Tourism Imaginary and Landscape at Heritage Site: A Case in Honghe Hani Rice Terraces, China

Zhe Wang,Lawal Marafa

doi:10.3390/land10040439

Abstract

The relationship between tourism and landscape has been extensively studied, but a conceptual framework to study cultural relationships between tourism and landscape is not specified in the literature. On the basis of the theory of social imaginary, this article takes China’s Honghe Hani Terraces as an example to study how the landscape is imagined in tourism and the potential cultural conflicts. Content analysis on tourist discourses and images in social media was conducted in order to identify tourist imaginaries about the landscape. A gap between tourism imaginaries and the Hani landscape was found: the latter was imagined as an overlooking view of stereotyped terraced imagery, a schema separated and independent from other landscape components. In-depth interviews on stakeholders and participant observations were used to study the production process of tourism imaginaries. Findings show that the viewing platforms and roads provided an enclave space from local contexts, wherein the Hani landscape was staged for gazing. The tourism company’s strategies dominated the process, leading to local communities’ marginalization and threats to the landscape. We suggest that tourism planning and marketing should maintain the integrity of landscape in tourism imaginaries and empower the local communities, thereby reducing cultural tensions between tourism and the landscape.

Highlights

The relationship between tourism and landscape has been extensively studied [1,2,3,4,5,6,7].As an image and representation of a place and the medium of contact between the tourist and place of travel [3], the landscape satisfies tourists’ needs for pleasure sought and is the core of tourism planning and marketing
The production of tourism imaginary, in this case, has revealed such relationship between tourism and landscape: for tourism, the landscape is the raw material for creating tourism imaginaries that meets the needs of the mass public, rather than the opposite, the production of tourism imaginary that is based on a deep understanding of the landscape
This research studied how the landscape is imagined in tourism using a cultural heritage site as an example

Summary

Introduction

The relationship between tourism and landscape has been extensively studied [1,2,3,4,5,6,7].As an image and representation of a place and the medium of contact between the tourist and place of travel [3], the landscape satisfies tourists’ needs for pleasure sought and is the core of tourism planning and marketing. The relationship between tourism and landscape has been extensively studied [1,2,3,4,5,6,7]. Many studies have explored the way in which to develop landscape resources in tourism planning for successful tourism business [4,8,9,10]. Some studies have explored the impact of tourism on landscapes [11,12]. Influenced by post-modern sociological methods, recent studies on the relationship between tourism and landscape in geography have begun to explore deeper cultural conflicts [7,13], including identity and symbolics [14,15,16,17], exploring the newly emerging cultural economy of space [2], especially the cultural landscape [18,19,20]

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