Untitled

does lead to standardised attractions in particular
locales �for example, among `hill tribes' in Southeast
Asia and China or Navajos in New Mexico),
and for these, middlemen or brokers are needed
to facilitate interaction between tourists and
natives. Brokers occupy a crucial space where
industrialised modernity meets its imagined counterpart;
the authentic exotic native. Brokers are
instrumental in packaging and marketing local
ethnic groups in such a fashion so as to appeal to
ethnic tourists. They are typically members of the
dominant ethnic group within their country �for
example, Han Chinese in China, Thais in Thailand
or mestizos in Mexico), or may be ambitious
members of the minority group who have emigrated
from their villages to their country's
metropolitan centres. In many cases they may be
representatives of the state. They may simply serve
as tour guides, but more typically they arrange
performances and activities for tourists. Many
are remarkably savvy to the tourist's desire for the
exotic and authentic, and may arrange activities to
appear as spontaneous as possible �for example, a
visit to a local festival, an unannounced visit or
overnight stay in a village household).
It is important, however, to realise that native
ethnic groups themselves actively collaborate in the
ethnic tourist experience. They do this usually with
considerable state encouragement in hopes of
increasing local incomes. Indeed, ethnic tourism
is often promoted by the state as a catalyst for
economic integration and `modernisation' among
remote subsistence-oriented populations who as yet
contribute little to state revenues. Aside from
whatever economic benefits they may derive
from ethnic tourism �which are largely minimal),
however, ethnic groups may actively modify their
behaviour, dress, methods of production and
customary practices in order to facilitate or
otherwise cope with the tourist experience. While
it has been common for scholars to view these
ethnic groups purely as objectified victims of the
tourism industry, they in fact actively strive to
maintain subjectivity over their interactions with
tourists in many ways. Thus, ethnic tourism may
generate reconstructed senses of identity, place
and tradition among local groups, may lead to
creative new expressions in art, and may help local
groups resist long-standing attitudes of discrimination
among the dominant population.
Because ethnic tourism is capable of generating
such outcomes among host groups, it should more
accurately be considered a process of ethnic
relations. Recent studies have indeed argued with
increasing consistency that ethnic tourism �along
with other forms of tourism in general) be
conceptualised not as an external force impacting
a local ethnic or cultural group, but rather as an
important component of that local group itself. It is
in such a direction that research in ethnic tourism
is currently moving. Important questions remain,
however. The world's ethnic tourists are increasingly
non-Western, and this raises questions about
the assumptions of tourist motivations. Chinese
ethnic tourists, for example, appear to be much less
concerned with authenticity than their Western
counterparts; they may also be less concerned with
exoticism than with finding evidence of national
continuity which transcends ethnic differences.
More fundamentally, research on ethnic tourism
has revealed the difficulty of separating tourism
from other processes of change operating at global,
national and local scales. Ethnic tourism can also
render problematic accepted notions of ethnic and
cultural boundaries, group identity formation and
a host of other issues which are only now
establishing themselves on the tourism research
frontier.
See also: ethnicity
Further reading
ethnic tourism 205
Harron, S. and Weiler, B. �1992) `Ethnic tourism',
in C.M. Hall and B. Weiler �eds) Special Interest
Tourism, London: Belhaven Press, 83±94. �A
general review of scholarly work on ethnic
tourism.)
Keyes, C.F. and van den Berghe, P. �eds) �1984)
`Tourism and re-created ethnicity', Annals of
Tourism Research 11. �Sociological and anthropological
foci on the relationship between ethnic
tourism and the maintenance, transformation
and re-creation of ethnic boundaries.)
Michaud, J. �1993) `Tourism as catalyst of
economic and political change; the case of
highland minorities in Ladakh �India) and