Faiths on Display: Religion, Tourism, State in China

Indiana University's Research Center for Chinese Politics and Business presents a lecture with author Tim Oakes.

Speaker:
Tim Oakes Professor of Geography - University of Colorado at Boulder

Siegfried Kracauer once said that “The hotel lobby is the inverted symbol of the House of God.” But is tourism really a substitute for ‘secular modernity’? The current global rise of ‘spiritual tourism’ would perhaps suggest not. Indeed, at least one scholar has famously conceived of tourism as nothing less than a ‘sacred spiritual journey.’ But is tourism, then, a modern substitute for spirituality? Again, anyone observing vacationers in Venice or gamblers in Las Vegas might be hard pressed to make such a connection. This talk will focus on exploring the relationship between tourism and religion, and will do so in the context of the concurrent rise of tourism and religious practice over the past several decades in China. I will argue that the conundrums found in the tourism-religion relationship mirror a deeper epistemological dualism inherent in modernist thought, and that paying more attention to tourism as a social process and project of social ordering helps us see more clearly what is going on in China, an officially atheist state that has nevertheless been busy promoting religious tourism, though not always promoting it on purpose.

Tim Oakes is Professor of Geography at the University of Colorado at Boulder. He is the author of Tourism and Modernity in China (1998), and has edited seven books, including Real Tourism: Practice, Care, and Politics in Contemporary Travel Culture (2011), Faiths on Display: Religion, Tourism, and the State in China (2010), and Translocal China: Linkages, Identities, and the Reimagining of Space (2006). He is currently working on a book about heritage tourism in China.