Abstract
Rural tourism is becoming increasingly embedded in the livestock animal management in rural areas. Drawing on a multi-methods approach, this exploratory research shows how to construct the livestock animal displacement actor-networks. As is found, human actors (local governments, tourists, and local residents), non-human animal (livestock) and quasi-object (human dwellings) construct an interaction network in a structured way. The critical action route of livestock animal displacement demonstrated in this research is aimed to improve residents' participation willingness and further to change the local livestock feeding model and traditional dwelling by rural environment governance and rural tourism landscape consumption. Through the process of translation, problematization, interest, enrollment, mobilization and opposition, the livestock displacement actor-networks were constructed to build a heterogeneous network of the local government, tourists, local residents, livestock and human dwelling. The ultimate goal is to change the traditional human dwelling to a dis-dwelling; the most important thing is to promote residents’ participation willingness in the livestock displacement actor-networks. This article attempts to perform compelling exploratory research to elucidate the livestock displacement actor-networks in hope to provide a meaningful contribution to the epistemology and methodology of livestock management on rural tourism destination and open a new path for research on rural livestock-human relations.
Highlights
The nature of livestock-human relations is complex, ambiguous and dynamic [1]
Since 2005, the Chinese government has implemented new rural construction (NRC), and the separation of livestock from human residence has been projected into the political agenda and social practice as a desired change in the rural landscape, which combines livestock animal and rural tourism, improves animal resources and rural settlement, and benefits the rural area environmentally and ecologically
The use of Actor-Network Theory (ANT) thinking is increasingly evident in tourism research [62], and related academic publication in this field [63,64] shows a focus on the development of the tourism industry ontology, where it has been used to explore relational concepts, such as Tourismscapes [65], cultural tourism areas [66], the wildlife tourism focusing on the role of non-human actors [53], tourism academic research [67,68], the mechanisms of tourism entrepreneurship and innovation [69,70,71] and the generation of destination perception [72,73]
Summary
The nature of livestock-human relations is complex, ambiguous and dynamic [1]. Livestock is defined as animals that humans have domesticated. The original meaning of the Chinese word “家 (jia)” in Oracle and Bronze is “man-pig cohabitation”, which is an associative compound indicating that “豕 (shı)” (pigs) were inhabited in houses [4], illustrating the placement of domesticated animal in the house Such dwellings exist as living examples around the world, such as Balaynatisa in Cebu, Philippines; Toraja’s Tongkonan in Sulawesi, Indonesia; Newa’s dwelling in Kathmandu, Nepal; dwellings in Thimbu, Bhutan; tower-like dwellings in Sana, Yemen; watchtower-like houses in Asir, Saudi Arabia; cave dwellings in Matera, Italy; Miniho in Portugal; granite dwellings in Trasos Montes; vineyard dwellings in Quercy, France; the Raab family farmstead in Michigan, America, etc. Aiming to seek answers as to how to set up an actor-network for livestock displacement, the present article gathers exploratory research from the perspective of actor-network on the questions as follows: What is the livestock displacement? What do the actors involved in the process of livestock animal displacement do? How to construct the livestock displacement networks?
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