Imaginaries reconfigured: development and resistance in Myanmar tourism

Following advances in the anthropological study of tourism ‘imaginaries’ and renewed focus on the dispossession and inequality wrought by development, this project takes an ethnographic approach in examining how imaginaries motivate, structure, and justify tourism development. Actively unfolding sociocultural formations and processes of development are surveyed with a case study in Dawei District, southern Myanmar, generating novel insights into the linkages between globalized tourism imaginaries and political economy. This project expands the methodological affordances of anthropology by conjoining qualitative ethnography, discourse analysis, and close reading in the pursuit of three objectives: 1) identify and historicize dominant tourism imaginaries, 2) trace how imaginaries produce systems of development and consumption, and 3) uncover the potential for imaginaries to be reconfigured. By embedding with residents in Dawei District’s Pa Nyit village, who are actively seeking to retain local autonomy as development sweeps the region, this project asks if community-based resistance can produce new or alternative imaginaries and developmental trajectories. As COVID-19 and the acceleration of climate change disrupt local lifeways and transnational networks of mobility, documenting community strategies for adaptation to these existential dilemmas suggests more sustainable avenues for the future of global tourism.