"Untouched" Myanmar : an ethnography of a tourism frontier

Abstract

Since the 1950s global tourism has grown at an exponential rate, with the annual number of tourists roughly doubling in the past 15 years. However, recent scholarship has empirically shown that the expansion of tourism into previously undeveloped regions—into so-called tourism “frontiers”—produces systemic changes in the societies and lands where it becomes established. The role of discourse in this process of frontier development has yet to be thoroughly studied, a question made urgent by the function of hegemonic discourses in establishing tourists’ desires and frameworks of understanding. This thesis responds by historicizing, theorizing, and describing the core discourses that motivate the consumption of tourism frontiers. By conducting a study of the recent expansion of tourism in the country of Myanmar, development is shown to be discursively preceded by the longstanding and widespread touristic desire for “untouched” places and peoples.

This thesis conjoins literary and discourse analysis with multi-sited ethnographic methods, tracing the touristic desire for the “untouched” in Myanmar to discourses of the “authentic” and the “picturesque.” In order to uncover the origins of these discourses and understand their present role in the consumption of tourism frontiers, a close reading of representative travelogues, literature, photographs, and social media posts is conducted, beginning with the long nineteenth century and concluding with the twenty-first. Further analysis of tourism discourse is conducted with interviews of tourists and residents in Myanmar, collected at popular tourism sites together with participant observation over the course of three month-long fieldwork trips between 2018-2020. By articulating the continuity of particular narratives and ways of seeing across a range of genres and modalities, present-day tourism is shown to be rooted in and continually shaped by colonial structures of feeling, even as today’s tourists hail from a wide array of regions, histories, and cultures.

These discourses of the untouched, dually comprised by desire for the authentic and the picturesque, assign symbolic value to tourism experiences. These experiences may then be exchanged on a symbolic marketplace, one which is increasingly salient to the maintenance of status in the globalized middle class. Ultimately, in locating the development of tourism frontiers as beginning with the discourses that make them attractive, the political economy of global tourism is shown to be motivated by a logic of symbolic accumulation among tourists, even as it is steered through the accumulation of material capital by industry actors. As tourism’s sociocultural formations and transnational economies confront the potential ruptures wrought by the COVID-19 pandemic, this thesis directs attention to the pivotal importance of discourse in configuring a more equitable global tourism.