ABSTRACT
The tourism space has been created through a process of uneven geographical development. This space is both a relative space onto which the others can project certain images in the context of global tourism, and a physical space in which the fundamental infrastructure and institutions are improved for tourists. The landscape of the space has been transformed through the projection of the identities of the tourists, and this transformed landscape has the potential to lead to the creation of new identities, for example, those of the new middle class. Thamel is a tourism space where the processes of global economic and cultural changes bring about and interact with local social transformation. Under such circumstances, local people themselves politically appropriate and objectify a part of their self-image and reconstruct their identities within the space. Since Nepal formally opened its doors to the world in the middle of the twentieth century, Kathmandu has become a centre of international trade, mass media, mass tourism, foreign aid and the global labour market. Tourism, which stimulates the economy, has been directly implicated in both the changing nature of place and shaping geographical imaginations and experiences of place on a global scale. Kathmandu now enjoys a full complement of mediated windows onto global consumer modernity, even if Nepal’s position on the political-economic periphery guarantees that few Nepalis ever engage the new cultural economy beyond the levels of image, imagination and longing (Liechty 2006: 4). In terms of the transnational flow of goods and people, the most distinctive place functioning as a mediated window onto the global consumer modernity in Kathmandu is the tourism space of Thamel. Many people, including international tourists, come and go with money, cultures, information and goods that attract more people both within and outside Nepal, directly or indirectly, and create new circumstances. In Kathmandu, how have people accepted, resisted or ignored such new circumstances, and how has the tourism space been transformed? To answer these questions is to also consider how local people experience the changes in Thamel, which has been situated on the periphery of the world system on a global scale. This chapter also tries to depict the ongoing process led by the interaction between global tourism and social changes in Thamel.1 The following chapter briefly outlines the tourism development of Nepal in terms of its having been absorbed into global tourism as a peripheral destination. It describes how tourism spaces have been developed along with the urban development of Kathmandu and shows the characteristics of Thamel compared with other tourism spaces in the city. Then it indicates how and why this transformation has occurred in Thamel, focusing on the commodification of culture and space not for international tourists but for the local middle class. Finally, the chapter concludes that interaction between global tourism and social changes has created, in a sense, Thamel as a space for consumption for the middle classes in Kathmandu.
