Paper short abstract:

Within this paper, I explore discourses and countercurrents of identity produced by tourism in the Lugu Lake area of southwest China. The Mosuo, a small matrilineal group, have been deluged with Chinese tourists searching for matriarchy and free love.

Paper long abstract:

As mobility and consumption link to create the rush of domestic tourists across China, more and more "remote" peoples and places are called upon to define themselves - both to package themselves for marketing as well as to try to remember and hold onto group identity in the face of the "golden hordes" of wealthier tourists descending on their locales. Decades of inclusion in the Chinese state, media, national education, and now ethnic tourism have created competing versions of Mosuo identity in Yongning, northwest Yunnan. The Mosuo at Lugu Lake have had to deal with romantic notions of the lake as both a land of wise matriarchs and a feminist paradise or a land of frolicking maidens and a place for quick and easy trysts. Meanwhile, the image of Namu, known to urban Chinese as the ultramodern Mosuo, competes with images of "daughters" and "princesses" at secluded and ostensibly backward Lugu Lake. Within this paper, I explore discourses and countercurrents of identity produced by tourism in the Lugu Lake area, and the challenges to simple configurations of Han and "Other" as a basis for ethnic politics and understandings in China. I describe media representations of the Mosuo, as well as their responses, and then turn to a discussion of gender, ethnicity and Mosuo identity. I use the example of Namu to look at how Mosuoness is being created, debated and presented. I contrast this with notions of cultural preservation presented by scholars and tourism officials working on preserving Mosuo culture to interrogate ideas of culture and authenticity.

E-paper: this Paper will not be presented, but read in advance and discussed

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