Cedric Zhe Wang
Research
Tourism Anthropology
The anthropology of tourism emphasizes two topics: 1) the study of the tourists and the nature of tourism itself, and 2) the study of the social, economic, and cultural impact of tourism on host populations and societies, including the nature of the host-tourist relationship (Graburn, 1983).
Tourists and locals make sense of anthropologists based on their own perceptions of nationality, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, occupation, authority, and power, positioning scholars in ways that have profound implications for the kinds of knowledge attainable through participant-observation (Ness, 2003; Swain, 2004; Graburn, 2002: 25–28).
My Interests:
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Cultural and ethnic tourism
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Indigenous community
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Tourism practice
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Authenticity and commodification of culture
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Tourism imaginaries
My interests in tourism anthropology concentrate on using participant observation as a tool to explore transforming human-nature relationships and sociocultural changes in tourism areas. My fieldworks were primarily in Southwestern China, including the ethnic areas of Yunnan and Guangxi.
My study on cultural and ethnic tourism aims to understand cultural changes in tourism, and the influences of the state. As tourism is an ongoing process, ethnic tourism provides a lens to observe the changing relationships between the state and local communities, the rural and the urban, as well as between formal and informal sectors. These provide policy implications for good governance in the tourism areas.
Authenticity has been a major concept to explain the nature of tourism. However, the development of virtual reality technologies, the recent pandemic and threats to globalisation advocate new frameworks to better explain the tourism phenomenon. My future work will hold this perspective and review the theory of tourism for new theoretical perspectives.