Cultural preservation, tourism and ‘donkey travel’ on China’s frontier

As the editors to this volume highlight, in anthropology and sociology, much attention has been paid to the impact of tourism, mainly from the ‘West,’ on local cultural practices in non-Western societies (cf. Greenwood 1989; MacCannell 1992; Linnekin 1997). Implicit in these concerns has been an assumption that increased tourism flows to a site inevitably lead to a dilution of authentic cultural practices as local residents take on performative roles and become ‘Westernized’ (cf. Ritzer and Liska 1997: 97-101). The net result of this process becomes what Claude Lévi-Strauss in Tristes Tropiques (1957) lamented as a futile search for a ‘vanished reality,’ as authentic cultural practices forever remain beyond the grasp of (Western) visitors.