Tourism as Spatial Pedagogy in Rural Ethnic Education

• In Event: Roundtable Session 2
  In Roundtable Session: Rethinking Educational Change: Cultural-Historical Analyses of Educational Reforms Across and Beyond National Boundaries

Abstract

In recent decades, tourism-centered development is steadily gaining popularity in rural ethnic China. Despite its relative late start, China is said to have the fastest growing domestic tourism market in the world. In Guizhou and Qiandongnan (southeast Guizhou) in particular, where rugged topography and exotic lifeways mainly attracted western backpackers before the late 1980s, new roads and improved transportation have led to considerable growth of domestic tourists since the 1990s. The promotion of rural ethnic tourism becomes an essential part of the state program to “open up the west,” which was also bolstered by the naming of 2006 as the “Year of Rural Tourism” and the state’s 11th Five-Year-Plan (2006-2010) to “Build a New Socialist Countryside.” The suturing of tourism with two distinct categories—the rural and the ethnic—brings about a salient salvational tone of the development ballads: the doubly peripheralized population (rural and ethnic) could be uplifted by the desirable national policy of touristification.

Touted as an innovative strategy to engender economic prosperity, revitalize the countryside, and modernize the inland regions, tourism development has met with tensions of educational expansion, another modernization strategy of the Chinese state. Drawing from the Foucaultian lenses of governmentality and spatial politics, based on 16 months of ethnographic research conducted in a Miao and a Dong village in Qiandongnan Prefecture, Guizhou Province, this paper examines tourism as a spatial pedagogy and illustrates village schools’ entanglement in the spatial tussle of tourism administration and surveillance. Through detailed accounts of the controversial touristification in two minority villages, it illustrates (1) how tourism remakes spatial order and renders school walls ever more porous with bureaucratic demands, commercial agendas, and state-business coalition; (2) tourism’s pedagogical functions in shaping the experience of compulsory schooling, and the daily coping, negotiation, and repositioning of village teachers and students; (3) the tensions and disenchantment in and around the school as tourism’s discursive effects. Through examining the dilemmas of schooling and its intertwinement with tourism and the larger agendas of nation building, this paper informs educational policies and practices beyond the case of China.

I divide the paper into two parts. The first part introduces tourism as a prime mover in thinking about development and how it works as a disciplinary apparatus to shape both the physical and symbolic landscape. I then zoom in to my two field sites to narrate the controversial touristification processes, what it means for people to live everyday lives under spatial intervention, how state agents and private actors are involved in orchestrating the transformation, and how school agents are ensnared in tourism administration and surveillance. In part two, I approach tourism from the lens of new village teacherhood and rural literacy to further explore the complex workings of tourism in fostering particular subjectivities, and how it also produces tricky and surreptitious creativities in everyday practices.

Author

• Jinting Wu, University of Macau