Jenny T. Chio, A Landscape of Travel: The Work of Tourism Rural Ethnic China. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2014. 304 pp.In A Landscape of Travel: The Work of Tourism Rural Ethnic China, Jenny Chio skillfully unpacks complexities of ethnic-tourism development rural China. Based on substantial ethnographic fieldwork Ping'an (a Zhuang village Guangxi) and Upper Jidao (a Miao village Guizhou), she lays bare regimes of mobility and visuality that turn one person's leisure into another person's labor. Situating her research within and guests framework (Smith 1989), Chio criticizes overemphasis on tourists studies. Instead, her focuses on residents of village destinations. More precisely, she disentangles discourses and practices of those who do of tourism, thereby blurring fine line between hosts and often-neglected intermediary category of service providers.In preface and introduction to book, Chio gives readers more information about theoretical and methodological tools that she uses. Her main analytical focus on doing examines landscape of travel, which the act and imagination of travel become key nodes through which tourists, migrants, ethnic minorities, mainstream majorities, rural villagers, and urban dwellers negotiate and make sense of current social, economic, and political (xvii). As a conceptual framework for tracing social relations, this landscape of travel illuminates complex networks of ambitions, expectations, and opportunities that are shaping transformations (14). Such approach allows Chio to zoom on two fundamental social processes that shape work of tourism, namely human mobility (particularly and migration) and visuality (the social fact of vision).Chapter 1 sketches larger context of Chio's case studies. It describes history of and current conditions villages, and discusses broader issues of ethnic identity and visual representations of ethnicity China. This reveals lasting importance of imaginaries of difference, point that has also been made by other anthropologists of (e.g., Salazar and Graburn 2014). The construction of ethnic minorities China involves continuous process of negotiation between national, mainstream, local, and individual imaginations and aspirations (34). The way this plays out development of field sites, however, is slightly dissimilar. Whereas Ping'an beautiful views of Longsheng rice terraces are primary tourist focus, Upper Jidao was developed from very beginning as ethnic destination.In second chapter, Chio discusses tourism as development, or tight connection between rural household-based enterprises (nong jia le, or family business happiness) and general Chinese policies for rural development (particularly campaign to build New Socialist Countryside). Both formed part of an effort to increase rural incomes and also to raise suzhi [quality] of ethnic minorities by modernizing them (98). Moreover, aimed at curbing rural-to-urban migration and encouraging villagers to stay, or return, home. After all, domestic migrant workers China continue to be regarded by many as low quality (92). By discussing larger frame of national development policies (to keep rural population in place), Chio nicely illustrates here how tourism China was bound tightly with explicit attempts to construct new Chinese countryside, new Chinese tourist, and new rural Chinese subject (97).Chapter 3 focuses on mobility, which Chio defines as both ability to travel and...all of attendant desires and notions of agency associated with this capacity to envision travel as socially significant element of one's subjectivity and life experiences (102). …
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