From Nü Guo to Nü’er Guo

Abstract

Tourism at Lugu Lake exploded in the 1990s, drawing on government representations of the Mosuo as “matriarchal” and as engaging in traditional sexual relations (zouhun) outside of marriage. The village of Luoshui is the primary tourist destination; its economy is almost completely driven by tourism. In this article, the author discusses state policy and scholarly representations of the Mosuo, tourist representations that developed from them, and the interactions and responses around ethnicity at Luoshui. Locals daily engage with the commodification of their culture and must continually negotiate tourists’ contradictory desires. The author argues that locals address these contradictions in part through performing both “front” and “backstages.” She interrogates the notion of an “authentic” Mosuo identity while describing how tourism has reified culture as a gendered consumable and has sexualized Mosuo culture in tourist areas.

Gender disparities in material and educational resources differ by kinship system

“…Market integration has changed Mosuo lifestyles in various ways in recent decades [72,73]. Matrilineal communities have been particularly affected by market integration [6], as the area's connections to regional markets have long been stronger than those of patrilineal communities.…”

Which measures matter? A behavioral ecology view of “market integration” among the matrilineal Mosuo of Southwest China

“…We test these hypotheses among the Chinese Mosuo, an ethnic minority who, since the 1980s, have experienced intensifying integration with regional markets, stemming primarily from increasing domestic and international tourism (Mattison 2010;Walsh 2005).…”

“Living Fossils”: The Politics of Language Preservation in Huangshan, China

“…In these chunks of narration, The Charm of Huizhou Topolects very clearly places Huangshan in a chronotope of an ahistorical past, presenting it as a “living fossil” ( huohuashi ) of a generic and timeless “ancient” ( gudai ) China. The film also places Huangshanese themselves as guileless artifacts that make up the museum display that is Huangshan, akin to the ethnographic displays of “Indigenous people” presented for the viewing pleasure of a gawking public in a World’s Fair or natural history diorama (Hilden and Huhndorf 1999; Walsh 2005; Zittlau 2011).…”

“…As in many other parts of the world, the thrill for the modern tourist (or anthropologist or documentary photographer) lies in encountering the primitive other and, through close juxtaposition with radical difference, having their own modernity affirmed. These tourist desires and the tourist projects that cater to them exist in ethnic minority areas of China, particularly in the west and southwest, where ethnic minorities like the Yi, Bai, Zhuang, Mosuo, Naxi, Zang, and Miao are presented as exotic and primitive to the Han gaze (Blum 2001; Chio 2014; Feng 2017; Harrell 1995; Link 2016; Litzinger 2000; Oakes 1998, 2005; Walsh 2005).…”