Paper short abstract:

Using the transformative tourism process in Lijiang, China as a case study, this article explores how the tourism imaginaries are embedded within the circuits of tourism including representation and promotion, service provision, multi-sensory practices of consumption, remembering and sharing. It is not a spontaneous process, but a complex embodiment and interaction between tourists and local groups, as well as national and international forces.

Paper long abstract:

Imaginaries are conceptualized as socially transmitted representational assemblages that interact with peoples' personal imaginings. Tourism imaginaries of destinations and travels are increasingly produced and consumed by diverse populations around the globe through expanding forms of media and opportunities for travel. Tourism imaginaries usually reproduce representations created by the tourism industry and mass media, but tourists also harness their purchasing power to feed their imagination and their consumption preferences back into the production of heritage landscape and, thus, contribute to the ways in which places are represented and constituted. Through tourists' bodily practices like gazing, photographing, living, and listening, tourism imaginaries are not solely semiotic but "thoroughly embodied". It is expressed through virtual body enactments, and is co-constructed through the interaction of service providers and receivers.

Taking the tourism development of Lijiang, China, especially the transformation of its varied images as a case study, this paper aims to explore how tourism imaginaries are produced, negotiated, and transformed to intersect and establish the network of actors including different individuals and groups in the tourism industry. It elaborates the argument by examining how the historic trade town is transformed to the commercial heritage site, and how the theme of love is constructed with the presentation of romance in the bars. This paper argues that through the flow of actors in the tourism network, the imaginaries are more than embedded in the tourist's mind. Rather, imaginaries constitute "the flow of relations among things, people and human purposes" through embodied practices to construct identity and make social meanings.