Emptying the landscape: outsider place-making, tourism and migration in Sikkim, India

Abstract

Lachung valley in north Sikkim, India is valorised and marketed as a pristine, traditional, culturally and ecologically rich landscape. Tourism in Sikkim relies on a trail of non-local tour operators, hotel chains and migrant labour, which in turn, has emptied the landscape of local communities who out-migrate for education and employment. This emptying however, comes not from displacement or dispossession, but from the effectiveness of local land regimes that allow many locals to live and work in other parts of the state while generating profits from the land. The paper focuses on tourist-based placemaking in Sikkim, India to illustrate, first, the reconfiguration of socio-spatial relationships as a result of tourism as a development strategy; second, the transformation of the landscape and the attendant mobilities that it enables, and finally, the material, social and political assemblages crucial to the production of the constantly shifting understandings of space and place.