Displacing Desire: Travel and Popular Culture in China, by Beth E. Notar. Honolulu: University of Hawai'i Press, 2006. xiv + 193 pp. US$60.00 (hardcover). For the first time, serious social researchers of non-Western societies are beginning to turn their attention to tourism, a topic previously considered too frivolous and left to management schools. No fewer than four social science conferences in 2006 dealt with tourism in Asia, and the Association of Social Anthropologists of the UK and the Commonwealth is devoting its 2007 annual meeting to Thinking through Tourism. After a hiatus of nearly ten years following Tim Oakes's pioneering Tourism and Modernity in China, a series of doctoral theses on China and tourism is also emerging. Beth Notar' s Displacing Desire is the first of these to be published as a book. It uses the touristic transformations of DaIi in Yunnan (which began, like many others, as a foreign backpackers' joint, before becoming a scenic spot for domestic tourism) to shed light on China's cultural transformation. What differentiates this book is that Notar is interested in the dynamics shaping tourism, as much as in tourism's impact on local society. She begins with foreign backpackers (transnationals), who appeared in DaIi in the 1980s, and focuses on the contradiction between their pursuit of the and their desire for the familiar (banana pancakes, for example), a desire prompting the development of Foreigner Street, replete with bars and cafes. The proprietors of these establishments were concerned that their city was becoming like any other place on the backpacker circuit, that it would be overrun and ruined by foreign tourists (pp. 21, 44)-this, of course, is the familiar fear of losing the authentic also pervading the discourse of their clients, the backpackers. Homogenization took a different route, however. In 1999, taking its lead from the national government, the city decided to develop domestic tourism. This led to a spatial transformation corresponding to the Chinese ideal of a scenic spot (Jingdian): the removal of unseemly houses, the construction of new buildings in a style corresponding to tbe ethnic of the place (Bai in the case of DaIi), and the creation of tourist festivals and performances (including an order that all tourism-related personnel must wear dress). Backpackers fled in search of the authentic; those in the foreigner followed them to greener pastures. In came domestic tourists, resulting in further business and employment opportunities for locals, who now themselves could become tourists: even for a couple of retired schoolteachers, a trip to Thailand is becoming affordable. The local government's promotion of two theming projects-based on a classic 1959 film and a 1963 Hong Kong martial arts novel set in Dali-to attract domestic and overseas Chinese tourists resulted in the construction of simulacra, including a temple, a palace, a resort island and two theme parks, and entirely reshaped a tourist itinerary previously defined by backpackers. Five Golden Flowers, a popular film about a Bai love affair, serves as the basis for tours and folk songs performed by local singers, and after a tree featured in a famous scene dried up it was reconstructed from fiberglass. The fictional locations in Heavenly Dragons, Jin Yong's novel set in the 11th-century Nanzhao Kingdom, are the source of a theme park, a newly opened cave, a newly constructed temple, a palace and an island. Notar argues that Five Golden Flowers, and the screen tourism it inspires, is popular because it resonates with nostalgia for the supposedly pure and communitarian days of early Maoism, which in turn is used to critique the materialistic present. …