Noah,
You're right. What Valene pointed out years ago still remains true.
Tourism is not the principle cause of social change in most tourist
areas.
Steve Butts
Faculty of Leisure and Tourism
Buckinghamshire Chilterns University College
Noah Shepherd wrote:
>
> Hello
>
> I've been following the debate and would like to add my comments.
>
> Last year, I took part in a pre conference trip for the PATA Ecotourism and
> Adventure Travel Conference in Chiang Mai, Thailand. I have lived in
> Thailand for many years and work as a consulant specialising in sustainable
> tourism development.
>
> As part of the trip, we visited Doi Inthanon National Park to see some of
> the minority people, commonly known as 'hill tribes' - they are certainly
> not indigenous as such, in that they are nomadic but their habitats are now
> permanent, many of them having been absorbed into Thai society albeit
> peripherally.
>
> Several of the villages offer 'exhibition culture' - the kind that is
> commonly criticised by both tourism academics and professionals. They dress
> up in traditional garb, smile for photographs, and generally do the tourist
> thing and wait until the tour buses go home. There are several other
> villages that are untouched by tourism where some of the people in the
> village seem to live in more of a traditional manner, and some have
> 'progressed' to the Honda/Levi lifestyle.
>
> Perhaps the most interesting of all the villages are those that have been
> adopted by Royal Projects under the name of His Majesty the King or Her
> Majesty the Queen. The Royal family have been very involved in helping
> villages move from their opium cash crops to latter day cash crops such as
> flowers and vegetables that are sold via a number of sources. In many of
> these villages, if you were not either an anthropologist, or in the know,
> you would think that you were in any other Thai village. Certainly there
> are giveaway signs such as the detail of house construction (concrete houses
> with a mud floor for example), internal decorations, and of course the faces
> of the people themselves. These prosperous villages have pickup trucks,
> electricity, Levis, Hondas and TVs all over the place. One thing that these
> villages do not have is tourists.
>
> In all of these villages, I feel that the pressure from Thai society to
> change, and indeed the aspirations of the villagers themselves to be
> prosperous is far greater than any influence that tourism may have.
>
> Noah Shepherd
> Managing Director
> ETC Asia Co., Ltd (A Member of Asia Web Direct)
> Muang Mai Chrysler Building 4th Floor.
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