Tourism and environmental subjectivities in the Anthropocene: observations from Niru Village, Southwest China
基于中国尼汝村的田野调查，从政治生态学视角分析生态旅游如何通过个体间的协商与交流，塑造人们与环境相关的主体性，挑战“自然”与“文化”的传统观念。
The increasingly popular notion of Anthropocene urges us to reflect and review the role of the human, the Anthropos, as part of the planet earth. In this context, tourism has been singled out as a global industry that is driven by neoliberal economic principles and is inevitably intertwined in the production of the Anthropocene. At the same time, tourism has been adopted also as part of environmental governance and management, aiming for a more sustainable economy. Based on the idea that ecotourism contributes to the discourse of “nature” (and Anthropocene) disruptively as well as productively in unsettling the normative ideas of “nature” and “culture”, in this article I attempt to understand more specifically how ecotourism may enable individuals' subject formation in relation to the broader environmental discourse. Drawn on fieldwork in Niru Village, Shangri-La, Southwest China, I employ a political ecology approach and examine the ways individuals relate themselves to “nature”, through a process of negotiation and exchange with others engaged in ecotourism activities. The tourism encounters in Niru Village, therefore are also embodied encounters of different environmental subjectivities.