourism planning’ (Harrill, 2004; Jamal & Getz, 1995; Murphy, 1985) – have emerged alongside sustainable development initiatives, the persistent critiques leveled against the insertion of a global tourism industry into a local environment remain.

This essay has two primary goals. The first is to trace, in a relatively abbreviated form, the historical intersections of development practice and tourism – with the aim of revealing how many of the arguments against tourism development do not necessarily pertain to the phenomenological or structural nature of tourism per se, nor to any malicious intent on the part of tourism developers, but rather to the very culturally situated perspective that innately underlies such practices. It is not the intent of this article to critique any particular actor, theory, or practice associated with tourism development. On the contrary, as my sketch of the historical trajectory of the development paradigm should reveal, many of these initiatives are undertaken by well‐meaning and well‐informed individuals who are continually in search of more equitable and more efficient means of helping groups who are less fortunate than themselves. What the paper aims to accomplish, however, is to shed light on the very culturally oriented nature of this perspective, to reveal that it should not be considered in universalizing terms, as it so often is, but rather as one approach out of many possibilities at creating touristic infrastructures that will benefit the local population. When one is open to the possibility that there are alternative worldviews, interests, and practices associated with ‘betterment,’ it seems more likely that they will be taken into account in future tourism endeavors.

In contrast to that of development, I offer an alternative paradigm, one that is appropriated from anthropologist Anthony F.C. Wallace’s classic theory of ‘revitalization movements.’ When Wallace first introduced this paradigm in 1956, he used it to explain the similarities among the emergence of several prophetic Native American religious movements in early American history – movements that reacted to cultural pressures by invoking, re‐presenting and re‐interpreting traditional elements of their heritage. Not only are tourism and heritage often related (Di Giovine, 2009, pp. 48–58), but tourism and religion also often go together, as students of pilgrimage or festivals well know (cf. Badone & Roseman, 2004; Ebron, 1999; Graburn, 1977; Morinis, 1992); ‘a tourist is half a pilgrim if a pilgrim is half a tourist,’ Victor and Edith Turner once remarked (1978, p. 20). And though tourism seems to be oriented to the ‘modern leisure class’ (cf. Boorstin, 1961/1994; MacCannell, 1976/1999; Towner, 1985), Nelson Graburn (1977, 1985) drew on Victor Turner’s understanding of pilgrimage (Turner, 1974; Turner & Turner, 1978) to show that its core phenomenological aspects transcend economics: it is undertaken to experience a formative change from the everyday. Its return‐oriented ritual structure allows it to be conceptualized not only as a rite of passage (van Gennep, 1960) but a rite of intensification – ‘cyclical rites that renew the social or natural order’ (Chapple & Coon, 1942), a personal act of revitalization for participants.

But it is less the phenomenology of tourism and religion that renders a revitalization paradigm applicable to this context, than its discursive and perspectival qualities which differentiate the theory from that of development. While a development paradigm posits a universal evolutionary trajectory of all people toward capitalistic ‘modernization,’ the theory of revitalization posits a cyclical movement of renewal – one that calls upon individuated notions of shared ‘heritage’ to resolve current problems. As Michael Harkin reveals, there is a fundamental dualism in human temporal perceptions (2004, pp. xxii–xxv). On one level is the rather Western notion of a linear, or organismic time – one that mirrors the individuated human lifespan: a being is germinated, born, grows stronger, maintains stasis, grows sickly, and dies out. The development paradigm espouses this notion, for it attempts to induce evolution in ‘underdeveloped’ cultures lest that culture perish in the modern world. Yet it is in the sickly period of the culture’s life that revitalization leaders sense their outmoded culture, feeling the stress of linear time. Their solution, their very cultural understanding for resolving the problem of transience, is by invoking an alternative temporal notion: that of the cycle, of a ‘seasonal’ reality, one that constantly returns to itself and refreshes its existence. A revitalization movement’s goal is to re‐cycle the culture: to germinate a new beginning, to grow in followers, to reach strength in adulthood, and to flourish once again. Yet while the development paradigm posits a common future‐oriented endpoint of those cultures that are capable of evolving to survive, revitalization movements call upon – or, rather, reinvent – the past to point the way for a more sustainable future.

The second aspect of this paper is to illustrate how a revitalization movement can be fostered through the creation of touristic infrastructures, including the invention of a new festival celebrating an imagined heritage. To achieve this, I discuss the case of Hội An, a Vietnamese port town which, in the course of the last several centuries, flourished, stagnated, and nearly ‘died out’ before tourism effectively re‐generated the town materially and culturally. Today, Hội An is one of Việt Nam’s premiere World Heritage sites, toured by countless visitors throughout the year, and valorized at the international level (Di Giovine, 2009, p. 262). While Hội An’s success was achieved comparatively quickly – in little over a decade – the road was not direct, nor was it terribly easy for locals. Hội An’s path to ‘betterment’ commenced through a common development perspective, creating unforeseen consequences and stress for locals. Yet, I will argue, the town’s now‐renowned monthly Lantern Festival, an ‘invented tradition,’ constitutes a means of revitalization. Calling upon an imagined past, it resolves that ‘aporia of time’ between linear human transience and the regenerative cycle of nature (Harkin, 2004, p. xxiii; cf. Augustine of Hippo, 1958), and alleviates the tension between fostering meaningful cultural transformations and maintaining tradition.

Tourism and the global development movement

Although tourism is a phenomenon that has occurred in diverse cultures throughout time, and with notable material effects ranging from preservation to religious revival, interest in its capacity to foster economic development can be traced to the end of World War II, when a number of global conjunctures between a reconstructed ‘North’ and post‐colonial, ‘developing’ ‘South’ rendered tourism an attractive means to integrate nation states into the ‘modern’ world stage. The end of the war saw industrialized countries devastated by barbaric violence; much of their metropoles were reduced to rubble, reminiscent perhaps of the Oriental ruins that so fascinated their imperial eyes and informed their romanticized understandings of history. It is not unreasonable to assume that gazing upon their devastated cities elicited reactions similar to those by colonial tourists when confronting the archaeological remains of a ‘disappeared’ civilization, as epitomized by this quote from Henri Mouhot, who is credited with ‘discovering’ the Khmer temple Angkor Wat in 1860: ‘There are few things that can stir such melancholy feelings as the sight of places that were once the scene of some glorious or pleasurable event, but which are now deserted’ (quoted Dagens, 1995, p. 35). In part because of their impressive monumental scale and in part because of their dire need of restoration that the West could provide, the Indochinese temples of Angkor – like so many other monuments of ‘past’ civilizations excavated by the colonial powers – contributed to the formation of Orientalist narrative claims that saw Western Europeans as heirs to the luminous torch of ‘civilization.’ Lux ex Oriente, as the narrative goes; the ‘light from the East’ had been extinguished there in Kampuchea, but through the colonial efforts of the French, it can once again be brought back to the heirs of the Khmer (Di Giovine, 2009, p. 31; Edwards, 2007; cf. Said, 1994).

In contrast to a revitalization movement, the development paradigm can be defined as a historically and culturally situated category of processes that attempts to bring about positive changes in a society through the intervention of outsiders who are considered more ‘advanced’ members of a common, broadly conceived civilization. Utilizing Modernization theory, this post‐World War II phenomenon drew on the Enlightenment‐era conception of human progress as well as Darwinian evolutionary notions of ‘descent with modification’ – that complex creatures evolve from more simplistic organisms over time (Darwin, 2005, pp. 774–775). The paradigm thus views all people on a common historical trajectory toward a more developed, universal and ‘modern’ culture (cf. Morgan, 1877); difference is considered hierarchically as indicative of the stage of progression in which a culture finds itself. Modernization proponents propose that all cultures are linked in their desire for social development into a rational, capitalistic form of civilization (cf. Weber, 1992, pp. xvii, 20). This concept had informed the colonial enterprise, as it did the League of Nations. ¹ Nor is this only a capitalistic notion; Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels also were informed by such a civilizational understanding, as was Vladimir Lenin – though communism, rather than capitalism, represented the final stage in their theory of socio‐economic evolution.

This type of reasoning also guided the US‐initiated Marshall Plan, which in 1947 aimed to reconstruct Europe and to provide America’s ‘huge production capacity with the markets it needed for postwar conversion’ (Rist, 1997, p. 69). It was as much a security endeavor as it was a reconstruction effort; it was a struggle to keep the torch of civilization from leaving, especially in the wake of the ascendancy of the Soviet Union, which was informed by a similar understanding of civilization and development, but whose objectives were at odds with that of the West. These security initiatives, coupled with the stunning progress of reconstruction efforts in Europe and Japan, informed what would become the most important factor ushering in the ‘development age’ (1997, p. 71): Truman’s 1949 inauguration speech and his famed ‘Point Four,’ which stated that ‘all countries, including our own, will greatly benefit from a constructive program for the better use of the world’s human and natural resources.’ Deftly coupling the post‐war desire for economic expansion with humanitarian overtones, an impassioned Truman argued that ‘greater production is the key to prosperity to peace,’ and that ‘only by helping the least fortunate of its members to help themselves can the human family achieve the decent, satisfying life that is the right of all people’ (Truman, 1949).

Several factors are important here. As Rist points out, Truman’s introduction of the concept of ‘underdevelopment’ was an innovation that ‘radically altered the way the world was seen’ (1997, pp. 72–73). Instead of the colonizer/colonized paradigm, the developed/undeveloped binary was intensely more human (both biologically and socially); it linked the modern North and traditional South in a universal movement across a continuum of civilizational sophistication. An ‘undeveloped’ society was perceived to posses structural and technical flaws that could be fixed through Western intervention, and Walter Rostow’s ‘Big Push’ theory, first articulated in a paper at Cambridge University in 1958, epitomized this thinking. Arguing that economic growth occurs essentially in a ‘biological field,’ Rostow argued that massive amounts of capital and expertise is required to change the structures of undeveloped countries, allowing them to ‘take off’ (in his words) like a rocket toward the higher echelons of development (Rostow, 1960; quoted Rist, 1997, p. 95).

Unlike the colonial era, therefore, development assumes a ‘transitive meaning;’ development is not simply a de facto biological or evolutionary process across time, subject only to the caprices of Civilization that can come and go, but rather ‘an action performed by one agent upon another [sic] which corresponded to a principle of social organization’ (Rist, 1997, p. 73). Such a view continues to inform development discourse, for it provides the impetus for outside involvement. At a London School of Economics lecture in the early 1970s, R.P. Dure breaks with the ‘conveyor belt’ view of modernization while nevertheless espousing the transitive understanding of development:

[Much] has been written on ‘pre‐programmed runners on the white line’ assumptions [that] ‘modernisation’ is an intransitive concept: it is something that happens to societies. Used in that way, however, it is not a very useful concept: the runners are not pre‐programmed and there is no single white line, let alone a finishing line called a state of modernity. But ‘modernisation’ becomes a useful word if it is derived from the transitive verb ‘to modernise’ in the sense of ‘seeing to transform one’s society, or segments of it, in imitation of models, and under the influence of ideas, drawn from other countries which are seen as more advanced in some implicit scale of progress.’ (Dure, 1974, p. 93).

Indeed, one of the most important aspects of Truman’s speech is that he argues that development is a global effort; it calls upon different types of actors from different countries to assist different recipients who seem to be lacking the characteristics of modernity, for the collective security and economic benefits of all. Integration into the world system (and world markets) ‘through increased production and accumulation, based on private investment and external assistance,’ is key (Rist, 1997, p. 85; cf. Clancy, 1999, p. 2); it sets the precedent for direct, often bodily, involvement in local settings – and, in the case of tourism, it links such interactions to discourses of economic and ‘psycho‐social’ (cf. Rist, 1997, p. 100) improvement. Such actions are fostered primarily through economic means: foreign investment, technological innovation to maximize resource extraction, and increased production capacity. Walt Rostow’s philosophy of providing a ‘big push’ of international capital and expertise fit right in to this plan; development was not a de facto evolutionary process across time, but a global effort to provide, as United Nations Secretary‐General U. Thant would state in 1962, ‘growth plus change’ (Rist, 1997, p. 90; cf. Rostow, 1960, p. 9).

The simultaneous advent of more sophisticated means of transportation and communication created another paradigm shift that rendered tourism conducive to incorporation into Truman’s ‘Point Four.’ It significantly opened up the possibility that tourism could be ‘implemented’ in developing countries by a variety of global actors – both individuals and communities – with relative ease. As a response to this new movement, several inter‐governmental and non‐governmental organizations were founded to coordinate both the promotion of international travel as well as its associated technical aspects (including the standardization of airport codes, flight paths, and airline and hotel booking procedures). Today, it continues to be considered ‘a global means of economic development’ (Harrill, 2004, p. 263).

Tourism was conceptualized in a broader sense as a monolithic and organismic ‘industry’ which ‘involves the procurement of both goods and services to foreign visitors’ (Clancy, 1999, p. 2). It could be ‘developed’ or ‘undeveloped,’ made more efficient through technical assistance given to its workers, and ‘integrated’ into undeveloped areas (cf. Murphy, 1985, p. 34). It could also generate profits and losses, cultivate investors, and insert itself into worldwide industrial matrices. Indeed, tourism was frequently touted as a ‘growth industry,’ since it had expanded faster and penetrated more regions of the world in the post‐war era than most others, and, some claimed, its unique transnational nature seemed to escape many of the conventional trade barriers (Clancy, 1999, p. 4). Especially since the United Nations and World Bank began to consider tourism a ‘foreign’ trade (Norohona, 1979) – the concept of ‘domestic tourism’ would come later – it naturally follows that it can be conceptualized as an ‘export’ industry, though the exportation process is actually reversed as Barbara Kirshenblatt‐Gimblett points out (1998, p. 153). This creates a rather unique position for tourism in the larger development endeavor. Like so many other ‘extractive’ industries in the post‐colonial world, tourism mines raw materials; however, these materials are not shipped away to be refined and consumed by outsiders, but outsiders are induced to voluntarily and temporarily import themselves to consume them. This also led to the initial perception that, ‘as an agent of transformation,’ tourism would be ‘friendlier, in general, to the environment than many other activities and past industries’ (Murphy, 1985, p. 31). The movement for the conservation of natural and built structures grew hand‐in‐hand; arguing that the hallmarks of development practices were not enough to cultivate world peace, UNESCO passed its Convention Concerning the Protection of the World Cultural and Natural Heritage in 1972. Commonly known as the World Heritage Convention, the initiative is concerned primarily with conserving and exhibiting sites that provide tangible evidence of the present’s connection with the past, and are therefore of universal appeal, particularly to tourists (Di Giovine, 2009; cf. UNESCO, 1972, p. 1).

Both UNESCO’s World Heritage Convention and the varieties of development initiatives across the world were, on one level at least, egalitarian in nature; they were – and continue to be – concerned with sustainable practices that valorize and improve individuals at the local level (Di Giovine, 2009, p. 33). Yet indicative of the cultural and historical situatedness of these processes, the diversity of local practices was often perceived as a detriment; it is necessary to coordinate development practice through a development ‘plan’ (Ferguson, 1994; Mosse, 2005; Murphy, 1985, p. 36), especially if outsiders with little experience or social networks within the community were supposed to be fueling the movement. As Ashley, Boyd, and Goodwin point out:

Donor‐supported tourism master plans focus on creating infrastructure, stimulating private investment and attracting international tourists. Investors are often international companies and local elites, whose profits are generally repatriated abroad or to metropolitan centres. Links with the local economy are often weak, with the possible exception of employment. (2000, p. 1)

These donors thus often call upon governments, who exist above and beyond the local, to act as powerful mediators between practitioners and locals. In speaking of community tourism planning, for example, Peter Murphy writes, ‘Government involvement in tourism [is imperative], for it alone possesses the necessary financial resources and legislative power to redirect and coordinate the industry among more desirable courses of action’ (p. 36). R.C. Mings, upon whose analysis Murphy draws, states unequivocally that for tourism development to be successful, tourism requires ‘proper planning,’ something that, in the late 1970s, had yet to be accomplished. ‘Consequently, development in most places falls short of achieving optimum impacts’ (1978, p. 2). Murphy concludes that even ‘a community approach to tourism management’ – that is, tourism that includes (and benefits) the local population – necessitates ‘a general goal that can be identified and measured’ (1985, p. 37).

Simply put, until the 1980s, interaction between foreign developers and the state was promoted by the World Bank, IUOTO/UNWTO ² and the United Nations. In 1969, the World Bank created a dedicated Tourism Projects Department to ‘support tourism as an economic growth tool’ for countries that met specific criteria (Hawkins & Mann, 2007, p. 354). It lent over $525 million to 18 developing countries between 1970 and 1979, most of which were specifically called ‘tourism projects’ and were directed at constructing the infrastructure, ‘urban regeneration’ and conservation of resources necessary for a robust tourist economy (2007, p. 324).

After the failure of Rostowian industrialization pushes, which were exacerbated by OPEC’s oil shocks in the 1970s, post‐colonial states turned in greater numbers to the tourism sector, for they recognized their competitive advantage to lie in the very underdevelopment they sought to transcend: Tourism was relatively inexpensive to utilize as a resource, it could bring in short‐term cash flows, it could impel conservation and infrastructural development endeavors (UNESCO, 1972), and it could produce both direct and indirect employment through what Emanuel de Kadt critically termed ‘economic and social dualism’ (1979). Viewing tourism through a Modernization paradigm, it promised to pull locals from a rural subsistence economy into urban life by directly employing them in ‘modern’ touristic infrastructures as guides, cooks, and hotel workers, and indirectly as souvenir producers, foodstuff and textile providers, and hotel furniture craftsmen who utilized and performed their ‘traditions.’ Envisioned as a ‘basket of goods’ made up of numerous individual businesses and entrepreneurial spirits, the ‘tourist product’ was often conceived in egalitarian terms where locals and outsiders were wrapped in a package whose value was greater than the sum of its parts (Murphy, 1985, p. 14). It was necessarily predicated on a ‘dependence on public facilities and goodwill’ (1985, p. 14). Positioning locals as unique culture brokers (Kaiser & Helber, 1978, p. ix; Powell, 1978, p. 3), tourism also was in line with Latin American and African dependency theorists’ belief that development’s primary goal should be psycho‐social ‘empowerment’ and self‐reliance (Nyerere, 1977, pp. 41–42; Rist, 1997, p. 130; cf. Amin, 1973; Baran & Sweezy, 1966/1968; Cardoso & Faletto, 1969).

Despite ambitiously altruistic aims, the Deus ex machina conception of tourism and development was quickly found to be a problematic one. A study commissioned by UNESCO in 1975 already found that tourism did not necessarily produce the kinds of direct and indirect employment that had generally been contended. On the economic level, while tourism was thought to provide direct employment opportunities to locals who would work at internationally owned facilities, in actuality the industry was conducive to vertical integration by foreigners, who would not only manage hotels, but would open competing restaurants, travel agencies, bus companies, and guiding facilities. The ‘multiplier effect’ of indirect employment also did not materialize (cf. Murphy, 1985, pp. 90–95); that is, the opening of new markets for traditional crafts and agricultural goods did not revitalize ‘traditional’ industries, or stave off a ‘flight from the land’ by framers who continued to move to the cosmopolitan urban centers to look for work (UNESCO, 1976, p. 81). Lastly, the vertical and horizontal integration of foreign tourism companies created notable ‘leakages’ – ‘the proportion of monies invested or earned in the tourism sector that ended up overseas’ (Markandya, Taylor, & Pedroso, 2005, p. 231), mostly in the hands of the tourists’ countries of origin (Bryden, 1973). And tourism theorists such as Denison Nash (1977), Daniel Boorstin (1961/1994), and Dean MacCannell (1976/1999) decried what they perceived as an environment of modern colonialism, inauthenticity and ‘museumification’ caused by the touristic enterprise.

Responses from tourism advocates largely echoed those leveled by development practitioners, especially the large funding agencies operating outside the local sphere: In the absence of measurable or predictable results, success is often contingent upon – or espoused through the idiom of – the proper execution of a specific plan, though in reality most development practitioners on the ground adapt to change just as often as the locals do. The corollary, therefore, is that the perceived ‘failure’ of tourism development was directly linked to an incorrect implementation of the plan – either because of human error or because of faults in their coherency and execution. As Mosse and Ferguson both intimate in their respective ethnographies, development practices may be perceived as a glaring failure by outside funders, managers, and government entities who are removed from the everyday nuances of the site if the results do not match up to the plan’s predetermined, and often arbitrarily assigned, developmental benchmarks. James Ferguson asserts that, ‘like all “development” discourses … “development” results from “development” projects’ rather than from a process of discourse and practice that both produces knowledge and embargoes it (1994, p. 37; cf. Quarles van Ufford, 1993, p. 137). Indeed, the opening paragraph from the World Bank’s first major working paper on tourism development resonates today:

Tourism is a path to economic development; for some countries it is the only viable path. But too few developing countries plan for tourism. Countries that lack the financial, technical or administrative capacity to plan almost inevitably lose control over the development of tourism. Foreign exchange earnings flow to the international hotel chains, airlines, travel agencies, and marketing experts needed to attract the requisite numbers of tourists. Unforeseen consequences cause the relationship between tourist and host country to sour. They include: loss of land by the local population; weakening of family ties; and loss of local ownership and control of hotels, restaurants and other tourist facilities. (Norohona, 1979, p. 1)

Many of these problems were chalked up to ‘structural failures’ in economically backward places, such as nepotism, corruption, and the persistence of an informal economy that circumvents and subverts the global economic infrastructure inhabited, too, by the tourism industry. By the 1980s, the tourism industry as a whole suffered this fate; the World Bank took on very few projects that incorporated a tourism dimension (Hawkins & Mann, 2007, p. 356). Multilateral tourism development has nevertheless continued under the aegis of the United Nations Development Program (UNDP), the UNWTO, and a proliferation of NGOs advocating ‘sustainable tourism.’ Yet informed by the same developmental perspective, these initiatives often meet the same ‘failures.’ Writing on ecotourism’s focus on ‘strategies’ and ‘parameters of success,’ Amanda Stronza states:

The ideas are generally prescriptive, arguing that if the ecotourism industry were to provide the right inputs, such as ‘a participatory approach,’ then the negative impacts of tourism on local hosts could be reduced. The emphasis remains, however, on what is external to a site, rather than on what the existing conditions might reveal about whether tourism will have a positive or negative impact on local residents (Stronza, 2001, p. 275).

Indeed, Murphy – one of the first advocates for a ‘community tourism perspective’ – seems to belie the egalitarian dimension to his theory much the same way Truman did; his task was to enumerate best practices and ‘response strategies’ (1985, p. 38) to help ‘the industry’s survival’ (p. 29), perhaps more so than the survival of the community itself. The most indicative element of this perspective is Murphy’s contention that the primary resource which governments and tourism development practitioners must manage is locals’ ‘goodwill’ (p. 39). Writing decades later, Rich Harrill seems to echo this point; ‘planners are challenged with understanding how the public perceives tourism’ not in order to better tailor the touristic enterprise to local cosmologies, but rather ‘in order to gain local support for tourism projects and initiatives’ (2004, p. 251). Furthermore, locals seem to be considered as ignorant of their own (economic) betterment, and tourism practitioners are exhorted to ‘demonstrate that benefits pass to the community as well as industry personnel’ (Murphy, 1985, p. 124), since ‘[o]ne reason why residents have consistently lower attitude ratings to local tourism, compared to other groups, is that they are often unaware of its economic significances and overall contribution to their community’ (p. 122).

Despite the good intentions of many development practitioners, it appears that tourism development suffers from an unforeseen clash of cultures in its very approach – a clash which is often subtle, and which threatens to marginalize those to whom the initiatives are to help. It seems that what is needed, by both practitioners and analysts, is an alternative paradigm to inform both the practice of tourism and the analysis of its outcomes. This paradigm should integrate efforts by outsiders and locals alike; it should not link results to a rigid ‘plan’ constructed by outsiders, but to the interactions between these entities; and it should call upon, and valorize, locals’ traditional worldviews, as the primary impetus for their ‘betterment.’

An alternative to development: the revitalization paradigm

This article offers a different, more equitable and, in some cases, more accurate model for understanding those cases where locals themselves are in charge of their transformations, where they adopt tourism initiatives to suit their own value systems and in accordance with their own cosmologies, their own understandings of the world, and their place in it. Appropriating Anthony F.C. Wallace’s classic ‘revitalization’ theory, originally intended to understand Native American religious movements, I posit that analysts and practitioners alike should view these cases through a revitalization paradigm. Revitalization, as Wallace describes it, is a model for understanding culture change, brought about by significant and often complex environmental, economic, social, cultural, and psychological stresses in the host society, which have been caused by new or intensified contact with an outside society. It is often fueled by visionary local leaders who, perceiving the culture as once functional but now operating unsatisfactorily, are desirous of a restoration of ideal cultural values. While the end product of such movements is ultimately novel and unprecedented, local leaders consciously make reference to, and attempt to purify, the past in relation to the present. They therefore view ‘development’ not as a linear and evolutionary progression on the world stage, but as a cycle: one’s culture can be germinated, born, flourish, grow sick, and become born anew (1956, pp. 265, 267).

Although there are traces of Positivistic universalism in Wallace’s original conceptualization, this is indeed a model that can be applied in various contemporary settings. Individuals are not Durkheimian automatons who are moved by the hidden hand of collective effervescence to maintain some sort of social homeostasis, but are true biological, psychological, and social beings, who recognize Outside forces threatening their culture’s very existence, who experience stress from real material pressures and from the tension to stay the same and to change, and who come together behind a culture hero to significantly transform their society – on their own terms. Furthermore, as revitalization movements are fundamentally predicated on a distinctive recourse to an imagined past, they are often articulated through heritage claims, a specific – if equally imagined – narrative linking an individual’s lineage and his society’s history as a whole (Di Giovine, 2009, p. 34).

One significant difference between revitalization and a development paradigm is the agentive role of the local individual. Even after the ‘participatory development’ turn of the late 1980s and early 1990s, wherein the thoughts and opinions of local representatives are solicited by development practitioners before drawing up a plan (Chambers, 1994), agency in the development paradigm rests nearly exclusively in the hands of outsiders (cf. Ferguson, 1994, p. 37; Gray, 1989, p. 65; Jamal & Getz, 1995, pp. 194–195; Mosse, 2005, p. 4; Parfitt, 2004, p. 538; Quarles van Ufford, 1993, p. 137). As Mohan and Stokke convey, Westerners act as crucial mediators in participatory development practices, ‘placing ourselves back at the centre of the (under)development process and therefore re‐inscrib[ing] the authorial voice, because it is only us who can really change things’ (2000, p. 253). Indeed, the World Bank’s Samuel Paul defined community participation as ‘an active process by which beneficiary or client groups influence the direction and execution of a development project with a view to enhancing their well‐being in terms of income, personal growth, self‐reliance or other values they cherish’ (1987; quoted Parfitt, 2004, p. 538). It is important to note that for Paul, as for others, participatory development gives communities the chance to ‘influence’ – not determine, drive, or create – a development plan that is created by other entities. The same seems to ring true in many contemporary community tourism planning initiatives. Although conceding that local stakeholders must be brought into the process, Jamal and Getz (1995), for example, still take for granted the imposition of a plan from above. Because it inherently utilizes an organizational model, community tourism planning is inherently not a grassroots theory, but rather uses ‘representatives from the local community and others from outside the geographic locale of the community’ (p. 198) who provide ‘legitimacy and power,’ ‘an external mandate,’ and ‘authority’ (1994, p. 197) to the plan. ‘Failure to include them in the design stage only invites technical or political difficulties during implementation,’ Gray tellingly remarks (1989, p. 65).

Organic, a revitalization movement is instead fueled by locals responding to pressures on an individually experienced, yet collectively mediated conception of a group’s cultural existence, which Wallace terms a ‘mazeway.’ Unlike structural functionalists, Wallace’s formulation of a society does not exist as a self‐contained whole without any clear beginning or end, but is a transient creature whose individual components are cognizant of their own lifestyle, their own place in the system, and their cosmological position in space and time. Indeed, place is integral to Wallace’s conceptualization of a mazeway, as he indicates:

This mental image I have called ‘the mazeway,’ since as a model of the cell‐body‐personality‐nature‐culture‐society system or field, organized by the individual’s own experience, it includes perceptions of both the maze of physical objects of the environment (internal and external, human and nonhuman) and also of the ways in which this maze can be manipulated by the self and others in order to minimize stress. (1956, p. 266)

An important component of Wallace’s revitalization paradigm is therefore the notion of cultural boundaries, an often spatialized understanding of those inside a cultural system and those outside. The movement emerges when individuals recognize that their culture has passed from a ‘steady state,’ wherein the culturally recognized techniques for satisfying needs operate with relative efficiency (1956, p. 268) to periods of ‘increased individual stress’ and ‘cultural distortion.’ These latter periods are marked by behavioral changes brought about by influences outside the boundaries established in one’s mazeway and are largely physical in nature; Wallace (1956) enumerates ‘climatic, floral and faunal change; military defeat; political subordination; extreme pressure toward acculturation resulting in internal conflict; economic distress; epidemics; and so on’ as possible pressures. He couples these spatio‐physical stresses with cultural pressure: ‘The situation is often, but not necessarily, one of acculturation’ (p. 269). Linking the cultural with the material is important, for as Marshall Sahlins argues, ‘every culture is a cosmological order; and in thus including the universe within its own cultural scheme … the people accord beings and things beyond their immediate community a definite place in its reproduction’ (2000, p. 489); cultures are not hermetically sealed, neither physically nor conceptually. While the group and the Other continue to conceptualize themselves in different ways, all act with the understanding that there is a continuation of a world outside their conceptual and material boundaries that may impact them. One’s mazeway is thrown into disequilibrium not necessarily because one’s perspective of the world and the Other has changed, but because the Other’s impingement on its boundaries has impacted the culture’s processes on a very real, material level.

Thus, it is important to note that the revitalization paradigm does not eschew the intervention of outside forces, such as the often well‐meaning tourism developers and NGO workers. Rather, it recognizes that all groups appropriate within their particular cosmological schemes an image of the ‘Other,’ just as a bricoleur assembles disparate chunks of debris into an ‘ideological castle’ (Lévi‐Strauss, 1966/1974, p. 17). While development practice innately incorporates the ‘Other’ into a civilizational scheme, attempting to translate alternative value systems into standardized plans that are comprehendible to Westerners, revitalization movements similarly see locals incorporating the worldviews of outsiders. Indeed, the revitalization paradigm emphasizes the many processes in which various groups are mutually incorporated; it views cultural regeneration from a more equitable point of view as the product of a totalization of multiple procedures that impels locals to make significant changes to their society by calling upon, yet re‐inventing, their narratively understood identity. Unlike a development paradigm, the revitalization model brings local ‘hosts’ into a direct and more equal relationship with tourist ‘guests,’ as well as with the variety of other actors operating within what I have elsewhere called a ‘field of touristic production’ – a complex of different subjective communities engaged in struggles of positioning and position‐taking (Di Giovine, 2009, pp. 42–48; cf. Bourdieu, 1993). By participating in mutual and multifarious interaction, contestation and negotiation, locals drive their socio‐cultural transformation by subtly expanding their very cosmologies and how they perceive of themselves fitting into it.

This phenomenon occurred in the UNESCO World Heritage site of Hội An, a once sleepy port town in central Việt Nam that has become one of the socialist country’s most popular tourist destinations. ³ Located on the Thu Bồn river, at the epicenter of ancient Champa – a Hindu state that frequently clashed with both the Khmers at Angkor and the Đại Việt in Hà Nội – Hội An (or ‘Fai Fo’ as it was sometimes called) was an important trading center at the periphery of the Silk Road for its prized cinnamon and sandalwood exports. When the Vietnamese took control of the region, the town continued to flourish, and from the late sixteenth century to the early eighteenth century it became a melting pot of merchants from China, Japan, Portugal, and, later, France (ICOMOS, 1999, p. 114). But the closed‐door trade policies of the Nguyễn empire – which echoed those of the Chinese and Japanese – coupled with the unfortunate silting of Hội An’s ancient harbor, led to sudden and gross economic stagnation. Locals turned mainly to subsistence fishing or farming. Though many fled the town, those who remained were impoverished and largely forgotten, eclipsed by the urban center of Đà Nẵng. Yet a series of touristic interventions by those outside and inside the town regenerated Hội An, transforming, in the process, the very socio‐cultural fabric of the town. The ways in which tourism was implemented in the 1980s was very much in line with the global development movement; however, to truly understand this transformation, we will examine this through the lens of revitalization.

The revitalization of Hội An

Like elsewhere in post‐war Việt Nam, the first ‘tourists’ arrived in Hội An in the 1980s, and they were Soviets – mostly advisors and their families on holiday from Hà Nội or possibly Đà Nẵng, to which they were called to work. According to Trần Văn Nhân, Chair of the local office of the Ministry of Culture and Information, they recognized the stunning outward ossification of the town, and dubbed Hội An ‘old Hà Nội.’ Sometime around 1983, news of this old Hà Nội reached a Polish historic preservationist affectionately called Kazim (Kazimier Kwiatkowski), who was working at the sacred Cham site of M[ytilde] Syon, which was severely damaged during the Vietnamese–American war. When he arrived in the town, he was ‘surprised’ to see such well‐preserved traditional buildings and lobbied government officials ‘who knew nothing about the town’ to ‘come in to study it.’ In 1985, the Vietnamese government hosted Hội An’s first domestic symposium in an expansive French villa on the outskirts of town, now the large Hội An Hotel. At the symposium, experts shared their scientific and architectural assessments gathered through the past few years’ study. Five years later, over 100 scientists (including 52 foreigners from Western Europe and East Asia) attended an international symposium in Đà Nẵng. According to Trần, this was the turning point for Hội An; the symposium sufficiently raised awareness in the academic community of this once‐forgotten town.

By a stroke of good timing, less than a year earlier a man had arrived in Hội An named Daniel Robinson, a traveler affiliated with Lonely Planet guidebooks. The backpacker‐oriented travel publisher had sent him to research the country, which was on the cusp of opening up to tourism. His aim was to compile the first edition of a new guidebook dedicated exclusively to former French Indochina: Việt Nam, Laos and Cambodia. He had been allowed to visit Saigon and Hà Nội, but ‘probably with special permission,’ his government guides took him to Hội An. Like Kazim almost a decade before him, he was astonished by what he considered its lack of modernity and its state of preservation. He dedicated a full 14 pages to this small and relatively unknown town – stunningly, the same amount he gave to Saigon and Hà Nội. This is not insignificant if a tourist ‘attraction’ is constituted through the dialectic of ‘site‐visitor‐marker’ (MacCannell, 1976/1999, p. 41) – where the marker is, in this case, the first true touristic text of Việt Nam since the colonial era. This parity of pagination served its purpose, conveying the perceived parity of Hội An’s importance compared to Việt Nam’s well‐known urban centers to the north and south. When the book came out in 1991, backpackers arrived in such numbers into the small town that the Ministry of Culture and Information almost immediately established a program of tourist services there.

By now it is clear that Hội An was engaged in a type of ‘tourism first’ development push, which Peter Burns describes as the implementation of a touristic ‘industry’ after a ‘suitable site’ is located (1999, p. 332). Yet like other such initiatives, the actual transformation was not influenced merely by a standardized development plan but rather a unique set of conjunctures between Outsiders and some visionary locals who represented the town not as a stagnant and economically inefficient place, but a ‘heritage’ site worthy of visitation. But like other development projects, it created unforeseen problems for locals. Hội An had already been a century into its decay, and the pressures of tourism seemed only to exacerbate the situation by putting stress on the social and material bones of the town. Colored by expectations of a perfectly preserved town, backpackers demanded an improvement of the destination’s offerings. This translated not only to cleaning and restoring the aesthetics of the place, but also to converting buildings into venues appropriate for tourists, such as restaurants, bars, and hostels with plumbing and electricity. Toward the end of 1990s, even Internet cafes were requested. The demand also increased for souvenir shops and other shopping venues; presumably because most visitors arrive in Việt Nam from Hong Kong or Bangkok, two cities famous for low‐cost seamstresses, many locals began tailoring businesses.

In the early days of tourism, the greatest need was to reconstruct the dilapidated homes, but the situation was not conducive to proper preservation. The Vietnamese government had imposed a commercial logging ban; wood had to be imported from Laos. The price thus was so high that the people of Hội An could not afford it. ‘The people were saying, “I can’t do this. My roof will fall and it will kill my family. I’ll knock it down and build another one in concrete,”’ Trần recalled. After requesting help from Hà Nội, the central government sent in preservationists to restore a few exemplary edifices at no cost. To help the others, however, the Ministry of Culture and Information granted local homeowners licenses to work in the tourist sector. According to guide Pham Van Anh, non‐participating locals could not help but see tourists visiting newly restored buildings, and it raised their desire to preserve their own homes in a similar fashion. They began to come up with their own proposals for restoration and integration into this new touristic situation in order to gain the limited funds available.

To assist the impoverished locals looking to restore their homes, in 1995, the Ministry of Culture and Information began a semi‐voluntary ticket system where tourists would be strongly encouraged to pay an entrance fee. The purchase of this ticket would grant the visitor access to one museum, one Chinese meeting house, and one historic home out of a pool of three of each. The original tickets were priced at VND 50,000, or about US$4; the cost has only increased slightly over time. While 25% of the revenue would be dedicated to tourist authority’s management and operation costs, such as staff payments, printing of tickets, and drafting of brochures, the remainder would be put into a preservation fund to which local homeowners could apply irrespective of their engagement in the tourist sector. An application alone does not necessarily ensure funding, however; ‘groups of advisors’ must first be sent in by the government to draw up accurate floor plans, assess the needs of the home, ‘suggest’ a team of workers, and propose a comprehensive restoration plan. The governmental lenders will also investigate the homeowners’ income, including alternative sources of funding such as family abroad with whom the homeowner continues to maintain contact. With this procedure completed, the government may then offer to pay a percentage of the total cost using revenue from the fund – it could be upward of 80% to 100%, or less than 10%. Today, most – if not all – of the homes within the historic center of Hội An have been restored in accordance to international preservation standards, and all but a few of its inhabitants are actively engaged in the tourist industry.

Engagement with outsiders expanded the way in which Hội An’s inhabitants understood the world and their place in it; it also created growing material desires from its enriched inhabitants. Television antennae, satellite dishes, and cables of all sorts began to be put up haphazardly. In response, the government implemented a number of public infrastructural ‘development’ projects aimed at maintaining the old world charm of the town. By 2004, all anachronistic television antennae, satellite dishes, and electrical wiring were removed from the roofs of homes, and cables were installed underground. And in 2006, the town enacted a trial program banning motorcycles within the city center a few days a week, with little adverse reaction.

In many ways, the material and cultural regeneration of Hội An mirrors those classic processes of touristic development which occur elsewhere in the world: plans are created through the intervention of outside (and often ‘Western’) experts, with little input from locals save some visionary local leaders who act as mediators; locals react in unexpected ways, contesting, and sometimes thwarting the efforts of tourism implementers; outside stakeholders feel obliged to ‘educate’ locals on the material benefits their cooperation will bring; and, as Murphy, Harrill, and others contend, once locals experience economic profits, they accept other stressful changes with less complaint. Yet this type of analysis fails to adequately concentrate on the locals’ role in the field of touristic production. I have thus attempted to paint a portrait of Hội An’s material and cultural regeneration through a revitalization paradigm: Though the decisions private individuals made concerning their own property were influenced by very public elements, they were undertaken organically and relatively independently of a typical tourism development ‘plan’ imposed by outsiders in Hà Nội. Furthermore, the development narrative does not focus on how locals alleviated the immaterial, yet immanently perceptible, stresses on their culture by outsiders. Indeed, tourism’s growth in the region was spurred through the intervention of diverse actors operating within a field of touristic production. Yet locals in Hội An – perceiving a variety of cultural, economic, and environmental pressures on their way of life – ultimately shaped the way in which the town reinvented itself, and provided solutions to their problems that were based on their own value systems. They were able to respond to the tension between transformation and tradition ‘by attempting to craft unprecedented visions of themselves and the world around them,’ to appropriate the words of development critic Arturo Escobar (1995, p. 225). In the next section, I will focus on one such unprecedented vision, the Lantern Festival, as a direct manifestation of this revitalization mentality.

The Lantern Festival

One unique and effective way of responding to – and, it can be argued, alleviating – the tension between transformation and tradition is by staging Hội An’s now‐famous Lantern Festival, an ‘invented tradition’ designed to portray an idealized vision of Hội An’s ‘past.’ Held on the 15th day of every lunar month, Hội An’s Lantern Festival was intended to ‘bring back a night in the old days,’ according to one informant. Artifacts of modernity are eschewed; florescent lights are turned off, and the public spaces are illuminated by strings of traditional‐styled paper lanterns lining the streets. Motorcycles and even bicycles are prohibited from entering the city center. Many shops are closed, or are restricted in terms of the wares they are allowed to sell. To maintain the eighteenth‐century air about the town, even television watching in private is strictly prohibited, since it not only casts an artificial glow, but its sound and images might break the suspension of disbelief hanging in the town. As one advertisement puts it:

NO FLUORESCENT LIGHTS. NO MOTORCYCLES. NO TELEVISION. ON THE 15TH DAY OF EACH LUNAR MONTH, THE RIVERSIDE TOWN OF HỘI AN GIVES MODERN LIFE THE NIGHT OFF. ⁴

That the monthly Lantern Festival has made an indelible mark upon the economics of Hội An was observable about five years after its inception. Previously, the numerous shops in Hội An sold a variety of wares, of which paper lanterns were a very minor part. Hội An, in fact, was not known for lanterns as it seems to be today; to the extent that it could be marked by any product, it was known in the country for a type of doughy noodle called cao lầu, and a particular type of pottery named after Thanh Hà, a hamlet nearby. Capitalizing on the World Heritage narrative of the town, many of these stores dishonestly masqueraded as antique shops, selling inauthentic fragments of blue‐and‐white Delftware, faux opium pipes, and metal objects that were purposefully weathered to appear hundreds of years old; they would weave stories that their relics were excavated from shipwrecks nearby. More ‘honest’ proprietors stuck to selling hand‐carved wood, Thanh Hà pottery, silk paintings, and tchotchkes such as chopstick holders, chess sets and statuettes, sculpted of marble (or sometimes just resin) from the Marble Mountains halfway between Hội An and Đà Nẵng. But about five years later, many of these same proprietors turned to making and selling silk lanterns of the type used during the Lantern Festival; they had found that the majority of tourists who experienced the festival purchased at least one lantern as a souvenir. These labor‐intensive lanterns have already begun to be exported, first to Saigon and today abroad in Australia and the USA. Indeed, the buzz surrounding the festival in the international travel community has so shaped awareness of the lantern’s supposedly strong connection to Hội An‐ese culture that travelers today seek out lanterns for purchase, irrespective of their participation in the festival. Today, the streets are literally lined with shops exhibiting lanterns of all sizes, shapes, and colors; from the mercantile aspect, the streets are almost unrecognizable from what they were at the turn of the millennium.

The Lantern Festival was designed not solely for economic purposes, but apparently as an educational tool, especially to Vietnamese outside of the town; it is promoted strongly to young people in the greater region as an ideal location for dates, where couples can share in an emotional and educational romanticization of their heritage. It is the hope that, as adults, these same people will continue to make day‐trips to Hội An for shopping, eating, and entertainment. ‘Someday they’ll be addicted. We want them to be a lover of the night,’ one informant smiled slyly.

The Lantern Festival is directed inwardly as well. The repetition of this liminal event can be viewed as a means of further shaping and replicating culture in the minds of the locals through a uniquely constructed temporality. Temporality is at the forefront of this festival; not only is it intended to bring all those within its walls ‘back in time,’ it is itself a liminal period wherein daily life is suspended. Most tellingly, it is purposefully connected to the traditional lunar year, not the Westernized calendar. It should be understood as an intensification of the culture’s sense of ‘heritage time,’ which is illustrated by the basic, paper lanterns, and is defined in opposition to ‘modern time’ represented by technology. Technology is denied during the Lantern Festival inasmuch as it is a symbol for ‘modern’ contemporary life, but those intangible elements that truly define a culture – taste, philosophy, politics, and language, for example – are left untouched, and, I would argue, reinforced by the collective spirit of effervescence that permeates the townspeople who temporarily deny themselves these ‘modern’ luxuries.

Another informant describes the Lantern Festival in terms of filial piety, remarking, ‘We want to say to the elder generation that the younger generation understands and appreciates’ their way of life. More than enacting this deep‐rooted Confucian tenet, the Lantern Festival also contributes to the formation of a solidarity constructed on the unique experience of living within this cultural bubble – an experience of communitas that transcends generations as well as social status. As Victor Turner argues, communitas is more than merely a sense of ‘community’ – a term which itself is imbued with a geographical sense of common living; rather, occurring in the liminal phase of rituals wherein individuated statuses are suspended as individuals pass from one state to another, it is the transcendence of traditional boundaries that mark daily social life, a recognition among individuals temporarily disrobed of their social trappings that they are all the same (1974, pp. 201–202).

The Lantern Festival punctuates the locals’ calendar in the same metrical way traditional festivals and rites do. To use the words of Durkheim, it ‘expresses the rhythms of collective activity while ensuring the regularity’ of the people’s social life (1995, p. 10). Unlike other festivals, however, this one is hyper‐regular; it occurs practically all of the time, with barely a repose. Not only does the Lantern Festival punctuate the calendar illustratively for reinforcing the collective, but it also actively re‐creates temporality for the locals, who in their ‘between’ status are constantly being pulled by modernity. Throughout the rest of the lunar month, locals are relatively free to immerse themselves within contemporary culture. They can sell souvenirs and contemporary art, they can sew the hippest fashions and sell the most popular brands of athletic ware. They are at liberty to move forward with the rest of society, riding on their Hondas and watching color cable television, using their indoor plumbing and their electric lights, singing along to pop music videos, and watching English‐language movies. They may enjoy as unfettered an access to modern ideas as is allowed in the country, pulling them along with their foreign guests, becoming one with ‘modern Vietnamese culture.’ But as if to check this so‐perceived ‘progress,’ once a month all of this must be denied. Under the glow of the lantern light, like sacramental Confession, the stains of modernity imprinted on the culture are absolved through the people’s active, collective rejection of this sin; the ideal state is restored once again. When the sunlight finally bathes the pastel town in its radiance, the locals emerge from this ritual cleansed and revitalized – only to pick up where they left off, to catch up to their visitors’ modernity that had continued on without them.

Conclusion

Viewing the material and social transformations brought on by the implementation of tourism through the perspective of a revitalization movement can be fruitful. Unlike a ‘development’ paradigm, the revitalization model brings local ‘hosts’ into a direct and more equal relationship with tourist ‘guests,’ as well as with the variety of other actors operating within the field of touristic production. Instead of merely ‘participating’ in development, all are equally engaged in processes of transformation: tourists are not ignorant or passive recipients of ‘pseudo‐events’ or ‘staged authenticity,’ tourism industry professionals are neither the ‘gatekeepers’ nor the authoritative voices for tourism implementation plans, and locals ultimately are seen as driving their cultural transformation.

A revitalization paradigm is also sensitive to alternative value systems while also being responsive to the real material impacts of global forces on the local. While recognizing the important role outsiders play on the local milieu, it considers cultural transformation to be ‘organic,’ not unidirectional and not incumbent on the intervention of ‘modern’ nation‐states. Focusing on the transformations brought about from within a culture, in reaction to and in conjunction with outside forces – rather than on the ‘implementation’ of development strategies from the outside – the revitalization paradigm can better capture the complex processes of negotiation that occur within a touristic field of production, as well as the variety of intertwining elements that inevitably factor into any ‘culture change’ phenomenon.

Indeed, a revitalization paradigm allows for greater attention to be paid to the significance of locals’ discourses and practices in relationship to the panoply of others within the field of touristic production. This is especially significant for post‐colonial states who struggle to define and represent themselves on a newly enlarged, global stage. Development critic Arturo Escobar argues throughout his monograph that the ‘development discourse,’ as framed from the post‐World War II era onward, ‘has been the central and most ubiquitous operator of the politics of representation and identity’ in many recipient nations (1995, p. 214). It should be understood that, like that of the development paradigm, this revitalization paradigm is also discursive; it is not only another way of perceiving and analyzing, but also of discussing, the ways in which tourism can transform a culture. This is not insignificant. Following Michel Foucault (1972), Escobar points out that a discourse is itself a historically and culturally situated practice that produces real material results (cf. Ferguson, 1994, p. 18):

Discourse is not the expression of thought; it is a practice, with conditions, rules and historical transformations. To analyze development as a discourse is ‘to show that to speak is to do something – something other than to express what one thinks; … to show that to add a statement to a pre‐existing series of statements is to perform a complicated an costly gesture’ (Foucault, 1972, p. 209) …. Said differently, changing the order of discourse is a political question that entails the collective practice of social actors and the restructuring of existing political economies of truth (Escobar, 1995, p. 216).

That is, the way one discusses tourism development, and their place in the field of production, will inform its approach, methodology, and practice. It is in this manner that practitioners can move beyond the teleology of the development paradigm, opening the way for alternative views of how individuals and groups work to ‘improve’ themselves as active agents, and how outsiders can productively contribute to the process on a more equitable basis.

Notes

1. In Article 22, the League of Nations outlined the ‘stages of development’ that all peoples will inevitably undergo (Rist, 1997, p. 73).

2. In 1974, after much debate within IUOTO, the association transformed itself into the UNWTO, whose ‘fundamental aim … shall be the promotion and development of tourism with a view to contributing to economic development, … pay[ing] particular attention to the interests of the developing countries in the field of tourism’ (UNWTO, 1974, p. 83).

3. Ethnographic research in Hội An was undertaken from 2001–2006. Interviews contained in this article were conducted in August 2006. This portion of the article is based on a more detailed discussion of museumification and politics of World Heritage in Chapter 7 of Di Giovine (2009, pp. 261–274).

4. Retrieved October 29, 2006, from www.vietnamtourism.com/e_pages/heritage/Hoian.asp