Asian Thought AND Culture: Partners in Paradise

Shepherd_DD_CB_978-1-4331-1609-4:WAWRYTKODD.
qxd 9/20/2011 10:23 AM Page 1
69
How and why do some places in the world become symbols of
illusive paradise, and what does this mean for their residents?
Shepherd
Moving between anthropology, tourism, and the increasingly
influential cultural heritage movement, Partners in Paradise exam-
ines the origins of a Euro-American fascination with places imag-
ined to exist outside of Modernity. Focusing on the emergence
ASIAN
●
of Tibet and Bali as, in turn, anthropological field sites, tourist des-
Partners in Paradise
tinations, and cultural heritage sites, it argues that the work of aca-
demic researchers, tourists, and cultural preservationists inform
and constitute each other, in the process constructing particu-
THOUGHT
lar places as “paradise”. Unpacking this process is a necessary first
step in understanding how Tibetans and Balinese negotiate their
AND
place in a modern world in which the meaning of “paradise” is con-
tested. Drawing on anthropology, history, and tourist studies,
CULTURE
Partners in Paradise offers a unique lens on the politics of devel-
opment, modernization, and cultural preservation.
Robert Shepherd is Assistant Professor of Anthropology and

International Affairs at The George Washington University in
Washington, D.C., where he teaches courses on international
development, human rights, and contemporary China. His research
interests include the domestic tourism and heritage industries in
China, transnational cultural flows, and contested forms of global
theorizing, such as human rights and world heritage. He served
as a Peace Corps volunteer in Nepal and as a United Nations
volunteer in China and Indonesia. Partners in Paradise
Tourism Practices, Heritage Policies,
and Anthropological Sites
PETER LANG
Robert Shepherd
www.peterlang.com
Shepherd_DD_CB_978-1-4331-1609-4:WAWRYTKODD.qxd 9/20/2011 10:23 AM Page 1
69
How and why do some places in the world become symbols of
illusive paradise, and what does this mean for their residents?
Shepherd
Moving between anthropology, tourism, and the increasingly
influential cultural heritage movement, Partners in Paradise exam-
ines the origins of a Euro-American fascination with places imag-
ined to exist outside of Modernity. Focusing on the emergence
ASIAN
●
of Tibet and Bali as, in turn, anthropological field sites, tourist des-
tinations, and cultural heritage sites, it argues that the work of aca-
demic researchers, tourists, and cultural preservationists inform
and constitute each other, in the process constructing particu-
THOUGHT
lar places as “paradise”. Unpacking this process is a necessary first
step in understanding how Tibetans and Balinese negotiate their
AND
place in a modern world in which the meaning of “paradise” is con-
tested. Drawing on anthropology, history, and tourist studies,
CULTURE
Partners in Paradise offers a unique lens on the politics of devel-
opment, modernization, and cultural preservation.
Robert Shepherd is Assistant Professor of Anthropology and

International Affairs at The George Washington University in
Washington, D.C., where he teaches courses on international
development, human rights, and contemporary China. His research
interests include the domestic tourism and heritage industries in
China, transnational cultural flows, and contested forms of global
theorizing, such as human rights and world heritage. He served
as a Peace Corps volunteer in Nepal and as a United Nations
volunteer in China and Indonesia. Partners in Paradise
PETER LANG
Robert Shepherd
www.peterlang.com
ASIAN
THOUGHT
AND
CULTURE
Sandra A. Wawrytko
General Editor
Vol. 69
PETER LANG
New York y Washington, D.C./Baltimore y Bern
Frankfurt y Berlin y Brussels y Vienna y Oxford
Robert Shepherd

PETER LANG
New York y Washington, D.C./Baltimore y Bern
Frankfurt y Berlin y Brussels y Vienna y Oxford
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Shepherd, Robert.
Partners in paradise: tourism practices, heritage policies,
and anthropological sites / Robert Shepherd.
p. cm. — (Asian Thought and Culture; vol. 69)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-1-4331-1609-4
ISSN 0893-6870
E-ISBN 978-1-4539-0193-9
Bibliographic information published by Die Deutsche Nationalbibliothek.

Die Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the “Deutsche
Nationalbibliografie”; detailed bibliographic data is available
on the Internet at http://dnb.d-nb.de/.
The paper in this book meets the guidelines for permanence and durability
of the Committee on Production Guidelines for Book Longevity
of the Council of Library Resources.
© 2011 Peter Lang Publishing, Inc., New York

29 Broadway, 18th floor, New York, NY 10006
www.peterlang.com
All rights reserved.

Reprint or reproduction, even partially, in all forms such as microfilm,
xerography, microfiche, microcard, and offset strictly prohibited.
Printed in Germany
This book is dedicated to Jean Paul Dumont, adventurer, scholar, painter, and
cultivator of curiosity, who took me on as a graduate student and showed me in
his own unique way how to think about the world.
Table of Contents
Acknowledgments ......................................................................... ix
Introduction: Anthropology, Tourism and Heritage ................ 1
Chapter I: Culture in the Field ....................................................... 9
Chapter II: Suspect Others: Tourists at Play ............................. 19
Chapter III: To Preserve and Protect:

The Intangibles of Heritage ........................................................ 37
Chapter IV: Paradise Found:

Bali, Tibet, and the Quest for Paradise ..................................... 51
Chapter V: Marketing Paradise:

The Bali Tourism Project ............................................................ 77
Chapter VI: Paradise Lost:

Tourism and Cultural Heritage in Tibet .................................... 99
Conclusion: The Politics of Travel .......................................... 121
Bibliography ................................................................................ 127
Index .............................................................................................. 139

Acknowledgments
Thank you to the many people in China, Tibet, and on Java and Bali who
took the time to answer my questions, engage me in debate, or pass some time
in an amiable chat. I am also deeply grateful to Dr. Shawn McHale and the
Sigur Center for Asian Studies at The George Washington University for
providing research funds for this project, various colleagues who listened to
presentations on different parts of this work and offered insightful comments
and suggestions, and my co-workers in the University Honors Program and
Department of Anthropology at The George Washington University. Many
thanks also to Caitlin Lavelle, my editor at Peter Lang, and Dr. Sandra A.
Wawrytko, editor of the Asian Thought and Culture series. Sarah Stack, the
production coordinator for this book, was invaluable with her assistance,
advice, and close reading.
Finally, my hat goes off to my traveling companions and pals, past and
present, in and around Asia: Conal McCarthy, Jeff Logan, Big Todd Judy, Fithri
Diah, Steve, Mike and Dougie from Peace Corps days, Lao Wang, Liu Yizi, and
Dawei from Beijing, Bob #1 of Shanghai and Virginia, and Liu Jie, traveler
extraordinaire.
Parts of Chapter II appeared in Consumption, Markets & Culture 6:2 (2003),
133-144 and Tourist Studies 2:2 (2002), 183-201. A different version of Chapter V
appeared in South East Asia Research 10:1 (2002), 63-97. Parts of Chapter VI
appeared in the Journal of Contemporary Asia 36:2 (2006), 243-257.
And of course, all errors are mine.
Introduction
Anthropology, Tourism and Heritage

The only aim of this book ... is to collect in one volume all that could be obtained from
personal experience by an unscientific artist, of a living culture that is doomed to dis-
appear under the merciless onslaught of modern commercialism and standardization.
Miguel Covarrubias, Island of Bali
This book examines the relationship between the field practices of anthro-
pology, the preservation goals of cultural heritage, and the consumption desires
of tourism. Anthropological research has been conducted on the process and
problems of fieldwork (Cf. Dumont 1978; Kullick & Wilson 1995), the relation-
ship between anthropological fieldwork and tourism (Cf. Crick 1985 & 1995;
Dumont 1984; Bruner 1989; Errington & Gewertz 1989), and, in recent years,
the promotion of cultural heritage sites (Butler 2007, Hancock 2008). Yet little
work has been done on the interrelationship between these three practices.
I am interested in the ways in which these three practices (anthropological
fieldwork, tourism, and heritage) shape and enable each other. Through their
fieldwork, anthropologists draw notice to particular cultural practices and sites;
some of these sites and practices are classified by state authorities as ‘heritage’;
once so classified, these in turn become tourist attractions, which often leads
particular aspects of ‘the state’ and international preservationists to call for
limits on tourism in order to protect this ‘heritage’. In this study I am particular-
ly interested in the cultivation of a particular type of field site/tourist destina-
tion/heritage site, what I call paradise-scapes.
The Discourse of Paradise

If, for the sixteenth century English poet John Milton, paradise had been
lost by Adam and Eve, it nevertheless found a place in the imaginations of
many people in Europe with the discovery of new geographical environments.
Although Columbus and those who followed him failed in their quest to
discover El Dorado, European and American explorers and adventurers found
something just as desirable, the South Pacific, West Indies, and other tropical
islands. The first sites of anthropological fieldwork, tropical islands have
2 Partners in Paradise
simultaneously been portrayed as both Edenic paradises and exemplar of the

Heart of Darkness (Escobar 1996: 386). Indeed, for more than three hundred
years, Europeans and North Americans have written of islands of exotic foods,
promiscuous women, and a life of leisure, intermixed with lurid stories of
violence and cannibalism, a discourse of tropicality that shows no signs of
abating (Arnold 1996).
These islands of sensual pleasure and visceral danger were joined in the
early twentieth century by a new locale for paradise, remote mountain valleys
ruled over by God-like men who controlled physical desires with spiritual
tranquility. Lush tropical islands on which food is plentiful, disease is unknown,
and sex exists outside the prison house of moral prudishness came to co-exist
with mountain enclaves where austerity is a mark of goodness, emptiness is a
sign of spirituality, and mental contemplation, not physical satisfaction, guides
life.
This desire to find places outside of modernity grew during a time of rapid
material changes brought by modernity. Roughly four decades separate the end
of the American Civil War in 1865 with the British occupation of Lhasa in 1904
and the Dutch conquest of Bali in 1908. During this period almost all of Africa,
Asia, and the Pacific were colonized by Europeans and Americans. New forms
of technology that appeared ranged from automatic weapons, long range
artillery, automobiles and planes to ocean liners, wireless communications,
movies, bicycles, x-ray machines, and refrigerators (Bishop 1989: 139). By the
turn of the twentieth century, the Realpolitik of Social Darwinism and the
civilizing impulse of high colonialism had begun to generate a counter-response
within metropolitan areas. The colonial project increasingly began being
portrayed as bittersweet, both a triumph of civilization and progress as well as a
regretful opening up of more innocent places to the competitive world of
capitalism (Anand 2007: 29). Spaces that had not yet been colonized such as
Tibet were simultaneously infantilized and looked to as storehouses of wisdom,
lands existing outside of (modern) time and therefore not yet corrupted.
Yet it would be overly reductionist to explain a late nineteenth century in-
terest in cultivating and preserving spaces outside of modernity as solely a
response to colonialism. In other words, to identify the emergence of a natural-
ist aesthetic as a reaction to the aggressive utilitarianism of Euro-American
imperialism simply replicates the Orientalist tendencies of the contemporary
environmental movement and alternative traveler rhetoric, in which ‘they’ (non-
Western peoples) are both more authentic in their relationship to nature and
Introduction 3
constantly in danger of being tainted by ‘us’ (the ‘West’, modernity, mass

consumer society). Indeed, environmentalism and conservationism did not
emerge in opposition to colonialism and imperialism, but as products of the
colonial encounter (Grove 1995). Beginning in the fifteenth century, European
exploration was motivated not only by economic gain, but also by a search for a
better life. To put this differently, a “search for Eden” was simultaneously a
search for gold, timber sources, botanical knowledge, and access to the wealth
of India and China (ibid, 22–24).
Islands have been ground-zero in this search for more than four centuries.
Functioning as micro-worlds, the first European colonies in the Atlantic and
Caribbean served as experimental stations for not just the extraction of wealth
but also for analyzing the environmental impact of these economic policies.
While it is true that the mechanistic and utilitarian logic of Locke and Mill
transformed the natural world into a collection of resources to harness, this
same logic enabled the measurement of the human impact on nature (Grove
1995: 51). By the seventeenth century Caribbean tropical islands were widely
recognized as both paradises and as crucial economic wealth producers.
The late nineteenth and early twentieth century search for Shangri-La was,
however, fundamentally different. A colonial desire to promote conservation as
a necessary component of a well-run colony was replaced by a very different
desire, to escape from modernity and its emphasis on reason, logic, and utility.
However, the irony in this quest was that, for many such travelers, life in
modernity might have been bad, but the material privileges of modernity were
thoroughly enjoyable. To put this crudely, the goal for many travelers, wander-
ers, and spiritual adventurers was not to leave modernity behind but to carry it
with them. The form this took ranged from cold beer, servants, electricity, and
swimming pools in the Bali of the 1930s to an international telegraph connec-
tion and an occasional game of cricket in Lhasa following the British occupa-
tion in 1904. But unlike, say, the colonial bureaucrat, the Christian missionary,
or the development worker, there was no intention of bringing the subjects of
Shangri-La into the present. They instead existed as part of these non-places.
This conflicting desire to enjoy and preserve paradise versus changing it lies at
the heart of the Euro-American encounter with the world at large (Said 1979).
To quote the late Ben Anderson: “disintegration of paradise: nothing makes
fatality more arbitrary. Absurdity of salvation: nothing makes another style of
continuity more necessary” (2006: 11).
From Lost Horizons to Bali Hai

For much of the twentieth century, two places in the world were symbolic
of a dichotomous desire for physical pleasure and spiritual enlightenment, the
island of Bali and the Kingdom of Tibet. In many ways, these two places could
not be more different. Bali is a small tropical island located just below the
Equator, close to some of the busiest shipping lanes in the world. Tibet is a
sprawling, dry, mountainous region situated high in the Himalayas, between
China and India. Balinese are overwhelmingly Hindu, Tibetans Buddhist.
Politically, Bali is a self-governing province within the Republic of Indonesia,
while Tibet has been carved into Indian-occupied Ladakh, the Chinese provinc-
es of Qinghai, Yunnan, and Sichuan, and the nominally self-governing Tibetan
Autonomous Region in the People’s Republic of China. When tourists think of
Bali, most no doubt imagine tropical beaches; when they think of Tibet, they
usually imagine chanting monks.
Yet, despite these differences, the popular narratives of Bali and Tibet mir-
ror the Biblical story of humanity’s fall from grace and exile from paradise. For
many people, especially among the European and North American educated
classes, Bali is a once-pristine island, populated by a cultured and deeply
religious people, now inundated by tourism. Some may also know that the
island was colonized, though far fewer probably know by whom (Holland), just
as many also probably do not know that it is now part of the Muslim-majority
Republic of Indonesia. What they do know, through reading travel guides such
as The Lonely Planet, is that the island today has been supposedly reduced to a
commercial playground for tourists in search of a beach holiday and exotic
thrills. Similarly, Tibet is imagined to have been isolated from the world and
home to a happy and content society of devout Buddhists who lived their lives
free from daily wants and desires. However, the Chinese intervention in 1951
and occupation in 1959 caused, according to common belief, the wholesale
destruction of Tibetan culture, culminating in the madness of the Cultural
Revolution (1966–1976). Although freed from Mao Zedong and his Red
Guards, Tibet today is assaulted by mass tourism, which will inevitably succeed
where Mao failed, by turning ‘the land of snows’ into a destination spot devoid
of authentic culture.
It is certainly easy to construct a defense of these story lines. After all, most
observers would agree that tourism permeates life on Bali. Western backpackers
congregate in the cheap hotels and bars of Kuta Beach, the wealthy and famous
at the five-star hotels of Nusa Dua, and self-styled travelers in the artistic center
Introduction 5
of Ubud, where they sip espresso and read international newspapers beside
hotel swimming pools set in the midst of rice fields. In Tibet, hundreds of
thousands of Han Chinese tourists now visit Lhasa annually, mainly in the
summer months, aided by a recently opened rail line that links the city with
major urban areas of China. Tourism on Bali is both the largest source of
employment and the most important sector of the economy, which may well
soon be the case in Tibet as well. One could argue that the main industry in
both places is the production of self-images, or rather of images of what they
are supposed to be: outposts of paradise in a rapidly globalizing world.
Just as “Bali” as a place name is synonymous with the myth of the tropics,
both in terms of nature (swaying palms, terraced rice fields, slumbering volca-
noes, shimmering beaches) and culture (delicate batik designs, subtle paintings,
intricate wood carvings, gamelan music, the legong dance, and ancient cremation
rites), “Tibet” is a symbolic marker of spiritualism, goodness, and personal
enlightenment. In this sense, both places are examples of a new form of global
non-place, utopias that depend on the words spoken about them for their
existence as destinations, clichés for paradise (Augé 1995: 95).
Assisted by the World Bank, the New Order government (1966–1998) of
former Indonesian President Suharto marketed Bali-as-paradise in the service of
national development. Between 1970 and 1998, tourism on the island increased
from 30,000 foreign and almost no domestic arrivals to 1.5 million foreign and
750,000 domestic arrivals (Picard 1997: 182). Since 2001 and the subsequent
terrorist bombings in Kuta Beach in 2002, foreign arrivals have leveled off
while domestic tourism has doubled. In Tibet, since the opening up of the
region to tourism as a development resource in the early 1990s, arrivals have
steadily increased. In 2006, the Tibetan Autonomous Region received 2.35
million visitors, of which 2.2 million were domestic (Xinhua, November 11,
2006).
As these figures illustrate, tourism in both Bali and Tibet is quite significant.
However, rather than using this fact as the foundation of a diatribe against the
destructive powers of tourism, I wish to look at these places from a different
perspective. Other historical facts matter beyond tourist arrival figures. For
example, Bali was, until the late nineteenth century, widely perceived by Dutch,
British, and residents of neighboring islands as a dangerous island of political
intrigue, military violence, and slave trading. Only after Bali was finally con-
quered and fully occupied by Dutch forces in 1908 could foreign artists and
anthropologists intent on documenting paradise settle there. After Japanese
forces invaded and occupied the island in World War II, a revolutionary war
broke out against the returning Dutch and their local supporters. Eventually,
following a military coup in Jakarta that led to widespread mass killings
throughout Java and Bali, a new central government worked with the World
Bank to promote tourism on Bali as a development tool while protecting
“authentic” Balinese culture. While the master plan formulated to guide and
manage tourism on the island has largely failed in its goal to control the spatial
movement of tourists, Bali has become an international tourist destination.
Similarly, Tibet was for much of recent history loosely tied to dynastic reigns
in China, through religious, trade, and cultural exchanges. The complete
occupation of Tibet after 1959 by Chinese forces was followed by a concerted
state effort to economically and socially change Tibet by ‘liberating’ Tibetans
from the shackles of culture and tradition, policies that in their intention
replicated the desires of much international development work. As in any
occupation, some local residents gained from this process while others suffered.
Some cooperated, others fled, while many, arguably the majority, sought to
simply survive this catastrophe. Since 1978, economic and social reforms have
radically changed Chinese society. One key side-effect of these reforms has
been increased spatial mobility within China, which in turn has enabled a large
and growing domestic tourism industry. National and local authorities have
adopted policies aimed at stimulating tourism within Tibet for multiple reasons,
ranging from economic (as a means of cutting subsidies to the region) to
political (as a means of further solidifying the imagined community of the
People’s Republic). However, this state policy, premised on utilizing cultural
resources, suitably de-politicized, for development purposes does not aim for
the disappearance of surface differences. As in Indonesia under the New Order
government, this is part of a State strategy aimed at the aesthetization of
Tibetan culture as an object of tourist desire.
Structure of the Book

I use a comparative approach in this work, seeking to link popular imagin-
ing of two different geographical places that seem to have little in common with
each other, the tropical island of Bali and the mountainous terrain of Tibet.
More specifically, I have adopted a multi-sited methodological approach. In
doing so, I have talked with Chinese tourists, Tibetan guides and souvenir
vendors, Balinese tourism workers, and Euro-American visitors to China, Tibet,
and Bali. In China, to better understand the recent surge in Han Chinese
Introduction 7
tourism to Tibetan destinations, I have looked beyond a stable and distinct site,
such as Lhasa, and gone further afield, to Wutai Shan in Shanxi Province, a
Buddhist mountain considered sacred by both Tibetan and Chinese Buddhists,
Labrang Monastery in Gansu Province, the largest Tibetan monastery outside
of the Tibetan Autonomous Region and one of the most important centers for
the Gelukpa (Yellow hat) sect, the state-promoted site of ‘Shangri-la’, the
frontier town of Zhongdian in Northern Yunnan Province, and the shopping
streets of Beijing, Chengdu, and other urban centers. Similarly, to learn how
residents of Bali think about mass tourism on their island, I have visited not just
sacred sites that are now contested as ‘heritage’, such as the temple complex of
Pura Besakih or, from an aesthetic view, the artistic center of Ubud, but also the
most profane, such as the tourist centers of Kuta and Sanur. In all of these
places I have sought to better understand how and why particular communities
become imagined as home to paradise.
Just as this is not a project based on a single and distinct field site, it is not
based on a single event of long-term immersion in the field. Initial field
experiences that helped shape this analysis occurred in China from 1989 until
1992 and Indonesia from 1994 until 1996, when I worked on United Nations
Development Program (UNDP) projects. During my years as a development
worker, I visited Lhasa in the summer of 1990, and Bali in 1995 and 1996. I
returned to Lhasa as a field researcher in 2001 and 2002, and Bali in 2009. In
between I made field visits to Labrang Monastery in Gansu (2004 and 2010),
Tashilunpo Monastery in Qinghai (2001, 2002), Wutai Shan in Shanxi (2008,
2009, 2010), Chengde in Hebei (2006, 2007), and Zhongdian (Shangri-la) in
Yunnan (2008). Between 2001 and 2010, I spent a total of nine months in the
field on this project, mainly during summer breaks from teaching.
In Chapter One, I provide an historical and theoretical overview of how
fieldwork has been conceptualized within anthropology. In doing so, I seek to
show the transformation of the concept of ‘culture’ within anthropology over
the course of the twentieth century. Ironically, as anthropology as a discipline
has become suspicious of any stable and unchanging sense of culture, just such
a concept has become a core assumption within, first, tourism studies and now
heritage programs.
In Chapter Two, I analyze the place of tourism as a subject within anthro-
pology and related fields. Within the interdisciplinary field of tourism studies,
‘culture’ continues to be viewed by many as a coherent and clearly defined
object, albeit fragile and threatened by tourism. This position has been increa-
singly questioned by those who accept the unstable, fluid nature of cultural
practices. Yet for both perspectives, the primary subject of their inquiry remains
Europeans and Americans. Thus, if for some critics, Euro-American tourists
are dangerous because they have the ability to destroy other people’s cultures,
for others they are naïve because they wish for ‘realness’. Yet the assumption
that mainstream tourists either destroy cultural practices or even desire to
experience “authentic” culture is certainly open to question. In Chapter III, I
examine the implications of a new emphasis among heritage preservation
proponents on protecting intangible cultural heritage. This focus, I argue, not
only replicates the salvage focus of early anthropological fieldwork, but also
uses a specific set of cultural values to evaluate what constitutes a cultural
practice to be protected.
Part II shifts from theory to history, examining two destinations that
epitomize particular forms of paradise, the Indonesian island of Bali and the
former Kingdom and now Chinese autonomous region of Tibet. Chapter Four
describes the historical context of the emergence of Bali and Tibet as destina-
tions for anthropologists, explorers and travelers. Drawing on a collection of
ethnographies and travel narratives, I examine how these environmentally,
culturally, and economically different societies came to symbolize earthly
paradises in the first half of the twentieth century.
Chapter Five analyzes the World Bank-funded Bali Tourism Project, which,
beginning in 1972, aimed to transform the island into an international tourism
destination while preserving Balinese cultural practices from the dangers of,
paradoxically, tourism. In Chapter Six, I discuss the reemergence of Tibet as a
travel destination in the past twenty years. With the support of UNESCO, the
Chinese government has sought to protect heritage sites in Tibet from tourism
while simultaneously using heritage sites to promote domestic tourism for
economic and political reasons. The result has been the opening of Tibet to
Han Chinese and a renewed sense of impending doom among foreign observ-
ers who believe this signals the ‘end’ of Tibet. This anxiety over the forever
disappearing Other has had a remarkable shelf life in the ongoing narrative of
modernity. Paradise, it seems, always carries a price.
Chapter One
Culture in the Field

The anthropologist must relinquish his comfortable position in the long chair on the
verandah of the missionary compound, government station, or planter’s bungalow,
where, armed with pencil and notebook and at times with a whiskey and soda, he has
been accustomed to collect statements from informants, write down stories, and fill out
sheets of paper with savage texts. He must go out into the villages, and see the natives
at work in gardens, on the beach, in the jungle...
Bronislaw Malinowski, Argonauts of the Western Pacific
Anthropology’s disciplinary identity is intimately connected to the place of

fieldwork as a central element within it, both in terms of practice (the writing
down in the field of participant observation) and text (the writing up back home
of field notes into monographs). ‘To go to the field’ is a rite of passage for
students into the community of anthropologists (Peacock 1986: 55; Van
Maanen 1988: 13). It is also a boundary maintenance marker that distinguishes
anthropology from related disciplines such as sociology, political science, and
economics, as well as related spatial practices such as tourism, travel, and aid
work (Stocking 1992: 278). Unlike an economist or a historian, an anthropolo-
gist goes out, ex camera, beyond the library, where she becomes, in a sense, the
camera (Plath 1990: 373). Of course, once there, an anthropologist inevitably
encounters others, such as development workers, tourists, and missionaries,
who invariably are categorized as amateurish (Clifford 1983: 122–123). Others
who operate ex camera in the field and who cannot be framed so easily as
amateurs (for example, certain journalists or survey sociologists) can, however,
be defined as less qualified to speak, based on the limited time they spend in the
field and their mobility (Plath 1990: 375; Van Maanen 1988: 21). In short,
fieldwork does more than serve as a method for organizing ethnographic data.
It also enables certain forms of knowledge, authorizes certain questions, and
legitimates particular analytical methods, thus disabling, de-authorizing, and de-
legitimizing other voices (Gupta & Ferguson 1997: 1–2).
Professionalizing Anthropological Fieldwork

According to a common anthropological narrative, fieldwork as a method
arose in the late nineteenth century in reaction to the methodological problems
encountered by stay-at-home armchair anthropologists who had in the past
relied on data gathered via surveys and questionnaires by travelers, missionaries
and colonial officials. It was pioneered by the naturalist-turned-ethnologist A.C.
Haddon (1855–1940), who argued that a careful, systematic description of
small, clearly-defined areas by trained observers would yield better information
than the notes and queries approach used by amateur observers (Gupta &
Ferguson 1997: 5–11). This professionalization of fieldwork mirrored the
professionalization of anthropology within academia. The first anthropology
appointment at Oxford (E.B. Taylor) occurred in 1883. In 1888, while doing
research on coral reefs in the Torres Strait, the zoologist A.C. Haddon became
interested in the peoples of this area, primarily because he believed that local
customs were disappearing. Upon his return to the United Kingdom in 1889, he
shifted his research interests to physical anthropology, particularly anthropome-
try, and subsequently carried out research on Irish subjects (Urry 1993: 66–68).
Haddon’s phrenological research is easily criticized today. Yet in a certain
sense what he studied is beside the point; what is important is the way in which
he went about his research. In short, he appeared to make a ‘natural’ shift from
fieldwork on nature to fieldwork on disappearing natives.
Fieldwork research, as opposed to the ‘stay at home’ research it displaced,
served as a starting point for a transformative view about the place of ‘culture’
in relation to ‘nature’ and ‘civilization’. By first re-defining culture as the sum of
all (inherited) social practices within a particular society and then arguing for the
need to take serious all such cultural practices, early fieldwork practitioners
distanced themselves from nineteenth century notions of culture as the aesthet-
ic by-product of civilization, a view which had been used by social evolutionists
to justify colonialism. For example, as early as 1896 Franz Boas provided a neo-
ethnological critique of physical anthropology and social evolution, arguing that
human thought was a product of culture, not race (Stocking 1992: 352–353).
The significance of this should not be under-emphasized, since it directly
challenged the social evolutionary view of a hierarchical framework of human
development that claimed to explain the political and economic power of
imperialist states as scientifically based. However, it was a short step from
arguing for the relativity of cultural practices to using the cultural practices of
subject peoples as foils for a critique of one’s own society.
Culture in the Field 11
For example, in a 1924 article, American anthropologist Edward Sapir

divided culture into three categories: socially inherited practices, aesthetic
practices and products, and the spiritual realm. A genuine culture, he argued,
was always local and particular, a combination of individual refinement and
pluralistic harmony, and had nothing to do with the increased sophistication or
complexity of a society (Sapir 1924: 409). In fact, genuine culture often existed
in direct conflict with what was usually thought of as “civilization”:
The American Indian who solves the economic problem with salmon-spear and rabbit-
snare operates on a relatively low level of civilization, but he represents an incompara-
bly higher solution than our telephone girl of the questions that culture has to ask eco-
nomics. There is no question of the immediate utility, of the effective directness of
economic effort, nor of any sentimentalizing regrets as to the passing of the “Natural
Man”. The Indian’s salmon-spearing is a culturally-higher type of activity than that of
the telephone girl or mill hand simply because there is normally no sense of spiritual
frustration during its prosecution, no feeling of subservience to tyrannous yet largely
inchoate demands, because it works in naturally with all the rest of the Indian’s activities instead of
standing out as a desert patch of merely economic effort in the whole of life. (Sapir 1924: 411–412,
emphasis added)
Despite Sapir’s explicit rejection of any lament for what he called “Natural
Man,” just such a lament underpins his argument that “civilization” separates
economic activities from other human action, and is thus a less natural form of
existence than life within a genuine culture, one in which all human activity is
“inherently harmonious, balanced, self-satisfactory” (ibid, 409). Genuine culture
might not have been a harbinger of civilization, as argued by social evolution-
ists, yet a civilization-nature binary opposition remained firmly in place, only
with its values reversed: ‘civilization’ became the source of degradation, ‘nature’
(renamed genuine culture) the source of depth and wholeness, with the conse-
quence that the closer to ‘nature’ one was perceived to be, the more authentic
one’s cultural practices were perceived to be. Moreover, if genuine culture is
always local and particular, civilization by definition becomes suspect, as a
source of superficiality, sameness and cultural death, precisely because it entails
by definition increased social complexities and material production (ibid, 426–
429). In other words, the anthropological desire to rescue non-Western peoples
from Social Darwinism and colonialism resulted in a re-categorization of
culture, now re-defined, as a victim (rather than a product) of civilization.
This Appollonian ethnographic stance, identifiable in the work of early

twentieth-century American cultural anthropologists such as Ruth Benedict,
Margaret Mead, and Robert Redfield, was driven mainly by a critique of North
American society (Stocking 1992: 333–337). It also illustrates the always-present
anthropological dilemma, the contradictions between anthropos and ethnos, the
universal and the particular, and the ideals of the Enlightenment and a romanti-
cized natural state (ibid, 346–347).
In short, a paradox arose, one which remains to this day: anthropologists
attempted to defend and help preserve indigenous cultural values as a means of
critiquing the modern societies of their home countries while simultaneously
arguing for indigenous peoples’ capacity to participate fully in this modern life.
Furthermore, whether arguing that culture consisted of a web-like pattern (Ruth
Benedict) or an inter-related series of social functions (Bronislaw Malinowski),
this position trapped itself within the language of wholeness:
Every item of culture ... represents a value, fulfills a social function, has a positive bio-
logical significance. For tradition is a fabric in which all the strands are so closely wo-
ven that the destruction of one unmakes the whole. And tradition is, biologically
speaking, a form of collective adaptation of a community to its surroundings. Destroy
tradition, and you will deprive the collective organism of its protective shell, and give it
over to the slow but inevitable process of dying out. (Malinowski 1922: 209)
Of course, one might dismiss this as an outdated view, made obsolete by

contemporary postmodernist celebrations of cultural hybridity. Yet this
destruction of “tradition” remains a source of anxiety within not just anthro-
pology but also tourism and, more recently, the cultural heritage movement.
In short, other people’s cultures are still presumed to be vanishing, only
now in the onslaught of globalization rather than colonialism. Yet, if culture is
defined as the sum of a given society’s inherited social practices, and if all such
practices are said to be relative, contingent, and always emerging, how to argue
that a particular culture is dying out, if the people identified as members of this
culture remain? For instance, what does it mean to argue that Tibetan culture is
disappearing, while millions of Tibetans remain very much alive? How to accept
and understand the competing claims to speak for ‘Tibetans’, a people found
not just in the Tibetan Autonomous Region but in China, India, Nepal, Bhutan,
and throughout Europe and the United States? (Frechette 2002).
To cite another example, one which I shall return to in later chapters, how
to argue that an authentic Balinese culture has been diluted or destroyed by
tourism when tourism itself has played a central role since the 1920s in shaping
this very authenticity? Is there any way to make this argument without resorting
to either Malinowski’s logic, namely, that “tradition [that is, culture] is a fabric in
which all the strands are so closely woven that the destruction of one unmakes
the whole” (1922: 209) or Saphir’s characterization of genuine culture, both of
which presumes a certain purity of a genuine culture?
Salvaging the Past

Fieldwork served a salvaging function for American practitioners such as
Franz Boas and Margaret Mead. Convinced that both cultures and particular
cultural practices were being swept away on the tide of European and North
American imperialism, they created a need for the fieldworker-as-a-recording
machine, an expert to go into a threatened cultural space and record as much
and as minute an amount of data as possible before this data was lost. Within
this framework, a dynamic subject-gatherer collected knowledge and artifacts
from a passive, threatened object, while the forces of colonialism lurked in the
background (Pinxton 1997: 35–37; see also Fabian 1991: 195–196). While
occupying a space as a salvager-hero, the fieldworker also operated from a
position of anxious awareness of a presumed time clock. As Mead noted in the
1920s, the cultural worlds of subjected peoples were fast disappearing, while
anthropology was small and limited (Mead 1977: 139–140).
This emphasis on a (constantly) disappearing past, whether articulated as
salvage ethnography, a tourist desire to ‘see it before it is too late’, or a heritage
campaign to preserve tangible and intangible culture from tourists and tourism,
implicitly diminishes the value of the present by focusing on what is presumed
to be a more complete past now threatened by the present (Clifford 1990,
1992). In doing so, it paradoxically contributes to this presumed disappearance
by taking what currently exists as degraded and hence less worthy of attention.
It also requires the salvager, tourist, or preservationist to ignore his/her own
subject position as an active participant in this process.
The texts which emerged from the shift to fieldwork in the 1920s and 1930s,
whether premised on American cultural relativism or British functionalism,
came to serve as organizing models within anthropology for the production of
knowledge about other cultures (Fischer & Marcus 1986: 41). In presuming to
tell the story of a particular group, place, or time within the framework of a
book, these texts transformed the chaos and contradictions of everyday life in
an alien space into a logical and rational story with a beginning, middle, and an
end. For example, the organization of chapters around such topics as ‘Kinship’,
‘Food’, ‘Customs’, ‘Agriculture’ and the like created a template for the categori-
zation of societies which were often radically different from that of the observ-
ing anthropologist. Yet these categorization tactics, and the resulting appearance
of an apparently seamless body of knowledge, was presumed to be needed if
anthropology were to be taken seriously as a science.
This is not to say that a monolithic view about culture and its representation
can be neatly defined throughout the discipline. Indeed, resistance to the
scientification of anthropology appeared as early as the 1920s, primarily in the
texts of French avant-garde writers such as Michel Leiris, Georges Bataille and
Roger Caillois. Rather than seeking to categorize the exotic by comparing this
to the known and the named or using the non-West as a canvas on which to
sketch the supposed evils of the modern world, these writers focused on the
shock of juxtaposition, what James Clifford has called the “sheer incongruity”
of scientifically describing the radically different in any realistic sense (Clifford
1988: 146). However, this resistance to the scientification of anthropology was
less evident in American and British practices.
In short, despite anthropology’s privileging of ‘being there’ (and being active
in the field) over both the preliminary travel logistics of ‘getting there’ and later
‘being (back) here’ (to write up one’s findings), the anthropological field itself is
neither discrete nor bounded (Hutnyk 1999: 48). Rather than being a distinct
space, it is a “fluid, loosely connected set of relations, sites, events, actors,
agents and experiences from which, and onto which, anthropologists try to
impose some conceptual order” (Shore 1999: 44–45).
Encountering Reality
In the second edition of Anthropology as Cultural Critique (1999), George
Marcus and Michael Fischer argue that the anthropological project is no longer
focused on discovering the unknown or making the exotic familiar, but rather
on “the discovery of worlds that are familiar to or fully understood by no one,
and that all are in search of puzzling out” (1999: xvii). Anthropology now must
share a representational space with others:
More generally, we now find ourselves arguing that it is to the advantage of critical
anthropology to recognize the fact that anthropology no longer operates under the
ideal of discovering new worlds like explorers of the fifteenth century. Rather, we step
into a stream of already existing representations produced by journalists, prior anthropologists, histo-
rians, creative writers, and of course the subjects of study themselves. And, therefore, a primary
framing task of any ethnography is to juxtapose these preexisting representations, at-

tempting to understand their diverse conditions of production, and to incorporate the
resulting analysis fully into the strategies which define any contemporary fieldwork
project. (ibid, xx, emphasis added)
Marcus and Fischer echo James Clifford, who has written about the end of
a sense of originality in fieldwork, arguing, “the field is more and more littered
with ‘serious’ ethnographic texts … one writes among, against, through, and in
spite of them” (Clifford 1990: 55). Crucially, however, Clifford (like Marcus and
Fischer) brushes aside “those most easily dismissed: missionaries, travelers,
administrators” (ibid).
This ability to view contemporary fieldwork as either a part of a larger
network of representations within ethnography or, alternatively, within a
selected series of representations, conflates discipline and discourse. By
elevating anthropology to the status of a discourse, this approach masks the fact
that anthropology operates within a larger discursive field, one in which
anthropology fills the “savage slot”, a role it has shared with literature and travel
accounts (Trovillot 1990: 17). In particular, by focusing on texts, postmodernist
approaches to anthropology have singularized the anthropological voice, as if
the discourse of anthropology were either self-enclosed or self-sufficient,
operating outside of politics, economics, and history (ibid, 37). Neither of these
hold true, something that becomes clearer if we substitute ‘discourse’ for
‘stream’ in the above quote from Marcus and Fischer. Rather than choosing
what stream of representations and where on the bank of this stream one might
leap into a particular discursive field, an anthropologist necessarily goes out into
a field site that is filled with a wide variety of representations that, like the water
that flows through a stream, are inseparable. It is not that the field now leaks; it
is that it has always leaked.
A Realm of Blank Paper

Given that the experience of fieldwork is crucial to the practice of anthro-
pology, what is surprising is the mystical aura the practice of fieldwork has
assumed within anthropology. Indeed, this practice has often been framed as
incommunicable, something which either cannot be taught or can only be done
so in a haphazard, piecemeal fashion (Wengle 1988: 8–9; Sanjek 1990: 228–228;
Shore 1999: 33). Fieldwork, being un-teachable, is only learned by doing:
The mystique has it that fieldwork is “deeply untellable”, profoundly moving, but in-
capable of being described except perhaps through intuitive means. The experience of
fieldwork is the sound of one hand clapping; it is a realm of blank paper. (Wengle 1988:
xviii)
Margaret Mead, for example, wrote that she received no fieldwork training
from her mentor Franz Boas. Rather than instructing her in how to go about
her research, he told her what to look for during her fieldwork, and provided
her with a guiding research question (Mead 1977: 151–152). This approach
assumes the means of doing will follow from the information desired. In other
words, because research questions are not universal and fieldwork experiences
are by definition unique, any sort of standardized fieldwork training is assumed
to be of limited usefulness beyond the functional basics. What is required
instead is a guiding question. This preliminary question is one of the key
epistemological elements distinguishing fieldwork from merely field experience.
This disciplinary focus on the intuitive aspects of fieldwork privileges the
empirical over the theoretical. Field notes, the raw material of fieldwork, take
on the appearance of scripture; markers of pure empirical experience, they
become in a certain sense unquestionable, since field experience itself is
transformed by disciplinary conventions into this category of the purely
personal (Jackson 1990: 22–24). In this sense, fieldwork fits well with John
Dewey’s educational philosophy: authentic learning only occurs by doing;
actions speak louder than words. A logical outgrowth of this epistemological
approach, one which neatly meshes with tourist experiential desires, is the
popularity in recent years of field-based educational activities under the guise of
study-abroad programs.
This is not to say that critique disappears. Rather, it gets re-channeled to
what can be considered the more technical, quantifiable aspects of the field:
how many informants did one have, and (perhaps crucially) how much time did
one spend in the field? Derek Freeman’s critique of Mead’s Samoan research is
a good example of this. Freeman’s critique (1999) revolves around what he
claims were Mead’s fieldwork inadequacies. She lived with Navy personnel, and
not ‘natives’; she spent too little time focusing on her central research problem;
she did not check her sources; she cut short her field stay. Therefore she got the
story wrong.
What, then, of fieldwork? Setting aside its mystique, one can see that it is as
much a series of processes, not bound to a specific place and time, as it is a
collection of encounters with a chosen other (Shore 1999: 26–27; Gardener
1999: 52). At a micro level, the process of going to the field armed with a
guiding research question to encounter the Other is a necessary first step in the
transformation of field experiences into a coherent story. At a discursive level,
fieldwork is a disciplining process for the molding of credentialed practitioners.
Fieldwork, then, is not simply a rite of passage, nor a means of identity trans-
formation, nor a boundary maintenance device; it is all of these at one and the
same time. Above all, it is a particular travel practice, one which simultaneously
presupposes a mobile self and an immobile subject (Clifford 1997: 207).
The turn to reflexivity in contemporary anthropology has not diminished
the importance of fieldwork. Quite the opposite: reflexivity and self-awareness
have led to a reification of fieldwork. In short, through the celebration of
“difference” and “otherness”, contemporary anthropology simultaneously
textualizes and culturizes other societies while engaging in a process of appropr-
iation and translation, thereby mirroring empire-building (Said 1989: 213–214).
This, however, leads to a contradiction: while anthropological theorizing has
shifted away from a geographically-bounded concept of culture, the discipline
continues to be defined by a method (fieldwork) which privileges detailed study
in a specific geographic locale (Gupta & Ferguson 1997:4). Gutpa and Fergu-
son’s solution is to de-center fieldwork and reconceptualize it as one strand
among many in what Donna Harraway (1988) has termed “situated know-
ledges”. In particular, they argue for a renewed disciplinary attention to ethno-
graphic practices which disrupt the constitution of ‘the field’ as both a practice
and a discipline, focusing on three borders: that between anthropology and
related academic practices such as folklore studies, ethnic studies, and sociology;
that between mainstream ethnographic writing practices and such heterodox
practices as field novels and “tell all” reports; and that between fieldwork and
other forms of dwelling, in particular those of cultural “insiders” (such as
fieldworkers studying their home societies) and independent scholars who work
outside the institutional structure of the academy (Gupta & Ferguson 1997: 30–
32).
Notably missing from the above is any mention of possible boundary
crossings with non-ethnographic practices that also disrupt the constitution of
the field. Indeed, Gupta and Ferguson explicitly dismiss tourism and develop-
ment field practices from consideration, as if these practices already have been
dealt with in the past:
By definition, the borders of the discipline constitute those spaces where the hegemon-
ic hold of canonical methods and disciplinary formations has been the weakest. These
borders are not merely geographic, but can be seen in the heterogeneity of ethnograph-
ic representations that threaten to overrun the well-policed boundaries of anthropolo-
gy. We will not deal with those obvious suspects that anthropology struggled to distinguish itself from at
the beginning of the formation of the discipline, namely, travelogues, missionary reports, the narratives
produced by colonial bureaucracies, and so forth. Rather, we wish to highlight a congeries of
practices and representations of the field that interrupt the mutual constitution of the
“field” as a specific empirical practice and the “field” as a discipline. (ibid, 29, emphasis
added)
Why is this ready dismissal, not just by Gupta and Ferguson but also in the
discipline as a whole, so apparently commonsensical? Is it possible to select
disciplinary borders to cross, while maintaining others? That is to say, can one
so neatly control what is and is not inside a particular discursive flow? Finally,
how does the fact that the world today is constituted by an unprecedented flow
of peoples across state borders into ‘the field’, primarily as tourists in search of
fun and migrants in search of economic opportunities, affect questions about
the field of anthropological fieldwork?
In conclusion, despite changes in the structure of fieldwork monographs
brought about by the anthropological turn to reflexivity, the anthropological
process remains structurally little changed. “Anthropologyland”, the location of
field experiences, remains a piece of turf anthropology seeks to control (Fox
1990: 7–8). This can be seen in the ways in which anthropologists, like sociolo-
gists, economists, and political scientists, have sought to define the fields of
those “obvious suspects”, tourists, development practitioners, and heritage
preservationists. It is to the most suspect of these others, the tourist, to which I
turn to next.
Chapter Two
Suspect Others: Tourists at Play

From the perspective of ethnography, tourism is an illegitimate child, a disgraceful
simplification, and an imposter
Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life
A genealogy of laments for the supposed havoc caused by tourism to

peoples and societies of the ‘non-West’ can be easily traced. The story is
familiar: once there existed pristine and natural societies outside the West; then
tourism arrived; now what was once distinct and authentic has been corrupted,
commodified, and made false.
Tellingly, this story of loss transcends ideological boundaries. It has been
voiced by conservative literary critics, liberal academics, postmodernists, and, as
a subtext to larger arguments, environmentalists, feminists, and, most recently,
much of the anti-globalization movement. All embrace, implicitly or explicitly,
Claude Lévi-Strauss’s thesis in Tristes Tropiques: genuine travel has been replaced
by movement through a “monoculture” in a fruitless search for a “vanished
reality” (Lévi-Strauss: 1972 [1957]: 39–40, 45).
In part because of this seemingly clear-cut story line, tourism as a subject of
inquiry remains a marginal topic within not just anthropology but most discip-
lines (Wood & Picard 1997: 3). This is particularly puzzling in light of the
dramatic growth of the tourism industry in recent decades and its economic and
social importance. Today it is one of the world’s largest industries, accounting
for approximately 9.9% of world GDP in 2008, as well as a major source of
employment, accounting for some 238 million jobs (World Travel & Tourism
Council 2008).
As a field of academic inquiry, tourism has been defined and shaped by a
series of questions that revolve around three issues: individual motivation (why
do people travel?), economic gains and losses (who benefits from this travel?)
and tourism’s cultural impact (what cultural changes does tourism cause?)
In this chapter I analyze each of these issues in turn. As I shall show, how
these questions are analyzed hinges on the assumptions they carry. The ‘who’ of
the first question more often than not has been reduced to an idealized individ-
ual subject (usually a privileged Euro-American cultural traveler), contesting the

alleged emptiness of middle-class and working-class package tourists. Second,
critiques of the economic impact of tourism have long relied on questionable
assumptions about the passivity of local residents in tourist zones. Finally,
arguments over the cultural impact of tourism often begin with static notions of
culture that have more in common with anthropological positions of one
hundred years ago than they do with how most anthropologists think about
‘culture’ today.
Why Do We Go?
A generation after Lévi-Strauss opened Tristes Tropiques with “Je hais les
voyageurs et le voyage”, historian Daniel J. Boorstin lamented the end of what he
called “real” travel. For Boorstein, travel, which had once been an art, had
become a staged event, a spectator sport for passive consumers trained to
consume assembly line, store-bought commodities (Boorstin 1964: 85–90). He
contrasted this bleak portrayal of contemporary travel (circa 1960) to a vanished
past (the early decades of the twentieth century) in which travelers “went
strenuously in search of people, of adventure, of experience” (80–81), at a time
which offered the traveler a chance “to sow his wild oats” (85), and a period in
which the “real thing” was as “free as air” (99).
A generation later, literary critic Paul Fussell echoed Boorstin’s lament for a
supposed lost golden age of travel, contrasting this with a contemporary
“proletarian moment” of global tourism (Fussell 1980: 38). In Fussell’s view,
authentic travel stopped in 1939. While conceding mass tourism’s egalitarian-
ism, he distinguished this from travel, which he described as a mediating space
between an explorer’s “risks of the formless and unknown” and a tourist’s
“pure cliché” (Fussell 1980: 40). Like Boorstin and Lévi-Strauss, he believed the
possibility of authentic travel was past. In this sense, Lévi-Strauss’s bleak
portrayal was fully justified; as Fussell wrote, “the anti-tourist deludes himself.
We are all tourists now, and there is no escape.” (ibid, 49).
Sociologist Dean MacCannell, widely regarded as the first academic theorist
of tourism, characterized tourists as a model for “modern-man-in-general”,
middle-class sightseers searching for authentic experiences they cannot find in
their own lives (1989: 1–3). This authenticity is gained via the semiotic process,
in which the signifier (a marker informing the viewer about a site) represents
the signified (the tourist site) to the tourist (110). The culminating act for the
tourist becomes that moment when she links a site to its marker, revealing the
Tourists as Play 21
contrast between what is personally experienced and what had previously been
imagined from representations (137). The act of tourism from MacCannell’s
perspective is a process of de-sacralization, one in which otherness is appro-
priated and the strange made familiar (Harkin 1995: 653). Or, to put this
another way, “the authentic is a usage perceived as a sign of that usage, and
tourism is in large measure a quest for such signs” (Culler 1981: 132; emphasis
in the original).
In response to this presumed tourist desire for authentic experience, hosts
create staged presentations to fulfill this tourist longing. Adapting Erving
Goffman’s theory of front and back regions in everyday life (1959), McCannell
proposed a six-stage theory of tourist authenticity, beginning with a front room
open to all, and eventually leading, via various degrees of what he termed
“staged authenticity”, to the “real”, an authentic place inside another culture
(1989: 101–102).
MacCannell acutely recognized the ultimate inaccessibility of this final stage.
The tourist can never get behind the final door; rather than eventually reaching
a final real space, he only can encounter a trace of this (Dumont 1984: 140). Yet
this does not let tourists off the hook; according to MacCannell, to be a tourist
is to fruitlessly seek this ultimate stage. Pity these unthinking people.
The problem with this perspective rests with what this claim takes as a
given, that tourists actually seek some sort of heightened authenticity, which
corresponds to a desire for the “real thing”. If they do, and they end up
watching staged cultural performances in the comfort of their hotel, then the
critique holds. But what if they do not? Or, more to the point, what if some
tourists do not seek complete access to the inner sanctum of a different culture
but simply heightened individual experiences?
Rather than seeking access to an authentic culture, some people travel in
order to reconfirm their existing impressions and stereotypes (Guldin 1989:
129) or simply for a pleasurable experience grounded in the familiar (Van Den
Berghe 1994: 8). In other words, some tourists do not desire acute difference so
much as a confirmation of what ‘it’ (the site, the Other, the experience) is
supposed to be like. Far from being alienated from modernity, many tourists
may be quite content with the copies of an illusive reality they are presented
with in their travels (Bruner 1991: 240). Indeed, rather than seeking pre-modern
experiences in a post-modern world, such tourists may actually simply seek an
experience that lives up to the hype while enabling them to have a good time.
A second problem with this perspective is the ideal-type it portrays. ‘The
tourist’ is not anyone, yet is supposed to represent everyone. The social realities
of gender, race, nationality, and above all socio-economic class are usually
ignored. Yet the subtext is clear: ‘the tourist’ is the middle-class or working-class
provincial who (apparently) lacks the education and social capital required to be
comfortably ‘at home in the world’.
Nevertheless, a presumed desire to not be a (passive) tourist has been an
article of faith for a range of writers. According to Jonathan Culler, “part of
what is involved in being a tourist is disliking tourists (both other tourists and
the fact that one is oneself a tourist). Tourists can always find someone more
touristy than themselves to sneer at” (Culler 1981: 129–130). In short, to be
identified as a tourist carries a wide range of negative connotations for a specific
class of people, a transnational cosmopolitan elite that mistakenly sees itself as
post-cultural (Goodale 2009).
This desire not to be a tourist on the part of a specific socio-economic class
is fueled in part by an enduring dream of a paradise simultaneously found and
lost, a space of difference experienced under a cloud of certainty that a once-in-
a-lifetime experience will soon become a part of a lost (and thus nostalgic) past,
its purity destroyed (Hutnyk 1996: 9). Like Lévi-Strauss, self-described ‘travel-
ers’ who condemn tourism also reject discursive notions of Euro-American
superiority while positioning non-Western peoples as being closer to nature and
hence a presumed natural goodness. They thus combine a theme of fatal
degradation as the price of progress with nostalgia for a more complete
presence in a distant, timeless past. In other words, ethnocentric assumptions
about Euro-American superiority are simply reversed, so that the ‘Third World’
becomes a generalized place of peoples possessing ‘culture’ who nevertheless
remain closer to ‘nature’, and hence goodness. Much like with Edward Sapir
depiction of an indigenous hunter and a telephone operator, the Nature versus
Culture opposition of nineteenth century imperialism is replaced by a Civiliza-
tion versus Culture/Nature divide, in which non-Western subjects are pre-
sumed to possess a ‘culture’ those in the metropolitan West are presumed to
have spoiled or lost (Rosaldo 1989). In an echo of Sapir’s lament (not to
mention those of Claude Levi-Strauss and Jean Rousseau), this degradation is
linked to “the dislocation of a unanimous people assembled in the full-presence
of its speech”, in a place where “all members are within earshot” (Derrida 1976:
134; 136). The cottage industry in ‘anti-tourism tourism’, such as cultural
tourism, experiential education, and the backpacking foot soldiers of the Lonely
Planet brigades, represents the commercialization of anthropology as the science
of remorse:
Tourists as Play 23
The [anti] tourists must forever push beyond the waves of spoilage created by their
intrusion, in search of more and more Shangri-las, just beyond the reach of the bull-
dozer and on the heels of the missionary and anthropologist. The live fringe of ethnic
tourism is the outer reach of the second-class bus. (Van Den Berghe 1994: 9)
The logical culmination of this quest is eco-tourism. Being Green, ecotour-

ism is assumed to be good; it is supposed to provide more sustainable types of
service jobs than those produced by mass tourism, while increasing local
awareness of the global environment and promoting the conservation of both
nature and local cultural practices. Crucially, alternative travel forms such as
ecotourism claim to be able to do this while not having an impact on local
culture (Macleod 1997). Indeed, the issue of cultural impact is often reversed
and transformed into a site of positive interaction between self and toured other
without any consequences.
It thus responds to Levi-Strauss’ dilemma (I gain access to the exotic and
unknown knowing that cultural degradation will follow) by distinguishing
‘travel’ from tourism. While tourists are blamed for destroying the culture of
others, travelers need only worry about experiencing this culture before it is
destroyed. Travel is thus ethical, in the sense of claiming to be non-intrusive;
tourism is bad. This position is also very similar to that adopted by many in the
international development industry, particularly field-based development
workers: like the giving-to of Development, the traveling-in of alternative travel
is grounded in a belief that others can be helped (and known) without cost to
either oneself or one’s subjects (Latouche 1993: 114).
Thus, to be a responsible eco-tourist, a person needs only to, according to
one Sierra Club guidebook writer, “strengthen cultural identities and help build
interest in preserving local traditions” by “living locally” while adapting to
“village life” and being as “non-invasive to culture as possible” (H. Smith 1997:
61). The contradictions in this view are several, most notably with the fact that
some cultural practices (such as female circumcision or arranged marriages) may
very well clash with an eco-tourist’s own personal cultural practices and hence
values, while the values and practices of urbane cosmopolitan foreigners may be
far from appealing to local residents. What remains in the end is eco-tourism’s
reliance on an idealized absence of self, which underpins the popular concept of
leaving nothing but footprints, taking nothing but photos. Rather than being a
dialogue with those toured about tourism, ecotourism, like its cousin cultural
tourism, is premised on first, how eco-tourists define themselves, and second,
on what they believe those on the receiving end must be protected against
(mass tourism). The mirror of modernist development, a postmodernist anti-

development that reduces Modernity to a simplistic process of cultural degrada-
tion, reveals itself here, categorizing those who are toured as passive victims
while elevating travelers to the status of protector of the non-Western Other.
At the same time, these others remain as essentialized and reified as in the past
under the guise of generic Third World Chic objects and practices signifying an
imaginary Other (Errington 1998: 147–149).
In thinking about the reasons why people engage in leisure travel, what
seems most evident is that most theorizing and fieldwork has focused on
European and American tourism and travel. This ethnocentric focus has largely
ignored the enormous growth in different forms of tourism, a point I shall
return to in my discussion of the politics of tourism and cultural heritage in
Tibet and China. What should also be evident is that the reasons people travel
are simultaneously plural, shifting, and contingent on context. Theories that
variously portray travel as a quest for authenticity, as sacred journey, as a
process of becoming other, as a contemporary form of imperialist privilege, or,
seen in a more cynical light, as at times an opportunity to live well in cheap
places are not invalid; they are at best valid in a partial sense. Each describes not
just different types of travelers but also different types of travel experiences.
Any substantive distinction between tourists and travelers is largely illusory,
except in one crucial sense: most tourists do not think of themselves as not
being tourists, while travelers imagine they are not tourists. What has often been
taken to be a distinction (the traveler defined as active and adventuresome, the
tourist as passive and unimaginative) is, on closer examination, highly question-
able. This distinction is grounded on the logic of expenditure, albeit reversed:
namely, that the less one expends on travel, the greater the authenticity of one’s
experiences. Or, in crude terms, rich people experience superficiality while
budget travelers gain access to the ‘real thing’, as if living on the cheap allows
one to transcend the barriers of wealth, class, race, gender, and birth. While this
presumption is a key aspect of monastic and pilgrimage practices, backpackers
traveling on the cheap at best experience only an illusion of escape from
privilege (Hutnyk 1996: 208). This in turn leads to a measure of ambiguity
lurking within this pathos of distinction: those who do not travel as typical tour-
centered tourists yet also do not lay claim to a privileged position as non-tourist
insiders nevertheless journey within the space of the tourist, a space they share
with fieldworker practitioners of reflexivity.
In contrast, the anti-tourist continues to delude himself into believing he can
transcend the boundaries of self and other with the help of guidebooks written
Tourists as Play 25
(supposedly) not for tourists. If the anti-tourist is anything, he is a postmodern

version of the Great Western Fieldworker: one who, because of contemporary
relationships within the global political economy, can now play at being
Malinowski, absent Levi-Strauss’s remorse.
The Economics of Tourism

Critics of tourism as an economic development tool argue that what em-
ployment is created by tourism tends to be in the low-paid service sector, while
an increased leakage of foreign exchange (to import tourist-related products) is
far more common than improved domestic linkages. In addition, critics charge
that tourism development increases land prices and inflation, leads to a gov-
ernment focus on stability at the cost of social change, and is highly elastic,
being dependent on both seasons and outside political factors (Harrison 1994:
252–257; McLaren 1998: 32). International tourism to Third World countries is
seen as a form of “leisure imperialism”, one in which tourists choose destina-
tions as much for their relative cheapness as for their supposed attractions:
Tourists do not go to Third World countries because the people are friendly, they go
because a holiday is cheap there; and that cheapness is, in part, a matter of the poverty
of the people, which derives in some theoretical formulations directly from the afflu-
ence of those in the formerly metropolitan centers of the colonial system. (Crick 1989:
319)
Indeed, tourism is often offered as an example of globalization, since its

continued expansion depends on improved communication and transportation
systems (McLaren 1998: 16–17). Yet, as Winter (2007) has so succinctly noted,
such views often rest on the premise that “globalization” is equal to “Westerni-
zation”, which is clearly not the case, particularly in Asia, where both the
materials of the “global” and the majority of tourists are, if not local, then
clearly regional.
Nevertheless, Dennison Nash portrayed tourism as a form of contemporary
imperialism, arguing that a tourist, at leisure, engages in “experiencing as
toying”, made possible by the fact that “others must serve while the tourist
plays, rests, cures, or mentally enriches himself” (1989: 45). Moreover, tourism
transforms economic relations by simultaneously requiring a one-way process
of cultural adaptation on the part of those toured and creating a class of service
providers (47-48). Tourism today is thus a direct expression of colonial nostal-
gia (Harkin 1995: 652), yesterday’s imperialism under a different name:
The tourist, like the trader, the employer, the conqueror, the governor, the educator, or
the missionary, is seen as the agent of contact between cultures and, directly or indirect-
ly, the cause of change particularly in the less developed regions of the world. (Nash
1989: 36)
Increased tourism, he argues, leads to an increase in the service sector, im-

plying that this reflects a continuation of imperialism by other means. Yet left
unspoken is the presence of a largely unexamined bias within the social sciences
and humanities against service labor. The question that needs to be asked is:
why should the job of a waiter, desk clerk, or bartender be seen as legitimate
labor (indeed, as professions) in Paris or New York, but not in Nassau or
Bangkok?
This bias is found at the heart of classical economic theory, which distin-
guishes between “productive” and “unproductive” labor. According to Adam
Smith, unproductive labor consists of work that “perishes in the very instant of
its production”, leaving nothing durable behind:
The labor of some of the most respectable orders in the society is, like that of menial
servants, unproductive of any value, and does not fix or realize itself in any permanent
subject, or vendible commodity, which endures after that labor is past and for which an
equal quantity of labor could afterwards be procured .... (1909: 271)
As Hannah Arendt noted in The Human Condition, this distinction is also

found in the work of the physiocrats, who distinguished between productive,
property-owning and “sterile” (service) classes (1998: fn, 87). This difference is
one Arendt herself used to make her argument that labor fundamentally differs
from work; as she wrote, “the distinction between productive and unproductive
labor contains, albeit in a prejudicial manner, the more fundamental distinction
between work and labor” (87) because, “viewed as part of the world, the
products of work—and not the products of labor—guarantee the permanence
and durability without which a world would not be possible at all” (94). This
distinction centers on the durability of the products of work versus the biologi-
cal circular logic of labor, which she connects to nature:
While nature manifests itself in human existence through the circular movement of our
bodily functions, she makes her presence felt in the man-made world through the con-
stant threat of overgrowing or decaying it. The common characteristic of both, the biological
process in man and the process of growth and decay in the world, is that they are part of the cyclical
movement of nature and therefore endlessly repetitive; all human activities which arise out of the necessi-
ty to cope with them are bound to the recurring cycles of nature and have in themselves no beginning and
Tourists as Play 27
no end, properly speaking; unlike working, whose end has come when the object is fi-
nished, ready to be added to the common world of things, laboring always moves in
the same circle, which is prescribed by the biological process of the living organism and
the end of its “toil and trouble” comes only with the death of this organism. (ibid, 98;
emphasis added)
Arendt’s distinction carries important implications, particularly at a time

when service jobs have increased in number and importance. She believes that
service labor which is conducted in a timeless state, bound by “the recurring
cycles of nature”, and leaving nothing durable behind, operates at a less
developed level than ‘work’, defined as the production of durable objects. In
simple terms, she privileges not just making over doing, but a particular form of
making, that which transcends the biological life span of the maker:
The distinction between a bread, whose “life expectancy” in the world is hardly more
than a day, and a table, which may easily survive generations of men, is certainly much
more obvious and decisive than the difference between a baker and a carpenter. (ibid,
94)
For Arendt, then, durability, measured by longevity, is the crucial criterion

for distinguishing work from labor and the basis for privileging the former over
the latter. Following this line of reasoning, labor in the form of service (such as
that found in the tourism industry) is not indicative of authentic, in the sense of
“real” production. In other words, a factory that produces sport shoes for
export or cigarettes for local consumption suddenly appears to be a more
genuine form of economic development than a hotel or restaurant catering to
tourists, since the latter merely produces, returning to the argument of Nash, a
class of service providers.
Moreover, by asserting that the tourist, heir apparent of the missionary and
colonial agent, is “the cause of change” in the non-Western regions of the
world, Nash not only ignores the fact that culture, however defined, revolves
around change, but also grants tourism the dubious distinction of being the
greatest threat on the planet today (Crick 1994: 9). Finally, conspicuously absent
from his list of imperialist agents are anthropologists themselves. This illustrates
yet again the paradox of fieldwork: anthropologists are not supposed to be like
other foreign intruders because they dwell in a place; yet cultural disruption and
change on the fieldwork object is supposedly a direct result of other foreigners
who pass through a place. Drawing on Dean MacCannell’s Goffman-inspired
argument, one could argue that those who claim to have gained the furthest and
deepest access to the back stage area of a given culture also claim to have the
least impact on the supposed purity of this culture, while those who remain on
the front door step are blamed for corrupting and debasing this pure culture.
Culture and Tourism

Some critics of tourism have warned against reductions in the aesthetic qual-
ity of cultural products and traditions due to tourist demands, arguing that this
inevitably leads to a process of cultural commodification. They argue that, while
tourism may promote a renewed interest in traditional arts and social practices
among local craftsmen and others, tourist purchases are fueled by a desire to
possess a mark, rather than out of any genuine interest in local cultural tradi-
tions or beliefs (Mathieson & Wall 1982: 165–169). This results in what Shelly
Errington has dubbed “New Age Primitivism”, a situation in which objects
signify a purely imaginary Other, one no longer tied to any specific context,
geographical, historical, or otherwise (1998: 147–149).
This lack of genuine interest carries over into the Other, so that Third
World tourees, pressured to assume the idealized identities tourists expect,
“become other”, resulting in an encounter defined by “reciprocal misconstruc-
tions” (Lanfant 1995: 35–36), or what MacCannell (1994) has referred to as the
“postmodern emptiness” of idealized primitives performing for a culturally-
consuming audience (see also Brunner 1995; Linnekin 1997: 216). This becom-
ing other, a direct outcome of the objectification and commodification of both
culture and ethnicity, has resulted in the mass consumption of identity mer-
chandise by both tourist outsiders and local insiders. As a result, local residents’
view of themselves is distorted by the tourist gaze: given a monetary value,
ritual and tradition become valueless for local inhabitants (Harrison 1994: 243–
244). The “death” of “authentic” primitive art thus appears to be tied to the
pace of the incorporation of “the primitive” into the global economy, a process
which in turn is generally viewed as the root cause of the increased production
of market objects by those toured and aimed at an outside audience (S. Erring-
ton 1998: 268). In its extreme form, this argument describes a world in which
cultures have been replaced by a single monoculture, driven by a process of
“McDonaldization” and “Disneyfication” that transforms everything into a
theme park and makes other, presumably more authentic travel experiences
impossible (Ritzer and Liska 1997: 97–101).
The resulting degradation of local cultural practices and social relationships
has led, in this view, to a host of previously not experienced social ills. In other
Tourists as Play 29
words, the development cure (increased tourism as a means of spurring

economic change) has led to new diseases, such as drug addiction, crime,
pollution, prostitution, and a decline in social stability, as well as to the growth
of “capitalist values” and a “consumer culture” (McLaren 1998: 28). Indeed,
researchers talk about measuring the touristic “impact” on a local culture,
language that brings to mind not just destruction (a bomb impacts on a target)
but also passivity (the other is always impacted upon). In short, local cultures
are presumed to be transformed (for the worse) by contact with a monolithic
West, a presumption which implies the existence of pristine pre-tourist cultures
which can serve as baseline tools for measuring the impact of this touristic
degradation (Hitchcock et.al. 1993: 8; Wood 1993: 63).
Left largely unspoken in these discussions about cultural commodification at
the hands of tourism is the central importance of Karl Marx’s concept of the
commodity in this argument. According to Marx, alienation from one’s own
labor is a result of commodity exchange, since without such exchange a given
commodity would be fully utilized by its producers, presumably for a fixed
purpose. One of the most-cited examples of Marx’s commodity analysis in the
contemporary cultural arena has been Davydd Greenwood’s essay on the
commodification of a local festival in the Basque region of Spain. Echoing
Marx, Greenwood argued that anything sold assumes a commodity form,
including culture. However, because culture does not belong to anyone, the
marketing and selling of cultural productions to tourists is a form of communi-
ty-wide expropriation. When this happens, local culture is “altered and often
destroyed” and “made meaningless” to its people (1989: 173). In the case he
cites, the Spanish Ministry of Tourism’s interference in a local festival had
transformed a locally-grounded, meaningful practice into a public spectacle for
outsiders, which had led to a decline in local interest (178). By transforming a
local cultural practice into first a natural resource and then into a commodity,
the Ministry of Tourism robbed local participants of the meanings they had
used to organize their lives’ in Greenwood’s words, “The ritual has become a
performance for money. The meaning is gone.” (178)
In an epilogue to the second edition of Hosts and Guests (1989), Greenwood
conceded that, contrary to his gloomy prediction, the Fuenterrabia festival had
not disappeared, and had in some aspects actually thrived. Yet he insisted on
framing this issue as one of ‘no change’ versus ‘all change’: “To argue globally
against cultural change is a startling position; to accept all change as good is
mindless and cruel.” (182)
To argue against any form of change is startling. On the other hand, who
actually argues that all change is positive? To do so would require one to not
only exist outside of human relationships, but also to be devoid of a personal
value system, beyond valuing generic change. Greenwood’s underlying concern
is with intrusive tourists. For him, tourism (not colonialism, or imperialism, or
capitalism) is responsible for both “massive alterations in the distribution of
wealth and power” and “equally massive and perhaps equally destructive
alterations in local culture” (179), because of a methodical search for “authen-
ticity” by tourists:
Their thirst for cultural authenticity seems at once a recognition of the supposed cul-
tural impoverishment that has accompanied economic success and world domination
and a reinforcement of the sense of social superiority. While a voodoo dance is fun to
watch, it is important that the process be tightly controlled and that nothing stands in
the way of a return to suburbia some days later. (1989: 184)
We are left once again with Culler’s point: tourists are paradoxically charged
with both an aggressive urge to consume other people’s cultures and a repres-
sive desire to not be exposed to ‘real’ culture. Moreover, they are now the foot
soldiers of globalization, charged with ‘consuming countries’ and seeking to “set
up sedentary housekeeping in the entire world, to displace the local peoples, or
at least to subordinate them in the enterprise to make them the household staff
of global capitalists” (McCannell 1992: 1, 4). Tourism, according to McCannell,
functions as the mediating space between the primitive and the modern, a place
where primitives (the tourees) stage their own savagery and modern cannibals
(the tourists) consume these staged representations in the form of souvenirs,
photographs and video recordings. Western tourists now meet non-Western
hosts in a postmodern emptiness, what he calls an empty meeting ground
(MacCannell 1994: 99–114).
In place of this emptiness, MacCannell offers an alternative: “neo-nomads”
who, “cross boundaries, not as invaders conquering territory, but as passersby
accumulating nothing, and collecting nothing but perishables—impressions and
stories” (McCannell 1992: 4), a view echoed by literary critic Syed Islam. In his
discussion of travel, Islam divides travelers into two groups: the sedentary (those
who travel to seek confirmation of the self in the mirror of the other, as well as
to capture the other in a representative frame) and the nomadic (those who cross
boundaries to encounter the other as a means of “becoming-other”) (Islam 196:
209).
Tourists as Play 31
Both MacCannell and Islam rely on Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s con-
cepts of ‘nomadology’ and ‘deterritorialization’ in their arguments. Deleuze and
Guattari envisioned a future of perpetual displacement in which people
transcend both the physical borders of nation states and the social boundaries
of race, class, gender, ethnicity, and the like (1983, 1987). This ‘nomad thought’
is premised on a desire to become part of the margins that are a product of
their own power positions (Kaplan 1996: 66). That is to say, to speak of
“becoming minor”, as Deleuze and Guattari do, is to theorize the Third World
as a generalized “imaginary space” for those in the center who wish to avert
‘The West’ (ibid, 88). It is thus by definition an activity only available to those in
particular places with sufficient economic resources. Moreover, it is a form of
sleight-of-hand: while implicitly exoticizing non-Western peoples as closer to
nature, ‘nomadology’ simultaneously denaturalizes the individual subject, erasing
race, ethnicity, gender and class, as if these no longer matter. Indeed, such an
idealized deterritorialization ignores the fact that the seemingly empty desert of
the nomad is never empty; in this sense, the process of ‘becoming other’
operates as a form of colonization and appropriation (Kaplan 1996: 89).
These neo-nomads sound suspiciously like Boorstin and Fussell’s heroic
travelers of the past and the Lonely Planet’s backpacking legions of the present:
the flip side of an active/passive, empathetic/exploitative, good/evil binary
distinction between those who travel and those who tour. “Travelers” under
whatever name are the heroes:
Travelers are the visitors who really get to know a culture; they are the guests who stay
for ‘the season’. As tourists take the place of travelers, what will become of the rela-
tionship of the locals and the people from ‘away’? Already we have a taste of the an-
swer: indifference at best. (C. Williams 1998: xxii)
This view has strong currency in tourism literature. As early as 1972, sociol-
ogist Erik Cohen was contrasting backpacking “drifters” and “explorers” with
organized and individual tourists who confined themselves to an “environmen-
tal bubble” (1972: 164–182), while John Vogt argued that backpackers had
deeper and more intensive experiences (Vogt 1976: 28). Traveling in ecological
harmony and making fewer demands on a host culture, backpackers, according
to Vogt, “merge” with a culture, coming to know it without destroying it (39).
Backpackers continue to be heroicized in contemporary tourism literature.
Thus, for example, in a study of backpacker tourism in Australia, the authors
portrayed backpackers as “immersed” within local social relations, “shunning”
tourist haunts in favor of “living with the people” (Loker-Murphy & Pearce
1995: 823). Travelers, freed of clock discipline, are portrayed as creators of their
own journeys, in contrast to tourists who passively follow the logistical deci-
sions of others (Risse 1998: 44–48).
Cohen soon distanced himself from his original thesis, questioning in partic-
ular his previous assumption about the depth and authenticity of traveler
experiences vis-à-vis those of conventional tourists (1982: 191). For example, he
has suggested that most backpackers are young, educated, white and part-time
travelers, usually students and professionals on vacation, not global wanderers
(ibid, 207). Furthermore, far from experiencing more intimate relationships with
hosts, travelers’ encounters with others revolve around commercial exchanges
(ibid, 210–211). Travel thus serves as a training ground for future lives in
consumption and as a simulation of alienation and exile (Hutnyk 1996: 68).
If travel is defined as a voluntary spatial movement from home to an away
for some kind of gain, whether material, spiritual, or experiential, the bounda-
ries that anthropology (not to mention anti-tourists) have sought to erect look
less solid (Clifford 1997: 66). Indeed, it is not at all clear where tourism ends
and academic fieldwork begins, particularly in a contemporary world in which
travel metaphors are found throughout academia (Rojek and Urry 1997: 9-10).
To put this another way, we can say that tourists share, together with explorers,
missionaries, traders, anthropologists, and development workers, a sense of
Mikhail Bakhtin’s exotopy, movement from the bounded region of home to the
region of an Other, and thence a return home (Harkin 1995: 650–651).
Tourists share other commonalities with fieldworkers. Malcolm Crick has
argued that the anthropologist’s fieldwork experience mirrors that of the tourist:
affluent, temporary strangers living outside of their normal time and space
constraints and hence positioned on the margins of the Other, both rely on paid
brokers (tour guides or local research assistants) for access to an inside space in
order to gather material (photos & souvenirs for the tourist, field notes for the
fieldworker) to take home as a means of enhancing personal status. In addition,
both engage in a form of story-telling about others, have narrow interests
formed in advance of their encounters, and, being both affluent and marginal,
are free to depart whenever they desire (Crick 1994: 10; 1995: 212, 217).
Moreover, as many anthropologists have noted, actual experience in the field is
a relatively small part of a professional’s career - just as travel is a relatively
small part of a tourist’s life. Finally, while living in the field, anthropologists are
just as prone to being transformed into local spectacles in their own right as
tourists are (Crick 1995; Dumont 1984).
Tourists as Play 33
This is not to say that fieldwork can be simply reduced to a form of genera-
lized tourism. There are significant differences between these respective
experiences. In addition to differences in the length of stay “in the field”
anthropological experience is metaphoric, in which the subject is framed via the
fieldworker’s total experience (thus transcending the field experience itself), in
contrast to the metonymic structure of tourist experience, in which the subject
of this experience is defined episodically (Harkin 1995: 663). That is to say, an
anthropological fieldworker’s experiences are organized around a research
question that defines his field and thus defines his travels as fieldwork. Yet
crucially, while the fieldworker’s experiences are shaped by a guiding question,
she can never escape from the pre-conceived layers of meaning which travel
with her (as they do with a tourist) into the field.
Simply put, texts go astray. What gets produced in the anthropological
fieldwork process of writing up/down (in the form of field notes, articles,
dissertations, books, remembrances, and lecture notes) makes alterability (in the
form of citation and re-citation) possible, despite the discipline’s turn away
from a public audience. This being the case, the subjects of ethnographers
become the desired objects of other discourses, other travelers, and other times.
Messages may arrive and be received by an intended audience, yet also may not
arrive, since a receiver-reader is always writing what is received. And they may
go astray, with unintended consequences, ending up, for example, as citations in
a Lonely Planet guidebook, bits of gossip on internet travel sites, or new truths
shared at travelers’ cafes.
Such guidebooks fulfill a mechanical function, providing information on the
practicalities of travel: where to stay, what to eat, how much to pay, what to
bring, and what to buy once arrived at a destination. Importantly, however, they
also instruct readers where to go and what places to visit. In this sense, they
function as a form of scripture, or word maps (Foulke 1992: 96) assumed to
provide access to hidden truths (Castañeda 1994: 4). Their contents are the stuff
of classical ethnography: ‘flora and fauna’, ‘geography’, ‘history’, ‘peoples’,
‘language and literature’ and ‘religion’, ‘village life’, ‘arts and crafts’, ‘traditional
music and dance’, and even ‘the impact of tourism’, buttressed by extensive
reading lists which explicitly tie the professional and serious work of academia
to the play of tourism. Because tourism is as much about home as it is about an
away, the sites guidebooks point to are “markers in a touristic universe” (Crick
1989: 328). In this sense, guidebooks lead the blind (Barthes 1972: 76). At their
best they are a different type of ethnography, based on a different type of
fieldwork; at their worst, a facade. Guidebooks, especially those aimed at an
audience that rejects the label of ‘tourist’, promise entry into MacCannell’s back
stages and no personal impact on this.
Thus, for example, the writers of Let’s Go Southeast Asia (2000), promise their
readers the chance to “travel farther and more simply, [and] get closer to the
places and people you want to visit” while urging each of them to “be a traveler,
not a tourist; avoid tourist traps, discover local secrets, and create your own
adventures.” (Richards 2000: ix).
The publishers of the Lonely Planet series of guidebooks state that their goal
is “to help make it possible for adventure travelers to get out there—to explore
and better understand the world” (Finlay 1999: 20). In her Adventuring in
Indonesia guidebook (1997), Holly S. Smith tells her readers that “tourists are
those who bring their homes with them wherever they go and apply them
wherever they see” while travelers “leave home at home, bringing only them-
selves”; by doing so, a visitor will gain access to the ‘real’ Indonesia (xvii).
Finally, Bill Dalton, author of the Bali Handbook (1997), first laments the
“tourism cancer” spreading throughout this island, then reveals to his readers
that, with a little work, an authentic experience can still be found: “On Bali you
can still get as lost as you want,” he writes, in “hundreds of villages” which, he
assures his readers, have not changed since the 1930s (49).
These authors’ collective predicament echoes Lévi-Strauss’s search for a
vanished reality: the more involved in tourism local residents become, the less
genuine do their cultural practices become and hence the less desirable they are
as tourist objects (Bruner 1995: 224). In other words, as ‘they’ become more
like ‘us’, our desire for them diminishes.
Whither Authenticity?
In the background of any discussion of culture-as-commodity and commo-
dification-as-a-destroyer-of-authenticity is an echo of where I began this
chapter, with Claude Lévi-Strauss’ lament for an original pristine moment when
‘They’ (the other, the non-West, the primitive, the noble, the savage, the exotic)
were not like ‘Us’. It is an echo of the search for an alternative to ourselves, a
search grounded in a belief that what we have lost can be found in others less
developed and therefore more natural. It is a search that privileges the spatially
localized and (seemingly) homogeneous as the location of “real” culture.
Anthropologists are joined here in this unending search for a hidden good
nature against which our own degradation can be measured by not just certain
types of travelers, but also by a long line of philosophers and contemporary
Tourists as Play 35
social critics. Martin Heidegger’s location of Dasein within a problematic organic

community, Jean-Paul Satre’s desire for a self-recovery of what has been
corrupted, and the environmental movement’s ode to nature all carry clear
traces of this longing.
From this perspective, tourism corrupts culture, transforms what has been
sacred into the profane, and cheapens the ritualistic, transforming what was
authentic into spectacle. However, these familiar charges obscure a more
complex reality. What is most commonly referred to as the tourist impact
(whether viewed as negative or positive) on others presumes that these others at
some point in the past lived in enclosed spaces of cultural purity, protected
from outside contamination, akin to the inhabitants described in James Hilton’s
Lost Horizon (1933). While these natives have largely disappeared from contem-
porary anthropology, they appear to be alive and not well but facing perpetual
danger in the world of tourism (‘See them before it’s too late!’).
Of course, anthropologists take pains to show that their subjects are not
“static, ahistorical, agencyless, [or] solidly bounded” (Castañeda 1996: 9). We
stress that there is no original moment, no ethnic others who exist in a never-
never land, segregated in both time and space. We remind ourselves that there
have always been others who have come before: missionaries, traders, political
agents, explorers - and yes, tourists (Oakes 1997: 36).
For all of his professed hatred of travel and travelers, Claude Lévi-Strauss’
central dilemma, his belief that communication between cultures is necessarily
corrupting, remains the dilemma of many travelers who do not wish to be
tourists. In his account of his solo travels across central Asia, self-proclaimed
adventure traveler Nick Danzinger sounds much like an anthropologist
wrestling with questions about the ethics of fieldwork when discussing his
desire to take photographs during his travels versus his concern that this action
would harm those he photographed:
And for what would I use these photographs? To whet other foreigner’s appetites for
travel? Too encourage them to intrude on these people’s lives, as I had done? My
greatest moral and ethical dilemma is that, in communicating my own sensations and
experiences, am I not encouraging tourism—thereby precipitating the downfall of
peoples I love? (Danziger 1988: 366)
Laments such as Danziger’s about cultural decay obscure the absence of

distinct and pure cultures; we interact and meet in border zones, those spaces of
contestation in which “nothing is sacred, permanent or sealed off” (Rosaldo
1989: 44-45). However, these are not empty meeting grounds, being devoid
neither of the everyday social relations we call culture nor of power. Instead,
they are fluid spaces saturated with power.
This power takes different forms, but what I am interested in here is the
process by which state authorities have attempted to use tourism as a tool for
state-building by promoting the aesthetic aspects of cultural display while
attempting to control the social relations of culture (Picard 1997: 198). This is
also a process that has become increasingly common within the field of cultural
heritage. In both cases, such a policy rests on a belief that “culture” and
“tourism” can be clearly distinguished, and thus kept separate (Picard 1996:
129–130). This is, as with other aspects of development, a profoundly political
activity that operates as a seemingly technical, apolitical technique (Ferguson
1994). It is to this I shall now turn, examining the growth of a global heritage
industry over the last four decades, a movement led by the United Nations
Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), which has
asserted a need to protect the world’s cultural heritage from, broadly, the
market (in the form of economic development) and, paradoxically, people (in
the form of tourism).
Chapter Three
To Preserve and Protect:

The Intangibles of Heritage
Cultural heritage preservation projects have enjoyed a remarkable success in
the last four decades, thriving globally in both the developed and developing
world under the auspices of the United Nations Educational, Technical, and
Scientific Organization (UNESCO). UNESCO’s official list of World Heritage
Sites, which currently numbers 851 sites in 141 countries, is a powerful symbol-
ic marker of international cultural politics. Indeed, ‘world heritage’ as a concept
is indicative of the emergence and standing of an imagined international
community, one in which proponents can argue that the Taj Mahal, for example,
is not simply a Moghul monument or an Indian heritage site but a cultural
product that ‘belongs’ as much to the citizens of Boston and Sao Paulo as it
does to contemporary Indians. At the same time, many world heritage sites
serve profoundly political purposes in the present. The Buddhist ruins of
Borobodur on the island of Java have been utilized by authorities of the
majority Muslim, secular Republic of Indonesia as a symbol of Indonesian
history, in much the same way as Egyptian authorities have laid claim to the
Pyramids as emblematic of the modern Egyptian republic.
Despite these and other examples, the avowedly apolitical project of world
heritage preservation continues to expand, encompassing both tangible and
intangible culture. In this chapter I analyze the implications of a shift to the
preservation of intangible heritage. In particular, I hope to show the extent to
which this project replicates the salvaging efforts of late nineteenth century
anthropology.
UNESCO and Heritage

The inaugural conference of the United Nations Educational, Scientific,
and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) in 1946 was preceded by years of formal
and informal meetings among Allied representatives and non-governmental
organizations, as well as by the work of the League of Nations. In 1922, the
League had established the Commission of Intellectual Cooperation, which
became the International Organization for International Cooperation in 1926,

charged with the task of promoting peace and tolerance (Dutt 2002: 1–2). After
the Second World War began, the London International Assembly, composed
of exiled officials from occupied countries, was established. This group advo-
cated for a future international educational organization, a proposal also
supported by the British Council for Education in World Citizenship. In
November of 1942 the first Conference of Allied Ministers of Education
(CAME) was held, to discuss education in a post-war Europe (Sewell 1975: 34–
36). Finally, after the end of hostilities in Europe, a larger conference was
convened in London in November 1945, attended by representatives from
forty-four states. At this meeting the broad parameters of what would come to
be UNESCO were agreed upon. The new organization would promote educa-
tion and science in the service of modernization and progress; culture would
serve this goal.
Writing in 1947, biologist Julian Huxley (1887–1975), UNESCO’s first
chair, asserted that the organization’s primary goal was to transcend political
and religious differences worldwide by encouraging a set of global social values
based on secular humanism and an acceptance of biological evolution as the key
organizing principle of life. His global vision was premised on equal respect for
all peoples, the integration of science with other human activities, the “biologi-
cal roots” of human values, and a “truly monistic, unitary philosophical basis”
to the “spiritual and mental aspects of existence” (Huxley 1947: 7–8). To
promote this global vision, Huxley argued that UNESCO needed to identify “a
unified pool of tradition for the human species as a whole” as a way of “leveling
up” those in “backwards sectors” (ibid, 17). UNESCO would work to identify a
universal knowledge base and value system, a point Huxley made clear in the
following statement:
… it will be impossible for humanity to acquire a common outlook if large sectors of it

are the illiterate inhabitants of a mental world entirely different from that in which a
fully educated man can have his being, a world of superstition and petty tribalism in
place of one of scientific advance and unity … further, a satisfactory common scale of
values can obviously not be attained so long as large sections of mankind are preoccu-
pied with the base material and physiological needs of food, shelter, and health. (Hux-
ley 1947:17)
As this quote illustrates, the initial aim of UNESCO at is inception was nei-
ther the preservation of a diverse array of tangible cultural sites nor the celebra-
tion of a wide range of intangible cultural practices, but the identification of a
The Intangibles of Heritage 39
shared set of human values. Starting with his belief that such a shared set of
values was necessary to insure global progress, Huxley identified the basis of
these values in biology and not culture. Promoting these global values was thus
at once an educational, scientific and development problem: ‘backwards’
peoples needed to be educated on proper values to hold, but this could only
happen after their basic physical needs were met. Once the latter was accom-
plished, the future evolution of humanity could be managed through a judicious
reconstitution of social organization (Sewell 1975: 108).
Beginning in the early 1960s, in response to the decolonization movement
and the transformation of its membership that resulted, UNESCO sifted its
focus from Huxley’s universalist project to educate the colonized peoples of the
world in a shared set of global values to an emphasis on cultural cooperation
and economic development, asserting in a 1966 declaration that all cultures had
values that “must be respected and preserved” (quoted in Logan 2007: 35). This
was preceded in 1965 by a declaration at UNESCO’s annual general conference
that the role of heritage sites in the development of tourism as an aspect of
economic development should be studied. Consequently, the 1966 general
conference issued a statement declaring the need to work with the United
Nations Development Program (UNDP) to develop cultural tourism (Sewell
1975: 255).
However, a growing recognition of the potential contradictions between
economic development programs and cultural preservation, particularly among
European member delegations, led to the publication of Our Creative Diversity
(1995), which remains UNESCO’s key policy document on cultural heritage.
This report, prepared by the World Commission on Culture and Development,
defines culture in terms of respect, diversity, freedom, and pluralism. UNES-
CO’s guiding principle is stated as “respect for all cultures whose values are
tolerant of others and that subscribe to a global ethics” (1995:15). A “unity of
diversity” of cultures is premised on a global ethics rooted in the principles of
equality at birth, democracy, human rights, and minority rights (16). The report
defines “cultural freedom” as a group’s right to follow a way of life of its choice
and an individual’s right to practice “alternative ways of living” within a given
group, since such cultural freedom entails “creativity, experimentation, and
diversity” (16). Finally, the report champions cultural pluralism in the face of an
“all-pervasive” global homogenization (16).
This report was not a complete break with Huxley’s advocacy of a global
set of values, but a continuation of this view. Whereas Huxley spoke of the
need for identifying a set of global values and then educating the peoples of the
world in these values, the authors of Our Cultural Diversity provide these values.
All peoples are required to accept equality, democracy, and human rights. If for
Huxley global values were biological and hence organic, the authors of Our
Cultural Diversity ignore this question; these values apparently simply exist.
This UNESCO vision imagines a world of distinct cultural spaces, separate
but equal in their diversity (Eriksen 2001: 132). Such a position, rooted in a
fundamentalist cultural conservationism, implicitly assumes that cultural
borrowings are inherently threatening to existing social practices and beliefs.
Yet the authors of Our Creative Diversity also assert that “universalism is the
fundamental principle of a global ethics” (1995: 46), a claim that explicitly
assumes, like Huxley, a global value system. This claim of a shared universal
ethical framework not only raises questions about what constitutes cultural
pluralism, but also points to two related issues, the origins of such a framework
and the contradiction between a universal value system and the social realities
of actually existing communities. This position harkens back to a binary division
of (local) culture and (global) civilization. This split, rooted in German Roman-
ticism, defines “culture” as the sphere of the local, intuitive and experiential and
“civilization” as that of the cognitive, rational, and universal (Ericksen 2001:
137). Reason is taken to be universal, while “culture” is taken to be particular,
the net result being a problematic encounter between the truth-claims of any
universal position and the subjective perspectives of local social realities and
political positions.
This view of cultures existing as discrete islands is what one finds in the
UNESCO approach to cultural heritage beginning with the 1972 convention
that established UNESCO’s World Heritage List and continuing in the 2001
Universal Declaration on Cultural Diversity and 2003 Convention for the Safeguarding of
Intangible Heritage. However, UNESCO authorities recognize that cultural and
natural heritage can also be simultaneously viewed as cultural and natural
resources. Thus Our Cultural Diversity states that each society must “assess the
nature and precariousness of its heritage resources on its own terms” in order
to decide what uses to make of them in “the spirit of development” (176) while
guarding against allowing cultural heritage to be transformed into a “tourist
resource” (UNESCO 1995: 184).
Underlying this unease with tourism is an assumption that cultural products
and heritage sites must be protected from market forces that might encourage
the commodification of both tangible and intangible cultural forms. For
example, at a World Bank forum on culture and sustainable development,
Milagros Del Corral, director of the UNESCO Publishing House, warned

against relying on market forces to regulate cultural industries. Del Corral called
for “the development of domestic cultural industries by creating an environ-
ment conducive to the promotion of national creativity and cultural diversity in
the marketplace”, the goal being “to ensure that nationals of a country are not
exposed exclusively to foreign products” (1999: 79). Similarly, Valery Patin, an
official with ICOMOS, has cautioned against “heritage supermarkets” and has
argued that “authentic” heritage must be protected against being turned into
models for copies in the pursuit of profit (2002: 139).
How to reconcile a desire for the promotion of “national creativity” with
“cultural diversity”? The former, when practiced, invariably leads to state
control of what counts as both “culture” and “heritage”, and not just in extreme
cases such as in North Korea. Indeed, to assert that “national creativity” in fact
exists and can be promoted implies that one also supports the notion that a
“culture” is a holistic set of agreed upon beliefs, practices, and sets of meanings,
shared by a homogeneous nation. This is the opposite of cultural diversity,
unless by this term one means diversity among discrete cultures and not diversity
within a culture. Moreover, in cases in which a community-wide set of shared
cultural practices might, to some degree, exist, “authentic” heritage in material
form, as in intangible form, necessarily requires copies. Amish artisans produce
Amish furniture, whether for their own use or for sale, not because they engage
in creative bouts of design innovations, but because they faithfully reproduce
copies of what they have learned.
Neither the 1972 Convention nor Our Cultural Diversity discuss the politics
of cultural heritage or the concept of culture itself and the politics involved in
its definition(s). These issues are also absent from both the 2001 Declaration on
Cultural Diversity and the 2003 Convention on Intangible Heritage. Indeed, in the
latter documents, the preservation of cultural practices in general is explicitly
stated to be a key UNESCO goal. For example, “intangible cultural heritage” is
defined as follows in Article Two of the 2003 Convention:
The “intangible cultural heritage” means the practices, representations, expressions,

knowledge, skills—as well as the instruments, objects, artefacts and cultural spaces
associated therewith—that communities, groups and, in some cases, individuals
recognize as part of their cultural heritage. This intangible cultural heritage, transmitted
from generation to generation, is constantly recreated by communities and groups in
response to their environments, their interaction with nature and their history, and
provides them with a sense of identity and continuity, thus promoting respect for
cultural diversity and human creativity. (UNESCO 2003, emphasis added)
This statement implies that all social practices theoretically qualify for pro-
tection and preservation. Yet the same clause recognizes the underlying social
reality of all such practices, namely that these are always in flux and changing.
However, what factors influence these changes are limited to local “environ-
ments”, “nature”, and “history”. Conspicuously absent from this statement is
the key cause of change: human interaction. Societies, communities, and above
all people do not simply interact with their environments or with nature; they
interact with other societies, communities, and people. This core anthropologi-
cal point is ignored. Instead, readers are told that communities change through
a vague process of self-(re)creation in response to environmental and historical
factors, as if communities exist in a world of isolated islands. Yet despite this
purity of culture, this process is also supposed to foster respect for diversity.
While taking a universal template of reason and value as a given, these
agreements implicitly rest on a core basis of difference. This leads to a very
practical question: can a universal history of humanity be rejected without
implicitly accepting all views, values and cultural claims as valid? Can any
cultural claim and position be rejected? If not, then proponents of Confederate
values, Klu Klux Klan (KKK) “cultural practices”, and female foot-binding
have as much right to the preservation of their intangible cultural heritage as do
Amish farmers, Balinese legong dancers, and Javanese wayang kulit puppeteers.
Indeed, both cultural relativists and extreme cultural nationalists embrace this
view of culture as local, intuitive, and experiential, and of intangible heritage as a
matter of taste and not judgment. The role of multiculturalism is crucial in this
process, functioning as a tool for depoliticizing inherently political questions
(Hevia 2001: 220). After all, who has the right to judge witches, or Serbian
claims to a Kosovo heartland, or fundamentalist Mormon claims that polygamy
is a cultural practice and not a legal issue?
The authors of Our Cultural Diversity argue that some cultural practices are
not to be tolerated, such as female genital mutilation, dowry attacks, trafficking,
slavery, and child labor (2001: 30). Dutt (2002), editor of a UNESCO hagiogra-
phy, asserts that diversity should be defended to the extent that practices do not
infringe on human rights (2002: 122–123). Yet this is only plausible if a clear
consensus on what constitutes human rights as well as a clear agreement on the
privileging of (individual) rights over (community) cultural norms exist.
Moreover, if respect for cultural diversity and pluralism are defined as desirable
in themselves, how to define certain cultural practices as insupportable,
particularly when some of these practices have as much or more to do with
what Paul Farmer (2003) has termed the “structures of violence” as they may
have in common with “culture”? Viewing this from the perspective of historical
representation, it is not at all clear how some narratives and representations can
thus be ignored or rejected:
How is it possible to do away with the notion of a universal and readily accessible truth
about the past, while still wishing to condemn those accounts of the past which are
mendacious or calculated to generate hatred or violence? (Layton et.al. 2001: 12)
In short, the underlying premise of UNESCO’s worldview (a world of cul-

tural units co-existing as separate but equal in their diversity) is noteworthy for
its apparent disregard of the social complexity of human life. Humans are born
into a set of structural conditions saturated with material, social, religious,
linguistic and technological inequities, and defining concepts such as human
rights in concrete terms remains contested. Hence, for UNESCO to assert that
“universalism is the fundamental principle of a global ethics” (1995: 46) is of
little use, since this claim implies a shared global value system, which in turn
renders cultural pluralism irrelevant. That is to say, a UNESCO-approved
cultural pluralist is pluralistic only to the extent that his or her value system
mimics the institutional values of UNESCO. These values are in turn not so
much universal as they are a transnational set of values shared across cultural
lines by what Mark Goodale has referred to as a class of “cosmopolitan
elites”(2009). Assuming themselves to be beyond the limits of culture, these
elites fail to recognize the cultural basis of their own (and in this case, UNES-
CO) values.
Finally, to assert that a group or community has a right to live life as it
(communally) chooses while also asserting that individuals within each group
have a right to live differently avoids the practical contradictions between
communal rights and obligations and those of individuals. Such a position is
plausible only to the degree that it defines what counts as authentic life in the
exclusive terms of Western European and North American cosmopolitan
relativism. Such a claim renders culture meaningless as anything other than
aesthetic pleasure and/or performance.
The most recent UNESCO solution to this dilemma is the same solution
proposed in the original 1972 World Heritage Convention. Article Four of the
2001 Declaration on Cultural Diversity states that cultural diversity, being an
“ethical imperative”, is inseparable from human rights, and cannot be used to
violate any human right sanctioned in international law (UNESCO 2001: 13).
Yet, if diversity is such an imperative, how to reconcile the individual basis of

rights as articulated in the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights with
the limits to individual action implied by accepting wholesale cultural diversity
(Logan 2007: 39)? For example, Article 22 states:
Everyone, as a member of society, has the right to social security and is entitled to
realization, through national effort and international co-operation and in accordance
with the organization and resources of each State, of the economic, social and cultural
rights indispensable for his dignity and the free development of his personality.
Yet what might these cultural rights be? And what exactly would be the
“free development” of each individual’s personality? Free from what? Article 36
partly answers this, asserting that:
Education shall be directed to the full development of the human personality and to
the strengthening of respect for human rights and fundamental freedoms. It shall pro-
mote understanding, tolerance and friendship among all nations, racial or religious
groups, and shall further the activities of the United Nations for the maintenance of
peace.
Individuals thus have a right to develop, as long as they do so in a way that

leads them to embrace a set of values identified not with any particular culture
or society but instead with the United Nations and UNESCO: people are “free”
to the extent that they become ‘unesconian’ in their worldview, a term coined
by supporters of Julian Huxley in the early years of UNESCO (Sewell 1975: 89).
Viewed from this perspective, the 1948 Declaration is filled with cultural claims:
all people have a right to a nationality (Article 15); men and women of an
ambiguous “full age” have the right to marry whomever they wish (Article 16);
the family, being the “natural and fundamental group unit of society”, is entitled
to protection by state authorities (Article 16); all people have a right to “rest and
leisure” (Article 24); and all people have a right to individual intellectual
property rights (Article 27). In only two places are cultural rights mentioned.
Article 27 also asserts that all people have a right to “participate in the cultural
life of the community” while Article 29 states that “everyone has duties to the
community in which alone the free and full development of his personality is
possible”. What does it entail to claim that all people have a right to participate
in cultural activities? And how would the duties all individuals have limit their
individual rights? In Clause 2 of Article 29, the authors of the Declaration reply
to this question by defining the limits to freedom “as are determined by law
solely for the purpose of securing due recognition and respect for the rights and
freedoms of others and of meeting the just requirements of morality, public
order and the general welfare in a democratic society”. This utilitarian notion of
rights (individual rights stop only when these infringe on those of another
individual) is accepted without discussion in UNESCO documents (Logan
2007: 38). For example, the 2003 Convention on Intangible Heritage states in Article
Two that “consideration will be given solely to such intangible cultural heritage
as is compatible with existing international human rights instruments, as well as
with the requirements of mutual respect among communities, groups and
individuals, and of sustainable development” (UNESCO 2003). Taking this
claim seriously would disqualify a great deal of human social relations from
protection. For example, any marriage practices that contain aspects of dowry
or brides wealth, or emphasize virginity, or are in any way tied to family
concerns or family arrangments and are not the result of individual choice, or
value marriage within caste, or ethnicity, or for that matter religious belief,
should be condemned.
From the UNESCO perspective, intangible heritage should not only
conform to human rights conventions, embrace cultural pluralism, and support
tolerance for acceptable alternative social norms. It should also respect “sus-
tainable development”, an assertion which is clearly a profoundly culturally
position itself. Political questions of what precisely is “sustainable develop-
ment” and, more importantly, who has a right to take part in this discussion
when the subject is heritage are ignored.
Authenticity, Redux
When applied to cultural habits, norms, and practices, what is referred to in
the heritage industry as “intangible heritage”, authenticity has little to do with
the individuality of the Existentialists. For example, clothing styles, particularly
those classified as “traditional”, are not the products of individual creativity but
of the accumulated past of a particular community. Being profoundly social and
public, these resist classification within an authenticating framework of original-
versus-copy. Instead, as previously mentioned, individual material objects
within this category of traditional clothing are by definition copies: their value as
a culturally marked type of traditional clothing rests on the fact that they
replicate a mythical original that has disappeared into a collective past, one that
often is surprisingly recent. Authenticity in this case demands faithful imitation.
Indeed, originality, in the form of a personal interpretation straying too far from
an accepted template, increases the dangers of becoming inauthentic. Hence in

the popular tourist town of Dali in China’s Yunnan Province, young women of
the Yi minority group dress in “traditional” formal attire while leading tour
groups of Han Chinese, meeting popular Han expectations of what a Yi
minority women is supposed to look like. At the same time other Yi women,
often older, wear a different form of “traditional” clothing, one that includes a
Mao-style blue cap, a vestige of the post-1949 revolutionary years in China.
This being the case, how then to decide what is and is not an authentic so-
cial practice? Leaving aside the larger question of just why such an authenticat-
ing power is required, this turning away from a definition of an original-as-
natural and a copy-as-degrading returns us to the binary opposition of sacred
versus profane, the hallowed and inviolable versus the polluted and debased. To
reiterate, in terms of cultural practices, the copy is not degrading; indeed, it
cannot be, since the longevity of any cultural practice requires faithful replica-
tion. What appears to be degrading is the traveling of cultural practices and their
related objects from the domain of an authentic “real” or genuine sphere to that
of a corrupt, degrading, superficial sphere. When they travel, cultural practices
are presumed to move from a sanctified sphere of wholeness to one of calcula-
tion, in the process displacing use value with utilitarian exchange value (Shephe-
rd 2002).
In his influential essay “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Repro-
duction” (1934) Walter Benjamin blamed industrialization, in particular tech-
nologies that enabled the mass production of consumer goods, for this diminu-
tion of culture. Near-perfect copies of objects have destroyed an original’s value
by erasing its “aura”, which Benjamin characterized as “the essence of all that is
transmissible from its beginning, ranging from its substantive duration to its
testimony to the history which it has experienced.” (1934: 221). Mechanical
reproduction freed the creative arts from tradition, thus becoming more widely
available. Yet this has also served state interests by aiding with the aesthetization
of politics through the transformation of culture into political performance (ibid,
241).
Cultural value, characterized as timeless, intuitive, and transcendent, is con-
trasted with calculative exchange, defined as instrumental and a means to an
end. The former is quasi-sacred and located in the temples of culture, the latter
is mundane and petty and found in the jungle of the market (B. Smith 1988:
125–126). Barbara Smith argues that the anti-utilitarianism resulting from this
desire to separate market exchange and culture is often characterized by a
refusal to even consider the possibility of continuity between these two spheres
of value. This leads in turn to efforts by both conservative social critics and
liberal market critics to protect the seemingly sacred from the “jungle” of the
market (ibid, 129-130). In a paradoxical way, this effort to police value bounda-
ries works to naturalize ‘The Market’ by envisioning market processes as spaces
of barbarity and danger. In other words, humanist concerns about the polluting
effect exchange-value is said to have on a theoretically pure use-value (recon-
ceived as a stable and universal aesthetic value) actually replicates the critique
that market critics level at neoliberal market proponents.
To the issue of knowing when a tangible site or intangible practice has
stopped being authentic, the answer seems quite clear: once ‘The Market’ has
taken hold. This leads us back to the paradoxical dilemmas of tourism. Once a
place becomes a tourist destination, it is seemingly ruined, because, or so it is
often claimed, the consumer demands of tourism reduce authentic places,
people, and practices to a set of performative motifs. But this leads to a second
dilemma: can any turn to a road less traveled or a place off “the beaten path”
lead to something more real?
As I have argued elsewhere, authentic things and authentic practices are
bound up with seemingly authentic places: Chinese food served by Chinese
people in a Chinese restaurant decorated to look “Chinese” seems more
authentic than Chinese food served by a Salvadoran immigrant at a fast food
counter in a suburban shopping mall (Shepherd 2008: 154). But how this
authenticity is measured depends on the criteria used by people to evaluate what
counts as ‘real’ Chinese food and a ‘real’ Chinese restaurant. What counts as
authentic (in the sense of a satisfying experience) depends on the cultural lens
of the seeker, which in turn guides the direction in which authenticity is sought
(Spooner 1986: 223).
An example of this is the clash of perceptions that takes place at the Great
Wall of China. Foreign tourists in search of the ‘real’ Great Wall are often
disappointed with what they take as the ‘fake’ Great Wall they are presented
with by their tour guides at the tourist sites of Badaling and Mutianyu, north of
downtown Beijing. This is because the Chinese Ministry of Tourism has
invested significant resources into transforming these into up-to-date tourist
destinations, complete with parking lots, shops, restaurants, cable cars, and
restored sections of the Great Wall. Tourists who locate authenticity in the past
of China are no doubt taken aback by the touts, buses, and newly cemented
bricks, not to mention the piped-in music and packed crowds of domestic
sightseers: the site has been, it seems, desacralized, ruined, corrupted, and
cheapened. Conversely, the busloads of domestic tourists I have observed on

my own visits to these places seem largely untroubled by such concerns,
concentrating instead on getting suitable pictures certifying their presence at the
Wall. This is because desacralization (and therefore disappointment and unease)
only makes sense when the Great Wall’s authenticity is linked to an unaltered
materiality, so that the Wall’s ‘realness’ is bound up not simply with its age but
also with its natural material decay. Yet there is little evidence that Chinese
visitors to historic sites such as the Great Wall locate authenticity in unaltered
material reality. Instead, the value of a site lies in its historicity. In regard to the
Great Wall, it therefore makes little sense from a Chinese perspective to value a
crumbling section more than a freshly restored section, as many Euro-American
tourists do.
The large majority of tourists within China today are domestic Chinese, and
a majority of the country’s three million foreign visitors per year are ethnic
Chinese. The same is true for Asia in general: Asian tourism is increasingly
dominated by Asians (Winter 2008). Yet tourism theory remains rooted in
assumptions dating back to MacCannell’s assertion that tourism is about
modern subjects seeking a sense of authenticity in the pre-modern world
(Winter 2007: 29). This view completely ignores the practical realities of who
travels in the world and the multiple reasons why.
In my observations of Chinese domestic tourism I have met very few
tourists who have any desire to ride second class buses, or to move beyond the
hospitality zone’s borders, unless necessary. They do not seek ‘authenticity’, in
the sense of discovering a more real place completely divorced from their own
experiences. Nor do they seek sites not yet defined as tourist attractions.
Chinese travel experiences are profoundly social events, and are aimed at
observing and experiencing mingsheng (scenic spots), already-marked sites of
historical or cultural importance (Nyíri 2006). A good trip from this perspective
is not only faithful to the text (i.e. it meets expectations) but is also a social
experience (it is good because it is experienced with known others). This is a
very different travel expectation than the idealized view of travel found in much
tourism theory, or for that matter shared by field-going anthropologists. In fact,
from this perspective, a good Chinese experience is a bad travel experience,
since the point of travel is supposed to be to achieve a moment of insight
spurred by an experience that does not replicate personal expectations but
exceeds these, and does so in a solitary setting, if not literally alone than at least
among strangers. Estrangement thus is often presumed to be necessary if one is
to achieve a worthy experience (‘I’m alone, even if surrounded by lots of people

people whose language I do not understand, and thus can really know myself’).
However, for the former, estrangement is simply strange (‘I’m alone, and bored,
lonely, or both’).
This certainly appears to be the case for the legions of middle-class group
travelers in China, often on packaged tours from the same work units or
companies. As Nyíri demonstrates, these types of travelers are quite content to
consume the social experience of already-marked travel destinations, sur-
rounded by like-minded others. For such travelers, marked sites are not toured
for their uniqueness, or because they are off a beaten path, or not yet discov-
ered. Indeed, desirable destinations are only desirable because they are widely
known and hence popular.
Of course, a rejoinder to this would be to assert that what these people ex-
perience is not travel but tourism. Travel, or so it is sometimes asserted, has the
depth, thickness, and emotional weight that tourism is supposed to lack. Yet, if
this is true, what to make of the fact that self-defined travelers invariably travel
to the same places? A case in point is the well-established backpackers’ trail
through Asia. These contemporary versions of Dean McCannell’s neo-nomads
wander, with the aid of traveler-centric guidebooks, from Goa, India to
Kathmandu, Nepal, Lhasa, Tibet to Xishaungbanna, China, Ko Samui, Thailand
to Bali, Indonesia (and many places in-between) and find their own particular
hospitality zone reproduced in careful detail at each stage along the way: cheap
hotels, bars, restaurants, DVD and CD shops, laundry services, and internet
cafes. And it is in these hospitality zones that anti-tourists, despite their claims
to the contrary, interact not with the local culture they seek but more often
mainly with each other (Van den Berghe 1989: 16). Indeed, in some cases, they
become a tourist attraction in their own right. For years it has been a custom
for Indonesian tour groups to be bused to Kuta Beach on Bali in the late
afternoon, to watch both the sunset and see live foreign “hippies” in various
stages of undress. Likewise, in the backpacker haven of Dali, in China’s Yunnan
Province, domestic tourists are directed to be sure to promenade up and down
“Foreigner’s Street” (yangren jie), since, according to a local guidebook, “almost
all foreign tourists who come to Dali would like to pay a visit to have a nice
cheap meal” (Li 1999: 94). The restaurants along this street that once served
pizza and banana pancakes to European and American backpackers now
depend for most of their business on Chinese tourists who see eating ‘western’
food as part of their Dali experience.
Heritage as a Global Process

Michael di Giovine has argued that the process of being marked as world
heritage transforms a site into a new type of global place, which he refers to as
“heritage-scapes” (2009: 69–70). These sites, he asserts, become “understanda-
ble not just to the locals [sic] but to all peoples” (ibid, 82). This perspective
accepts that world heritage sites are not only global aspects of ‘heritage’, but
also destinations for an international audience. Such a perspective, as I have
argued in this chapter, ignores the political economy of heritage production, the
flattening out of history in this process, and the empirical evidence about
heritage visits, particularly in developing countries. For example, while di
Giovine spends a good part of his book discussing the world heritage status of
Cambodia’s Angkor Wat, he fails to note that the vast majority of foreign
visitors to this site are not cultural tourists or intrepid Euro-American back-
packers but mainland Chinese on package tours, who are not in search of
difference or strangeness (di Giovine 2009: 158) but a cheap tropical holiday
(Winter 2009).
Rather than simply being a global project aimed at rescuing our collective
past, the world heritage movement is a political process that, like all political
processes, rests on an ideological perspective. This perspective is at once
universal and particular: universal in its claims and scope, particular in its
insistence that the intangible and tangible aspects of all peoples’ “cultures”
should be preserved (clearly a cultural value). In a remarkable way, this perspec-
tive is yet another manifestation of the story of our collective fall from a
culturally rich past: ‘see it before it’s too late’ has now been linked to ‘preserve it
before it has changed’.
However, this is not only a contemporary phenomenon. In the following
chapters I turn to two foundational anthropological and tourist sites, the
Indonesian island of Bali and the Kingdom of Tibet. By looking back on a
collection of ethnographies and travel narratives, I examine how these two very
different places came to symbolize Shangri-La for a particular class of Euro-
peans and Americans in the first half of the twentieth century.
Chapter IV
Paradise Found:
Bali, Tibet, and the Quest for Paradise
The first recorded European contact with Bali occurred in 1597 when the
Dutchman Cornelis de Houtman landed on the north side of the island en route
from the neighboring island of Java. His perception of Bali was shaped in large
part by the then-prevailing European view of the world, which held that India
stretched from Ethiopia to Southeast Asia. He would include three engravings
in his later account of this contact: a nobleman being carried by slaves, a king
riding forth to greet him on a white buffalo, and a woman committing suttee.
Taken together, these images portrayed Bali as a South Asian-like, Hindu
monarchy (Vickers 1990: 11–15). In reality, the island was divided into eight
kingdoms, which were in a constant state of warfare with each other and
outsiders (Boon 1977: 13).
Following this initial contact, Dutch East Indies officials on Java showed
little interest in conquering the island. Unlike many other islands in the Malay
Archipelago, Bali produced no spices or other valuable commodities, while its
rugged geography made large-scale plantations unfeasible. Instead, until the
mid-nineteenth century, slaves captured in battle and in raids were the island’s
chief export, averaging around 2,000 per year. Most were sold to Dutch and
Chinese middlemen in Batavia (Jakarta), after which they were re-exported
throughout the Dutch empire (Vickers 1990: 15–21). One of the eight king-
doms on the island, Karangasem, itself became a colonizer, conquering the
neighboring island of Lombok and turning its Sasak Muslim population into
serfs. In sum, far from being an island paradise, Bali was initially viewed by the
Dutch as a dangerous land with few viable resources.
Bali all but disappeared from European accounts until 1812, when Java was
occupied by British forces during the Napoleonic Wars. Thomas Stanford
Raffles, who later established the Crown Colony of Singapore, was appointed
governor and took an immediate interest in Java’s pre-Islamic Hindu past. It
was Raffles who first suggested that Bali was a repository of Javanese culture.
His view of Bali, however, was formed through his contact with Islamic Java,
not through any contact with Bali per se. In his eyes, a noble Hinduism (and, by
extension, the inhabitants of Bali) stood in positive contrast to a servile Islam
and the colonized Javanese (Boon 1977: 20–29).
After the British Crown returned control of Java to The Netherlands in
1816, Bali again reverted in European eyes to a minor outpost of slave-traders.
The first major Dutch military excursion took place in 1844 against the north-
ern Balinese kingdoms of Buleleng and Jembana after a dispute over ownership
of a wrecked cargo ship. A similar incident in 1848 led to the conquest a year
later of both kingdoms. Dutch authorities were not, however, interested in
establishing a new colony. Instead, after the rulers of both kingdoms accepted
nominal Dutch sovereignty and abolished slavery, Dutch forces returned to
Java (de Klerck 1938: 319–325).
As the intensity of global colonization increased in the 1870s, Dutch author-
ities sought to secure those parts of the East Indies that they had previously
ignored as unprofitable or had not been able to defeat militarily. In 1882 a
Dutch governor was installed at Singaraja, on the north coast of Bali, to rule
both Buleleng and Jembana (Boon 1977: 30). In 1894 Dutch forces invaded the
neighboring island of Lombok, ostensibly to free the indigenous Sasak people
from their Karangasem colonizers. A year later, Karangasem surrendered, after
having been defeated by the Dutch on Lombok. The Kingdoms of Gianyar
(1900), Badung and Tabanan (1906), and Klungkung and Bangli (1908) were
conquered in turn, bringing the entire island under Dutch control. But it was
during the short war against Badung and Tabanan that a new view of Bali was
formulated.
Once again, the pretext for a Dutch attack was a dispute over a shipwreck.
Confronted by a large Dutch military force, the royal houses of both Badung
and Tabanan committed puputan, a form of ritual mass suicide. This act, which
would later be romanticized in German writer Vicki Baum’s novel A Tale from
Bali, was described by a Dutch eye-witness in a very different light:
Obviously the population was disgusted with the tyranny of the princes, with the result
that the latter, together with their relatives and followers, sought their own deaths by
committing puputan, i.e. by throwing themselves, according to the custom of the land,
on the fixed bayonets of their opponents. (de Klerck 1938: 468)
Following this conquest, the prevailing European view of Balinese as

savage and dangerous remained, at least initially, largely unchanged. A French
Bali, Tibet, and the Quest for Paradise 53
visitor in 1910 noted “the absolute contempt of hygiene manifested by the

inhabitants”, an “obstinate attachment to Hinduism”, and a “proud, bellicose
temper, only too often excited to madness by the abuse of hemp” (Cabaton
1912: 360–362).
Yet by the 1917 edition of the Encyclopaedie van Nederlandsch Indie (Encyclo-
pedia of the Dutch Indies), Bali was portrayed as a land of timeless art, wisdom
and religion. Indeed, Dutch editors of this volume claimed that Balinese culture
had been nurtured and allowed to flourish by the liberating policies of the
Dutch East Indies government, which had banned gambling, liberated women,
and ended feudalism (Boon 1977: 40–49).
The reasons for this semantic shift had as much to do with colonial politics
as with intellectual interest in Balinese culture. A traditional Bali was seen by
authorities as a bulwark against emergent nationalist, communist, and Islamic
movements on neighboring Java (Picard 1997: 186; Robinson 1995: 14). The
Dutch answer to these political threats was the institution of a policy of
Baliseering, or ‘Balinization’, in 1920. Raffles’ early nineteenth century view was
reflected in this policy: because Bali was a living museum of Java’s Hindu past,
its non-Islamic culture had to be protected from the dangers of East Indies
nationalism, foreign religions, communism, and uncontrolled tourism. Dutch
scholars assiduously focused on tracing these Bali-Java Hindu/Buddhist
connections (Belo 1972: xvi).
Balinization was carried out on two fronts, the political and the cultural. In
1910, caste was officially decreed to be the foundation of Balinese society and
adat (customary) law institutionalized at the local level. Adat law was adminis-
tered by the Brahmana (priest) caste, one of the Twiwangsa (Sanskrit: ‘three
castes’) on the islands. Yet the Brahmana, the Ksatriya (prince / noble) and Wesya
(low noble) castes constituted only around 10% of the total population. The
remainder was Sudra (literally ‘uncaste’). Thus the official legal code was
grounded in the disenfranchisement of 90% of the population. Colonial
authorities also co-opted the eight royal houses of the former Balinese states.
Those who did not agree to work with the Dutch were exiled to outer islands in
the East Indies and replaced with more compliant relatives. In 1929 royal titles
were restored and pensions awarded to these rulers. Finally, in 1938 an elabo-
rate royal restoration was conducted at Besakih, the island’s most important
Hindu temple, after which the Dutch colonial government returned a measure
of self-rule to the ruling families of these eight former kingdoms (Lansing 1995:
113–114).
Culturally, Dutch authorities promoted the retention of traditional architec-

tural forms and clothing styles, banned Christian missionary activity, and
promoted the Balinese language over Malay, which had been the lingua franca
throughout the region since the late sixteenth century. Education authorities
emphasized dance, music and art over such “foreign” subjects as history,
science, and philosophy. These policies were supported by a coalition of
indigenous leaders, Dutch scholars, and, significantly, colonial tourist bureau
officials, each of whom desired a culturally ‘pure’ Bali for their own reasons
(Bourquet 1940: 7). ‘Balinization’ aimed to turn the island into a singular “Bali”
and its people into a homogeneous “Balinese”, conflate these into a naturalized
ideal, and feminize the result. In 1924 G.P. Rouffaer, director of the Bali
Instituut (Institute of Balinese Studies), made this clear with a plea that sounds
remarkably similar to the desires of today’s cultural tourists or legions of Lonely
Planet backpackers:
Let the Balinese live their own beautiful native life as undisturbed as possible! Their
agriculture, their village life, their own forms of worship, their religious art, their own
literature: all bear witness to an autonomous native civilization of rare versatility and
richness. No railroads on Bali; no Western coffee plantations; and especially no sugar
factories! But also no proselytizing, neither Mohammedan (by zealous natives from
other parts of the Indies) nor Protestant nor Roman Catholic. Let the colonial administra-
tion, with the strong backing of the Netherlands government, treat the island of Bali as a rare jewel
that we must protect and whose virginity must remain intact. (emphasis added; quoted in Robin-
son 1995: 41)
The irony is that these Dutch policies, which ostensibly sought to preserve
Balinese culture, brought massive changes to the island. Local authorities were
rendered puppet figures and superseded by a colonial administration; education
was reorganized; caste rights and privileges, formerly fluid, were fixed; foreign
cultural categories such as ‘art’, ‘culture’ and ‘religion’ were superimposed; and
the economic sphere was reorganized around a common currency and linked to
the international market economy (Vickers 1990).
Tibet Revealed
One of the first mentions of Tibet in Europe appears in the chronicles of
Odoric Mattiussi (1286–1331), a Franciscan friar who made a remarkable
journey through most of the known world between 1316 and 1330. Traveling
by way of Venice, Constantinople and the Persian Gulf, Odoric reached
western India in 1321. From India he traveled by sea to Sri Lanka, Sumatra, and
Java, before reaching present-day Guangzhou in 1323. He later visited Fuzhou,

Hangzhou, Nanjing, and present-day Beijing. After three years in the capital of
the Mongolian Yuan dynasty, he returned to Europe overland through
Mongolia and Tibet.
In the memoir he dictated upon his return to Venice, Odoric provided few
details of his travels, focusing much of his attention on food. He describes hens
as white as snow in Fuzhou, great fat geese in Canton, and plentiful, cheap
dates in India. Regarding Tibet, beyond noting that women had two teeth that
resembled the tusks of a boar, he merely asserted that, “this nation has many
other vile and abominable customs, which I refrain from describing, because no
one would believe them unseen”.
Tibet remained terra incognita to Europeans for centuries after this. In Au-
gust 1624 a Jesuit mission led by Antonio de Andrade and Manuel Marques
visited Tsaparang, capital of the western Tibetan Kingdom of Guge, and briefly
established a presence. In April 1626 another Jesuit party led by Estevão Cacella
and João Cabral visited central Tibet and Shigatse. In 1714 Ippolito Desideri set
out for Tibet to reestablish the first mission. He reached Leh in June 1715 and
on March 18, 1717 entered Lhasa, where he remained for five years, studying
the Tibetan language and Buddhism at Sera Monastery. However, he was
recalled by Jesuit authorities in 1721 after the Papacy had accepted a Capuchin
claim that Tibet ‘belonged’ to their order. Desideri subsequently completed his
journey by returning to India through the closed Kingdom of Nepal (Wessels
2005: 13; Bishop 1993: 22).
The extent to which dynastic China exercised control over Tibet revolves
around the issue of sovereignty versus suzerainty. The Tibetan government
position was and continues in exile to be that the Qing Empire (1644–1911)
was a patron of Tibet but never exercised formal control. The current Chinese
government asserts that Tibet has for centuries been subordinate to Chinese
control (Anand 2007: 66–68). What can be said is that since at least the six-
teenth century Tibetan authorities have recognized ties with political powers to
the East. In 1578 Mongolian ruler Altan Khan conferred the title of ‘Dalai
Lama’ on Bsod-nams Rgya-mtsho (1543–1588) abbot of Drepung Monastery in
Lhasa and subsequently the Third Dalai Lama (Tuttle 2006: 67).
After the Manchurian conquest of Ming China in 1644 and the establish-
ment of the Qing Dynasty, the Fifth Dalai Lama accepted an invitation to visit
Beijing and set off in 1652 on a two year journey. Part tributary mission, part
state visit, this journey was also a missionary act, as the Dalai Lama preached,
initiated monks, visited temples, and accepted gifts ranging from thousands of
ounces of silver and gold to rolls of silk and herds of camels and horses (Tuttle
2006: 74–81). This visit established a precedent for future such visits by both
the Dalai Lama and the Panchen Lama, in which these religious leaders inte-
racted with the Emperor in a reciprocal relationship of priest and patron.
Until the British invasion in 1903–04, Tibet was largely inaccessible to out-
siders seeking access from India. This was less a result of a strong central state
as it was due to environmental and technological factors. Quite simply, to
approach Tibet from the west required surmounting forbidding passes that
reached 16,000 feet. Once on the Tibetan plateau, travelers faced weeks of
walking through an empty landscape that offered neither fuel nor food. In sharp
contrast to the inaccessibility of Tibet from India is the relatively easy access
offered from the east. Indeed, for centuries Tibetans have traded and interacted
with Han Chinese, Mongolians, and sundry other Central Asian peoples.
In 1774 and 1783 the British East Indies Company sent trading missions to
Lhasa. Warren Hastings, the first Governor-General of India, viewed these as
strictly commercial enterprises, and Tibet as simply another potential market
(Bishop 1989: 29). However, the border with British India was closed in 1792,
after a conflict between Nepali and Tibetan forces led to the deployment of a
large Qing army. For the next century few travelers succeeded in entering Tibet.
Those who did were stopped and returned to the border without having
reached Lhasa (Procida 1996: 186). The only exceptions were the Lazarist
priests Évariste Régis Huc and Joseph Gabet, who visited Lhasa in 1846
(Bishop 1993: 23), and an Englishman named Thomas Manning, who managed
to visit the city in 1811 after attaching himself to a Chinese military force
(Bishop 1989: 76–80).
After more than two centuries, the ambiguous and fluid relationship be-
tween the Qing Emperor and the Dalai Lama was disrupted when British
authorities in India, worried about possible Russian encroachments, decided to
intervene in Tibet, citing a desire for free trade relations. In response to this
invasion the Dali Lama and his advisors turned to a traditional Tibetan negotiat-
ing tactic, strategic flight. Consequently, in early 1904 the Dalai Lama left Lhasa
in advance of a British expeditionary force and settled for a time in Mongolia.
In 1906 he moved to Kumbum Monastery, located just west of the Chinese city
of Xining in present-day Qinghai Province. In the spring of 1908 he traveled to
Wutai Shan, in Shanxi Province, and in September of the same year arrived in
Beijing for a three month stay. Only in November of 1909 did he return to
Lhasa, a full five years after the British occupation of the city. Within four
months he had fled again, this time to Darjeeling in India, where he sought
British protection against a Qing army advancing towards Lhasa. In hindsight,

British intervention in Tibet had two notable side effects. First, it forced Qing
authorities to try to assert greater formal control over Tibet, leading to the 1910
invasion. And second, it turned British authorities into gatekeepers on Tibet’s
western borders (Tuttle 2005: 44).
The subsequent 1914 Simla Accord between the United Kingdom, the
Qing Empire, and representatives of the Dalai Lama formally recognized
Chinese suzerainty over Tibet, established borders between the parties, and
guaranteed limited trade rights for British subjects in Tibet. However, the
collapse of the Qing dynasty in 1911 and the subsequent civil conflict, Japanese
invasion, and finally civil war enabled Tibetan authorities to assert their inde-
pendence from 1913 until 1951. This independence was never formally recog-
nized by any other country (Anand 2007: 74). Nor was there much attempt by
the Lhasa government to cultivate any sort of citizenship basis within Tibet.
While state institutions were created, such as an army, a proto-bureaucracy, and
symbols such as an anthem and a flag, social structures remained unchanged,
and regions outside of central Tibet remained largely independent of Lhasa
(Tuttle 2006: 51–53).
Tibet Imagined
Remote, high, and exceedingly difficult to reach, Tibet was unique not only
because it remained one of the few places not conquered or colonized by
Europeans but also because for a long time it was geographically unconquera-
ble. While if approached from the east Tibet was quite accessible, from the
southwest frontier along Nepal, Sikkim and Bhutan, a stark geographic shift
from sub-tropical valleys and alpine forests to forbidding snow passes and a
high, desolate plateau devoid of large settlements made travel extremely
difficult.
Initially, it was not Tibetan Buddhism that attracted travelers. Until the late
nineteenth century Tibetan Buddhism was widely viewed by Europeans and
North Americans as sexually deviant, overly superstitious and exceedingly
corrupted (Bishop 1989: 127; Procida 1996: 202). Instead, a journey to Tibet
appealed to a Victorian emphasis on character building through physical effort
and adventure (Bishop 1993: 30–32). This in turn was related to a radical shift
in European perceptions of nature, particularly mountains. The nineteenth
century saw the emergence of a new wildness aesthetic, spurred by the work of
art critic John Ruskin in England and environmentalist John Muir (founder of
the Sierra Club) in the United States (Bishop 1989; Nicholson 1959). If until the
eighteenth century mountains were physical obstacles that were dangerous to
both one’s health and one’s soul, by the late nineteenth century they had
become repositories of sublime feelings and spiritualism, and hence desired
destinations for tourists and adventurers alike. This change was not simply a
matter of taste; it was connected to changes in astronomy, geology, theology,
geography, and other disciplines (Nicholson 1959: 3).
But it was interest in various forms of spiritualism in response to the revo-
lutionary social and economic changes of the Victorian era that made Tibet
special. If for some Europeans Tibet was desired in the way that, say, the North
Pole was (as a not-yet conquered place) for others it became desirable for a very
different reason: as a repository of the West’s collective past and future. Like
Bali, Tibet as an imagined place of savagery and danger soon became re-
imagined as something other. Unlike Bali, this something other was not a
sensual paradise on earth but an otherworldly land of wisdom. This transforma-
tion of a place few people had actually visited owes a great deal to the life and
adventures of Madam Blavatsky.
Elena Petrovna Gan was born in 1831 in Tiflis (Tbilis), Georgia to a
prominent Russian family. Her grandfather was a provincial governor, her
mother a successful novelist, and a cousin later served as Russian prime
minister. In 1848 she married the vice-governor of Erevan, in Armenia, but
returned home after three months. Her grandfather then sent her to Odessa,
but she ran away and took a boat to Constantinople. After working as a
companion for a Russian countess on a visit to Eygpt, Blavatsky spent several
years wandering the world. During this time she visited England, Canada, the
United States, South America, India, Java, and Singapore (Meade 1980: 64–67).
In 1856 she returned to India and visited Kashmir and Leh. In her
autobiography she claimed to have later returned to the East and lived in Tibet
from 1868 until 1870. In reality, however, she spent this period living with an
itinerant opera singer named Agardi Metrovitch (ibid, 71). In the late 1860s the
couple settled in Odessa, where Blavatsky failed in several business ventures,
including an ink shop, an artificial flower stand, and a wood import business. In
1871, Metrovitch was hired by the Cairo Opera House. But on July 4, 1871, the
ship the couple was traveling on exploded off the Greek island of Spetrai,
killing most passengers, including Metrovitch. Broke and alone, Blavatsky
returned to Odessa and eventually reached New York in 1873 (ibid, 92–93).
In New York she gained a reputation as a spiritual medium and became
friends with Henry Steel Olcott, who would later establish the Theosophical
Society. With the support and encouragement of Olcott, Blavatsky wrote Isis
Unveiled: A Master Key to the Mysteries of Ancient and Modern Science and Theology in
1877. In this and her later books Blavatsky described encounters with “The
Great White Brotherhood” ruled by “The Great Teachers of the White Lodge”
(Lopez 1998: 50). She claimed to have met the grand master of these teachers,
whom she called “Koot Hoomi”, during her purported years living in Tibet.
She described these teachers as a select group of Indian sages who had been
charged with keeping safe all of the world’s accumulated knowledge (Meade
1980: 170). She also claimed to have the power to maintain communication
with these sages through telepathy (Blavatsky 1975: 609).
In the Secret Doctrine (1888), Blavatsky described a reincarnate universe of
seven evolutionary cycles, each of which was characterized by a “root race”.
Preaching an eclectic mixture of evolutionism, Social Darwinism, spiritualism,
and a veneer of Buddhism and Daoism, she wrote that the world was in the
third of these cycles, and history would end with the triumph of the Aryan race
(Lopez 1998: 53).
In her writing, Tibet plays a crucial role, as site of the “Great Brother-
hood”. But just as important is the fact that Tibetans play no role in her view of
the world. In fact, they had no role, since they did not qualify as Aryan peoples.
This re-imagining of Tibet as an isolated outpost of wisdom and knowledge
reached its logical conclusion with the publication of James Hilton’s Lost
Horizon in 1933. Still widely read as a description of Shangri-la, Lost Horizon tells
the story of four passengers hijacked in 1931 from a British base in present-day
Pakistan by a mysterious Chinese pilot. Their plane crashes somewhere in the
Himalayas and the survivors are taken to a nearby lamasery. These passengers,
Conway, a British diplomat, Mallinson, his military attaché, Miss Brinklow, a
missionary, and an American businessman named Barnard, are surprised to
discover this lamasery, named ‘Shangri-la’, has central heating, indoor plumbing,
an enormous library, and a kitchen staff that prepares elaborate international
cuisine. The high lama turns out to be a Belgian Capuchin monk named
Perrault who is over two hundred years old. Finally approaching his death, he
had arranged Conway’s kidnapping because he wanted him to become the new
high lama. The lamasery is filled with the greatest minds of Europe and, to
some extent, China. It is supported by a community of peaceful Tibetans who
inhabit the valley below. When books, musical instruments, and other luxury
items are needed, the residents send off a mission to the outside world, supplied
with gold from a mine the lamasery is built upon.
Lost Horizons was the first mass market paperback book (1939), was made
into two films (1937 and 1973), and was the source of the original name
(Shangri-la) for Camp David, the Presidential retreat in rural Maryland estab-
lished by Franklin D. Roosevelt. Since its publication, ‘Tibet’ and ‘Shangri-la’
have become synonymous. Yet what is perplexing about the utopia Hilton
describes is how closely tied everyday life is to the modern world left behind.
After all, it is a place of anonymous servants, central heating, and indoor
plumbing (Anand 2007: 39–42). Far from being a utopia, this Shangri-la is the
opposite, a dystopic, isolated society ruled by a group of secretive foreigners
who do not work, smuggle gold, and use drugs to maintain their youth and
vigor (Masuzawa 1999: 544). Far from being a universal utopia, what Hilton
describes was a more-perfect colonial regime, one in which the privileged
classes live forever and have no fear of a rebellion by their colonial subjects. If
its reason for existence was to serve as a universal storehouse of knowledge,
what is most striking is the absence of anything Tibetan.
In fact, the only Tibetans depicted in the novel are porters and farmers,
among whom were women who, the American businessman Barnard discov-
ered, were quite willing to have sex with him. As Masuzawa argues, Lost Horizon
can be usefully read as a companion to Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. If for
Conrad a pursuit of a more natural life outside of modernity leads only to a
primitive state in which modern morality has no role, for Hilton a more
primitive state supports an escape from modernity that, paradoxically, aims to
recuperate not a natural state of being but a more civilized, pre-modern world.
This projection of a longing for a pre-modern world onto Tibet became a
common theme of writing about Tibet, particularly in the decades between the
two world wars. Much like in Bali, Tibet increasingly functioned not as a blank
space to fill on an imperial map but as a “museum of a fantasized past” (Bishop
1993: 41), one imagined to be separate from the world of the present. Yet in the
act of visiting Tibet these travelers had to confront the loss of this fantasy. By
the 1930s Lhasa was a destination, not a mystery, a fact the travel writer Robert
Byron wrestled with:
Tibet, for us now, is no longer the “land of mystery”, a piece of dark brown on physical
maps, gripped by an unholy hierarchy, and possessing no amenities of life beyond de-
vil-dances and butter statues … henceforth it exists on the map of our intelligence as
well as of our atlas. (1933: 238–239)
Arrival in Paradise
The port of Buleleng, on the north coast of Bali, was the main arrival point
for ships from Java and elsewhere in the East Indies archipelago, and thus
foreign visitors’ first experience of Bali. It also seems to have been a major
disappointment. Miguel Covarrubias described it as city filled with “eternal tin
roofs and dilapidated Chinese houses”, “scraggy coolies”, “emaciated Chinese”,
and “Arabs with forbidding black beards” (1937: xvii). Moreover, he com-
plained that the people were “ugly and unkempt” and the women lacking:
“instead of the much publicized beauties, there are only uninteresting women in
not very clean blouses.” (xviii).
Most foreign visitors in search of paradise quickly undertook a journey
away from the north coast (which had been under Dutch influence since 1849),
over the central mountains, and down to the newly conquered south. This
spatial journey (away from the Dutch and a port city filled with the flotsam of
colonialism) was matched by a perceived temporal journey, away from Modernity
and the West and back to an untouched and authentic Bali. Hickman Powell,
fleeing Buleleng as soon as he had arrived, found his Bali a few hours away, on
the road to Denpassar: a woman walking alone, as her “bronze bowls of maiden
breasts projected angular, living shadows” (1930: 6). But she did not remain
unique for long: the road to the “teeming, pregnant south” was soon “stream-
ing with girls” (8). Similarly, Louise Koke described people walking single file
along the motor road to the south in this way: “above the waist, most were
uncovered and the young women’s breasts, with dark, pointed nipples, stood
out in maternal fullness” (1987: 19). Similarly, K’tut Tantri wrote of “golden-
skinned, graceful little men and women … the women innocently displaying
their large, firm breasts” (1960: 18). For all of these expatriate writers, both
male and female, the feminine body symbolized Bali. As such, it needed to be
protected from outside pollution, a position similar to the goals of official
Dutch colonial policy.
All travelers eventually arrived at Denpassar, the new Dutch capital, which
they also found disappointing. For Powell, Denpassar was bad because “the
ways of whites were coming in” (1930: 191). Covarrubias characterized the city
as a “glorified Buleleng”, filled with “stolid, bourgeois Hollanders” who spent
their time playing tennis and drinking beer, Chinese shopkeepers, and Indian
merchants (1937: xx). The latter, in particular, drew his ire, as he described them
as “dressed like burlesque comedians in incongruous tall fezzes, embroidered
slippers, pink sarongs, and European vests worn over shirts with tails out,
bargaining excitedly with husky bare-breasted Balinese women” (ibid). These

shopkeepers do not simply have bad taste in their dress; for Covarrubias they
illustrated the central problem of modernity, its power to fragment and dislo-
cate people from place and hence to destroy authentic life. Not just out of
place, these shopkeepers in his mind had no place in Bali. For K’tut Tantri,
Denpassar was filled with “shabby Arab and Chinese shops” and “Dutch
houses which were neat and drab and stiff and all alike” (1960: 18–19). Colin
McPhee complained that the Bali Hotel, besides being expensive, was filled with
tourists (1947: 17), while Louise Koke described it as “white and antiseptic, like
something out of Miami Beach” (1987: 20).
The solution was to search for a more genuine Bali, one without foreigners.
Covarrubias moved to the Denpassar suburbs where he rented a house, bought
a used Chevrolet, and hired a cook and a driver. McPhee and his wife, anthro-
pologist Jane Belo, rented a house in the nearby village of Kedaton before
having a house built in the hills, in the village of Sayan. Powell, with the help of
André Roosevelt, became a long-term guest at Walter Spies’s house in Ubud,
which had a grand piano and an in-ground swimming pool. Vicky Baum would
later do the same, as would Beryl de Zoete and, for a time, anthropologists
Margaret Mead and Gregory Bateson. Eventually, Mead and Bateson settled in
the village of Bayung Gedé because they believed it to be untouched by
“intrusive” outside cultural elements yet conveniently just a twenty minute walk
from a motor road (Bateson & Mead 1942: xiii; Mead 1977: 167). They com-
missioned a large house, the size of ten village homes, with a veranda overlook-
ing the village (Mead 1977: 166–168). Louise and Bob Koke moved from the
Bali Hotel to a small local hotel, the Satria, before renting a house near Denpas-
sar. K’tut Tantri left Denpassar in a car she had bought and vowed to drive
until she ran out of gas. Conveniently, she managed to do so at the front gate of
a former rajah and his European-educated son. She took a new name, dressed
in local style, immersed herself in the study of Balinese and Malay, and even
dyed her red hair black. “I was born and bred a white woman” she would later
write, “and then ... quite deeply ... I became a Balinese” (1960: 28).
For travelers to Tibet, Lhasa was the ultimate destination, largely because it
had been inaccessible for so long. The British military force that reached the city
in 1904 encountered what one officer described as an “Asian Mecca” that
attracted pilgrims from throughout Central and Eastern Asia (Waddell 1906:
343). It was also an extremely dirty city; according to Waddell, even the wealthy
classes lived “in a curious mixture of squalor and dirt” (350), a point reiterated
by other travelers.
With no one to negotiate with (the Dalai Lama having fled in advance), the
British forces amused themselves by playing polo and football, touring the
Potala Palace and Jokhang Temple, and shopping. Waddell grumbled that little
in the way of “curiosities” were available, not because of pillage but because
British officers had quickly bought up everything of interest. Industrious
Tibetan merchants took to visiting the British camp, taking orders for souve-
nirs, and then searching in private homes for these objects (357).
William McGovern, an American anthropologist, visited Gyantse in 1922,
but was refused permission by Tibetan authorities to continue to Lhasa.
Determined to reach “the sacred city of the Buddhas”, he disguised himself by
growing a beard, staining his skin with a concoction of iodine and walnut juice,
and traveling as a servant (1924: 61–64). Alexandra David-Neel, a French
woman, did the same, coloring her hair black with ink, darkening her skin with
charcoal and cocoa, and dressing as a Buddhist nun. Like McGovern, she
visited Gyantse and Shigatse, but was prevented by British officials from
traveling any further. She subsequently traveled by sea to China via India,
visited Kumbun Monastery in western China, and walked, together with a
young Tibetan monk, from the Chinese frontier to Lhasa. Once there, she took
it as her right to sight-see:
It was my well-won reward after the trials on the road and the vexations by which for
several years various officials had endeavored to prevent my wandering in Tibet. This
time I intended that nobody should deprive me of it. (1927: 258–259)
By the 1930s, foreign travelers in Tibet followed a standard route, from the
Sikkim border, via a series of British rest houses, to Gyantse, where a British
trade representative was based along with a detachment of Gurkha soldiers. The
journey was as predictable as the scenery. Indeed, traveler’s accounts are so
formulaic that Robert Byron could joke about the inevitable description of the
long and tedious journey across a barren landscape, advising his readers that he
was about to “enter upon that stage familiar to all readers of Tibetan travel
books, in which the desolation of the country overwhelms all other impres-
sions” (1933: 238). For Byron, Tibet was a collection of bungalow stays,
monotonous walking, and food. He described in careful detail the meals he
shared with his two traveling companions, ‘G’ and ‘M’: dinners of steak and
kidney, plum pudding and tins of peaches, and breakfasts of sausage, eggs, and
scones (222). In Gyantse, they ate goose with a tin of sweet corn (247). In a
non-descript village called Kala, they bartered with a man for a gazelle haunch,
“which was excellent”, Byron wrote in his journal, “with French beans and
mushrooms” (246).
In Search of the Other

Hickman Powell relates how Walter Spies had first visited Bali as a traveler
in 1924 and returned four years later to settle: “He would dwell with these
people, learn their secrets of life” (1930: 229). Vicky Baum assured her readers
that she had seen the “real and unspoiled Bali instead of merely the modernized
and tawdry fringes which tourists skirt in comfort” (1935: vii).
What might this “real” Bali have been? And, if we accept the idea that a
more real Bali has existed in the past, where does this leave the Bali of today
and its inhabitants? Are they “less real” Balinese? Living examples of ‘postmo-
dern primitives’, staging their own re-presentation of their own mythical past
for the consumption and pleasure of modern-day cannibals (tourists) in the
postmodern emptiness that is today’s travel industry, an empty meeting ground?
(McCannell 1994: 99–114)
Either is possible, but each depends on the premise that something more
authentic did, indeed, exist at some point in the past. Yet this raises a question:
more authentic than what? Was the Bali of 1931 more authentic than the Bali of
1941, or the Bali of 2010? As already noted, claims of authenticity (or the lack
thereof) presuppose the existence of a benchmark of against which one version
of reality can be measured. But if social action, norms, and practices are fluid
and in flux any chosen benchmark is implicitly unstable. Thus the Bali of 1931
which Miguel Covarrubias was intent on preserving might be viewed as more
authentic than the Bali of today, if 1931 is taken as an authentic marker of
authenticity. But can the same be said if the Bali of 1931 is held up to the Bali
of 1910? Are the twiwangsa (the small minority of Balinese who belong to a
caste) authentic Balinese, even though they claim direct descent from Javanese?
Or, for that matter, are Balinese religious practices Balinese, or South Asian?
One can take this to extremes. A number of Bali Agra (Balinese agra, or
Indonesian asli, original) villages still exist on the island. Balinese residents
generally agree that these people are descended from Bali’s pre-Hindu inhabi-
tants. Should they therefore be considered more authenticate than Hindu
Balinese?
In Lhasa during this same period, William McGovern reports, the Dalai
Lama regularly received letters from Europeans and Americans, seeking access
to his secret knowledge:
For the most part such persons assured his Holiness of their rigid adherence to his
creed, their acceptance of his divinity, and their knowledge of the fact that he is a ma-
hatma, one of the great hidden personalities who direct the course of evolution all over
the world. The writer then adds that as he is different from the average materialistic
Westerner he would be pleased if the Dalai-lama would permit him to come to Lhasa
and study the ultimate mysteries in the home of the secret doctrine. (McGovern 1924:
436)
This fascination with the Dalai Lama and Tibetan Buddhism was starkly
different than the initial British encounter with Tibetan religious practices in
1904. After touring the Jokhang Temple, the most sacred Tibetan religious site
in Lhasa, Colonel Waddell described the Buddha it housed as “repellant” and of
“very rude workmanship”, far inferior to what he had seen in China (1906: 369).
“A revolting and bizarre spectacle of barbaric idolatry”, it seemed to him more
like a “glaring demon in a web of chains, than an effigy of the pure and simple
Buddha” (ibid, 370). As for whom Waddell described as “the young priest-god”
and “Tibetan pope”, even Alexandra David-Neel, one of the few travelers in
Tibet who claimed any sympathy for Tibet religious practices, was disappointed
with the contrast between the “haughty” appearance and “suppressed bore-
dom” of the Dalai Lama in public with what she described as the “ignorant,
listless crowd, watched by the brutal clerical policemen surrounding him” (1927:
283).
The isolation of both Bali and Tibet was such an accepted fact that evi-
dence to the contrary could be noted with little or no comment. Covarrubias
describes the eclectic assortment of objects he had seen on display in Balinese
homes, including postcards of New York City, light bulbs filled with colored
water, pictures of Queen Wilhelmina, and painted plates depicting Alpine snow
scenes, as “objects prized as exotic … as we prize their discarded textiles and
moth-eaten carvings” (1937: 93). McGovern noted without comment the
communication ties Lhasa had with the rest of the world. Mail traveled by a
pony postal service between Lhasa and Gyantse, where it was transferred to the
British imperial mail service and forwarded to India. A telegraph wire also
connected Lhasa with Gyantse, and to Darjeeling (1924: 433).
Covarrubias also noted the syncretism of Balinese temple carvings and cul-
tural products, particularly a now-famous temple depiction of a bicycle,
motorcar, and a pair of Dutchman drinking beer (Covarrubias 1937: 185–186).
Several writers also made note of the popularity of the djanger dance, a hybrid
dance form that developed in the mid-Twenties and combined elements of
Malay Opera, American jazz, and burlesque. Syncretism, in fact, was held up as
a defining feature of Balinese culture, and was contrasted against the degrading
effects of copying practiced in other Asian societies. In a letter to a friend
describing the relative comforts of fieldwork in Bali, Margaret Mead added,
“...but all this apparent “civilization” is on the surface ... and Bali seems to have
learned through a couple of thousand years of foreign influences just how to
use and how to ignore those influences ... meanwhile an anthropologist is
presented with an unprecedented situation—quick, easy transport between
dozens of versions of the culture” (Mead 1977: 160–161).
Powell drew attention to these different cultural styles while simultaneously
lamenting the cultural degradation of “the East”:
One frequently finds in the East, depressingly, that natives are imitative, seizing espe-
cially on American dress, jazz and dancing. But the Balinese does not imitate, but when con-
fronted with something strange, observes it and turns it into something peculiarly his own (1930: 60)
[emphasis added].
Similarly, Covarrubias wrote that, “All sorts of influences from the outside,
Indian, Chinese, Javanese, have left their mark on Balinese art, but they are
always translated into their own manner and they become strongly Balinese in
the process” (1937: 163). For Covarrubias and Powell, certain cultural borrow-
ings in Bali were good because these were borrowings from non-western
sources, while conversely such borrowings in other areas of “The East” were
corrupting because these were borrowings from “The West”. This was the case
for Marco Pallis in Tibet. He ridiculed cultural mimicking among Tibetan elites,
citing with contempt “the crudest examples of jazz or crooning, blared out by
strident bass bands or bleated by voices maudlin with vibrato” (1949: 368).
Unlike Covarrubias, Pallis did not find any amusement or irony in encountering
a postcard of Kent on an abbot’s altar in Leh or a wealthy man’s display of
British crockery in Ladakh; these were simply evidence of the degradation of
Tibetan traditions. He also lambasted the influence of European and American
importers on the domestic carpet industry in China, where manufacturers had
shifted to using chemicals in place of vegetable dies and had taken to producing
suitably oriental designs and motifs. But he reserved his strongest ire for the
Indian producers of inexpensive carpets exported to Tibet. “These textiles
transcend the limits of ugliness,” he wrote, “they deserve to be banned as moral
poisons as surely as cocaine” (1949: 363). To combat this, he proposed that the
Tibetan government ban machine-made or chemically dyed carpet imports, in
order to help preserve authentic ritual practices (ibid, 265).
Time & Space

The erasure of calendar time was a common characteristic of early twentieth
anthropology, thereby denying coevality to those under scrutiny. Fabian (1983)
has argued that anthropologists tended to use a timeless present tense in their
descriptions of an Other, a tendency which reinforces the hierarchical relation-
ship between the observer, his/her audience and the observed that lies at the
heart of Michel de Certeau’s scriptural economy (1984). A “customs and
manners” discourse of travel narratives fixes the subject in this timeless present,
“where all ‘his’ actions and reactions are repetitions of ‘his’ normal habits”
(Pratt 1985: 120).
This practice is evident in these texts about Bali. Jane Belo wrote of a “static
traditional culture” that provided “a desirable background against which well-
balanced personalities may be reared” (Belo 1935: 110). According to Covarru-
bias, the island was actually a “primitive agrarian commune in which every
village was a socially and politically independent little republic, with every
citizen enjoying equal rights and obligations” (1937: 262). Balinese, whom he
described as uniformly “easy, courteous and gentle, gay and witty,” were at one
with nature:
No other race gives the impression of living in such close touch with nature ... the
slender Balinese bodies are as much a part of the landscape as the palms and the bread-
fruit trees, and their smooth skins have the same tone as the earth and as the brown
rivers where they bathe. (ibid, 11–14)
Hickman Powell asserted that every Balinese was an artist, “the greatest of
the age” (xi), and the island itself was a Garden of Eden: “It was good to be
here among the children of Adam, still in their garden, who had not eaten from
the tree of knowledge of ugliness and beauty” (1930: 258). For Franklin Knott,
Bali was a “self-contained garden of Eden, where life is easy and food plentiful”
(1928: 346). Maynard Williams described the island as a place where nature
made “misery uncommon and famine unknown”, and a “subtle harmony”
existed between an artistic people and gentle nature (1939: 313).
Margaret Mead and Gergory Bateson characterized village life in Bali as a
place where Balinese character, “cut off from inter-personal relationships ...
[exists] in a state of dreamy-relaxed association” (1942: 47). “Ordinary” Balinese
life, which they believed was dominated by shyness, inhibition, and extreme
introversion, closely resembled the life of a schizoid (xvi). They argued that the
people of Bayung Gedé moved through life ignorant not just of an outside
world but also of the physical world around them. Thus Mead would write in a
letter home, “They [Bayung Gedé residents] are essentially peasants, afraid of
anything they do not understand, a striking contrast to the New Guinea natives,
who will tackle anything. They go from their walled village to their fields,
driving their cows before them, and come home again, ignorant of the very names of
the bushes and trees they have passed on the way.” (1977: 170; emphasis added). A
rupture appears here: a Bali of dream-like artists and musicians existing within
nature stands in stark contrast to a Bali of peasants existing in a dream-like state
seemingly divorced from nature. Yet in a 1942 article, Mead offered a glowing
portrait of a Bali in which all shared in art and performance, thus erasing the
gaps between performer and audience, professional and amateur, and process
and result found in the United States (Mead 1942: 341–349).
In 1990, anthropologists Gordon Jensen and Luh Ketut Suryani returned to
Bayung Gedé. According to Madé Kalér, Mead’s research assistant in the
village, Mead and Bateson never understood how the villagers interpreted them
and their presence. Because of her physical appearance and dress, Mead was
assumed by some to be an emanation of the demon witch Rangda. Others
associated her with the Dutch. This led villagers to interact with her via lek, a
form of embarrassment akin to stage fright, manifested when forced to deal
with a person who does not fit into any logical place within Balinese social
order. Taken together, these attributes, along with the constant presence of her
camera, had an enormous impact on her interpretive claims about a supposed
Balinese lack of emotional expressiveness. In other words, the residents of
Bayung Gedé seemed to be extremely shy, inhibited, and introverted not
because they inhabited a world of schizophrenia, but because they had to deal
with an apparently supernatural being who had suddenly taken up residence
(along with her camera-toting husband) among them (Jensen & Suryani 1992:
50).
Certain images continuously appear in these early twentieth century narra-
tives, examples of what Michel de Certeau called “circum-scriptions”, literally
the act of writing around, in the sense of marking out the limits and boundaries
of an action (1988: 212). In this case, the written and visual record of these
visitors’ Bali establishes the parameters of a scriptural economy that in turn
defines what Bali is and who the Balinese are. These images include the légong
and kajak dances, gamleon orchestras, cremation ceremonies, terraced rice fields,
and women carrying temple offerings and babies. Dominating all was the
repeated image of the female body as a signifier of all that these artists and
writers imagined Bali was to be and what, from this perspective, ‘The West’ was
not: natural, harmonious, a people which had not yet, in the words of Hickman
Powell, “eaten from the tree”.
Travelers to Tibet, in contrast, paid almost no attention to Tibetans them-
selves. When they described people, superstitious and naïve behavior were their
main subjects. Nikolay Przhevalsky, a Russian explorer and scientist, led an
expedition in 1879 that came within one hundred miles of Lhasa before being
forced to turn back. He described Tibetans as both childish and primitive, with
“souls like soot”, and devoted his attention to collecting fauna and other species
(Rayfield 1976: 138). William McGovern characterized Tibetans as “arrant
cowards” and ridiculed the money wasted by rich and poor alike on butter
lamps (1924: 81). He also asserted that most monasteries were filled with
fanatical monks, “ecclesiastical swashbucklers” who hated foreigners (ibid, 4).
Yet he lauded his fellow pilgrims in language that echoes Mead’s descriptions of
Balinese villagers: “extraordinary kind, simple, naïve people, completely
ignorant and grossly superstitious, but quite willing to accept life as it came to
them” (ibid, 203).
Salvaging the Past

John Urry (1995) has argued that anxiety over disappearing and/or ‘spoiled’
places is rooted in tourism’s privileging of visual consumption. Accepting the
notion that tourism visually consumes cultures suggests that cultures can be
used up, which in turn leads to an anxious desire to ‘see it before it is too late’
and at the same time salvage that which is presumed to be in danger of disap-
pearing. This desire to salvage a perceived threatened Other can be read as a
contemporary version of one of the central paradoxes of the colonial encoun-
ter: an Other is subjugated and absorbed within the Empire, yet at the same
time the Colonizer longs to preserve the Other in an untouched state.
Tibet was not colonized by the British. Yet this did not stop visitors from
worrying about the pernicious effects the outside world would have on Tibe-
tans, in particular a crass materialism. Robert Byron reported a conversation he
had with “Mary”, a young Tibetan aristocrat who had visited India several
times:
And then said Mary: “I love Tibet. If only it had trains or motors, I think it would be
the nicest country in the world”. “But”, I answered, “The monks don’t like that sort of
thing.” “No”, she sighed. “Some people don’t seem to want to be civilized.” (Byron
1933: 327)
Byron, like many of these writers, viewed modernity as a disruptive force

that appealed to the basest of human desires, material gain, at the expense of
loftier ideals. Margaret Mead described her work in Bali as a process of “cream-
ing the culture” as it disappeared: “there is not much hope for Bali ultimately,”
she wrote, “because their social system is founded on religion and that is bound
to crack before the Muslims, the Christians or the modern skeptics who
worship industrialism” (1977: 172). In the preface to his book, Miguel Covarru-
bias made clear his wish to record what he believed to be a “living culture that
is doomed to disappear under the merciless onslaught of modern commercial-
ism and standardization” (1937: xxv). Similarly, Hickman Powell, eerily antic-
ipating UNESCO’s later World Heritage Project, proposed turning the island
into an international park as a means of preserving the real Bali (1930: xvi).
Colin McPhee most vividly illustrates this desire to salvage an authentic Bali
from westernization. While in Paris after his first visit to Bali in 1931, he
decided that saving Balinese music would be his “life’s work”:
I realized with sudden clearness that the only thing in the world I wanted to do was to
return to Bali and make as a complete record as I could of the music. Some inner compul-
sion to preserve in some way this fugitive art made it seem important and urgent. It was only too clear
such music could not survive much longer. A thousand forces were at work to destroy it; at
present the people of the island still lived in an illusion of freedom, but they had long
since been caught in the net that was now being slowly dragged in, and their fate was
the fate of the Eastern world. (1947: 78, emphasis added)
Closely related to this desire to preserve or salvage an authentic Bali was an

intense suspicion of tourism. Powell equated tourism with novelist Sherwood
Anderson’s savage characterization of the petty bourgeoisie: “Babbit, who has
already started on the north of the island, will ruin Bali” (25). Covarrubias laid
the blame for unwelcome changes on merchants, unsuitable educational
policies, missionaries and tourism, while McPhee ridiculed dance performances
staged at the Bali Hotel for tourists.
Writing at roughly the same time, William McGovern joked about future
tourists in Tibet, which would herald the end of true adventure:
I wondered whether, in the not far-distant future, some use could not be made of the
ubiquitous Ford across the very plains of Tibet itself. Because of the difficulties of my
own situation, it struck me as grotesquely comical that perhaps in future years, when
the fanaticism of the ecclesiastical part of the population had been appeased, a part of
tourists, shepherded by Messrs. Thomas Cook & Son, might motor their way from the
pass to the threshold of the Potala, where the Dalai-Lama sits enthroned. (1924: 123)
Ironically, K’tut Tantri was one of the founders of the Bali tourism
industry. In need of money, she opened, in 1935, her first hotel in a small
bungalow outside the palace gates of her adopted family, rationalizing this
decision by arguing that she would cater to a different type of tourist:
I would take some paying guests; they would restore my bank account at least a little.
Not ordinary tourists, but writers, and artists, and those who would appreciate a place
away from the usual paths of the tourist crowd staying at the Dutch hotel at Den Pasar
and away from the Dutch official stationed there. (1960: 67)
This early form of cultural tourism lasted only a few months, mainly
because the artists she sought to cater to had a habit of not paying their bills.
She then leased most of Kuta beach from two families for a token fee (tax
payments due the colonial administration). In exchange for a half-interest in this
lease, the Bob and Lousie Koke, newly arrived on the island from Hollywood,
agreed to pay for hotel construction costs. But within a few months the
partnership fell apart. Tantri subsequently built a hotel across the road from the
Kokes’ hotel (1960: 72–78). She described this as “straight from the Arabian
nights with its lush gardens, its walls of white coral, and its ancient stone
statues” (82–83).
The Kokes’ and Tantri’s plan to market Bali as tropical paradise to foreign
tourists is evident in today’s beach strip of Kuta and Legian: an eight kilometer
stretch of hotels, restaurants, bars, cafes, shopping centers, souvenir shops,
tourist touts, car rental agents, tattoo parlors and nightclubs, the center of the
Balinese tourist industry. Not that they were unique: Walter Spies’s house in
Ubud, in which he played host to a long line of affluent tourists including Noel
Coward, Charlie Chaplin, Cole Porter, and Barbara Hutton, is now an upscale
hotel, while Colin McPhee’s home in Sayan has been turned into a museum,
with a home-stay next door.
Modernism and Colonialism

The collective fear of modernity and what it would do to the people and
cultures of both Bali and Tibet served to rationalize, for many of these writers,
the existing status quo. For Vicky Baum, Dutch control of Bali was justified as
long as it was used to control outside access to the island. “Scarcely anywhere
else in the world” she wrote, “ … are natives free to live their own lives under
white rule so happily and with so little interference and change as in Bali” (1937:
x). According to Louise Koke, “life was pleasant and secure” under the Dutch,
in contrast to the “autocratic rajas” of the past (1987: 273). For K’tut Tantri,
Balinese village (kampung) life was idyllic: “despite the filth, the discomfort, and
the meager meals from which I always arose hungry, I found the kampungs the
paradise for which I had left Hollywood (1960: 65).
Robert Byron, even while noting social problems in Tibetan society,
concluded that any benefits from modernization did not outweigh the moral
deficiencies of western life:
To a country … where justice is cruel and secret, disease rife and independent thought
impossible, Western ideas might bring some benefits. But could the benefits outweigh
the disadvantages? In the present state of Western civilization, whose spiritual empti-
ness in Asia is marked by a brutal assumption of moral superiority, it seems to me they
could not. (Byron 1933: 294)
The Italian explorer Marco Pallis did not necessarily oppose the conquest of
other societies, but rather such a conquest at a time when European traditions
had been disrupted and destroyed by modernity (1949: 367). In his view, a blind
faith in progress, which he likened to a merger of the most aggressive tenden-
cies of capitalist avarice and evangelical Christianity, was rapidly destroying the
world’s collective traditions. He advocated strict import controls on consumer
goods in Tibet, characterizing these as the “glittering and vulgar products of
mechanical and slave-man power” (360). For Pallis, Tibet was a refuge from
modernity; he cared little about what regular Tibetans might desire: they should
only desire what they already had. Similarly, Fosco Maraini characterized the
world as in an “unhappy age of transition”, one without a center (1998: 142–
143). Tibet, he believed, was not just out of step with this constant flux, it was a
better place precisely because it had achieved social and economic equilibrium.
Like Pallis, he deplored the crudeness of imperialism because it attracted the
worst types of foreigners, military men, businessmen, and bureaucrats, men
who were either “ignorant, or bigoted, or intent only on gain, or alternatively
kept to themselves” (103).
A radical shift in visitor attitudes towards Tibet is quite evident by the 1940s.
In books written before and just after the First World War there is a sense of
opening Tibet up to the world. For Eric Teichmann in 1922 and William
McGovern in 1924 no less than for the correspondents who covered the 1904
British invasion such as Edmund Chandler and Percival Landon, increased
trade relations with India, popular education, and outside technology would
help make Tibet a part of the twentieth century, even if this meant the end of
“unknown lands of dreams” for Europeans:
Tomorrow, when we enter Lhasa, we will have unveiled the last mystery of the East.
There are no more forbidden cities which men have not mapped and photographed …
now there are no real mysteries, no unknown land of dreams … the Tibetans, no
doubt, will benefit, and many abuses will be swept away. Yet there will always be
people who will hanker after the medieval and romantic, who will say: ‘We men are
children. Why could we not have been content that there was one mystery not un-
veiled? (Chandler 1905: 247–248)
In closing his account of his travels along the Chinese and Tibetan frontier
in 1918, Eric Teichman noted Christian missionary efforts in the region. He did
not dismiss these missionaries out of hand, or lament their impact on Tibetan
culture and traditions, but instead suggested they should focus not on saving
souls but on education. “To evangelize the people in their present state is
merely to add to the load of superstition with which their lives are already
burdened” he advised. Only through knowledge would Tibetans free them-
selves from religious control. Buddhism, “purged of its growth of superstition”,
could remain the basis of faith, but secular knowledge would lead the way to a
better future (1922: 229). Traveling in western Tibet a generation before
Teichman’s journey, Isabella Bird praised the Moravian missionaries she
encountered for their influence on local morals (2001: 196). She viewed Tibetan
Buddhism as a confusing babble of cymbals and horns, indecipherable chanting,
and bad smells (2001: 119). Similarly, Francis Younghusband, the political
commissioner in charge of the British invasion force, characterized Tibetan
Buddhism as a degenerate religion that encouraged laziness and corrupt
behavior (Anand 2007: 45). William McGovern described a variety of money-
making schemes monks engaged in, ranging from chanting sutras for cash to
occasional acts of armed robbery (1924: 251). He also questioned the view of
Tibet as a populist paradise, noting that thirty to forty great families held most
political and economic power. “In Tibet”, he wrote, “far greater attention seems
to be paid to animal welfare than to the welfare of human beings” (ibid, 307).
Yet by the late 1920s a different sense had taken hold. The timelessness of
Tibet as a place being brought into the present was replaced by a sense of
impending doom, variously characterized as communism, tourism, commercial-
ism, or, for Marco Pallis, modernity and progress (Bishop 1989: 202–203). New
ideas, new products, and new forms of technology would not liberate Tibet but
ruin it. In a world in which modernity appeared to serve the interests of
Stalinism and Fascism, a resurgent Germany was led by the Nazis, and the
global economy had largely collapsed, the bizarreness and brutality of Tibetan
feudalism could seem quaint in comparison (ibid, 204).
Travelers in Tibet began to portray generic Tibetans as generically happy.

Although most Tibetan peasants had little to eat and almost no chance of
changing their material conditions, Alexandra David-Neel assured her readers
that “waves of joy swept through the minds of those unlucky ones devoid of
material wealth” (1927: 285). Fosco Maraini described Tibet as a “living
museum” of India, China, and Central Asia’s lost past (1998: 228). Indeed,
given the spiritual emptiness these writers saw in Europe, the protection and
preservation of both Bali and Tibet by any means possible, became increasingly
paramount.
Consequently, most either ignored nationalist efforts at raising political
awareness or attacked formal education as a tool of corruption and impurity.
Covarrubias argued that colonial schools produced cultural half-castes, neither
Balinese nor Western, who were useful only as clerks. Worse, though, was the
native teacher: “the teacher forces his half-digested jumble of European ideas
on the little pupils, who from the beginning of their education learn to look
down on everything” (1937: 395). Covarrubias’ disdain for education was
shared by Colin McPhee, who wrote that he “dreaded the schools and the
Indonesian teachers, with their hatred for the past and their determination to
stamp out all traces of native culture” (1947: 178).
What emerges in these texts about Bali and Tibet is an expatriate vision of
pure and untouched islands of culture that required protection both from the
outside world and potential troublemakers within. This view was consistent
with Dutch colonial efforts in Bali, leading to an ironic situation: the foreign
avant-garde on the island, those who had fled the West, supported colonial
control of paradise as a means of protecting this from the degradation and
impurity of this same West.
By the end of the Second World War Tibet was a society grappling with
modernization. On August 15, 1947 the British Raj officially ended when the
Republics of India and Pakistan came into existence after decades of political
struggle. Two years later, on October 1, 1949, Mao Zedong proclaimed the
People’s Republic of China in Beijing, ending almost forty years of political
instability in China. Within two years Lhasa was occupied by Chinese forces and
in 1959 the Dalai Lama fled to India, repeating a journey his predecessor had
made in 1910 after an earlier Chinese invasion. Tibet from this point was closed
to European and American travelers. The closing of Tibet by the Chinese
government is a crucial aspect of the Shangri-la narrative, as it enabled Euro-
peans and Americans to absolve “The West” of all responsibility for the
destruction of paradise. Instead, first Maoism and more recently Han Chinese
tourists have been blamed, while “The West” in the form of an ideology of
universal cultural heritage and a fascination with a global Tibet, aims to ‘save’
Tibetan culture.
As I have already noted, far from preserving a culturally pure Bali, the
Dutch policy of Balinization resulted in stark social, political and economic
changes. Because of a lack of easily exploitable export commodities, Dutch
fiscal policies on Bali centered on local taxes. Everything from the slaughter of
pigs to the purchase of luxury goods (such as bicycles or lamps) was heavily
taxed. The land tax rate was 2.5 times the rate on Java. After 1919, local
residents were required to pay these various taxes in Dutch guilders and not in-
kind, which led to an increase in the production of exportable cash crops such
as coffee, copra and rice. As long as prices remained high during the 1920s,
taxes could be paid. But after world prices collapsed in 1931, many Balinese
were unable to pay their taxes and as a consequence lost their land. Yet in none
of these narratives of life on Bali in the years between the wars is there any
mention of economic problems, intra-Balinese exploitation, nationalist senti-
ment, or caste conflict. Instead, the underlying focus is on maintaining Balinese
cultural practices and preventing social change.
During World War II Bali was occupied by Japanese forces and local expa-
triates fled or were imprisoned. A war of independence against the Dutch
followed, leading to the proclamation of the Republic of Indonesia. Yet within a
generation an emphasis on preserving Balinese culture reappears, this time as a
crucial element in the plans of Indonesian central government authorities, in
concert with World Bank and United Nations Development Program consul-
tants, to utilize tourism as a development tool while preserving an “authentic”
Bali from the dangers of tourism. It is to this process that I turn to next.
Chapter Five
Marketing Paradise:
The Bali Tourism Project
Following the Japanese invasion and occupation of the Dutch East Indies
in early 1942, Bali’s expatriate community of writers, academics, tourist promo-
ters, and colonial agents fled to Australia or were interned in concentration
camps in east and central Java. After the Pacific war ended in 1945, the island
was engulfed in the conflict between returning Dutch forces and independence
fighters. A peace treaty was not signed until 1949. By the early Fifties the
marketing of Bali as Indonesia’s paradise island resumed (Republic of Indone-
sia, 1957). These early promotion efforts culminated in the opening of the Bali
Beach Hotel at Sanur, financed by Indonesia’s President Sukarno with Japanese
war reparations.
Sukarno was overthrown in a 1965 military coup which resulted in the
death of hundreds of thousands of people. The new government under
President Suharto declared a “New Order”, under which foreign investment
was encouraged and party politics restricted. Tourism was also officially
proclaimed a key tool of nation-building (K. Adams 1997: 157). This decree led
to a 1971 World Bank-funded “Master Plan” for the development of Bali as an
international tourist destination, a plan implemented beginning in 1975 as the
Bali Tourism Project. As part of this project the airport near the island’s
administrative capital, Denpassar, was upgraded to serve international arrivals,
visa requirements for foreign tourists were eased, and tax incentives were
granted for foreign investment in the tourist sector (Lansing 1995: 115). Most
importantly, a spatial zone for tourism was mapped out by planners, consisting
of a triangle between the Kuta-Sanur beach areas, Ubud, and Gianyar. Within
this zone, foreign tourists and Balinese would interact in controlled situations
and for specific purposes. Tourists would be segregated within a smaller hotel
zone located at Nusa Dua on the southwest coast, where they could enjoy the
conveniences of a western lifestyle while not, or so it was believed, bringing
harm to Balinese culture.
In this chapter I provide a close reading of the Bali Tourism Project. My

purpose is not to point out how World Bank consultants or Indonesian
government officials mismanaged the expansion of tourism on Bali. Rather, it is
to ask how and why this particular project came to be seen as necessary
(Ferguson 1994: 28). Specifically, I examine the assumptions that Balinese had
to be protected from international tourism so as to preserve their culture, and
second, that the most logical way to do so was by defining tourism as a separate
entity, simultaneously existing on Bali yet outside of Balinese culture.
The Plan
The 1971 Master Plan was a direct outgrowth of Indonesia’s first five-year
development plan under the New Order regime. In this 1969 plan, Presidential
Instruction #9 set forth the mission for international tourism within state
development plans: it would provide foreign exchange, improve the interna-
tional reputation of the Republic of Indonesia, and foster domestic harmony
(K. Adams 1997: 157). The first goal reflected a key policy shift by the World
Bank during this period. Following a 1963 United Nations Conference in
Rome, international tourism, and by extension “culture,” was identified as a
potential resource to be developed by newly-independent states, in carefully
planned and controlled situations. Consequently, between 1965 and 1975 the
World Bank funded twenty-four large-scale tourism development projects in
eighteen countries, including Indonesia (Lanfant 1995: 27).
The second goal reflected Indonesian political realities in 1969. President
Suharto, a former army colonel, had come to power following a coup attempt
by military officers allegedly associated with the Indonesian Communist Party
(PKI) on September 30, 1965. Widespread killings of suspected communists by
private militia groups soon began. These killings, primarily in Central Java and
on Bali, continued through the end of 1965 and into the early months of 1966
(Robinson 1996: 138–139). Approximately 80,000 people were killed on Bali,
approximately 5% of the island’s population at the time. It is against the
backdrop of these mass killings that the Suharto regime’s focus on improving
Indonesia’s international reputation should be considered.
The third goal of tourism, as a tool for promoting increased domestic social
stability, was central to New Order tourism policies. In the decade after
independence the Indonesian central government had fought insurrections in
the Molucca Islands, Sulawesi, Sumatra, and Java. In addition, Indonesia had
seized and occupied western Papua from the Dutch in 1963 (and would shortly
The Bali Tourism Project 79
occupy East Timor in 1975). A tourism policy aimed at domestic stability aimed
to limit ethnicity as an identity marker to artistic and cultural displays, while
simultaneously subordinating ethnicity to religious identity, the goal being to
both create and manage a pan-Indonesian identity. However, unintended
consequences resulted from these attempts, including the paradox that the
central government-driven promotion of tourism as a tool of national identity-
building necessarily led to the promotion of some ethnic groups as more
cultural than others, particularly, in this case, the Balinese (K. Adams 1997:
158).
As part of preparations for the first five-year national development plan
(Repelita I), the Bali Provincial Government published its own development
proposal in early 1969, emphasizing the importance of tourism. This advocated
both an intensification of tourism in existing tourist areas (particularly Sanur
Beach) and an “extensification” [ekstensifikasi] of tourism in new areas
(Pemerintah Daerah Tingkat 1969: 2–3). It also called for a focus on the
restoration of possible tourist attractions (objek-objek turist) as a means of
attracting foreign visitors, along with an increased emphasis on local “values of
life”, which, it asserted, would counteract negative foreign influences (13). This
proposal called for the restoration of not just temples and historical sites but
also recreational areas (tempat rekreasi), such as colonial beach resorts. Finally, it
called for the maintenance of not just artistic skills (seni patung and seni pahat) and
traditional arts (kesenian asli), but also handicrafts (kerajinan rakyat). All of these,
it asserted, could be maintained through a policy of education and regulation
(26).
On August 12, 1969, Indonesian Minister of Communications Frans Seda
sent letters to consulting groups in North America and Western Europe,
inviting them to submit proposals by October 15, 1969 for the design of a
tourism project on Bali to be funded by the World Bank. The terms of refer-
ence set forth in this letter called for the large-scale development of internation-
al tourism on Bali, in line with the goals of the government’s first five-year
development plan, while protecting local culture from outside influence. In
order to accomplish these goals, a Bali Tourism Development Authority
(BTDA) was envisioned as a guiding force.
After proposals were received from consulting groups in Italy, France,
Britain, Canada, and the United States, the French group Société Centrale Pour
l’Equipement Touristique d'Outre Mer (SCETO) was chosen to carry out this study.
On March 25, 1970, a consultant contract was signed between SCETO and
GOI representatives. Following this, a formal Plan of Operation was agreed
upon and signed by the Government of Indonesia, the International Bank for
Reconstruction and Development, and the United Nations Development
Program on April 13, 1970. SCETO than initiated a formal study. This was
completed by April 1971, and formally published in June, 1971, as the Bali
Tourism Study.
This final report confirmed the beginning assumptions of this project as set
out in the Indonesian government’s initial terms of reference, in particular, that
a supra-organization (in this case, the Bali Tourism Development Authority)
should manage the development of tourism on the island and manage Balinese
culture to protect this from degradation.
“A Green and Sumptuous Garden”

In April 1971, SCETO issued its report in six volumes. Volume I provided
a general overview of SCETO’s recommendations and proposals, Volume II
detailed the Master Plan, and Volume VI made recommendations for the plan’s
implementation. The other volumes vered technical aspects of the project,
including road construction (III), other infrastructure projects (IV), and
economic projections (V). SCETO took as its central goal the key objectives set
forth in Minister Seda’s letter of nearly two years before: “A Master Plan for the
long-term development of tourism which anticipates the attraction and accom-
modation of vastly increased numbers of tourists and, also, provides for the
protection of the Balinese community from indiscriminate and destructive
expansion and proliferation of tourism institutions and facilities” (SCETO I: 2).
The consultants began their study with a discussion of how many visitors
would come to Bali and what they would do once on the island. First, they
assumed that most visitors would want to stay at a beach resort in a first-class
hotel; second, that these visitors would want to visit “traditional rural life” (I: 6);
and third, that an accurate estimate could be made of the number of visitors for
the first ten-year phase of this project (I: 11). The consultants confidently
asserted that, by 1985, 730,000 tourists would annually arrive, stay an average
length of four days, and spend $35 per day while doing so. On the basis of
these figures, they calculated that 9,500 hotel rooms would be needed, assuming
a 64% occupancy rate. Based on these assumptions, the consultants arrived at
their guiding questions: Keeping in mind the stated desire to protect Balinese
culture from contact with tourism, where to build 9,500 first-class hotel rooms,
and what infrastructure would be needed to support these accommodations? (I:
11)
SCETO consultants could calculate that 9,500 hotel rooms would be

needed by 1985 by first assuming that these hotel rooms would, indeed, be built
before 1985, thereby creating a need to market these rooms to potential
tourists. In other words, demand was first imagined, thereby justifying supply.
Thus, the key question in this case (the stated need to provide for large num-
bers of foreign tourists while simultaneously protecting Balinese from cultural
harm) preceded the construction of economic projections that appeared to lead
to this question.
Having concluded that large-scale construction would be necessary to
accommodate projected visitors, the consultants then turned to the question of
cultural protection. A “civilization”, they stated, is “a living entity which exists
and develops according to certain organic laws peculiar to itself”, laws based on
“culture” and “environment” (I: 8). The introduction of mass tourism would
interfere with these laws in three ways. First, by initiating contacts between
Balinese and the outside world, tourism “will make them [Balinese] aware of a
certain alienation or estrangement.” In addition, by providing wage employment
for local residents, tourism would introduce salaries and individual incomes into
what the consultants portrayed as a communal, agrarian society, thereby
accelerating “the formation of a consumer class.” Finally, the introduction of
“specific infrastructures adapted to the Western way of life” would pressure
Balinese “to comply with Western models”, particularly in regard to transporta-
tion and housing (I: 9). Returning to this concern in Volume II of this study,
SCETO consultants characterized Bali as “a society in which tensions dissolve,
a society that is in full possession of its equilibrium”; any disruption of this
equilibrium would, from a marketing perspective, negatively affect Bali’s key
asset - its unique culture and society (II: 10).
This was because, according to the authors, contact between outside
tourists and local cultures can have a severe effect on local residents because of
reciprocal misunderstandings arising from an inherent contradiction between
hosts and guests; foreigners would be intent on saving paradise while local
residents would be intent on emulating their visitors:
What happens is that the visitors arrive as individuals with a high standard of living
who are more or less frustrated in their own culture and then attempt to idealize a civi-
lization they can only appreciate superficially, identifying it with a Lost Paradise they
hope to see preserved (II: 97).
The question is who was imagined as the typical visitor to Bali: people who
could afford to fly half-way around the world to stay for four days in a luxury
beachside hotel on a Pacific island promoted as exotic, or the artists and
intellectuals who settled on Bali in the years between the wars and proclaimed it
a paradise on earth? Consultants reduced tourist motivation to a search for a
paradise on earth and Balinese residents’ reaction to foreign tourism to slavish
imitation. Framed in this way, a regulatory body appears to be of crucial
importance, since without such a mediating authority foreign visitors might
seduce local residents into abandoning their cultural ways, thereby undercutting
the appeal of Bali as a tourist destination. Indeed, these consultants asserted
that an unregulated tourist presence would lead to the destruction of Balinese
society. It would do so by creating a “fascination” among Balinese for “the
western way of life and its values”, particularly individualism. Youth would
leave their villages in search of material gains in the tourist industry. This would
lead to labor shortages in the rice fields, which in turn would spark the dissolu-
tion of communal village social structures, thereby undercutting society’s
foundations (II: 100).
By introducing the opportunity for non-agricultural income, tourism, or so
these consultants asserted, provided the seeds of individualism. An increase in
personal gains, they argued, would lead to a weakening of “communal tradition”
(II: 101). This held true, they further argued, in all aspects of tourist-local
contacts, be these profane or sacred: whether an individual opened a food stall
or sold soft drinks beside a tourist center, made trinkets or handicrafts for
tourists, or performed dances or played music at hotels or other venues, the
individual intent behind these activities would destroy the communal founda-
tion of village communities (ibid, 101–102). In short, the sacred would be made
profane, the traditional would be disrupted, and authentic Balinese culture would
be degraded and cheapened.
Having constructed this cultural dilemma (a clash between foreigners intent
on consuming a unique and authentic Balinese culture and local residents intent
on emulating foreign materialism and thus being seduced by individualism), the
consultants proposed a logical solution: a master plan to strictly control foreign-
local contacts.
Noticeably absent in this study is any reference to the former Dutch
colonial presence on the island or to the widespread political killings that had
taken place in 1965 and 1966. As noted in Chapter IV, colonial policies had
introduced widespread social and economic changes. As early as the 1920s Bali
was linked to international tourism and nationalist politics. In addition, the

killings on Bali that followed the establishment of the New Order government,
while far fewer in number than those on Java, were nevertheless far more
devastating in terms of actual population figures.
Viewed from this perspective, the SCETO consultants’ portrayal of a
Balinese population at risk of alienation, consumption, individualism, and
slavish imitation of foreigners appears to be a reflection of these consultants’
own anxieties. More importantly, their seemingly objective description of a
problem (How to protect Balinese from tourism while making Bali attractive to
tourists?) and solution (regulate contact between outsiders and insiders)
required a series of unarticulated presumptions that, once articulated, contra-
dicted the very basis of this logic.
SCETO consultants recommended situating most tourism facilities in a
barren area of Bali called Nusa Dua. From a planning perspective this was an
ideal location. It was a undeveloped beach area close to the airport, near what
the consultants called the “most typical” Balinese areas of the island, and, most
importantly, apart from any actual Balinese communities (I: 12). They went a
step further than the government terms of reference, suggesting the creation of
not just a Bali Tourism Development Authority to manage and regulate the
industry island-wide, but also a Bali Tourism Development Corporation
(BTDC) to develop and manage the Nusa Dua complex. Visitors would be able
to enjoy all the amenities of a modern hotel within this tourist enclave while
being exposed to Balinese culture on carefully controlled excursion trips to
tourist centers in places identified as culturally interesting. The consultants
suggested that these tourist centers be run by local banjar, neighborhood
cooperative associations, while being regulated by the BTDA. Such a policy,
they wrote, would “reinforce and institutionalize the Balinese tendency to pay
for services, dancers, for example, to the banjar, and not to the individual” (I: 9).
In order to further protect and preserve local culture and social structures, they
proposed that visitors receive “sensitivity training” while local residents receive
training about “the significance of their own culture in order to avoid degrada-
tion” (II: 103).
To sum up, the SCETO consultants argued that only with tight controls
over tourist and Balinese encounters would tourism benefit local communities
and protect existing social structures. The alternative, they suggested, would be
chaos and inequities:
The measures designed to attempt to introduce the excursion routes into the delicate
mechanisms of Balinese life are intended to bring the two communities, the Balinese
and the visitors, into contact with one another in previously chosen areas and in an
especially prepared context. What will happen if one of the two rejects the other? Tour-
ists are generally naïve and somewhat bothersome with their cameras and good inten-
tions, and the actual economic benefits of the operation will go to too small a minority
to compensate for the social nuisances caused by the project (I: 17).
The answer to this rhetorical question (“What will happen if one of the two
rejects the other?”) was from SCETO’s perspective, disaster. If tourism was not
regulated, Balinese would quickly become mirrors of the foreigners they
encountered, leading these foreigners to reject Bali as a tourist destination. On
the other hand, if Balinese rejected tourism wholesale, their island would remain
poor and undeveloped. The solution, then, was a carefully managed tourism
industry guided by a mediating authority to oversee and regulate actual encoun-
ters. This would bring the greatest economic benefits to Bali with the fewest
social side-effects. Even with careful planning, however, the authors of this
report stated that by the end of the first phase of the project in 1985, Balinese
culture would have become irreparably harmed by tourism: in their words, “The
cultural manifestations will probably have disappeared, but Bali can still retain
its romantic image and still be thought of as a green and sumptuous garden” (II:
161).
The Bali Tourism Project

Before SCETO submitted its final report to the Indonesian government, it
was evaluated at the World Bank. In a memo dated July 27, 1971, a Bank
official recommended that $55 million in International Development Assistance
(IDA) funds be made available for the first phase of what was projected to be a
$213.4 million project (Simmons 1971). However, in a highly critical outside
evaluation dated November, 1971, an American consultant argued that the
proposed creation of both a supra-planning agency and a government tourism
corporation would lead to an inherent conflict among the realms of policy-
making, regulation, promotion, and development (Ritchie 1971: 2). Moreover,
the creation of two tourism authorities on Bali, a local tourism department that
reported to the provincial governor and a supra-agency (the Bali Tourism
Development Authority) that reported directly to the President, would create
management problems and benefit national officials at the expense of efficient
development (ibid, 6).
Despite these criticisms, the SCETO proposal was accepted by the World
Bank and the Indonesian government with only slight modifications, based on
further project feasibility studies conducted by Japanese consultants in 1972 and
1973. One such modification was a 1972 Indonesian government decree that
set strict limits on the construction of international-standard hotels outside of
the Nusa Dua site. During the first phase of the Bali Tourism Project (1975-
1985), only 1,600 new rooms would be allowed in other areas (IBRD 1974: ii).
The second significant modification was a decision to scale back the size of the
first project phase. Instead of SCETO’s 5,950 proposed rooms, a 2,500 room
complex at Nusa Dua was planned along with a further 1,600 rooms split
between Sanur Beach and the provincial capital of Denpassar. The total project
would require an initial outlay of $36.1 million for the infrastructure needed to
attract private funding for the actual construction of hotels. The Bali Tourism
Development Board (BTDB), established in March 1972, would implement the
over-all master plan, while the government-owned Bali Tourism Development
Corporation (BTDC), established in November 1973, would develop and
manage the Nusa Dua site. The BTDB would focus on maximizing the benefits
of tourism and minimizing cultural degradation, while the BTDC would focus
on the technical aspects of tourism development (6-7). The final plan was
approved by President Suharto in 1972 and the Bali Provincial Assembly in
December, 1973.
The final appraisal of the plan was issued by the World Bank in May, 1974.
Once again, absent from this report was any mention of the political upheavals,
mass murder, or arbitrary arrest of tens of thousands of political prisoners that
had taken place in Indonesia (including Bali) over the preceding decade.
Instead, the unnamed authors noted the “remarkable recovery of the Indone-
sian economy since the mid-1960s”, the continued dominance of the agricultur-
al sector, and the development potentials of tourism (IBRD/IDA 1974: 1–3).
Turning to Bali, the report painted a glowing portrait of a harmonious and static
society rich with tourism potential:
Bali continues to evoke in the tourist’s mind the ideal of a tropical paradise. Bali’s chief
tourist assets are the natural and scenic attractions of the island, and, more importantly,
its people and their culture. This culture, held in equilibrium by a communal society
and the Hindu heritage, permeates all facets of Balinese existence and expresses itself in
a profusion of art, dance, music and sculpture (4).
In addition to its unique culture, Bali was also strategically located on air
routes between Japan and Southeast Asia and Australia and the Asian mainland
(16). However, the report asserted, the economic benefits of tourism had been
jeopardized by its “largely unplanned and haphazard” nature (4). To prevent
further such problems, tourism facilities would be concentrated at Nusa Dua.
This plan, the report stated, was “designed to ensure the most economic
utilization of available land without detracting from the natural environment,
while being sufficiently flexible to accommodate the preferences of potential
investors in hotels and other facilities” (5). Local residents would benefit in
several ways. First, those immediately affected by the Nusa Dua project
(primarily residents in the villages of Benoa and Bualu) had already received
“the immediate benefits of cash payments” in exchange for their lands (5). In
addition, an estimated 6, 000 direct and 3,700 indirect jobs would be created by
1983 (23–24). Most importantly, Balinese as a whole would benefit because the
Nusa Dua project, by concentrating tourism in a specific locale, would protect
Balinese culture from contamination, degradation, and westernization.
The underlying logic of this project is neatly summarized in a section of this
report entitled, “Economic Justification”. After posing the question of what
would result from the complete absence of any planning, the authors reached
four conclusions. First, while conceding that tourism might still thrive in Bali,
they nevertheless argued that “the pattern of this development would be
dispersed, and its planning generally uncoordinated and haphazard.” As a result
of this lack of coordination, more rice land would be diverted to tourism,
leading to increased social costs and “greatly reduced government control over
the impact of tourism development which would substantially increase the risk
of both cultural and environmental damage.” Furthermore, such “unplanned
and scattered development” would not guarantee the construction of 2,500
international-standard rooms by 1985, raising doubts about the achievement of
foreign exchange and employment targets. Finally, the authors argued that “the
continuation of haphazard tourism development which this alternative
represents could seriously endanger the very assets which are the foundation of
the tourism industry in Bali.” (5.23).
Justification for state control of tourism thus rested on a series of assump-
tions that reinforced each other. Planners asserted that the only alternative to a
centrally planned and closely controlled tourism industry was the complete
absence of any regulation at all. Such an absence, they argued, would lead to
development chaos and environmental harm. Yet this contradicts the master
plan’s proposed use of village banjar organizations as conduits for regulation
and control. Indeed, while justifying this project by asserting that in its absence
there would be no planning or regulation of tourism, planners simultaneously

planned to rely on existing local regulatory organizations to implement its
provisions. This assumption also contradicted how both SCETO consultants
and IBRD evaluators had portrayed Balinese society. On the one hand, they had
described society as harmonious and stable, rich with adat (customs) and agama
(religion). Yet they left unexplained how this stability and harmony, the stated
goals of this plan, had come about in the absence of outside planning or
regulation.
Finally, planners believed that the absence of a centrally planned tourism
industry would result in the absence of any coordination. From these planning
assumptions by SCETO consultants and IBRD planners flowed a series of
related conclusions, all based on the guiding idea that only through central
government control could Balinese culture and the island’s environment be
protected from the disruptive effects of tourism while ensuring the continued
growth of the tourism industry.
In their analysis of the social effects of tourism, these World Bank experts
listed three potential drawbacks to unregulated tourism, connected to aesthetics,
religion, and economic equity. First, they argued that artists and performers
who lived near tourist areas spent their time producing and performing diluted
versions of their products for a less-discerning foreign audience, while those in
non-tourist areas maintained “classical art forms” yet received no patronage. In
addition, they noted local worries about the disruptive behavior of tour groups
in temples. Finally, they drew attention to the need to equitably distribute the
economic benefits of tourism to maintain local support for tourism policies
(25–26; also see IBRD, Annex XII).
The Bali Tourism Development Corporation (BTDC) was tasked with
solving these social problems. It would do so by maximizing the use of local
labor at the Nusa Dua construction site, recruiting artists, dancers, and musi-
cians from as many villages as possible, and, through a state-funded hotel
training school, make certain that Balinese workers were “suitably prepared for
the job opportunities generated by the resort investments” (27).
It is ironic to read of these planners’ worries about a fair distribution of
economic benefits, particularly considering the fact that their planning policies
were designed to insure an inequitable distribution by channeling tourism
spending into central government coffers and the pockets of foreign investors.
Moreover, a focus on producing trained hotel and restaurant workers to serve
foreign tourists in the Nusa Dua complex ignored the ongoing realities of
tourist-Balinese interactions at the time this report was written, namely, the
rapid expansion of private tourist businesses run by Balinese and aimed at those
foreign tourists ignored by the Master Plan, backpackers and budget travelers.
Viewed from a planning perspective, the need for central control appeared
both sensible and utterly logical: Bali needed to expand its economy in order to
raise living standards, its key assets were its culture and environment, foreign
tourists were eager to visit the island and experience these assets, therefore, a
certain number of hotel rooms isolated from everyday social life on the island
would be needed to accommodate these visitors. However, without a master
plan the quality and number of these rooms would not be guaranteed, cultural
and environmental assets protected, or growth insured. Therefore, such a
guiding plan was not only desirable but also crucial, since without this Bali
would slide into unplanned chaos.
Protecting Culture?
Concerns about the dangers of cultural corruption that would result from
the increase in tourism on Bali were not restricted to foreign consultants. These
concerns were also shared by local elites, particularly anthropologists.
As part of the World Bank project evaluation procedure, UNESCO funded
a series of local studies, carried out by Udayana State University’s Department
of Anthropology with the assistance of a French anthropologist named Gérald
Francillon, on the potential and current impact of tourism on Balinese culture.
The results of these studies were later published, in various forms, by Udayana,
the Indonesian Office of Planning and Development (Bappenas), and in the
United Nations’ development journal.
In its examination of the existing role of tourism on Bali, the Udayana team
divided the social impact of tourism into three spatial areas: hotel areas (such as
Kuta and Sanur), historical and cultural sites (such as Batubulan and Besakih),
and art and handicraft centers (such as Celek and Mas) (Universitas Udayana
1974: 29). In each of these locales, researchers noted evidence of a decline of
culture resulting from its commercialization. For example, in temples tourists
dressed inappropriately and took pictures, while some dance groups had
secularized previously sacred dances by, among other things, performing certain
dances at inappropriate times and cutting the performance times of others
(ibid,. 33–35). In addition, they noted that artisans had started to produce work
aimed at a tourist market, thereby leading to a “degradation of quality” (36) and
a decline in creativity (43). Finally, they complained of a general rise in what
they repeatedly referred to as “unhealthy competition” in a range of activities.
For example, they noted that handicraft shop owners gave a 10–25% commis-
sion to tour guides for steering foreign tourists to their shops, a practice these
researchers argued would “bring the art/souvenir shops sooner or later to their
ruins” (25–26). Most troublingly, they noted that some banjars had begun to
accept cash payments from members in lieu of labor obligations, thereby
disrupting the foundation of the concept of gotong-royong, or mutual assistance,
upon which Balinese society rested (42).
Yet these researchers also noted the appearance of new types of organiza-
tions, which they referred to in their report by the Indonesian term yayasan, an
ambiguous concept usually translated as ‘establishment’ or ‘organization’
(Wojowasito & Wasito 1982). These groups were organized not by neighbor-
hood (as were the banjar) or by shared resource rights (as were subak) but by
occupation. They included groups for dancers, guides, artisans, motorbike
owners, street vendors, homestay owners, even beach hawkers (ibid, 29–31).
Significantly, these new types of groups supplemented, rather than supplanted,
established social organizations.
This notion of supplementarity runs throughout the Udayana report. For
example, the emergence of a cash payment system in lieu of labor obligations in
some banjar could be interpreted as not just evidence of increased individualism
(as these researchers do) but also as a more complex system in which obliga-
tions to do work were supplemented by the option of obligatory payments for
work. In addition, while acknowledging that new types of organizations had not
displaced traditional organizations, these researchers also observed that within
such civic organizations traditional purposes had been supplemented by
additional aims. For example, particularly among banjar in heavily toured areas,
gamelon and dance performances for tourists generated cash income that could
be used for cultural practices such as festivals and cremations (41).
Finally, these researchers pointed to a rapid rise in indirect employment in
the tourism sector. While arguing that tourism generated relatively few full-time
jobs (contrary to the projections of the Bali Tourism Study), they noted that it
had involved an increasingly large percentage of the population in part-time
work, including dancers, artisans, and guides. In addition, it had spurred the
appearance of just the sort of micro-businesses that the SCETO study had
warned against, ranging from soft drink vendors to people who had started
renting slempot (a type of sash that must be worn inside a Balinese temple) to
tourists wishing to visit local temples (37).
These researchers concluded that, while there remained on Bali “a con-
sciousness among people of the value of art and culture”, art, particularly dance
and sculpture, had nevertheless been degraded by secularization (49). Yet their
own empirical evidence, as cited in this report, appears to point to an opposite
conclusion: local residents sought to gain benefits from tourists while maintain-
ing and adapting existing social structures and practices.
Shortly after the completion of the SCETO study and nearly three years
before the publication of the Bali Master Plan, a UNESCO-sponsored cultural
seminar was held in Denpassar to discuss tourism’s possible impact. It was at
this 1971 seminar that the term pariwisata budaya (‘cultural tourism’) was coined
to describe the type of foreign tourist deemed desirable, visitors who, intent on
learning about Balinese culture, would by extension generate economic benefits
for this culture (Picard 1997: 182–183). This was because local social elites
believed these cultural tourists to be vastly preferable to mass tourists, since
they were assumed to be less disruptive, more interested in buying local
souvenirs, and more respectful of local customs and traditions (Cf. Universitas
Udayana & Francillon 1975: 727). By focusing on the promotion of cultural
tourism, local elites believed that the overall tourist impact (what was referred
to as the “challenge” (tantangan) of tourism) on Bali could be managed and
tourism kept on the margins of society (ibid, 724).
However, their UNESCO-funded counterpart, French anthropologist
Gérald Francillon, took a much more pessimistic view of the tourist impact. In
a conclusion to a review of a series of Udayana studies conducted for UNES-
CO and the Bali Tourism Development Authority, he argued that there was no
difference between cultural tourists and other types of independent tourists,
since all did cultural and social damage:
Other dangers arise with the development of cultural tourism seen by the scholars and
researchers of Udayana University as endowed with positive aspects and consistently
presented as preferable to mass tourism. While this comes naturally enough to academ-
ics it is to be feared that they are deluded by the greater understanding that cultural
tourists show in their priorities, misled by their surer taste, deceived by their discrimina-
tion in the search for authentic antiques, their questions about the purposes and types
of ritual, their more overt wishes to participate in true home life than the casual ‘ho-
mestayer’ for whom stereotype smile communication is enough. Yet the attitudes of cultur-
al tourists consist not of contacts but of penetrations, encroachments and interactions which must, in
every way, have greater impact than the four-day visit of the guided tourist. The cultural tourist inserts
himself deeper into the core of his object of interest, thus disturbing it much more than would the super-
ficial observer (ibid, 751; emphasis added).
Francillon argued that tourist superficiality is better because only by main-

taining social relations at the level of superficiality can the subject of the
tourist’s interest (in this case, Balinese culture) be maintained in an undisturbed
state. That is to say, useful tourism, in his view, deliberately avoided any attempt
at meaningful communicative interchange.
Viewed from the perspective of planners concerned about cultural preser-
vation, Francillon’s argument in favor of superficiality makes a great deal of
sense. His support of guided tourism hence appears to be a logical solution to
the ‘problem’ of the touristic impact on Balinese culture. In a rejoinder, Peter
Lengyel, editor of the International Social Science Journal, rejected Francillon’s
argument while also criticizing the local Balinese focus on cultural tourism.
Questioning the distinction Udayana researchers (and local Balinese officials)
had drawn between mass tourism and cultural tourism, he argued that it would
make better sense for Bali to restrict its foreign visitors to “travelers who are
especially interested in what it has to offer and who might be particularly
appreciative of the more intimate atmosphere which the absence of crowds of
foreigners would preserve” (Lengyel 1975: 754). Lengyel revived the pre-WW II
Dutch colonial desire, supported at the time by writers such as Miguel Covarru-
bias, to maintain Bali as a living museum for discriminating travelers.
What both Francillon and Lengyel ignored in their arguments was the
political context within which the Udayana researchers made their recommen-
dations for a provincial tourism policy. These academic researchers were faced
with a dilemma: on the one hand, a central government plan to transform Bali
into the tourist center of Indonesia, and on the other, their own concerns and
worries about the effects uncontrolled foreign tourism would have on Balinese
society.
Beginning with its first five-year national development plan in 1969, the
central government aimed to use “culture” as a display motif as a means of
controlling communalism and class consciousness (K. Adams 1997: 158). It did
so by defining culture according to state-mapped spatial boundaries. “Regional
cultures” (kebudayaan daerah) were categorized as contributing members to a
series of regional “highpoints” (puncak-puncak) which in turn formed a national
culture (kebudayaan nasional). Each regional culture in turn, was defined as a
collection of elements of local cultures (Matheson 1993: 4). These regional
“highpoints” were drawn from regional cultures consisting of elements bor-
rowed from different ethnic groups residing within these state-defined spatial
mappings, the goal being to control ethnicity while using culture as a develop-
ment resource (Kipp 1993: 105).
By emphasizing regional cultures rather than ethnicity, central government

authorities sought to channel the latter to the level of aesthetic display as a
means of cultivating a regional identity. The aim was a simultaneous “folkloriza-
tion of culture” and a “provincialization of ethnicity” (Picard 1997: 197–198).
This re-imagining of culture as a collection of apolitical performative acts of
aesthetic diversity was designed to promote a national identity within the
context of official ethnic blindness. In other words, culture, from the perspec-
tive of the state, would function as a depoliticized showcase to be consumed
primarily by a domestic audience, not by foreign tourists (Kipp 1993).
This aesthetization of culture served state interests in several ways. First,
state policies sought to transform the past into a source for allegorical allusions
to the present, aided by World Bank and UNDP funding for not just the Bali
Tourism Project but also for heritage projects at sites such as the Prambanan
and Borobodur temple complexes in Central Java (Matheson 1993: 2; Picard
1997: 61). By framing these as authentic sites of national cultural, and by gaining
UNESCO backing for proclaiming these sites to be world cultural treasures, the
state could project national roots into an imagined unitary past, thereby
justifying contemporary national boundaries (S. Errington 1998: 37).
This process was carried out within a de-ideologized framework of “devel-
opment” and “modernization”. Within this framework, the state positioned
itself as both the guide to modernization and as the protector from moderniza-
tion’s side effects, in particular cultural pollution and the perceived chaos of
politics (McVey 1996: 22–23). In line with this, state-planned development
(pembangunan) during the Suharto regime was directly linked with “social
justice”, one of the five vague principles on which the Indonesian state had
been established in 1947. By defining social justice as a by-product of State-
planned development, the New Order transformed any critique of specific
development projects or broader development aims (such as the use of tourism
as a development tool) into a critique of the state ideology of Pancasila and
hence a subversive act against the Republic.
The Bali Provincial Government responded to the dilemma of a tourism
plan imposed from the center by adopting a policy favoring cultural tourism
(pariwisata budaya) in 1974. Under this policy, “cultural objects” (objek-objek
budaya) were identified as resources for the development of tourism, with the
resulting revenues to be used for the development of culture. That is to say,
cultural tourism would support and revitalize Balinese culture; in the words of
this regulation, “Cultural tourism is the type of tourism that supports the
development of the cultural factor. This culture is the culture of Bali inspired by
the soul of Hinduism” (Geriya 1996: 116). The resulting culture, held up as an
object of foreign desire, could also serve as an identity marker within Indonesia,
thereby protecting Bali’s status within a Javanese-dominated state.
However, such a policy rested on a belief that “culture” and “tourism” can
be clearly distinguished, and thus kept separate (Picard 1996: 129–130). Such
boundary maintenance between essence and surface, authentic and commercial,
pure and polluted, sacred and profane is not just assumed, but required.
Without such a clear-cut division, one runs the risk of encouraging not cultural
tourism (pariwisata budaya) but a touristified culture (kebudayaan pariwisata). This
becomes highly problematic in a society such as Bali, where tourism, having
been present for such a long period of time, operates within, not on, local
society. Tourism, in other words, is not simply an outside force that impacts
Balinese culture; it is a dynamic aspect of this very culture (Picard 1997: 183).
In the Shadow of the Plan

After numerous delays, the first international-class hotel finally opened at
Nusa Dua in 1983. By 1996, the enclave had twelve hotels, with a total capacity
of 4,585 rooms (Picard 1996: 71–73). As of 2001, the island had 102 starred
hotels with a total capacity of over 16,000 rooms (Bappenas 2001). Ngurah Rai
Airport has been upgraded to handle international flights and a new road
system has been completed. Despite recent political upheavals and economic
disruptions, annual international tourist arrivals average 2.5 million and approx-
imately 80% of the province’s economic output is tourist-related (BPS 2011).
Today, Bali is second only to Java in terms of per-capita wealth among Indone-
sian provinces, proof, advocates claim, of the success of the Bali Tourism
Project.
Yet in addition to these 102 starred hotels, built to attract the cultural tour-
ists desired by planners, Bali has at least 1,500 unplanned, non-starred hotels
(1,000 of which have less than 20 rooms), containing over 18,000 rooms, as well
as 575 restaurants scattered across the island (Bappenas 2001). The purported
success of the project is due as much to its failure to control local efforts to
capitalize on paradise as it is in the achievement of planning goals.
The expansion of the resort areas of Kuta and Ubud is an example of this.
Kuta, comprised of three villages (Kuta, Legian, Seminyak) was the site of the
first beach hotels on Bali, those of the Kokes and K’Tut Tantri in the 1930s. In
the late 1960s and early 1970s Kuta became a popular destination for foreign
backpackers. In response to this demand, local residents, mainly fishermen and

coconut farmers, added guest rooms to their homes and opened small shops
and restaurants catering to these foreigners. By 1976 the area had approximately
180 homestays with a capacity of 1,100 rooms, along with 11 hotels containing
426 rooms. There were also 64 restaurants, 93 souvenir shops, and 122 toko
(shops) and warung (stalls) (Geriya 1996: 10). Tourist arrivals also rose, from
approximately 6,000 in 1972 to over 18,000 in 1974 (Hussey 1989: 316). As the
number of tourists increased, land prices rose dramatically and the beach area
began to expand. Kuta today is a crowded ten-kilometer strip of bars, discos,
restaurants, shops, hotels, hostels, boutiques, tour agencies, shopping centers,
and cafes that hosts hundreds of thousands of tourists each year in at least 90
starred hotels and over 130 non-starred accommodations (Van der Giessen,
et.al. 1999). Critics of Kuta have pointed to its sprawl and chaotic growth as
evidence of the need for stringent tourist planning. They have also argued that
local residents have not actually benefited from this transformation of a local
community of fishermen and farmers into an urban tourist space. For example,
a 1976 Udayana University survey showed that 92% of Kuta’s 9,515 residents
were locally born, and 67% of homestays and shops were locally-owned. A
similar survey conducted in 1990-91 revealed that, while the resident population
had risen to 15,972, 90% of businesses were non-locally owned (Scures 1994:
93). However, the situation is more complicated than this. For example, already
by 1983 over 40% of local businesses were foreign-owned (Hussey 1989: 319).
In practice this usually meant that a foreign entrepreneur had invested in a local
business, thus circumventing regulations on foreign investment and property
ownership. Local residents benefited by gaining access to necessary capital
(albeit on a small scale) and, more importantly, to the cultural knowledge
needed to respond to the demands of their foreign clientele. In addition, as land
prices rose in the Kuta area, local residents eventually shifted out of business
operations in favor of leasing their land to both domestic and foreign outsiders.
The key point, then, is that the 90% of non-local businesses identified in the
1990 survey operated on land leased mainly from local owners. Within one
generation local residents shifted from farming and fishing to petty entrepre-
neurship and, finally, landlord status.
In Ubud, usually cited as the cultural center of Bali, similar changes have
occurred. Indeed, assumptions about cultural authenticity and the superiority of
the original over the copy lose all relevance in this ‘artist’s colony’. Like Kuta, it
was not a part of the Master Plan. In fact, Ubud was identified as a place that
needed to be protected from uncontrolled tourism, and hence was projected as

a daily excursion site. Its fame rests on its identification as a center of painting,
tied to the German painter Walter Spies and Dutch painter Rudolf Bonnet’s
decisions to settle in the village in the late Twenties to paint landscapes. Funded
by a local aristocrat named Cukarda Sukawati, they formed the Pita Maha art
society and tutored young Balinese painters in European techniques.
As in Kuta, backpackers began to arrive in the area in the early Seventies,
leading to a boom in local accommodation. By 1994, the Ubud area had over
2,200 rooms in 350 non-starred homestays, along with dozens of cafes, restau-
rants, and bars. Today Ubud is filled with galleries and studios displaying
examples of what is widely accepted as a distinctive Balinese painting school.
Much like the ‘Wyeth School’ of painting identified with Chadd’s Ford, Penn-
sylvania, the ‘Ubud School’ is as much an image and idea as it is a site (Dorst
1983). Today, both Balinese (from Ubud and elsewhere) and foreign visitors
now recognize the cultural “aura” of Ubud, which is the product of a foreign
artist’s community (Picard 1996: 89).
Both Kuta and Ubud, as well as other unplanned tourist areas on Bali such
as Candi Dasa, Batur, and Lovina, have thrived outside the Master Plan because
of a combination of high demand, low capital investment requirements, and
high local linkages (Picard 1993: 81). Just as importantly, they have been able to
develop in part because of the building restrictions imposed by the Master Plan
on areas outside of Nusa Dua, Sanur, Kuta, and Denpassar. Today, 100% of the
4,500 rooms at the Nusa Dua enclave and 76% of the 3,200 rooms at Sanur are
starred hotels. In contrast, 37% of the Kuta area’s 17,000 rooms and 95% of
Ubud’s 2,200 rooms are non-starred (Van der Giessen et.al. 1999: 54).
State discourse in Bali (since 1974) and in Indonesia as a whole (since 1977)
has proclaimed tourism, when crafted and controlled by the state, to be a tool
by which traditional culture is maintained while the state implements moderni-
zation. Yet the role played by tourism in places such as Kuta and Ubud suggests
that, while tradition, both in the sense of culture and social structure, has
continued to flourish outside the protection of planned tourism development,
the meanings embodied in these traditions also have continued to shift (Scures
1995: 391-392). In other words, tradition, rather than disappearing, has evolved
in unpredictable ways.
The success of the informal tourism sector in Bali has spurred measures
designed not to formalize the informal but to capitalize on its success. In 1988,
the Governor of Bali proposed fifteen new “tourist zones” as part of a reorga-
nized provincial tourism plan that simultaneously recognized the value of the
informal sector and imposed new zoning and land-use regulations, the effect of
which was to open up new areas of the island to hotel construction (Van der
Giessen et.al. 1999: 56). In 1990 the central government signed an agreement
with UNDP to revise the Master Plan, which had expired in 1985. Finally, a
new provincial regulation re-defining the concept of cultural tourism was issued
in 1991.
In 1974 the Bali provincial government had described its official policy of
cultural tourism as a strategy to use tourism as a tool to support culture. This
policy was based on a presumed foreign desire to experience Balinese “cultural
objects” (objek-objek budaya), which would, it was theorized, produce revenues
for the further production, strengthening, and preservation of these objects of
culture. This decree specifically stated that the relationship between tourism and
culture was one-way; tourists would experience Balinese culture without
Balinese culture experiencing, and suffering harm from, tourism. The 1991
decree (Perda No. 3, 1991) transformed this one-way relationship into a
dialectical one:
Cultural tourism is the kind of tourism that in its development (perkembangan) and
progress uses Balinese culture, inspired by the soul of the Hindu religion [and a part of
the national culture], as a dominant element; and within this relationship there is im-
plied (tersirat) one goal, which is that there is a connection on both sides between tour-
ism and culture, so that both develop (meningkat) in a matching, harmonious and well-
balanced fashion (cited in Geriya 1996: 117).
In other words, tourism was identified by local authorities as a partner in the

protection of culture, and hence a stimulus to a cultural renaissance. By
identifying suitable objects for tourism, provincial authorities claimed to be able
to catalogue, in effect, Balinese culture.
These new efforts at harnessing the informal activities of tourist-local
interaction aimed to impose further formalized development planning (pemban-
gunan) on what, from a planning perspective, was unplanned socio-economic
change (perkembangan). This illustrates the tensions between the strategies of
experts and planners and the tactics of everyday life (de Certeau 1984). For
Certeau, a strategy (the planning apparatus of pembangunan) claims its own place
distinct from an object, one which serves as “a basis for generating relations
with an exterior.” (1984: xix). This can be contrasted with a tactic (the unfolding
of perkembangan) which erases borders between self and other. Lacking a fixed
place, tactics are always in search of new opportunities, in part by manipulating
events as a means of creating such opportunities. A “guileful ruse”, an “art of
the weak”, a tactic works on and via an imposed terrain and is determined by an
absence of power (ibid, 37). This notion of tactic describes what the Greeks
called metis (Scott 1998).
Paradoxes abound in contemporary Bali. The heartland of expatriate living
and anthropological fieldwork in the years between the wars has become a
tourist frenzy that stretches across much of the southern half of the island. In
Ubud, art galleries, craft shops and espresso bars compete for business with
French and Italian restaurants and bookshops stocking the New York Times,
while in Kuta surf shops and all-you-can-drink night clubs compete with
pizzerias and the Hard Rock cafe for the cash of Australians and Japanese.
Sanur, once the home of expatriate artists, has become a playground of the
international scene. The former homes of many of the 1930s expatriates have
become hotels and tourist attractions in their own right, as have the tourists
themselves: Kuta Beach is a regular stop on bus tours for domestic tourists,
who promenade on the beach at sunset, staring at sunbathing foreigners. It is
no doubt this reputation as the center of tourism on Bali that made Kuta a
target for Islamic radicals.
Shortly after 11 pm on October 12, 2002 a suicide bomber blew himself up
inside Paddy’s Pub in downtown Kuta Beach on Bali, followed seconds later by
a car bomb explosion in front of the Sari nighclub, directly across the street.
The two bombs and resulting fires killed 202 people, including 161 foreigners.
This attack, carried out by the radical group Jemaah Islamiyah, was the worst
act of terror in Indonesian history.
Two years to the day later, a memorial to the victims of the bombing was
dedicated on the site of Paddy’s Pub. The dedication ceremony combined Bali
Hindu religious rituals with a promotional event called “Kuta Karnival”, which
included Balinese dance performances, gamelon orchestras, beach sports, and a
food festival. The memorial has quickly become a tourist attraction, for both
domestic tourists and foreigners, a memory symbol that marks sacred ground,
and one which no doubt in the coming years will come to be seen by local
residents, other Indonesians, and foreign visitors as part of Bali’s heritage.
On October 1, 2005, bombs went off in central Kuta and at Jimbaran, a
small fishing village and site of several luxury hotels within the original planned
tourism zone. Twenty people died in these attacks, fifteen of whom were
Indonesian (Hitchcock and Putra 2007: 146).
Despite these attacks, tourism arrivals have quickly recovered. In 2006, 1.26
million international tourists visited, approximately the same number as in the
boom years before the 1998 Asian financial crisis and 2001 terror attacks in the
United States. By 2009 total arrivals reached more than 1.9 million, almost half
of which came from the Asian region, and a year later arrivals reached 2.57
million (BPS 2011).
In summary, tourism has neither destroyed authentic Balinese culture nor
spurred its rebirth; rather, local residents have become self-conscious about a
thing they possess called ‘culture’ (Picard 1997: 60). The question is thus not
what tourism’s impact on Balinese culture is or has been, but rather how
tourism, as one factor among many, influences and helps shape the outcomes
of Balinese social relationships (Richter 1989: 189). Rather than being an
external factor inextricably leading to cultural degradation, tourism, at least in
the case of Bali, has been an internal source of transformation, one which has
transcended the boundaries between the sacred and the profane (Picard 1993:
72).
At tourist sites such as Kuta and Ubud, a distinct social order has evolved,
one that achieves the primary goal of the Master Plan, namely, to realize the
economic benefits of tourism while limiting contacts between foreigners and
Balinese. However, in this case at least, a majority of foreign visitors willingly
segregate themselves. They do so because, contrary to both the projections of
tourism planners and the expectations of provincial officials and elites, the
majority of visitors to Bali are not, and arguably never have been, cultural
tourists. Quite the contrary: Bali for most visitors, whether to the five-star
hotels of Nusa Dua or the back alley homestays of Kuta, has been mainly a
place for sand, sea, shopping, sun and sex (not so much with the Balinese, but
with each other).
Chapter Six
Paradise Lost:
Tourism and Cultural Heritage in Tibet
The term ‘globalization’ often is used by both proponents and critics to
describe a clash between the universal and the local, a historical process that
allegedly aims to replace cultural differences with a global consensus of how life
should be lived. Concepts such as ‘democracy’, ‘the market’, ‘development’ and
‘the environment’ are increasingly used as hallmarks of this global world. Yet
these ideologies, like all, invariably take form within grounded, particular social
places and social worlds. Anna Tsing has employed the metaphor of ‘friction’ to
describe this encounter between global and local, thus emphasizing the unpre-
dictable and unstable nature of global interactions, as well as the productive
tension that can result (2004: 3).
The relatively recent phenomenon of cultural heritage is another global cat-
egory that fits Tsing’s analysis. Since the signing of the 1972 Convention on
World Heritage, the existence of a shared world heritage has been the guiding
principle behind United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organiza-
tion (UNESCO) efforts to preserve particular sites of culture and nature (and
now ambiguous cultural practices). UNESCO’s World Heritage list has become
a powerful symbolic marker of international cultural politics. Indeed, as noted
in Chapter III, state cooperation with UNESCO efforts has become so
normative that the rejection of UNESCO interventions usually are portrayed in
mainstream media outlets as transgressions against a world community.
Returning to Tsing’s metaphor, the friction in the context of heritage is
found in the competing interests of not only global and local, but also national
and local, and leads to a central question: Whose heritage is being preserved, by
whom, and for what purposes?
In this chapter I explore this question by examining the relationship be-
tween UNESCO efforts to preserve Tibetan culture and heritage and Chinese
state efforts to more firmly incorporate Tibet into China through domestic
tourism and heritage policies. Since the early 1990s Chinese authorities have
opened Tibet to tourism while welcoming the assistance of UNESCO in
restoring and preserving Tibetan cultural and religious sites. While many critics
have complained about the ‘touristification’ of Tibet, less attention has been
paid to the role UNESCO plays in this process.
Tourism Comes to Shangri-la

According to the China National Tourism Administration, the Chinese
tourism sector in 2005 consisted of approximately 100 million domestic tourist
trips and 100 million visitors from Hong Kong, Taiwan, and Macau, far
exceeding the 20.2 million international tourist arrivals (CNTO, 2006). By 2007,
state authorities calculated tourist arrivals to be 1.6 billion and total spending to
be approximately $100 billion. Of this total, less than 10% were by foreign
visitors (130 million), the vast majority of whom (105.8 million) were residents
of Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Macau (CNTO 2007). In 2009, the actual number
of non-Chinese arrivals totaled 21.93 million, of which almost 50% (10.2
million) were citizens of Japan, Russia, or the Republic of Korea. Approximate-
ly 7.1 million visitors were from the European Community and North America
(CNTO 2008, 2009). These figures demonstrate that foreign tourist arrivals
from outside the Chinese cultural sphere, while appearing to be large (8.7
million) are actually negligible, less than 0.5% of total tourism journeys (CNTO
2008).
In 2006, the Tibetan Autonomous Region received 2.35 million visitors, of
which approximately 145,000 were foreigners (Xinhua, November 11, 2006). In
2007, total arrivals rose to 4.02 million, dropped to 2.28 million in 2008 after
anti-Chinese riots in Lhasa, then reached approximately 4 million again in 2009
(Xinhua, July 20, 2009). In 2010 the TAR received 6.8 million tourists, 95% of
whom were domestic. Local officials have set a goal of 15 million annual
visitors by 2015 (Wang 2011).
The marginal realities of Euro-American tourism in China and Tibet should
demonstrate that a fear of the supposed destruction of other people’s cultures
by Western tourists is of limited use in examining the place of tourism in
contemporary Tibet, where the overwhelming majority of tourists are Han
Chinese.
Nevertheless, this tourism boom in Tibetan regions has raised new con-
cerns among foreign critics, as worries over Chinese attempts to forcibly
assimilate Tibetans into a broader Chinese cultural and ideological landscape
under Maoism have been replaced by a fear that tourism will achieve what Mao
could not: a Tibet emptied of any authentic cultural differences. A recent travel
Tourism and Cultural Heritage in Tibet 101
article in the New York Times is an example of this worry. It begins by evoking a
timeless Tibet of pious pilgrims and chanting monks before disrupting this
image with the specter not of communist modernization but of mass tourism:
In front of one of the holiest sites in Tibetan Buddhism, the Jokhang Temple in Lhasa,
hundreds of pilgrims fall on the ground, spread-eagled, prostrating themselves so force-
fully their hands bleed from being smacked to earth … several seem so overcome to
have arrived at the Jokhang that they sob controllably or stare into the temple as if
entranced. Then the trance snaps. Behind one of the pilgrims, a tourist climbs onto one
of the Jokhang’s massive golden prayer wheels, pulls out a cell phone camera, and starts
snapping away. (Kurlantzick 2006)
A lament for an authentic Tibet rapidly disappearing as it is transformed by

development and tourism follows, along with a warning for readers to expe-
rience Tibet “while they can still recognize its unique culture and fragile
environment” (ibid.). Tibet, it seems, is under siege not by Communist Party
bureaucrats or revolutionary Red Guards but by tourists. Moreover, these are
not the middle-class and working-class Europeans and North Americans usually
blamed for such acts of destruction, but Han Chinese. Race and ethnicity are
layered on to the usual class-driven tourist-traveler divide: Tibet is being ruined
not simply by tourism, but by Chinese tourism.
This is a point also stressed by various elements of the Tibetan exile
movement. ‘Free Tibet’ activists argue that mass tourism brings few benefits to
ordinary Tibetans as most jobs go to Han Chinese and much of the profit
generated by the industry is controlled by large Chinese corporations (freeti-
bet.org). The International Campaign for Tibet has linked tourism promotion
with the commoditization of Tibetan culture and decline in the use of the
Tibetan language (ICT, 2010). For its part, the Tibetan government in exile has
not rejected large-scale Chinese tourism out of hand. Instead, it has advocated
for an environmentally sustainable policy that emphasizes village level, small
scale projects that reduces overcrowding in Lhasa by spreading tourism
throughout Tibet (2007: 185–193). Indeed, far from rejecting tourism as an
existential threat to Tibetan culture and identity, the Dharamsala government
has stressed the potential benefits a sustainable policy can have on promoting
culture and improving incomes.
Nevertheless, an ethno-racial narrative about the destruction of cultural
Tibet by waves of Han tourists appeals to some Europeans and North Ameri-
cans because it fits their conceptions of Shangri-la. In this narrative, Tibet was
once a place of isolation, harmony and peace that, beginning in 1951, was
assaulted by a Maoist attempt to destroy its cultural and spiritual uniqueness.

Yet having survived Mao, Tibet has been, it seems, confronted with the
destructive power of tourism. Angst about Tibetans in Tibet becoming Sini-
cized thus takes precedence among Tibetophiles over concerns about Tibetans
living in exile becoming ‘westernized’, as if the former carries more coercive
force than the latter (V. Adams 1996: 521). These concerns about the harm
done to Tibetan culture by Chinese tourists increased after the opening in July
2006 of a direct rail link between Xining, the provincial capital of Qinghai, and
Lhasa. With onward rail connections from Xining to major cities such as Beijing,
Shanghai, and Guangzhou, Tibet as a travel destination is now possible for
millions of urban Chinese residents.
Although this despair over a (forever) disappearing Tibet is understandable
in the context of a continued Euro-American fascination with Tibet as Shangri-
la, it misses the broader implications of state tourism policies in Tibet. Officially
described as an economic development strategy and condemned by outside
critics as a tactic aimed at cultural destruction, these policies seek to transform
Tibet into a de-politicized space of ‘culture’ and ‘tradition’ securely within the
People’s Republic, much like New Order tourism policies under former
President Suharto in Indonesia that were aimed at increasing the state presence
in non-Javanese regions of the Republic (K. Adams 1997: 156–158). In both
cases, these policies enable state actors to make a claim on an imagined unified
national past, thereby justifying contemporary state boundaries and strengthen-
ing national standing (Errington 1998: 37; Tuohy 1991: 201).
Equating increased Han Chinese tourism in Tibetan cultural areas with the
destruction of Tibetan culture is therefore highly questionable. A key goal of a
policy premised on utilizing culture, suitably de-politicized, for development
purposes is the preservation of differences, not their erasure. It is therefore more
useful to view these tourism policies as one aspect of a broader policy aimed at
the “culturalization” of Tibetan culture, led by government-directed efforts to
protect this by working with UNESCO to preserve Tibetan cultural sites from
the dangers of, paradoxically, tourism.
This leads to three questions. First, why has the Chinese government pro-
moted tourism in Tibetan areas after decades of limiting outside access to this
region for both Han Chinese and foreigners? Second, why have state authorities
actively cooperated with UNESCO to promote Tibetan cultural sites as
examples of ‘world heritage’? Finally, what attracts Han Chinese citizens to
Tibet despite widespread negative stereotypes about Tibetans in Chinese

popular culture?
I begin with a brief review of the place of tourism in Chinese society, link-
ing the rapid growth in domestic tourism in the past decade to the transforma-
tion of spatial policies in a post-Maoist era. I then turn to the role played by
UNESCO in Chinese state policies that seek to harness Tibetan culture in
service to a greater China. Finally, I turn to the issue of Han Chinese tourists in
Tibet, arguing that different types of tourists are visiting Tibet for different
reasons.
Space, Place, and Mobility in the Tourist Landscape

First mentioned in China’s Seventh Five-Year Plan (1986–1990), tourism
was defined as a key component of the service sector only in the Eighth Plan
(1991–1995). Initial state policies under Deng Xiaoping emphasized the rapid
development of an international tourism sector as means of increasing foreign
exchange earnings. Yet, while foreign tourist arrivals have steadily increased
since the beginning of the reform process, the most dramatic increases have
been in domestic tourism.
The explosion of domestic tourism is a by-product of policy changes that
have benefitted urban residents since the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests. In
the last two decades, increased personal autonomy and an emphasis on con-
sumption have created an urban middle-class with the means and desire to
travel (Hevia 2001: 221). However, the most important factor in this radical
transformation has been a relaxation of spatial control and increased personal
mobility. Quite simply, without the ability to travel, tourism cannot exist. Yet
for much of the post-1949 era in China the ability of citizens to move was
extremely limited.
Formal surveillance in China long predates the establishment of the
People’s Republic in 1949. For example, during the Ming era (1644–1911),
household registers (baojia) were required for all subjects. These enabled
authorities to track people’s movements and served as a basis for tax levies.
During the Republican era (1911–1949), surveillance techniques based on
identity cards were common in both government and communist-controlled
areas. However, no previous regime sought to completely control the move-
ment of people to the degree that PRC authorities have (Cheng & Seldon 1994:
646). The post-1949 government mandated population registration in urban
areas in 1951, and established a nation-wide family registration system (hukou) in
1960 (Kam & Li 1999: 819–821). Modeled on the Soviet internal passport
system, this policy was designed to address the same planning problem Soviet
administrators encountered in attempting rapid modernization: in a largely rural
society, how to prevent peasants from leaving rural areas and moving to cities?
The solution in both states was a registration system that tied citizens to their
places of birth.
In China, the net result was a new type of state-sanctioned social inequality.
In seeking to erase economic class differences, authorities created a new and
more rigid social marker of difference, based on place of birth. As Gong Xikui
has noted, “the reproduction of the household register (was) the reproduction
of difference … it was originally the outcome of people’s activity, but it quickly
changed to become a precondition for social activity” (Gong 1998: 83).
In urban areas, residents were assigned to a ‘work unit’ (danwei), where they
lived, labored, shopped, ate, socialized, often married, and eventually died.
Cities were spatially organized as collections of walled work unit compounds;
public space in the normative Euro-American sense was thus highly limited.
Travel, for either business or pleasure, was also highly restricted. While hotels
existed, the ability to stay in a hotel depended on having a reason, which meant
a letter from one’s work unit boss explaining why a person was ‘out of place’.
Buying a train ticket required the same sort of authorization. In such an
environment, tourism functioned as an extension of the work unit.
Economic reforms beginning in 1978 have not just radically transformed
economic production in China but have also fundamentally altered social
relationships. As work units have privatized their housing stock and state
employment has declined, control over the movement of urban residents has
broken down. Travel for both pleasure and for economic necessity is closely
connected to this breakdown in state control of space and institutional limits to
citizens’ ability to move. This breakdown, necessitated largely by market
pressures for a mobile, flexible and cheap lo-skill labor force, has created both
the affluence that enables some people to travel as tourists and the rural
marginalization that induces peasants to move to urban areas in search of work.
However, economic affluence an emerging middle class has not displaced the
normative view of people who are ‘out of place’. In Chinese, the character liu,
‘to float or move’, is culturally and historically linked to a concern for being ‘in
place’, that is, both physically and socially embedded in a specific community of
relatives, friends, and associates. Those who are out of place include liumang
‘criminals’, liumin ‘refugees’, and mangliu, literally ‘blindly floating’ people,
migrants who seek work in places they are not from. The hyper-modernization
of urban areas has not erased traditional urban views of ‘the countryside’ or
‘country bumpkins’, but has in fact further solidified these.
Building the State by Preserving the Past

In the context of Tibet, cultural heritage programs assist state-directed de-
velopment efforts that are explicitly linked to a national project of moderniza-
tion. State authorities and the Communist Party position themselves as both
guides to modernization and shields against the negative effects of moderniza-
tion. This claim to being the protector of culture against an unrestrained market
process mirrors UNESCO’s emphasis on protecting cultural practices from
tourism (UNESCO 1995: 184). From a critical perspective, this simultaneous
State celebration of cultural difference and claimed role as protector of this
difference turns both tangible and intangible culture into aesthetic performance.
State claims of cultural guardianship have traditionally been manifested in
national museums, such as the Museum of the Revolution in Beijing and the
Indonesian National Museum in Jakarta. Between 1980 and 2000, mirroring an
ideological shift from Maoist asceticism and High Socialism to authoritarian
nationalism, the number of museums in China almost quadrupled, increasing
from 365 to 1,353 (Denton 2005:566). During the Maoist era, museums shared
a single revolutionary narrative that emphasized self-sacrifice for the collective
good, while built heritage sites that were not directly connected to either the
1911 Revolution or the history of the Chinese Communist Party were ignored
or physically attacked (Sofield and Li 1998: 363). New museums resolve the
dilemma between a former emphasis on a revolutionary past and a contempo-
rary state emphasis on individualism and self-interest by defining both as
necessary aspects of “building the nation” (Denton 2005: 582). In other words,
the past no longer serves a revolutionary purpose but a nationalist one. The
Maoist goal of creating a new cultural order, one which erased differences, has
been replaced by a contemporary Communist Party emphasis on managed
ethnicity as a consumption resource (Hevia 2001: 236–237). This is also evident
in two related areas: theme parks and heritage sites.
As in New Order Indonesia, the marketing of theme parks and heritage
sites are closely related in China. In New Order Indonesia, Taman Mini Indonesia
Indah (“Beautiful Indonesia Miniature Park”), funded through former First Lady
Ibu Tien’s private foundation and inspired by a visit she had made to Disneyl-
and, opened near Jakarta in 1977, while the Prambanan and Borobodur Temple
complexes in Central Java were restored with UNESCO funding over a period
of ten years, from 1972 to 1982 (Errington 1998: 213–215).
In China, an explosion of folk, ethnic, and historical theme parks, number-
ing approximately 2,500 by 2008, began with the opening in 1989 of the
“Splendid China” theme park (Jinxiu Zhonghua). Located near Shenzhen, in the
heartland of China’s modernization drive in Guangdong Province, the park
contains a scale model of the Potala Palace, among other exhibits that portray
the country’s major historical sites. This successful theme park was followed in
1991 by the opening of the first “China Folk Culture Village” (Minzu Wenhua
Cun) nearby (Oakes 1998: 49–50). This park displays copies of the built heritage
of twenty-three different minority groups, ranging from a Uighur Mosque and
Tibetan Monastery to Mongolian Yurts and Dong bell towers (Sofield and Li
1998: 382-383). Like Disney’s Epcot Center in Orlando, Florida, the park’s staff
members are all “authentic” minority peoples. This park, like similar folk parks
throughout China, is designed for and visited by domestic tourists. On the one
hand, these sites serve as an educational tool of the state for instructing visitors
in how to tour the actual sites and the peoples depicted (Nyíri 2006: 15). At the
same time, these parks reaffirm popular Han majority narratives about the less
developed status of minority peoples (Gladney 2004: 45).
In terms of heritage, China as of 2010 had forty UNESCO-designated
World Heritage sites, third in the world behind Italy (forty-five) and Spain
(forty-two), despite not having signed the World Heritage Convention until
1985. China has an additional fifty-six sites awaiting UNESCO approval, and
thousands of other heritage-related sites classified as “key cultural relics
protection units” (Zhongdian Wenwu Baohu Danwei). All of these sites fall under
the loose domain of the State Administration of Cultural Heritage.
Chinese world heritage sites include built heritage places such as the For-
bidden City, Temple of Heaven, and Summer Palace in Beijing; natural sites
such as the Wulong Panda Reserve and Jiuzhaigou Valley in Sichuan Province;
and cultural sites situated in nature, such as certain historic mountain temple
complexes, including Emei Shan in Sichuan Province. In Tibet, the Potala
Palace became an official World Heritage site in 1994, followed by the Jokhang
temple complex in 2000 and the Norbulingka Summer Palace in 2001.
The enthusiastic acceptance of the concept of world heritage in minority
regions by Chinese authorities supports a government and Party imagined
“landscape of nostalgia” (Oakes 1997: 42). For example, the official application
for World Heritage status for the Potala Palace states that it deserves inclusion
not because it is symbolic of Tibet nationhood or Tibetan culture but because it

“embodies the outstanding skills of the Tibetan, Han, Mongol, Man, and other
nationalities and the high achievements of Tibetan architecture in terms of the
overall layout of the Palace as well as its civil engineering, its metalwork, its
sculptures, and its wall paintings” (UNESCO 1993: 5). In other words, the
Potala is significant because from the State perspective it reflects the joint
technical and aesthetic achievements of the peoples of China, not of a separate
nation of Tibet.
The UNESCO response to this claim is mute, although for understandable
reasons. This pragmatic view is particularly relevant in the case of Tibet, given
that Chinese authorities oversaw the destruction of many Tibetan cultural sites
during the initial occupation of Tibet in the 1950s and 1960s and during the
Cultural Revolution of 1966–1976. In response to the Chinese government’s
application for World Heritage status for the Potala complex, members of the
International Council on Monuments and Sites (ICOMOS), the primary
organization responsible for evaluating all such applications, did note dissatis-
faction with government plans to redevelop areas around the Potala (UNESCO
1993: 9). Yet the Council limited its critique to urging “responsible authorities
to give careful consideration to a possible reappraisal of the overall plan” (ibid.)
and, more recently, has suggested authorities “develop an articulated strategic
program for the conservation and rehabilitation of the historic fabric of Lhasa”
so as to “make the most appropriate use of the historic Shol area” (UNESCO
2004: 104). More specifically, it has limited its suggestions to better signage
highlighting the “World Heritage values of the Potala Palace” and ways to
“address the challenge of tourism pressure” by diverting tourists to a proposed
visitor center (2005: 4).
These calls have not been heeded. Instead, the area directly below the Pa-
lace (known as inner Shol), previously home to approximately three hundred
Tibetan families and numerous small Tibetan-run shops, is being redeveloped
into, ironically, a museum that will include just such a visitor center, while
across the main boulevard, Beijing Road, the area known as outer Shol was
demolished in 1995 and replaced by a large square modeled on Tiananmen
Square in Beijing. At the back of this square, facing the Potala, is a futuristic
monument built in 2001 to commemorate the liberation of Tibet. While the
square is intended to serve as a visual reminder of the power of China in Lhasa,
it has itself become a tourist attraction, both for local Tibetans and visiting Han
Chinese. Indeed, Chinese tourists generally ignore the monument to liberation
in favor of the souvenir photo tables that line one side of the square. There,
they can dress up in Tibetan robes and have their photographs taken by Hui
Muslim entrepreneurs with the Potala Palace as a backdrop.
In addition to being a tourist attraction, this Square also serves as a spatial
marker denoting the separation of “Tibet” and “China”. Beijing Road going
east leads to the crowded alleyways and twisting streets of old Lhasa. Running
west it leads to ‘China’, both figuratively and literally (connecting as it does to
the airport road and Qinghai-Tibet highway), and thus to the heart of the
ambiguity of Chinese tourism. What is most noticeable about this part of the
city is the preponderance of not just nondescript Chinese hotels and restaurants
(which, after all, one would expect in a place that is officially a tourist boom-
town), but also karaoke clubs and hair salons, staffed by Han migrants. A “hair
salon” in China is often a brothel. Much of what is categorized as domestic
tourism is from this perspective less about Lhasa as a historically situated site
than it is about the city as a marker for a different culture and an escape from
the binds of everyday life. Just as with other colonial cities, Lhasa functions as a
dual city, as home for local residents and as temporary abode for those whom,
because of job circumstances or economic necessity, become non-local locals,
including Han entrepreneurs, service workers, soldiers, and a legion of prosti-
tutes, mainly rural or working-class migrants from Sichuan.
The Tibetan exile movement has responded not by criticizing UNESCO
complicity in State-building projects but by seizing on UNESCO discomfort at
Chinese heritage approaches as evidence of UNESCO support for its own
policies. For example, groups such as the World Tibet Network News (pub-
lished by the Canada Tibet Committee), the Office of Tibet in New York, and
the International Campaign for Tibet regularly mention UNESCO and world
heritage in their reports on urban renewal in Lhasa (CF. August 2002, Saunders
2003, Tibet News 2003). However, there is no acknowledgement by these groups
that, beyond verbalizing its concerns, UNESCO has little influence over how
Chinese authorities manage Tibetan heritage sites, let alone any recognition or
discussion of the role UNESCO plays in strengthening Chinese claims.
The realities of Lhasa’s heritage sites points to a practical dilemma for UN-
ESCO and other groups seeking to support the preservation of tangible
material culture sites and intangible cultural and social practices. To do so, they
must sometimes work with state authorities who have little interest in maintain-
ing authentic cultural differences and identities. The paradox that shapes the
relationship between UNESCO and Chinese State authorities is unavoidable:
UNESCO designates sites as of universal cultural and historical value, while
Chinese authorities then transform these sites into elements in the state
narrative of Chinese culture and civilization.
Ordering Human Subjects

The Communist Party classifies the peoples of China into five “races” (zu),
Han, Manchurian, Mongolian, Tibetan, and Muslim, and 51 minority peoples
(shao shu minzu). Each minority group is assumed to possess “customs” while
the nation (guojia) is the source of culture (wenhua) and civilization (wenming).
According to this logic, peoples such as Tibetans are recognized as different
from Han Chinese not simply because they have a different language and script
but also because they have “traditions.” These “traditions” in turn impede them
from becoming modern (Blum 2001: 98).
This positioning of minority peoples as less developed and following in the
footsteps of a more advanced “race” [zu] is rooted in the stage-based social
evolutionary model of late nineteenth century anthropologist Lewis Henry
Morgan and the early twentieth century historical materialism of Joseph Stalin.
Morgan’s three stages of social development (savagery, barbarism, and civiliza-
tion) were transformed in the Soviet Union via Marx into a five-stage theory of
development (primitive communism, slavery, feudalism, capitalism, and
socialism). This Soviet model of social evolution and development in turn
became in post-1949 China the theoretical basis for classifying minority peoples
(Yang 1996: 96–97).
This preoccupation with social diversity at a folk-cultural level and cultural
unity at a national level reflects popular assumptions among Han Chinese about
the relationship of Han with local others, particularly the belief that diverse folk
ways are subsumed within a broader, shared “civilization” with Han China at its
center (Tuohy 1991: 214). Paradoxically, the notion of being Han in the sense
of a nationality (minzu), or the notion of being Chinese (zhongguo ren) are
relatively recent identity markers, dating from the years leading up to the 1911
Nationalist Revolution (Gladney 2004:14). Minzu, the first of Sun Yatsen’s
“Three Principles of the People” (Sanmin Zhuyi) is a direct borrowing from the
Japanese minzokushugi, which literally translates as “racism” (Tuttle 2005:58). In
his writings before the 1911 overthrow of the Qing Emperor, Dr. Sun asserted
that a revolution could succeed only if the subjects of the Empire possessed a
sense of nationalism. He argued that Han Chinese had to first be convinced that
their identity was rooted in the ethnic marker “Han” and not in local place or
language differences. Only then would the majority of subjects in the Empire
view the Manchu-centered Qing Dynasty as a foreign race that had to be

overthrown (Wei et al. 1994: 42–43). Once the Revolution had occurred,
however, Dr. Sun called on Han people to become “Chinese” by merging with
non-Han groups to form a new nation:
Now, in overthrowing the Manchus and restoring the Han nation, we have achieved
only the negative half of the goal of nationalism. From now on, we must struggle to
boldly advance toward the positive side of that goal. What is this positive goal? It is for
the Han people to sacrifice the separate nationality, history, and identity they are so
proud of and to merge with all sincerity with the Manchus, Mongols, Muslims, and
Tibetans in one melting pot to create a new order of Chinese nationalism. (ibid, 225)
Just as the majority Han would lead non-Han groups down a pathway of
national progress and development in a Republican China, the Han under
Chairman Mao were constituted as the vanguard of the Revolution, charged
with assisting non-Han groups to march forward into a Marxist future (Gladney
2004: 13).
This process of being and becoming modern continues in post-socialist
China. A state emphasis on tourism as a development method in minority areas
intersects with how non-Han residents of these areas are both officially and
popularly imagined in the state’s ongoing drive to modernization. Because
minority peoples are assumed to be less modern than Han Chinese, they are (or
should be) grateful for Han help in becoming modern, given that moderniza-
tion is unavoidable in order (Blum 2001: 73–74).
Although this preoccupation with diversity at a folk-cultural level and unity
at a national level resembles historical materialist approaches, it also has long
been part of popular assumptions among Han Chinese about the relationship
between Han and non-Han peoples, particularly the belief that diverse folk ways
are subsumed within a broader, shared ‘civilization’ that has Han China at the
center (Tuohy 1991: 214). In other words, the State-directed modernization
project undertaken after 1911 by the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) and after
1949 by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has unfolded within long-held
Han cultural assumptions of what it means to be civilized. In terms of minority
groups, this is tied to their cultural distance, real or perceived, from the Han
(Oakes 1997: 46). It therefore is not surprising that Mayfair Yang, in her
fieldwork in Wenzhou, found peasants who conceptualized cultural practices in
neat linear stages (1996: 96), or Debra Blum, in her fieldwork in Yunan,
students who characterized Tibetans as ‘primitive’ and troublesome for their
perceived refusal to learn from the Han (2001: 125–130). These complaints
about troublesome peoples highlight a second aspect of Modernity, its emphasis

on order and being in-place: people become out of place when they are
uprooted from their ‘natural’ places, a process which is presumed to lead to
alienation and inauthenticity (Oakes 1998: 60).
Yet despite the above, the on-going Chinese State effort to harness the past
for its own interests in Tibet cannot avoid the fact that no one actually owns
the past. Given this, State tourism policies in Tibet, like in other minority areas,
only succeed to the extent that first, local subjects accede to these State efforts
and accept their roles, and second, that tourists validate and authenticate State-
sanctioned sites by visiting (Oakes 1998: 80; Ashworth & Larkham 1994: 18). In
doing so, tourism certainly cannot avoid influencing local culture. For example,
in the case of Tibet’s tropical counterpart in the popular Western imagination,
Bali, tourism has become such an integral part of everyday life that it is not at all
clear what it might mean to be Balinese and not be a tourist object (Picard 1997:
61). Yet this implosion of local identity with an exoticized touristic vision of
Balinese-ness (kebalian) has arguably led to a strengthening of Bali’s relative
position within the Indonesian Republic over the past three decades in political,
economic, and cultural terms, not an accelerated assimilation of Bali into a
State-sanctioned Indonesian State culture or a disappearance of Balinese culture.
Closer to Tibet, Timothy Oakes has shown how the State-encouraged
transformation of Dong and Miao villages in rural Guizhou into tourist
destinations has led to a similar situation. He argues that at the local level
villagers seldom see any contradiction between cultural authenticity and
economic development, equating the former with the relative satisfaction of
foreign visitors, which leads to the latter (1997: 55). This contrasts with
concerns among State Cultural Bureau officials to protect local cultural practices
from commercialization. This would not matter except that it is the State
Cultural Bureau that has the power to grant official status of cultural authentici-
ty to villages seeking to attract tourists. It does so by designating villages and
sites as “protected cultural relic units” (wenwu baohu danwei), a status that not
only attracts tourists but also provides government funding for developing
tourism resources. Given this, Oakes argues that an important effect of tourism
is not necessarily the touristification of places (which then leads to a decline in
local ‘culture’) but instead a means of becoming modern by embracing local
traditions, be these real or imagined, authentic or invented (65). Or alternatively,
one could argue that touristification in this case is a pathway to Modernity.
Something similar appears to be happening in the case of Tibet and Tibe-
tans. Yet this focus on becoming modern leads to a further question. What
motivates increasing numbers of Han Chinese to visit minority regions such as

Tibet, given the fact that Tibetans for centuries have been popularly portrayed
in Han culture as primitive, suspect, and recalcitrant, and Tibet as backwards,
desolate and uncivilized?
Scenic Spots
A Euro-American perspective would explain travel to places popularly per-
ceived as not-yet modern in terms of the relationship between self and nature.
In other words, urban Han Chinese visit minority areas such as Tibet to
cultivate the “I” of their identity, engaging in the paradoxical process of ‘finding
themselves’ (coming to more intimately know their own self) among strangers,
by literally ‘finding themselves among strangers’ through travel. In doing so,
these tourists seek to experience a natural world they no longer recognize in
their urban lives, confirming their own modernity in contrast to Tibetan people
and their distance from them. For many Han Chinese tourists, however,
tourism in Tibet, as at other destinations in the PRC, emphasizes touring
already-marked sites of historical or cultural importance, and doing so in the
company of others (Nyíri 2006).
Variously referred to as jingdian (“scenic spots”), fengjing (“wind and views”),
or mingsheng (“famous sites”), lists of such sites date to the second century BCE
(Nyíri 2006:7). By the sixteenth century a canon of several hundred destinations
existed for a discerning elite class of intellectuals and the wealthy. Ranging from
mountains and valleys to rock formations, individual stones and carvings, and
vistas, these mingsheng were designed, as Nyíri notes, to “validate one’s know-
ledge of canonical representations” (ibid, 12). These representations evoked not
a personal response to a scene but instead an experience tied mimetically to
already existing responses. If, for example, Europeans and Americans look at a
famous site such as the Yangtze River and see a river, discerning Chinese
visitors see “an epic poem replete with philosophical ideas” (Sofield & Li 1998:
367).
After 1949, individual tourism was replaced by work unit (danwei) based
travel. A new canon of suitable scenic spots emerged. These sites either
heroicized the Communist Party and People’s Liberation Army or villanized
enemies of the Revolution. For example, work unit members might visit a
famous battle site or the birthplace of famous men such as Chairman Mao’s
hometown of Shaoshan in Hunan province, or observe the decadent lifestyles
of counter-revolutionaries such as Chiang Kaishek or the Dalai Lama. The
Norbulinka Summer Palace in Lhasa stills displays the Dalai Lama’s “western”
toilet, presumably as evidence of his privileged lifestyle.
In post-socialist China, the canon of destinations transcends ideological
boundaries, signifying not just socialist and nationalist sites but also strictly
modern ones as well. Confucius’ ancestral home in Shandong, like Chairman
Mao’s in Hunan, is a scenic spot, but so is the Disney Park in Hong Kong,
home of Mickey Mouse. Imperial steeles (official memorial columns), urban
skyscrapers, and a revived list of classical mingsheng vie for visitors. A bureaucrat-
ic web of state agencies classifies and ranks destinations as “key scenic areas”,
“key cultural relics protection units”, “historic and cultural cities of national
fame”, “national sites of patriotic education”, and “tourist scenic spots” – with
local, county, provincial, and national rankings of “A” to “AAAA” for each
(Nyíri 2006: 51–52). The most sought-after title is UNESCO World Heritage
status because of the global recognition this carries.
Tibetan mingsheng, suitably classified, function as part of the Chinese nation-
al landscape of an imagined unity that transcends time and historical facts. Like
other “scenic spots” in China, the value of these sites rests not in their material
purity or authenticity but in their historical categorization. Just as few domestic
tourists who visit the Great Wall at either Badaling or Mutianyu (the two main
tourist sites) appear concerned about the presence of cable cars, vendors, or the
reconstructed nature of the Wall itself in these places, few Han Chinese visitors
to the Potala Palace in Lhasa seem overly concerned with the commercialization
of the area around the Palace or other improvements.
As the size of China’s urban middle-class has increased since the 1990s
domestic tourism has also risen dramatically. Most Chinese tourists continue to
travel in groups. The social aspect of these journeys is paramount: a fulfilling
trip meets personal expectations tied to the revived practice of accumulating
marked “scenic spots”, now expanded to the middle class. But it is also a social
experience, a different travel expectation than the idealized view of travel which
circulates in the Euro-American canon. From the latter perspective, one travels
to achieve a moment of insight spurred by an out-of-the-ordinary experience
that takes place either in solitude or among strangers. According to this view, a
good Chinese experience is a bad travel experience. Yet from a Chinese perspec-
tive, estrangement is not crucial to the experience; it is simply strange.
A critic might assert that what Han Chinese experience is not travel but
tourism. Travel supposedly offers the depth, thickness, and emotional weight
that tourism lacks. Thus Chinese travel is not ‘authentic’ but at best mimics the
package tourism so widely disparaged by theorists of tourism. To what extent
might this be true in the case of Chinese tourism in Tibet, and to what extent
does this affect the broader Chinese state project of using Tibetan culture as a
development tool?
The Tibet “Craze”

Beginning in the late 1990s, a “Tibet craze” (xizang re, literally “Tibet hot-
ness”) took hold in urban China among intellectuals. The new Tibet presented
by Han Chinese artists, musicians, writers, and filmmakers looks remarkably like
the Tibet portrayed in the 1997 Hollywood film version of Heinrich Harrer’s
1957 memoir Seven Years in Tibet, Martin Scorsese’s 1998 film Kundun, or James
Hilton’s 1933 novel Lost Horizons. It is a place of primitiveness, mystery, and
spirituality, far removed from the modern world (Upton 2003:104). It is also far
removed from both the CCP portrayal of Tibetans as a happy, colorful minority
and of the Han Chinese folk imagery of Tibetans as surly, backwards, and
dangerous.
The Tibet craze is manifested in the Chinese consumer economy in multiple
ways. Tibet-themed shops, often run by Lhasa-based Hui (Muslim) Chinese, sell
jewelry, clothing, and thanka (religious paintings) to affluent consumers in
upscale shopping areas of Beijing, Shanghai, and other cosmopolitan cities.
Whereas Tibetans selling traditional medicine, both herbs and animal parts,
have been common on city streets in China since the beginning of the econom-
ic reforms in 1979, they have been supplemented in the early years of the 21st
century by other Tibetans selling jewelry and prayer beads. Significantly, these
street vendors are not found in the international tourist areas but instead near
university campuses and suburban bus stations. This pattern reflects the
popularity among Han Chinese university students for cultural markers of
“Tibet-ness”, which in turn is an aspect of new forms of tourism for these
youth made possible by economic reforms.
Neither cause nor effect but both, Tibetan culture is attractive to young
urban residents caught up by a second “craze:” backpacking. These young
people are called “friends of donkeys” (lúzi péngyou, shortened to lúyou) in
Chinese, a phonetic pun on the characters for tourism (pronounced “lüyou”) and
an apt description of a backpacker and his or her load. For these backpackers,
Tibet and Tibetans are not primitive, dirty, superstitious, and dangerous, but
exotic, authentic, spiritual, and mystical. More accurately, they are “primitive”
and therefore exotic, not yet modern and therefore mystical. Tibet is appealing
to backpackers for the same reasons it appeals to China’s new class of urban
intellectuals: it is both culturally remote yet also part of the greater Chinese
nation envisioned by Sun Yatsen (Upton 2003: 111–112). Backpackers thus do
not necessarily tour Tibetan areas to confirm their own cultural superiority, or
to cultivate already-existing social ties, as is the case with the package tourists
Nyíri analyzes, but to grasp at something they do not have. Thus, Kolas (2004)
may be partially right; for these donkey travelers the goal is, broadly conceived,
‘nature’, though not so much a “nostalgic rejuvenation” (2004: 273) for what
they have lost, but an idealized nostalgia for something they have never
experienced.
The emergence of a backpacker class of traveling tourists in China does not
signal a shift in Han Chinese perceptions of Tibetans; set forth on a spiritual
quest or a religious pilgrimage. Instead, they speak of Tibet’s ‘mystery’ and
‘magic’. Tibetans are special people, a backpacker at Labrang Monastery said.
They have special practices and beliefs. For ‘special’ Xiao Wang used both tebie,
which translates as ‘unique’ and ‘unusual’ and shenmi, which connotes mystery
and secrecy. Chen, one of her companions, added that he thought Tibetans
were ‘superstitious’ people. In Chinese, ‘superstition’ (mixin) carries a sense of
over-enthusiasm for a subject, to the point where a person becomes bewildered,
confused, and ultimately lost. For most of the twentieth century, to describe a
person as mixin was to classify them as trapped in the past and not-yet modern:
people to improve, not observe. Yet Chen was not out to develop Tibetans and
make them modern, he was content to simply see their ‘superstitions’ in practice.
Neither Xiao Wang nor her companions had any desire to transcend their
positions as observing subjects and enter a backstage into a more authentic
zone of cultural reality, which so much of tourism theory assumes to be the
point of travel. Quite the contrary: when I posed this question of moving
beyond surface encounters to a deeper level of meaning, Xiao Wang stared at
me, perplexed. “I’m not Tibetan,” she told me. Shen, one of her companions,
laughed at my question. “I don’t understand anything they say! What would I do
here? And why would I want to?”
Lost Horizons Found

In one of the more unusual examples of life imitating art, local authorities
in Zhongdian County, located in northwestern Yunnan Province, announced in
2001 that the State Council in Beijing had approved its petition to change the
county’s name to Shangri-la.
Control of the symbolism of ‘Shangri-la’ is one more example of the on-

going conflict between the Tibetan exile movement and the Chinese state.
Chinese authorities have seized on the fictive ideal of Shangri-la and seek to
locate this in a particular place, literally renamed Shangri-la, located not in Tibet
but in a border zone historically populated by Tibetans, Bai, Naxi, and other
minority groups. Indeed, the Diqing Tibetan Autonomous Prefecture, consist-
ing of Zhongdian, Diqing, and Weixi Lisu counties, is one of the most ethnical-
ly diverse areas in all of China, as 84% of its 353,000 residents identify as
minorities, including 33% as Tibetans (Hillman 2003: 175). This Shangri-la thus
serves as an example of the state-imagined demographics of modern China, a
diverse array of minority peoples living in harmony with each other while being
guided towards modernity by Han. Tibetan exiles, in contrast, have long
recognized the power of Shangri-la as a marker of longing among the intellec-
tual classes of Europe and North America and have subsequently cultivated a
utopian Tibet-as-Shangri-la floating free from a physical Tibet.
To judge by international accounts of the remaking of Zhongdian into
Shangri-la, the project has been a failure because it lacks authenticity: it is not
literally in Tibet, and renaming a place does not make it different. It is thus
portrayed as a cynical attempt to cash in on a Western obsession with Tibet-as-
Shangri-la (Cf. Gluckman 2004). Two facts complicate this narrative. First, the
rebranding of the region as Shangri-la has proven, at least in the short term, to
be a significant tourism draw, mainly for Chinese citizens. In 2000, 94% of
approximately one million visitors were Chinese (Hillman 2003: 176). Secondly,
a local government decision to promote tourism was a direct result of a central
government decree that banned logging, the mainstay of the local economy,
after devastating 1998 floods in the Yangzi river basin were blamed on massive
deforestation in northwestern Yunnan (ibid, 176).
In 1996, local authorities invited historians and anthropologists to study
whether the region could claim to be the site of James Hilton’s (fictional)
Shangri-la. Not surprisingly, conference participants decided this was, in fact,
true (Li 1999). Shortly thereafter, major infrastructure projects were announced
for Jiantang, the county seat, including an airport, a cultural center, a Tibetan
old town complete with a chorten (Buddhist stupa) and enormous prayer-wheel,
and renovations to the area’s most important Tibetan monastery, Songtsamlin.
Local policies aimed at tapping into the large pool of tourist arrivals at Lijiang, a
Naxi minority town and UNESCO World Heritage site located four hours
south. Lijiang is one of China’s top tourist attractions, recording 5.3 million
visitors in 2007, 92% of whom were domestic tourists (Xinhua 2008). By 2007
tax revenue from tourism in Shangri-la County exceeded the revenues lost from
the ban on logging.
If Zhongdian has thrived as Shangri-la, people in the region do not agree
on just what ‘Shangri-la’ means. The Chinese term xianggelila translates as
“fragrant place that attracts”. Yet there are shops and hotels in town that
advertise their location as Xiangbala, “fragrance that grasps and pulls”. This is a
transliteration of the Tibetan ‘Shambala’, a mythical kingdom located to the
west of Tibet. In the same way, xiangelila makes sense in Chinese by linking it
with a paradise first described by the fourth century poet Tao Yuanming as
shiwai taoyuan (other-worldly peach garden), populated by people who had fled
the chaos and destruction of the first Qin Emperor, Qin Shi Huangdi (Kolas
2008: 110–111).
At the local state bookstore in the county seat, a clerk said Shangri-la was
another name for Zhongdian. “An Englishman wrote about it,” she added. At
Songtsamlin Monastery a monk asserted it meant “beautiful place” (meilide
defang). But he insisted Shangri-la was two hours north, not in Zhongdian. A
Tibetan waitress in a café in town explained that Shangri-la and Zhongdian
were the same: “Zhongdian became Shangri-la a few years ago because the
government decided it was very beautiful (mei-li)”. So what did the name mean,
I asked? “It is from a book,” she said. What kind of book? “I don’t know, I
haven’t read it”, she responded. A man from Beijing sitting at the next table said
the name didn’t mean anything, an odd answer in a country in which every
place name means something. “But it must mean something”, I said to him.
“Zhongdian means something. Beijing means something. So what does Shangri-
La mean?” He shrugged and repeated, “It’s just a name, like Washington. Or
Disney”.
In Shangri-la
In 2006 the Yunan People’s Publishing House released both English and
Chinese language editions of James Hilton’s Lost Horizon. In the Chinese edition,
Xiaoshi Diping Xian (‘Vanishing Horizon’), Kangwei (Conway) and Ma Lisun
(Mallinson, Conway’s aide), together with the English missionary Bulin Keluo
(Miss Brinklow) and American businessman Ba Nade (Barnard) are taken to the
lamasery of Xianggelila by the Chinese monk Zhang (Chang). Despite the
oddities of its plot line (a lamasery filled with foreigners who live forever while
being served by Tibetan peasants who act suspiciously like feudal serfs) Lost
Horizon has become a marketing tool in this effort to claim Shangri-la. Accord-
ing to one report, local authorities mandated that a copy of this book be placed
in each hotel room in the county center (Zhang & Gao 2008: 2).
The transformation of an obscure corner of northwestern Yunnan province
into the purported locale of a fictional utopia filled paradoxically with foreigners
and yet marketed to domestic Chinese tourists seems a perfect example of how
mass tourism destroys local ways of meaning. As in the case of Lhasa, such a
narrative lends itself to an intransigent Euro-American fear of both the destruc-
tion of Tibetan culture at the hands of Han Chinese tourists and the ruination
of Tibet’s environment. Yet ethnic tourism in Shangri-la, as in Bali, does not
follow a neat and orderly state-directed script. Instead, places such as this are
the spaces in which state narratives of identity clash with local perceptions of
self. In this sense, a site such as Shangri-la is not “de-sacralized” by tourism;
instead, it is made sacred (Kolas 2008: 77). Just as importantly, local tourist
subjects may dress and act the part of Tibetans, but it does not follow that this
performance means they lose their own sense of self (Hillman 2003: 188).
Instead, the marketing of minority status is a key source of difference (Kolas
2008: 103). This also serves to make local people aware of a desirable commodi-
ty they possess, namely ‘culture’, just as in the case of Bali, and closer to
Zhongdian, the World Heritage site of Lijiang and the former backpacker haven
and now popular Chinese tourist destination of Dali. In each of these places,
both the site and residents are tourist destinations because they are promoted
and marketed as different from everyday Han Chinese life. However, while Han
Chinese tourists in each of these places visit minority cultural shows of singing
and dancing, they also visit cafes, bars and restaurants that market themselves as
‘western’, such as the “Café de Jack” in Dali, yet are actually global places tied
to the imaginary longings for an exotic pseudo-Tibet. Wood furniture, paper
lamps, Ohm symbols and thankha paintings on the walls, reggae music in the
background, menus filled with pizza, pasta, burgers, fried rice, and “American
breakfast”: any of these places could be in the Thamel district of Kathmandu,
on Kosan Road in Bangkok, Kuta Beach in Bali, or for that matter in Saigon,
Dakar, or Aguas Calientes below Machu Picchu in Peru.
Nevertheless, for many people in Europe and North America, Tibetan cul-
ture has become synonymous with Tibetan religion, as if culture for Tibetans
consists only of religious rituals and practices. The Tibetan exile movement has
found itself confronting a world in which Tibet and Tibetans symbolize for
discerning cosmopolitan transnational elites all that is good, just, and wise
(Lopez 1999: 200). In this world, Tibetans were environmentally conscious

before the concept existed elsewhere, gender-equitable when women every-
where else were second-class citizens or property, and inhabitants of a society in
which social justice reigned and peace prevailed. In a remarkable way, the priest
and patron ties the Dalai Lama once cultivated with Qing Dynasty rulers have
been reconstituted on a global stage. He remains the priest, but his patron now
is a transnational class of the materially privileged beneficiaries of economic
globalization. These elites long for places not like theirs and people not like
them, if not the noble savages of Jean Rousseau then at least noble humans
who do not desire material wealth.
Meanwhile in China, from a state and party perspective, close collaboration
with UNESCO in marking and maintaining heritage sites in minority regions
such as Tibet brings international prestige, transforms political questions of
historic memory and site narratives into technical issues of historic preservation,
and situates state authorities as caretakers of an imagined national cultural
heritage. At the same time, these sites have become popular destinations for
Han Chinese tourists because UNESCO-marked world heritage sites neatly fit
the preexisting and long-held tradition of visiting mingsheng (scenic spots), a
practice no longer restricted to a privileged class of literati.
One can argue that the re-imagining of Tibet and Tibetans within urban
China as ‘mysterious’ and ‘magical’ is an improvement on long-held assump-
tions about Tibetans as primitive, dangerous and recalcitrant. This shift in
attitudes, however, has taken place within a state project of harnessing Tibetan
culture, reduced to a performative motif, as a resource in the economic devel-
opment of Tibet and a means of further incorporating Tibet into the national
state (Upton 2003, Denton 2005). This shift in state policy, from an emphasis
on forced assimilation under Mao to one of difference captured for the market,
succeeds to the extent that cultural differences remain “cultural” and not
political. It is thus a policy that assiduously promotes Tibet as Shangri-la, a land
of strangeness, beauty, and a “colorful” minority group in need of protection
from modernity. But, as the anti-Han Chinese riots in Lhasa in 2008 illustrate,
this is also a policy that seeks to negate the practical implications that follow:
namely, that “strangeness” often means fundamental differences, and “protec-
tion” usually takes the shape of bureaucratic control.
Even among the growing number of urban backpackers in China, the ex-
oticization of Tibet and Tibetans, while rooted in these Shangri-la narratives of
Europeans and Americans, remains firmly situated at the level of spectacle. In
this sense, these backpackers, like other types of Han Chinese tourists, are
willing participants in the broader state tourism project in China that situates
those who are toured as happy minorities.
This project is inextricably connected to UNESCO efforts to preserve
“universal” heritage while strenuously ignoring political realities. Far from being
either a global project beyond politics or simply a technical effort aimed at
preserving fragile examples of cultural diversity, the UNESCO World Heritage
project is deeply political, given that it explicitly assumes world heritage to be an
issue for states and not local communities. Because of this, what counts as
“world” heritage and who gains access to shaping these narratives are inevitably
questions for UNESCO and state authorities, not the people whose cultural
objects, sites and practices are the targets of these policies.
Conclusion
The Politics of Travel

Unlike tropical islands, mountainous places such as Tibet were not desira-
ble destinations in the European and American imagination until relatively
recently. The Darwinian revolution and a radical transformation of the aesthet-
ics of nature and especially mountains were required before this could happen.
And, once desired, these places, much like tropical islands, were valued because
they were idealized as separate from modernity. Writing in the wake of the
British occupation of Lhasa in 1905, L. Austine Waddell asserted that the
purpose of the invasion was not to overthrow the existing Tibetan political
order, but to provide British protection to a “charming land and interesting
people” (1906: 448). What is puzzling is how, despite his own descriptions of
the abject material poverty he encountered, Waddell, much like other travelers
to Tibet in the years before the post-1949 Chinese occupation, could reach such
a conclusion. He writes that “the real mind of Tibet seems to me to be more
authentically expressed in the words of the Cardinal of Lhasa than in the
superstitions of the monks and the people” (ibid). This illustrates the paradoxi-
cal way in which an idealized Tibet has come to substitute for Tibetans as
actually existing beings in the minds of many Europeans and Americans. No
matter what realities foreigners encounter, either in person or through films,
books, and essays, ‘Tibet’ is forever a land outside of the everyday reality of
their lives.
The world we inhabit is one in which people care about others, about
things, about their pasts, presents, and futures, about living fulfilling lives
through seeking to achieve personal desires, large and small. This is a world of
emotions, of love, jealousy, anger, hate, fear, happiness, despair, hope, and
sometimes, complete and utter boredom. It is a world many apparently do not
want to wish upon Tibetans or for that matter Balinese. Instead, for visitors
both past and present, Tibet, Bali, and similar paradise-scapes apparently cannot
not be utopia, no matter the material reality.
The Chinese occupation and closing off of Tibet to foreign travelers after
1949 completed the transformation of Tibet into an utopian non-place for
Europeans, North Americans, and others who desire a place outside of mod-
ernity and hence outside of time. This occupation has displaced not just
Tibetans, but also Tibetan Buddhism, in the process turning the latter into a
global tourist attraction (Bishop 1989: 245) and the former into “prisoners” of
the Shangri-la myth (Lopez 1999). In exile, circulating free of Tibet as a place,
Tibetan Buddhism has thrived as a catch-all secondary faith for millions, which
raises questions about the usefulness of speaking any longer of the authenticity
of this spiritual movement. In like manner, Tibetans abroad travel through and
interact with a secular sphere and are admired for their ability to nevertheless
remain more Tibetan than those ‘at home’.
With improved rail and road links between China and Tibet, ongoing
economic and social changes in both, and an end to travel barriers, it is no
longer possible to imagine Tibet as a closed society. Far from being a utopian
non-place, it is now the final stop on the Beijing-Lhasa daily express train. This
makes speaking of and writing about Tibet more difficult; no longer is it
possible for a Madam Blavatsky or Tuesday Lobsang Rampa to write books
about a place they never visited. Being able to go there means no longer being
able to speak of Tibetan mystery, which remains for some as regretful as it did
for Englishmen in 1905: “the world, the richer by the knowledge that has now
displaced conjecture and uncertainty, will forever be the poorer by what after all
may be worth many Tibetan photographs and facts—the last of her great
lodestones of romance and mystery” (Landon 1905: 340).
Nevertheless, the Tibetan government-in-exile not only continues to
cultivate this image of Tibet as a remote Shangri-la but sees this as Tibet’s
comparative advantage when it comes to tourism. For example, a 2007 devel-
opment report issued by the exile movement notes the obvious, that Tibet’s
relative isolation and lack of modernization continue to be attractive to wes-
terners. This report then suggests that the same will inevitably occur with urban
Han Chinese, asserting that as urban areas grow and modernize globally, all
people come to desire vacations in pre-modern and remote places (DIIR 2007:
194-195). Such a view is remarkable in its conflation of universal modernization
theory (all the world’s people are on the same development trajectory) and early
twentieth century anti-modern romanticism (modernization universally brings
alienation and a desire for a place outside of modernity). This implies that Tibet
has an obligation to remain not-modern as a refuge for the world, an odd
burden for Tibetans living in contemporary Tibet to accept.
Conclusion 123
Then again, the realities of Tibet do not really matter for many foreigners,
and never have. Writing in 1950, the French author Amaury de Riencourt
asserted, “real Tibet transcends politics and economics; it is invisible, beyond
sensory perception, beyond intellect” (cited in Anand 2007: 41).
World Heritage Opposed

Since the 1998 financial crisis and overthrow of the Suharto regime, Indo-
nesia has made a rocky transition to democracy. This process has involved the
devolution of power to local districts and cities and the emergence of a vibrant
civil society in the form of a free media and a wide range of civic organizations
and institutions (Silver 2007: 83). Politics, banned by the New Order as the
cause of post-independence social problems, has become a part of everyday life.
At the provincial level, the return of politics to the public sphere has had
multiple effects, ranging from outbreaks of violence between Muslims and
Christians in Ambon and indigenous Dayaks and Javanese migrants in Kaliman-
tan to successful peace accords with separatist groups in Acheh and Irian Jaya.
Politics has also had a role in cultural matters. A case in point is the debate over
world heritage status (warisan budaya dunia) for Bali’s most important Hindu
temple site, Pura Besakih.
Built in the ninth century, Pura Besakih is composed of 86 buildings on the
slopes of Mount Agung. It was first proposed for inclusion on UNESCO’s
World Heritage list in 1990 by the former New Order regime, but the nomi-
nation was withdrawn in the face of local and national opposition, particularly
by the National Hindu Council, which argued that ‘heritage’ (warisan) connotes a
non-living site, while Pura Besakih was the most important active temple on the
island (Hitchcock and Putra 2007: 100–101).
A decade later, the site was again proposed for inclusion on the UNESCO
list by the post-Suharto central government. Proponents, led by the Minister of
Culture and Tourism, I Gde Ardika (a Balinese) argued that Pura Besakih had
become too touristic, which could be changed with UNESCO funding (Hit-
chcock and Putra 2005: 232). However, local activists in Bali asserted that the
1972 World Heritage Convention specifically places responsibility for the care
and control of listed sites on states, which in this case would mean ceding
control of Bali Hinduism’s most sacred religious site to central government
authorities. They also pointed out that Pura Besakih includes descent group
shrines and village shrines in addition to pan-Bali Hindu shrines, raising
questions about ownership. These points are particularly relevant in Indonesia,

given state control of Borobodur in Central Java, one of the most important
Buddhist sites in the world which, nevertheless, saw religious practices banned
by the New Order government after it became a World Heritage site in 1974.
The nomination was once again withdrawn, making Pura Besakih one of the
few cases in which world heritage status has been rejected by local communities
(Hitchcock and Putra 2007: 104–106).
The case of Pura Besakih illustrates the central contradiction of the world
heritage movement. As a living, active cultural site, one embedded in local
social, religious, cultural, and political networks of meaning, Besakih can only
maintain its viability by not becoming a world heritage site. That is to say, its
survival as a site of religious and cultural meaning depends on the degree to
which it remains outside the grasp of a movement which takes as its objective
the protection and preservation of sites such as Pura Besakih. And this resis-
tance to heritage status was only possible, paradoxically, when politics became a
key element of the selection process.
———
In this book I have analyzed the ongoing Euro-American fascination with

places imagined to remain outside of (their) time. In the process, I have moved
my focus from the field of ethnographic inquiry, to the destinations of various
forms of tourism, to the increasingly influential cultural heritage movement.
One of my aims has been to remind my readers of the practices and motiva-
tions that link actors in these seemingly disparate projects. I do not claim a
sameness of either practices or goals among ethnographic fieldwork, tourism,
and heritage preservation projects. However, it is important for field researchers
to take seriously the practices and motivations of tourists and cultural heritage
proponents. This means finally dispelling the notion that travel is a universal
condition premised on an individual, existential search for meaning. It also
means paying closer attention to the ways in which seemingly apolitical pro-
grams aimed at preserving tangible and intangible forms of culture are inextric-
ably political projects that often serve particular class interests.
In a recent critique of how Africa is perceived by foreigners, James Fergu-
son argues that both the promises and perils of “globalization” have been vastly
overstated. According to Ferguson, this process has brought neither prosperity
and freedom nor subjugation and poverty to most peoples. Instead, far from
Conclusion 125
being seamless, homogeneous, and monolithic, globalization has been a

selective process that takes hold in specific enclaves (Ferguson 2006: 34–38).
He focuses on the limits to triumphal claims about the transformative impact of
foreign investment in developing countries. As he succinctly observes, these
investments not only flow into certain countries and not all, but also flow into
certain areas within countries and not all.
Ferguson’s insight offers a cautionary view of both the supposed economic
benefits of tourism and heritage promotion and the alleged cultural harm such
programs are charged with causing. Tourism, like other aspects of globalization,
does not uniformly spread across the globe, within states, or even within small
islands. Instead, to paraphrase Ferguson, it ‘skips’ across territories. In the case
of Tibet, because of environmental constraints and the sheer size of the region,
tourist destinations are quite few. Indeed, the vast majority of Han Chinese
tourists never leave the Lhasa Valley. How, then, practically speaking, is it
plausible to assume this new wave of tourism might threaten or even destroy
Tibetan culture? In Bali, as noted in Chapter V, tourism has been present for so
long that it has become part of Balinese culture. Yet at the same time, as I also
have noted, the original goal of the Bali Tourism Project (to cultivate interna-
tional tourism within specific tourist enclaves) has been achieved, albeit not
because of a master plan but because of market factors and tourist choices. The
large majority of foreign tourists never leave the core zone of Kuta, Legian, and
Sanur Beaches, and the art center of Ubud.
Tourism does not destroy culture anymore than do other side-effects of an
increasingly connected world. Just as the promise of the Internet (easy access to
the world’s knowledge) has not led to a post-national global society of tolerance
and personal freedom, the assumed perils of mass tourism (an erasure of
traditions and other cultural differences) has not led to a Disney-world of
superficiality and sameness. In both cases, what has resulted is, arguably, a
heightened sense of difference. The Internet, like ‘The Market’, facilitates the
development of differences by enabling people to more efficiently interact with
those of similar views, tastes, and desires. Similarly, tourism does not erase
barriers between those who can go on tour and those who are toured. Balinese
are still Balinese; what mass tourism to Bali has done is to stimulate and
strengthen Balinese identity within the Republic of Indonesia. Indeed, in
becoming subjects of a tourist gaze, Balinese, and by extension Balinese culture,
have been defined by this gaze. Something similar might happen with Tibet and
Tibetans in China. However, at the moment the debate over Tibet is largely
shaped by a key assumption shared by the two dominant voices in this debate.
The first, common among European and North American cosmopolitans, is
that authentic Tibetans are (or should be) pious devotees to ‘tradition’ and faith
and hence opposed to Chinese-directed efforts to modernize Tibet. The
second, shared by many Han Chinese across class lines both within and outside
the Chinese Communist Party, is that ‘real’ Tibetans are those who support
Chinese-directed modernization. How Tibetans imagine modernity, and what it
means to be both ‘modern’ and Tibetan, are too often absent from this debate
(Adams 1996; Markley 2007). In like manner, the anxiety of the cultural heritage
movement has been driven in large part by an assumption that modernization is
a world-historical process that destroys the material artifacts of the past, either
purposefully (such as the leveling of Beijing’s city walls to make way for the
city’s first subway line) or indirectly (through environmental damage and
increased population pressures). Yet a wholesale demand to preserve the past
for the future demands a response to those living in the present: who is harmed
by heritage projects, and who benefits? Who gains? Who loses? And most
fundamentally, whose voices should be part of the debate over what should be
preserved?
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Index
A
Anderson, Ben 3 Culture:
Angkor Wat 50 Loss of traditions 12
Arendt, Hannah 26–27 Relativism 13
Authenticity 34, 45-48 Political aspects 91–92, 102
B D
Bahktin, Mikhail 32 Dalai Lama 57, 63–65, 74, 118
Bali: Dali (China) 49, 118
1908 Dutch conquest 2, 52 Dalton, Bill 34
Dutch colonial perceptions 51, 53 Danzinger, Nick 35
Master Tourism Plan 77-87 David-Neel, Alexandra 63, 65, 74
Tourism 5 Del Corral, Milagros 41
War of Independence 75, 77 Deleuze, Gilles 32
Baliseering 53–54, 75 Denpassar (Bali) 61, 77
Bataille, Georges 14 Dewey, John 16
Bateson, Gregory 62, 67–68
Baum, Vicki 52, 64, 71
Belo, Jane 62, 67 E
Benedict, Ruth 12
Benjamin, Walter 46 Errington, Shelly 28
Bird, Isabella 73
Boas, Franz 10, 13, 16
Blavatsky, Madam 58–59 F
Boorstin, Daniel 20
Buleleng (Bali) 61 Fabian, Johannes 67
Byron, Robert 60, 69–70 Ferguson, James 17, 124–125
Fieldwork:
Discursive role 15
C History 10–12
Mystique 16
Caillois, Roger 14 Process 17
Certeau, Michel de 19, 68 Salvaging aspect 13
Chandler, Edmund 72–73 Travel practice 17
China: Fischer, Michael 14
Citizen mobility 6, 103–104 Francillon, Gerald 90–91
Ethnic policies 104 Freeman, Derek 16
Modernization 105, 110 Fussell, Paul 20
Tourism 48–49
Clifford, James 14, 15
Cohen, Erik 31-32 G
Commodification 28, 47, 69, 100–102
Covarrubias, Miguel 61–62, 65, 67, 70, 74 Giovine, Michael Di 50
Crick, Malcom 32 Goffman, Erving 21
Culler, Jonathan 22, 30 Greenwood,Davydd 29
Guattari, Felix 31
Guidebooks 33–35
Gupta, Akhiil 17 N
Gyantse 63
Nash, Dennison 25
H Nusa Dua (Bali) 77, 83, 85–86, 93, 98
Haddon, A.C. 10
Harraway, Donna 17
Hilton, James 35, 116, 117 O
Huxley, Julian 38–40
Hukou policies 103–105 Oakes, Tim 111
I P
Islam, Syed 30 Pallis, Marco 66, 72

Potala Palace 106–107
Powell, Hickman 61, 64 –65, 67, 70
Przhevalsky, Nikolay 69
K Pura Besakih (Bali) 7, 123–124
Koke, Louis & Bob 61, 71
Knight, Franklin 67
Kuta Beach (Bali) 7, 49, 71, 93–95, 97–98
R
Raffles, Sir Thomas Stanford 51
Rampa, Losang 122
L Redfield, Robert 12
Riencourt, Amaury 123
Labrang Monastery 7
Leiris, Michel 14
Lengyel, Peter 91
Lévi-Strauss, Claude 19, 34
S
Lhasa 2, 55–57, 65, 107–108
Sanur Beach (Bali) 7, 97
Lost Horizons 59–60, 114
Sapir, Edward 11
Scenic Spots (jingdian) 112–113
SCETO 79–87
M Shangri-La 3, 116–118
Simla Accord (1914) 57
MacCannell, Dean 20–21, 30, 49 Smith Adam 26
Malinowski, Bronislaw 9 Smith Barbara 46–47
Maraini, Fosco 72, 74 Smith Holly 34
Marcus, George 14 Spies, Walter 62, 64
Mattiursi, Odoric 54–55 Suharto 78, 102
McPhee, Colin 62, 70–71, 74 Sun Yatsen 109–110
McGovern, William 63, 65, 69–70, 72–73
Mead, Margaret 12 –13, 16, 62, 65, 67–68
Milton, John 2
Muir, John 57
T
Multiculturalism 42
Tantri, K’tut 61, 71–72
Taylor, .B. 10
Teichmann, Eric 72–73
Theme Parks (China) 105–106
Index 141
Tibet: World Commission on Culture and

1904 British Invasion 56 Development 39
1957 Chinese Invasion 4 World Heritage 41–42, 50, 106
Buddhism 57 Wutai Shan 7
Jesuit presence 55
Relations with China 55–56
Tourism 5 Y
Tibetans in exile 122
Younghusband, Sir Francis 73
Tourism:
Anthropology 19
Commonalities with fieldwork 32 Z
Cultural impact 82–84, 86–88, 90
Cultural policy 92, 96 Zhongdian (China) 7, 115
Economic development tool 25
Ecotourism 23
State building 36
Travel 22, 49
Tsing, Anna 99
U
UNESCO:
1966 Conference 39
Convention on Intangible Heritage 45
Declaration on Cultural Diversity 43
Cultural heritage 40
Organization 36
Our Creative Diversity 39, 42
Politics of heritage 41, 119–120
Tourism 40, 102, 105, 118
Universal Declaration on Human Rights 49
Universal ethics 40
World Heritage 37, 99, 108
Ubud (Bali) 7, 93–95, 97–98
Urry, John 69
V
Vogt, John 31
W
Wadddell, L. Austin 62, 65, 121
Westernization 25
Wilderness 57 –58
Williams, Maynard 67
Work Units (danwei) 104, 112
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qxd 9/20/2011 10:23 AM Page 1

Robert Shepherd is Assistant Professor of Anthropology and

Robert Shepherd is Assistant Professor of Anthropology and

Tourism Practices, Heritage Policies,

Bibliographic information published by Die Deutsche Nationalbibliothek.

© 2011 Peter Lang Publishing, Inc., New York

All rights reserved.

Introduction: Anthropology, Tourism and Heritage ................ 1

Chapter I: Culture in the Field ....................................................... 9

Chapter II: Suspect Others: Tourists at Play ............................. 19

Chapter III: To Preserve and Protect:

Chapter IV: Paradise Found:

Chapter V: Marketing Paradise:

Chapter VI: Paradise Lost:

Conclusion: The Politics of Travel .......................................... 121

Bibliography ................................................................................ 127

Index .............................................................................................. 139

Anthropology, Tourism and Heritage

Miguel Covarrubias, Island of Bali

The Discourse of Paradise

simultaneously been portrayed as both Edenic paradises and exemplar of the

constantly in danger of being tainted by ‘us’ (the ‘West’, modernity, mass

From Lost Horizons to Bali Hai

Structure of the Book

Culture in the Field

Bronislaw Malinowski, Argonauts of the Western Pacific

Anthropology’s disciplinary identity is intimately connected to the place of

Professionalizing Anthropological Fieldwork

For example, in a 1924 article, American anthropologist Edward Sapir

This Appollonian ethnographic stance, identifiable in the work of early

Of course, one might dismiss this as an outdated view, made obsolete by

Salvaging the Past

framing task of any ethnography is to juxtapose these preexisting representations, at-

A Realm of Blank Paper

Suspect Others: Tourists at Play

Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life

A genealogy of laments for the supposed havoc caused by tourism to

ual subject (usually a privileged Euro-American cultural traveler), contesting the

The logical culmination of this quest is eco-tourism. Being Green, ecotour-

(mass tourism). The mirror of modernist development, a postmodernist anti-

(supposedly) not for tourists. If the anti-tourist is anything, he is a postmodern

The Economics of Tourism

Indeed, tourism is often offered as an example of globalization, since its

Increased tourism, he argues, leads to an increase in the service sector, im-

As Hannah Arendt noted in The Human Condition, this distinction is also

Arendt’s distinction carries important implications, particularly at a time

For Arendt, then, durability, measured by longevity, is the crucial criterion

Culture and Tourism

words, the development cure (increased tourism as a means of spurring

social critics. Martin Heidegger’s location of Dasein within a problematic organic

Laments such as Danziger’s about cultural decay obscure the absence of

To Preserve and Protect:

UNESCO and Heritage

became the International Organization for International Cooperation in 1926,

… it will be impossible for humanity to acquire a common outlook if large sectors of it

Milagros Del Corral, director of the UNESCO Publishing House, warned

The “intangible cultural heritage” means the practices, representations, expressions,

In short, the underlying premise of UNESCO’s worldview (a world of cul-

Yet, if diversity is such an imperative, how to reconcile the individual basis of

Individuals thus have a right to develop, as long as they do so in a way that

an accepted template, increases the dangers of becoming inauthentic. Hence in