From the ‘Homeland Turned into a Strange-land’to a ‘New Homeland’: The Productions of Tourism Space of Northern-east Coastal Village Wai’ao,Local Responses and the Negotiated Meanings
Date Issued
2011
Date
2011
Author(s)
Kuo, Po-Sheng
Abstract
Through the readings of the production of tourism space and the socio-cultural theories of tourism, the researcher treats it as forces for producing space and culture. That is the creative role of tourism and leisure to change and transform places. It implicates the capacity of tourism to produce social reality: it involves the ways of organization of different things, such as ‘the tourist gaze’, the world view, and the imagination and understanding of other place. However, such a role involves the operation of power relationship. We have to notice whose knowledge to create tourism/space, and what kind of effects it produces.
The fieldwork located in a northern-east coastal village Wai’ao. During 2005~2010, the researcher recorded its spatial and socio-cultural changes. By participatory observation and interview, he attempts to understand that what people thought of and how they have done to respond to tourism in the process.
In the beginnings, the tourism development tends to be triggered by a kind of dominant exogenous forces. The B&B owner together with the tourism bureau both in the central and the local governments, through the tourism texts, holding festival and the construction of facilities, which inscribe the new image above the ordinary environment. Therefore, the village turns to be a leisure and tourism destination of attraction. However, it brings the impacts and conflicts; the environment becomes several ‘tourist territories’, kind of de-context, closed and excluded space, more or less for the locals in the Wai’ao; moreover, increasing immigration of outsiders buying the seaside lands accompanied with the emigration of insiders. These vicious cycle make Wai’ao a place that the ‘Homeland Turned into a Strange-land’ for most local people.
However, Tourism also means the ‘encounter’ that different knowledge and opinions between insiders and outsiders meet in the space. The local people seem to become self-conscious and got reflection from that.
Gradually the local elements have been actively chosen, organized and adapted in a new tourism context, people start to produce these practices: conducting ecological explanation to visitors based on their understanding of environment resources; self-naming and constructing the local tourism image; building a ‘tourist setting’ for ‘host-and-guest’ common uses by the bamboo materials that linked up the community around Wai’ao; and some old man revitalize an old fishing method to maintain their fisherman identity and to let the visitors experiencing it.
From the ‘Homeland Turned into a Strange-land’ to a ‘New Homeland’, this means the negotiated place meanings emergent from the spatial and cultural transformations interacted between the inside and outside forces. Through the local practices responding to tourism, the place of Wai’ao transforms itself. That is the so-called ‘New Homeland’, which implies the new experience and interpretation logic of place and towards a ‘host-and-guest’ tourist space with more openness.
Subjects
tourist gaze
local response to tourism
tourism development
endogenous rural development
the production of tourism space
Type
thesis
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