‘Ethnic Heritage’ on the New Frontier : The Idealisation and Commodification of Ethnic ‘Otherness’ in Xinjiang

Abstract

This chapter aims to explore conceptually the commodification of ‘heritage’ in ‘ethnic’ tourist sites, focusing upon a so-called ‘traditional Kazakh village’ commercial tourist attraction near Tianchi Lake in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region (XUAR). Taking an interdisciplinary approach which combines ethnographic methods with theoretical analysis, we consider tourism’s role in representing the cultural heritage of ethnic groups, but simultaneously consider how such representations also tie into wider social discourses in which ethnic groups are themselves represented as ‘heritage’ in being associated with ‘traditional cultures’ rather than modernity. Drawing on a ‘toolbox’ of theoretical concepts, we consider the village as a depiction of idealised/idyllised ethnicity, how it functions as a visual ‘sight/site’, and how Said’s concept of ‘imagined geographies’ might also encompass ‘imagined ethnicities’. We finish with a discussion of this tourist site in relation to Michel Foucault’s concept of ‘heterotopia’.