Disordered Tourists: On Social Ordering Projects and their Unintended Outcomes in China

The Center for Chinese Studies at UC Berkeley presents a discussion on tourism in China as a project of ordering with unforeseen consequences.

Panelist/Discussant: You-tien Hsing, Geography, UCB

Speaker/Performer: Timothy Oakes, Geography, University of Colorado at Boulder

This talk will explore tourism in China as a project of ordering with unforeseen consequences. Such ordering projects rely on a kind of “expert knowledge” of tourists and tourism, one that conceives of tourism as a set of categorized behaviors and motivations. In China, this expert knowledge of tourism is part of a much larger set of ordering projects seeking to shape modern Chinese society in particular ways. But these projects are unable to account for the “disordered” actions often displayed by actual tourists and their hosts in any other way but to find them deviant from the norm. This is because such ordering projects conceive of tourism and tourists as stable categories of knowledge rather than social processes. The talk therefore explores both a critique of tourism as a modernist project of ordering and a reconsidering of tourism as a social process. I hope to suggest a productive alternative to our search for the Chinese tourist and what his or her “difference” might tell us about (alternative) Asian modernity and, indeed, our Eurocentric assumptions about tourism in general.