Revitalization Lantern Festival Vietnam

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Revitalization and
counter‐revitalization: tourism,
heritage, and the Lantern Festival as
catalysts for regeneration in Hội An,
Việt Nam
a
Michael A. Di Giovine
a
Department of Anthropology , University of Chicago , Chicago,
USA
Published online: 25 Nov 2010.
To cite this article: Michael A. Di Giovine (2009) Revitalization and counter‐revitalization: tourism,
heritage, and the Lantern Festival as catalysts for regeneration in Hội An, Việt Nam, Journal of
Policy Research in Tourism, Leisure and Events, 1:3, 208-230, DOI: 10.1080/19407960903204364
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Journal of Policy Research in Tourism, Leisure and Events
Vol. 1, No. 3, November 2009, 208–230
Revitalization and counter-revitalization: tourism, heritage, and the

Lantern Festival as catalysts for regeneration in H i An, Vi t Nam
Michael A. Di Giovine*
Department of Anthropology, University of Chicago, Chicago, USA

(Received September 2008; final version received June 2009)
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1940-7963
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Research in (online)
Tourism, Leisure and Events
When employed for development purposes, tourism often elicits a fundamental

tension between locals’ desire (and need) to both change and to stay the same. Like
other development projects, it is often paradoxically conceived as a means of

empowering and ‘bettering’ hosts that necessarily rests in the hands of the guests.
After briefly tracing the historical conjunctures between development discourses
and tourism, the author argues for the adoption of an alternative theory, one that
eschews development’s tautologies and evolutionary notions: Anthony Wallace’s
classic revitalization theory, a ‘deliberate, organized, conscious effort by members
of a society to construct a more satisfying culture’. He contends that this paradigm
is a more totalizing set of processes, since it accounts for environmental, religious,
psychological, and biological pressures stemming from extra-cultural challenges.
Using ethnographic fieldwork to explore the emergence of H i An from a sleepy
Vietnamese town into the country’s most popular destination, the author shows
that, while the impetus for the adoption of tourism may have been the intervention
of outsiders, locals perceiving a variety of pressures on their way of life truly
shaped the manner in which the town regenerated itself. In particular, they respond
to the tension between transformation and tradition by implementing a monthly
Lantern Festival that ritually refreshes their sense of communitas and reinforces
the unique temporality in which they live. More importantly, it urges both
practitioners and theorists to consider the productivity of adopting a revitalization
paradigm to better understand and implement urban regeneration projects that
focus on tourism and festivals.
Keywords: tourism; development; revitalization; festivals; Vietnam; H i An
Resumen
Cuando se utiliza para fines de desarrollo, el turismo con frecuencia provoca una
tensión entre los deseos (y necesidades) con respecto al cambio y la permanencia
al mismo tiempo. Como otro tipo de proyectos de desarrollo, los de turismo con
frecuencia se conciben, paradójicamente, como medios de habilitación y ‘mejora’
de los huéspedes que necesariamente descansa en manos de los anfitriones.
Después de trazar brevemente las coyunturas históricas entre los discursos de
desarrollo y el turismo, el autor defiende la adopción de una teoría alternativa, una
que se abstenga de tautologías de desarrollo y nociones de evolución: la teoría de
revitalización clásica de Anthony Wallace, un ‘esfuerzo deliberado, organizado y
consciente por los miembros de una sociedad para construir una cultura más
*Email: digiovim@uchicago.edu
ISSN 1940-7963 print/ISSN 1940-7971 online

© 2009 Taylor & Francis
DOI: 10.1080/19407960903204364
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Journal of Policy Research in Tourism, Leisure and Events 209
satisfactoria’. Sostiene que este paradigma abarca mejor un conjunto de procesos,

puesto que considera las presiones medioambientales, religiosas, psicológicas y
biológicas procedentes de desafíos extra-culturales. Utilizando un campo de
trabajo etnográfico para explorar la emergencia de H i An desde una ciudad
dormitorio vietnamita en el destino nacional más popular, el autor muestra que
mientras los ímpetus de adopción del turismo pueden haber sido intervención de
forasteros, los habitantes locales perciben un conjunto de presiones en su formas
de vida que configuran verdaderamente la manera en la que la ciudad se regenera.
En particular, responden a la tensión entre trasformación y tradición llevando a
cabo mensualmente el Festival Lantern en el que refrescan ritualmente su sentido
de comunidad y refuerza la temporalidad única en la que viven. Aún más
importante, urge tanto a profesionales como a teóricos a considerar la
productividad de adoptar un paradigma de revitalización para comprender mejor e
implantar los proyectos de regeneración urbana que se concentran en el turismo y
los festivales.
Palabra clave: turismo; desarrollo; revitalización; festivales; Vietnam; H i An

Résumé
Employé dans le but de développement, le tourisme suscite souvent une tension

fondamentale entre le désir (et le besoin) de la population locale en ce qui
concerne le changement et le statu quo. Comme c’est le cas pour d’autres projets
de développement, le tourisme est paradoxalement souvent pris pour un moyen
qui permet aux hôtes de mieux s’assumer mais qui reste nécessairement dans les
mains des visiteurs. Après avoir brièvement passé en revue les conjonctures
historiques qui marquent les discours de développement et de tourisme, l’auteur
propose l’adoption d’une théorie alternative, celle qui passe sous silence les
tautologies du développement et des notions évolutionnistes: la théorie classique
de revitalisation d’Antony Wallace, un ‘effort délibéré, organisé et conscient des
membres d’une société pour construire une culture plus satisfaisante’. Il prétend
que ce paradigme est un ensemble de processus plus additionnels, surtout qu’il
représente les pressions environnementales, religieuses, psychologiques et
biologiques qui proviennent des défis extra-culturels. Par le biais d’une étude
ethnographique menée sur le terrain en vue d’explorer l’émergence de H i An de
la léthargie d’une ville vietnamienne à la destination la plus populaire du pays,
l’auteur montre que, au moment où l’élan de la dynamique d’adoption du
tourisme aurait été généré par les gens de l’extérieur, les populations locales qui
perçoivent diverses pressions à travers leur mode de vie ont véritablement donné
la forme à la manière dont la ville s’est régénérée. En particulier, elles répondent
à la tension qui existe entre la transformation et la tradition, en organisant
mensuellement le Lantern Festival qui, rituellement, revitalise leur identité
communautaire et renforce l’unicité de la temporalité de leur vie. Plus important
encore, ceci appelle à la fois les praticiens et les théoriciens à considérer le
rendement de l’adoption d’un paradigme de revitalisation pour mieux comprendre
et mettre en œuvre les projets de régénération urbaine qui se reposent sur le
tourisme et les festivals.
Mots-clés: tourisme; développement; revitalisation; festivals; Vietnam; H i An

210 M.A. Di Giovine
Introduction: the problems with tourism development

Tourism – today’s largest and fastest-growing export industry, surpassing even that
of the oil trade (UNWTO, 2007) – has long been considered a central means for
economic development, employment, and poverty alleviation (de Kadt, 1979;
Muhanna, 2007; UNESCO, 1976), especially when places have ‘outlived their
usefulness’ (Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, 1998, p. 151) as many ‘developing’ countries,
like Vi t Nam, have. Yet well-supported skepticism concerning tourism’s positive
potential for change has existed for just as long, and rich case studies reinforce
claims that touristic pressures create undue ‘stress’ on a host society (Murphy, 1985,
pp. 1, 3) by fostering economic and social disparities akin to modern colonialism
(Nash, 1977), ‘museumification’ of resources and self-representation (Dellios, 2002;
Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, 1998), and unsustainable environmental and cultural practices
(Kolata, 2007; Winter, 2003). Some of these issues are related to general inadequa-
cies of the development paradigm, while others emerge from the disconnect between
development and tourism.
When employed for development purposes, tourism often elicits a fundamental
tension between locals’ desire (and need) to both stay the same and to change. Like
many other development projects, tourism is viewed as a means to better a society in
the face of numerous socio-cultural pressures. ‘Betterment’ does not simply mean
economic improvement and increased employment, although that is often the case; it
also includes psycho-social aspects such as ‘empowerment’ (Kane, 1993; Rist, 1997,
p. 130), ‘integration’ into the global system (Truman, 1949; UNWTO, 1974), and
valorization on the international level (Di Giovine, 2009; Dure, 1974; UNESCO,
2005, p. 9) that can emerge precisely by adopting a newly introduced, globally
networked industry such as tourism. Often considered a form of ‘recreation,’ it
becomes a method of re-creation, of revitalizing or re-vivifying a place and people
through a complex process of interaction among a variety of stakeholders. Yet para-
doxically, tourism is often contingent on those very practices that are the intended
objects of change; tourism celebrates a culture’s traditions – often perceived as its
very ‘underdevelopment’ – that will necessarily be transformed through its implemen-
tation and ‘modernization.’ This problem was evident early in the post-war tourism
movement, as the United Nations World Tourism Organization (UNWTO) makes
clear in its inaugural publication:
In the second half of the 20th century we are seeing an increase in the number of nation
states all seeking to preserve their individualism while at the same time all wanting to
benefit from new technologies and new institutions which operate on a global scale
across all national boundaries. To weld together the common interests of all without
interfering unduly with the individual and particular interests of each is the task of this
growing community of specialized international agencies of which WTO is the most
recent member. (UNWTO, 1975, p. 248)
Tourism development also achieves this through a very evolutionary model of linear
progress: I will attempt to show that what could be dubbed a ‘development paradigm’
is predicated on claims that all humankind is inevitably traveling across a single,
linear trajectory towards a ‘modern’ capitalistic culture of production and consump-
tion. The necessary corollary of this, therefore, is that ‘modern’ Western people must
be the agents of change, the knowledge-brokers, the deliverers of civilization. Indeed,
the UNWTO – a global yet immanently Western institution based in Madrid, which
traces its roots to the International Congress of Official Tourist Traffic Associations
(ICOTT) in the Hague and the British International Union of Official Tourist Public-
ity Organizations (IUOTPO) (Jafari, 1975, pp. 237–238) – goes on to state its
mandate is to contribute to the alleviation of problems affecting the ‘world society’

(1975, p. 248). This is the tautological telos of tourism development: it is a means of
empowering hosts that necessarily rests, perhaps more so than other industries, in the
hands of guests. And although initiatives that aim to create sustainable tourism – such
as ‘pro-poor tourism’ (Ashley, Boyd, & Goodwin, 2000), eco-tourism (Honey, 1991;
Stronza, 2001), ‘volunteer tourism’ (McMillan, Cutchins, Geissinger, & Asner,
2009), and ‘community tourism planning’ (Harrill, 2004; Jamal & Getz, 1995;
Murphy, 1985) – have emerged alongside sustainable development initiatives, the
persistent critiques leveled against the insertion of a global tourism industry into a
local environment remain.
This essay has two primary goals. The first is to trace, in a relatively abbreviated
form, the historical intersections of development practice and tourism – with the aim
of revealing how many of the arguments against tourism development do not neces-
sarily pertain to the phenomenological or structural nature of tourism per se, nor to
any malicious intent on the part of tourism developers, but rather to the very culturally
situated perspective that innately underlies such practices. It is not the intent of this
article to critique any particular actor, theory, or practice associated with tourism
development. On the contrary, as my sketch of the historical trajectory of the
development paradigm should reveal, many of these initiatives are undertaken by well-
meaning and well-informed individuals who are continually in search of more equita-
ble and more efficient means of helping groups who are less fortunate than themselves.
What the paper aims to accomplish, however, is to shed light on the very culturally
oriented nature of this perspective, to reveal that it should not be considered in univer-
salizing terms, as it so often is, but rather as one approach out of many possibilities at
creating touristic infrastructures that will benefit the local population. When one is
open to the possibility that there are alternative worldviews, interests, and practices
associated with ‘betterment,’ it seems more likely that they will be taken into account
in future tourism endeavors.
In contrast to that of development, I offer an alternative paradigm, one that is appro-
priated from anthropologist Anthony F.C. Wallace’s classic theory of ‘revitalization
movements.’ When Wallace first introduced this paradigm in 1956, he used it to explain
the similarities among the emergence of several prophetic Native American religious
movements in early American history – movements that reacted to cultural pressures
by invoking, re-presenting and re-interpreting traditional elements of their heritage. Not
212 M.A. Di Giovine
only are tourism and heritage often related (Di Giovine, 2009, pp. 48–58), but tourism
and religion also often go together, as students of pilgrimage or festivals well know
(cf. Badone & Roseman, 2004; Ebron, 1999; Graburn, 1977; Morinis, 1992); ‘a tourist
is half a pilgrim if a pilgrim is half a tourist,’ Victor and Edith Turner once remarked
(1978, p. 20). And though tourism seems to be oriented to the ‘modern leisure class’
(cf. Boorstin, 1961/1994; MacCannell, 1976/1999; Towner, 1985), Nelson Graburn
(1977, 1985) drew on Victor Turner’s understanding of pilgrimage (Turner, 1974;
Turner & Turner, 1978) to show that its core phenomenological aspects transcend
economics: it is undertaken to experience a formative change from the everyday. Its
return-oriented ritual structure allows it to be conceptualized not only as a rite of
passage (van Gennep, 1960) but a rite of intensification – ‘cyclical rites that renew the
social or natural order’ (Chapple & Coon, 1942), a personal act of revitalization for
participants.
But it is less the phenomenology of tourism and religion that renders a revitaliza-
tion paradigm applicable to this context, than its discursive and perspectival qualities
which differentiate the theory from that of development. While a development

paradigm posits a universal evolutionary trajectory of all people toward capitalistic
‘modernization,’ the theory of revitalization posits a cyclical movement of renewal –
one that calls upon individuated notions of shared ‘heritage’ to resolve current prob-
lems. As Michael Harkin reveals, there is a fundamental dualism in human temporal
perceptions (2004, pp. xxii–xxv). On one level is the rather Western notion of a
linear, or organismic time – one that mirrors the individuated human lifespan: a being
is germinated, born, grows stronger, maintains stasis, grows sickly, and dies out. The
development paradigm espouses this notion, for it attempts to induce evolution in
‘underdeveloped’ cultures lest that culture perish in the modern world. Yet it is in the
sickly period of the culture’s life that revitalization leaders sense their outmoded
culture, feeling the stress of linear time. Their solution, their very cultural understand-
ing for resolving the problem of transience, is by invoking an alternative temporal
notion: that of the cycle, of a ‘seasonal’ reality, one that constantly returns to itself
and refreshes its existence. A revitalization movement’s goal is to re-cycle the
culture: to germinate a new beginning, to grow in followers, to reach strength in
adulthood, and to flourish once again. Yet while the development paradigm posits a
common future-oriented endpoint of those cultures that are capable of evolving to
survive, revitalization movements call upon – or, rather, reinvent – the past to point
the way for a more sustainable future.
The second aspect of this paper is to illustrate how a revitalization movement can
be fostered through the creation of touristic infrastructures, including the invention of
a new festival celebrating an imagined heritage. To achieve this, I discuss the case of
H i An, a Vietnamese port town which, in the course of the last several centuries,
flourished, stagnated, and nearly ‘died out’ before tourism effectively re-generated the
town materially and culturally. Today, H i An is one of Vi t Nam’s premiere World
Heritage sites, toured by countless visitors throughout the year, and valorized at the
international level (Di Giovine, 2009, p. 262). While H i An’s success was achieved
comparatively quickly – in little over a decade – the road was not direct, nor was it
terribly easy for locals. H i An’s path to ‘betterment’ commenced through a common
development perspective, creating unforeseen consequences and stress for locals. Yet,
I will argue, the town’s now-renowned monthly Lantern Festival, an ‘invented tradi-
tion,’ constitutes a means of revitalization. Calling upon an imagined past, it resolves
that ‘aporia of time’ between linear human transience and the regenerative cycle of
nature (Harkin, 2004, p. xxiii; cf. Augustine of Hippo, 1958), and alleviates the
tension between fostering meaningful cultural transformations and maintaining
tradition.
Tourism and the global development movement

Although tourism is a phenomenon that has occurred in diverse cultures throughout
time, and with notable material effects ranging from preservation to religious revival,
interest in its capacity to foster economic development can be traced to the end of
World War II, when a number of global conjunctures between a reconstructed
‘North’ and post-colonial, ‘developing’ ‘South’ rendered tourism an attractive means
to integrate nation states into the ‘modern’ world stage. The end of the war saw
industrialized countries devastated by barbaric violence; much of their metropoles
were reduced to rubble, reminiscent perhaps of the Oriental ruins that so fascinated
their imperial eyes and informed their romanticized understandings of history. It is
not unreasonable to assume that gazing upon their devastated cities elicited reactions
similar to those by colonial tourists when confronting the archaeological remains of a
‘disappeared’ civilization, as epitomized by this quote from Henri Mouhot, who is
credited with ‘discovering’ the Khmer temple Angkor Wat in 1860: ‘There are few
things that can stir such melancholy feelings as the sight of places that were once the
scene of some glorious or pleasurable event, but which are now deserted’ (quoted
Dagens, 1995, p. 35). In part because of their impressive monumental scale and in
part because of their dire need of restoration that the West could provide, the Indoch-
inese temples of Angkor – like so many other monuments of ‘past’ civilizations exca-
vated by the colonial powers – contributed to the formation of Orientalist narrative
claims that saw Western Europeans as heirs to the luminous torch of ‘civilization.’
Lux ex Oriente, as the narrative goes; the ‘light from the East’ had been extinguished
there in Kampuchea, but through the colonial efforts of the French, it can once again
be brought back to the heirs of the Khmer (Di Giovine, 2009, p. 31; Edwards, 2007;
cf. Said, 1994).
In contrast to a revitalization movement, the development paradigm can be defined
as a historically and culturally situated category of processes that attempts to bring
about positive changes in a society through the intervention of outsiders who are consid-
ered more ‘advanced’ members of a common, broadly conceived civilization. Utilizing
Modernization theory, this post-World War II phenomenon drew on the Enlighten-
ment-era conception of human progress as well as Darwinian evolutionary notions of
‘descent with modification’ – that complex creatures evolve from more simplistic
organisms over time (Darwin, 2005, pp. 774–775). The paradigm thus views all people
on a common historical trajectory toward a more developed, universal and ‘modern’
culture (cf. Morgan, 1877); difference is considered hierarchically as indicative of the
stage of progression in which a culture finds itself. Modernization proponents propose
that all cultures are linked in their desire for social development into a rational, capi-
talistic form of civilization (cf. Weber, 1992, pp. xvii, 20). This concept had informed
the colonial enterprise, as it did the League of Nations.1 Nor is this only a capitalistic
notion; Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels also were informed by such a civilizational
understanding, as was Vladimir Lenin – though communism, rather than capitalism,
represented the final stage in their theory of socio-economic evolution.
This type of reasoning also guided the US-initiated Marshall Plan, which in 1947
aimed to reconstruct Europe and to provide America’s ‘huge production capacity with
214 M.A. Di Giovine
the markets it needed for postwar conversion’ (Rist, 1997, p. 69). It was as much a
security endeavor as it was a reconstruction effort; it was a struggle to keep the torch
of civilization from leaving, especially in the wake of the ascendancy of the Soviet
Union, which was informed by a similar understanding of civilization and develop-
ment, but whose objectives were at odds with that of the West. These security initia-
tives, coupled with the stunning progress of reconstruction efforts in Europe and
Japan, informed what would become the most important factor ushering in the ‘devel-
opment age’ (1997, p. 71): Truman’s 1949 inauguration speech and his famed ‘Point
Four,’ which stated that ‘all countries, including our own, will greatly benefit from a
constructive program for the better use of the world’s human and natural resources.’
Deftly coupling the post-war desire for economic expansion with humanitarian over-
tones, an impassioned Truman argued that ‘greater production is the key to prosperity
to peace,’ and that ‘only by helping the least fortunate of its members to help them-
selves can the human family achieve the decent, satisfying life that is the right of all
people’ (Truman, 1949).
Several factors are important here. As Rist points out, Truman’s introduction
of the concept of ‘underdevelopment’ was an innovation that ‘radically altered the
way the world was seen’ (1997, pp. 72–73). Instead of the colonizer/colonized para-
digm, the developed/undeveloped binary was intensely more human (both biologi-
cally and socially); it linked the modern North and traditional South in a universal
movement across a continuum of civilizational sophistication. An ‘undeveloped’ soci-
ety was perceived to posses structural and technical flaws that could be fixed through
Western intervention, and Walter Rostow’s ‘Big Push’ theory, first articulated in a
paper at Cambridge University in 1958, epitomized this thinking. Arguing that
economic growth occurs essentially in a ‘biological field,’ Rostow argued that
massive amounts of capital and expertise is required to change the structures of unde-
veloped countries, allowing them to ‘take off’ (in his words) like a rocket toward the
higher echelons of development (Rostow, 1960; quoted Rist, 1997, p. 95).
Unlike the colonial era, therefore, development assumes a ‘transitive meaning;’
development is not simply a de facto biological or evolutionary process across time,
subject only to the caprices of Civilization that can come and go, but rather ‘an action
performed by one agent upon another [sic] which corresponded to a principle of social
organization’ (Rist, 1997, p. 73). Such a view continues to inform development
discourse, for it provides the impetus for outside involvement. At a London School of
Economics lecture in the early 1970s, R.P. Dure breaks with the ‘conveyor belt’ view
of modernization while nevertheless espousing the transitive understanding of
development:
[Much] has been written on ‘pre-programmed runners on the white line’ assumptions
[that] ‘modernisation’ is an intransitive concept: it is something that happens to societies.
Used in that way, however, it is not a very useful concept: the runners are not pre-
programmed and there is no single white line, let alone a finishing line called a state of
modernity. But ‘modernisation’ becomes a useful word if it is derived from the transitive
verb ‘to modernise’ in the sense of ‘seeing to transform one’s society, or segments of it,
in imitation of models, and under the influence of ideas, drawn from other countries
which are seen as more advanced in some implicit scale of progress.’ (Dure, 1974, p. 93).
Indeed, one of the most important aspects of Truman’s speech is that he argues that
development is a global effort; it calls upon different types of actors from different
countries to assist different recipients who seem to be lacking the characteristics of
modernity, for the collective security and economic benefits of all. Integration into the
world system (and world markets) ‘through increased production and accumulation,
based on private investment and external assistance,’ is key (Rist, 1997, p. 85; cf.
Clancy, 1999, p. 2); it sets the precedent for direct, often bodily, involvement in local
settings – and, in the case of tourism, it links such interactions to discourses of
economic and ‘psycho-social’ (cf. Rist, 1997, p. 100) improvement. Such actions are
fostered primarily through economic means: foreign investment, technological inno-
vation to maximize resource extraction, and increased production capacity. Walt
Rostow’s philosophy of providing a ‘big push’ of international capital and expertise
fit right in to this plan; development was not a de facto evolutionary process across
time, but a global effort to provide, as United Nations Secretary-General U. Thant
would state in 1962, ‘growth plus change’ (Rist, 1997, p. 90; cf. Rostow, 1960, p. 9).
The simultaneous advent of more sophisticated means of transportation and
communication created another paradigm shift that rendered tourism conducive to
incorporation into Truman’s ‘Point Four.’ It significantly opened up the possibility
that tourism could be ‘implemented’ in developing countries by a variety of global

actors – both individuals and communities – with relative ease. As a response to this
new movement, several inter-governmental and non-governmental organizations were
founded to coordinate both the promotion of international travel as well as its associ-
ated technical aspects (including the standardization of airport codes, flight paths, and
airline and hotel booking procedures). Today, it continues to be considered ‘a global
means of economic development’ (Harrill, 2004, p. 263).
Tourism was conceptualized in a broader sense as a monolithic and organismic
‘industry’ which ‘involves the procurement of both goods and services to foreign
visitors’ (Clancy, 1999, p. 2). It could be ‘developed’ or ‘undeveloped,’ made more
efficient through technical assistance given to its workers, and ‘integrated’ into
undeveloped areas (cf. Murphy, 1985, p. 34). It could also generate profits and
losses, cultivate investors, and insert itself into worldwide industrial matrices.
Indeed, tourism was frequently touted as a ‘growth industry,’ since it had expanded
faster and penetrated more regions of the world in the post-war era than most
others, and, some claimed, its unique transnational nature seemed to escape many
of the conventional trade barriers (Clancy, 1999, p. 4). Especially since the United
Nations and World Bank began to consider tourism a ‘foreign’ trade (Norohona,
1979) – the concept of ‘domestic tourism’ would come later – it naturally follows
that it can be conceptualized as an ‘export’ industry, though the exportation process
is actually reversed as Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett points out (1998, p. 153). This
creates a rather unique position for tourism in the larger development endeavor.
Like so many other ‘extractive’ industries in the post-colonial world, tourism mines
raw materials; however, these materials are not shipped away to be refined and
consumed by outsiders, but outsiders are induced to voluntarily and temporarily
import themselves to consume them. This also led to the initial perception that, ‘as
an agent of transformation,’ tourism would be ‘friendlier, in general, to the environ-
ment than many other activities and past industries’ (Murphy, 1985, p. 31). The
movement for the conservation of natural and built structures grew hand-in-hand;
arguing that the hallmarks of development practices were not enough to cultivate
world peace, UNESCO passed its Convention Concerning the Protection of the
World Cultural and Natural Heritage in 1972. Commonly known as the World
Heritage Convention, the initiative is concerned primarily with conserving and
exhibiting sites that provide tangible evidence of the present’s connection with the
216 M.A. Di Giovine
past, and are therefore of universal appeal, particularly to tourists (Di Giovine,
2009; cf. UNESCO, 1972, p. 1).
Both UNESCO’s World Heritage Convention and the varieties of development
initiatives across the world were, on one level at least, egalitarian in nature; they were
– and continue to be – concerned with sustainable practices that valorize and improve
individuals at the local level (Di Giovine, 2009, p. 33). Yet indicative of the cultural
and historical situatedness of these processes, the diversity of local practices was often
perceived as a detriment; it is necessary to coordinate development practice through a
development ‘plan’ (Ferguson, 1994; Mosse, 2005; Murphy, 1985, p. 36), especially
if outsiders with little experience or social networks within the community were
supposed to be fueling the movement. As Ashley, Boyd, and Goodwin point out:
Donor-supported tourism master plans focus on creating infrastructure, stimulating

private investment and attracting international tourists. Investors are often international
companies and local elites, whose profits are generally repatriated abroad or to metro-
politan centres. Links with the local economy are often weak, with the possible exception
of employment. (2000, p. 1)
These donors thus often call upon governments, who exist above and beyond the local,
to act as powerful mediators between practitioners and locals. In speaking of commu-
nity tourism planning, for example, Peter Murphy writes, ‘Government involvement
in tourism [is imperative], for it alone possesses the necessary financial resources and
legislative power to redirect and coordinate the industry among more desirable
courses of action’ (p. 36). R.C. Mings, upon whose analysis Murphy draws, states
unequivocally that for tourism development to be successful, tourism requires ‘proper
planning,’ something that, in the late 1970s, had yet to be accomplished. ‘Conse-
quently, development in most places falls short of achieving optimum impacts’ (1978,
p. 2). Murphy concludes that even ‘a community approach to tourism management’ –
that is, tourism that includes (and benefits) the local population – necessitates ‘a
general goal that can be identified and measured’ (1985, p. 37).
Simply put, until the 1980s, interaction between foreign developers and the state
was promoted by the World Bank, IUOTO/UNWTO2 and the United Nations. In
1969, the World Bank created a dedicated Tourism Projects Department to ‘support
tourism as an economic growth tool’ for countries that met specific criteria (Hawkins
& Mann, 2007, p. 354). It lent over $525 million to 18 developing countries between
1970 and 1979, most of which were specifically called ‘tourism projects’ and were
directed at constructing the infrastructure, ‘urban regeneration’ and conservation of
resources necessary for a robust tourist economy (2007, p. 324).
After the failure of Rostowian industrialization pushes, which were exacerbated by
OPEC’s oil shocks in the 1970s, post-colonial states turned in greater numbers to the
tourism sector, for they recognized their competitive advantage to lie in the very under-
development they sought to transcend: Tourism was relatively inexpensive to utilize
as a resource, it could bring in short-term cash flows, it could impel conservation and
infrastructural development endeavors (UNESCO, 1972), and it could produce both
direct and indirect employment through what Emanuel de Kadt critically termed
‘economic and social dualism’ (1979). Viewing tourism through a Modernization para-
digm, it promised to pull locals from a rural subsistence economy into urban life by
directly employing them in ‘modern’ touristic infrastructures as guides, cooks, and
hotel workers, and indirectly as souvenir producers, foodstuff and textile providers,
and hotel furniture craftsmen who utilized and performed their ‘traditions.’ Envisioned
as a ‘basket of goods’ made up of numerous individual businesses and entrepreneurial

spirits, the ‘tourist product’ was often conceived in egalitarian terms where locals and
outsiders were wrapped in a package whose value was greater than the sum of its parts
(Murphy, 1985, p. 14). It was necessarily predicated on a ‘dependence on public facil-
ities and goodwill’ (1985, p. 14). Positioning locals as unique culture brokers (Kaiser
& Helber, 1978, p. ix; Powell, 1978, p. 3), tourism also was in line with Latin American
and African dependency theorists’ belief that development’s primary goal should be
psycho-social ‘empowerment’ and self-reliance (Nyerere, 1977, pp. 41–42; Rist, 1997,
p. 130; cf. Amin, 1973; Baran & Sweezy, 1966/1968; Cardoso & Faletto, 1969).
Despite ambitiously altruistic aims, the Deus ex machina conception of tourism and
development was quickly found to be a problematic one. A study commissioned by
UNESCO in 1975 already found that tourism did not necessarily produce the kinds of
direct and indirect employment that had generally been contended. On the economic
level, while tourism was thought to provide direct employment opportunities to locals
who would work at internationally owned facilities, in actuality the industry was
conducive to vertical integration by foreigners, who would not only manage hotels, but
would open competing restaurants, travel agencies, bus companies, and guiding facil-
ities. The ‘multiplier effect’ of indirect employment also did not materialize (cf.
Murphy, 1985, pp. 90–95); that is, the opening of new markets for traditional crafts
and agricultural goods did not revitalize ‘traditional’ industries, or stave off a ‘flight
from the land’ by framers who continued to move to the cosmopolitan urban centers
to look for work (UNESCO, 1976, p. 81). Lastly, the vertical and horizontal integration
of foreign tourism companies created notable ‘leakages’ – ‘the proportion of monies
invested or earned in the tourism sector that ended up overseas’ (Markandya, Taylor,
& Pedroso, 2005, p. 231), mostly in the hands of the tourists’ countries of origin
(Bryden, 1973). And tourism theorists such as Denison Nash (1977), Daniel Boorstin
(1961/1994), and Dean MacCannell (1976/1999) decried what they perceived as an
environment of modern colonialism, inauthenticity and ‘museumification’ caused by
the touristic enterprise.
Responses from tourism advocates largely echoed those leveled by development
practitioners, especially the large funding agencies operating outside the local sphere:
In the absence of measurable or predictable results, success is often contingent upon
– or espoused through the idiom of – the proper execution of a specific plan, though
in reality most development practitioners on the ground adapt to change just as often
as the locals do. The corollary, therefore, is that the perceived ‘failure’ of tourism
development was directly linked to an incorrect implementation of the plan – either
because of human error or because of faults in their coherency and execution. As
Mosse and Ferguson both intimate in their respective ethnographies, development
practices may be perceived as a glaring failure by outside funders, managers, and
government entities who are removed from the everyday nuances of the site if the
results do not match up to the plan’s predetermined, and often arbitrarily assigned,
developmental benchmarks. James Ferguson asserts that, ‘like all “development”
discourses … “development” results from “development” projects’ rather than from a
process of discourse and practice that both produces knowledge and embargoes it
(1994, p. 37; cf. Quarles van Ufford, 1993, p. 137). Indeed, the opening paragraph from
the World Bank’s first major working paper on tourism development resonates today:
Tourism is a path to economic development; for some countries it is the only viable path.
But too few developing countries plan for tourism. Countries that lack the financial,
218 M.A. Di Giovine
technical or administrative capacity to plan almost inevitably lose control over the devel-
opment of tourism. Foreign exchange earnings flow to the international hotel chains,
airlines, travel agencies, and marketing experts needed to attract the requisite numbers
of tourists. Unforeseen consequences cause the relationship between tourist and host
country to sour. They include: loss of land by the local population; weakening of family
ties; and loss of local ownership and control of hotels, restaurants and other tourist facil-
ities. (Norohona, 1979, p. 1)
Many of these problems were chalked up to ‘structural failures’ in economically back-

ward places, such as nepotism, corruption, and the persistence of an informal econ-
omy that circumvents and subverts the global economic infrastructure inhabited, too,
by the tourism industry. By the 1980s, the tourism industry as a whole suffered this
fate; the World Bank took on very few projects that incorporated a tourism dimension
(Hawkins & Mann, 2007, p. 356). Multilateral tourism development has nevertheless
continued under the aegis of the United Nations Development Program (UNDP), the
UNWTO, and a proliferation of NGOs advocating ‘sustainable tourism.’ Yet informed
by the same developmental perspective, these initiatives often meet the same ‘fail-
ures.’ Writing on ecotourism’s focus on ‘strategies’ and ‘parameters of success,’
Amanda Stronza states:
The ideas are generally prescriptive, arguing that if the ecotourism industry were to
provide the right inputs, such as ‘a participatory approach,’ then the negative impacts of
tourism on local hosts could be reduced. The emphasis remains, however, on what is
external to a site, rather than on what the existing conditions might reveal about whether
tourism will have a positive or negative impact on local residents (Stronza, 2001, p. 275).
Indeed, Murphy – one of the first advocates for a ‘community tourism perspective’ –
seems to belie the egalitarian dimension to his theory much the same way Truman did;
his task was to enumerate best practices and ‘response strategies’ (1985, p. 38) to help
‘the industry’s survival’ (p. 29), perhaps more so than the survival of the community
itself. The most indicative element of this perspective is Murphy’s contention that the
primary resource which governments and tourism development practitioners must
manage is locals’ ‘goodwill’ (p. 39). Writing decades later, Rich Harrill seems to echo
this point; ‘planners are challenged with understanding how the public perceives tour-
ism’ not in order to better tailor the touristic enterprise to local cosmologies, but rather
‘in order to gain local support for tourism projects and initiatives’ (2004, p. 251).
Furthermore, locals seem to be considered as ignorant of their own (economic) better-
ment, and tourism practitioners are exhorted to ‘demonstrate that benefits pass to the
community as well as industry personnel’ (Murphy, 1985, p. 124), since ‘[o]ne reason
why residents have consistently lower attitude ratings to local tourism, compared to
other groups, is that they are often unaware of its economic significances and overall
contribution to their community’ (p. 122).
Despite the good intentions of many development practitioners, it appears that tour-
ism development suffers from an unforeseen clash of cultures in its very approach – a
clash which is often subtle, and which threatens to marginalize those to whom the initi-
atives are to help. It seems that what is needed, by both practitioners and analysts, is
an alternative paradigm to inform both the practice of tourism and the analysis of its
outcomes. This paradigm should integrate efforts by outsiders and locals alike; it should
not link results to a rigid ‘plan’ constructed by outsiders, but to the interactions between
these entities; and it should call upon, and valorize, locals’ traditional worldviews, as
the primary impetus for their ‘betterment.’
An alternative to development: the revitalization paradigm
This article offers a different, more equitable and, in some cases, more accurate model
for understanding those cases where locals themselves are in charge of their transfor-
mations, where they adopt tourism initiatives to suit their own value systems and in
accordance with their own cosmologies, their own understandings of the world, and
their place in it. Appropriating Anthony F.C. Wallace’s classic ‘revitalization’ theory,
originally intended to understand Native American religious movements, I posit that
analysts and practitioners alike should view these cases through a revitalization para-
digm. Revitalization, as Wallace describes it, is a model for understanding culture
change, brought about by significant and often complex environmental, economic,
social, cultural, and psychological stresses in the host society, which have been caused
by new or intensified contact with an outside society. It is often fueled by visionary
local leaders who, perceiving the culture as once functional but now operating unsat-
isfactorily, are desirous of a restoration of ideal cultural values. While the end product
of such movements is ultimately novel and unprecedented, local leaders consciously

make reference to, and attempt to purify, the past in relation to the present. They there-
fore view ‘development’ not as a linear and evolutionary progression on the world
stage, but as a cycle: one’s culture can be germinated, born, flourish, grow sick, and
become born anew (1956, pp. 265, 267).
Although there are traces of Positivistic universalism in Wallace’s original concep-
tualization, this is indeed a model that can be applied in various contemporary settings.
Individuals are not Durkheimian automatons who are moved by the hidden hand of
collective effervescence to maintain some sort of social homeostasis, but are true
biological, psychological, and social beings, who recognize Outside forces threatening
their culture’s very existence, who experience stress from real material pressures and
from the tension to stay the same and to change, and who come together behind a
culture hero to significantly transform their society – on their own terms. Furthermore,
as revitalization movements are fundamentally predicated on a distinctive recourse to
an imagined past, they are often articulated through heritage claims, a specific – if
equally imagined – narrative linking an individual’s lineage and his society’s history
as a whole (Di Giovine, 2009, p. 34).
One significant difference between revitalization and a development paradigm is
the agentive role of the local individual. Even after the ‘participatory development’ turn
of the late 1980s and early 1990s, wherein the thoughts and opinions of local repre-
sentatives are solicited by development practitioners before drawing up a plan
(Chambers, 1994), agency in the development paradigm rests nearly exclusively in the
hands of outsiders (cf. Ferguson, 1994, p. 37; Gray, 1989, p. 65; Jamal & Getz, 1995,
pp. 194–195; Mosse, 2005, p. 4; Parfitt, 2004, p. 538; Quarles van Ufford, 1993,
p. 137). As Mohan and Stokke convey, Westerners act as crucial mediators in partic-
ipatory development practices, ‘placing ourselves back at the centre of the
(under)development process and therefore re-inscrib[ing] the authorial voice, because
it is only us who can really change things’ (2000, p. 253). Indeed, the World Bank’s
Samuel Paul defined community participation as ‘an active process by which benefi-
ciary or client groups influence the direction and execution of a development project
with a view to enhancing their well-being in terms of income, personal growth, self-
reliance or other values they cherish’ (1987; quoted Parfitt, 2004, p. 538). It is important
to note that for Paul, as for others, participatory development gives communities the
chance to ‘influence’ – not determine, drive, or create – a development plan that is
220 M.A. Di Giovine
created by other entities. The same seems to ring true in many contemporary commu-
nity tourism planning initiatives. Although conceding that local stakeholders must be
brought into the process, Jamal and Getz (1995), for example, still take for granted the
imposition of a plan from above. Because it inherently utilizes an organizational model,
community tourism planning is inherently not a grassroots theory, but rather uses
‘representatives from the local community and others from outside the geographic
locale of the community’ (p. 198) who provide ‘legitimacy and power,’ ‘an external
mandate,’ and ‘authority’ (1994, p. 197) to the plan. ‘Failure to include them in the
design stage only invites technical or political difficulties during implementation,’ Gray
tellingly remarks (1989, p. 65).
Organic, a revitalization movement is instead fueled by locals responding to pres-
sures on an individually experienced, yet collectively mediated conception of a
group’s cultural existence, which Wallace terms a ‘mazeway.’ Unlike structural func-
tionalists, Wallace’s formulation of a society does not exist as a self-contained whole
without any clear beginning or end, but is a transient creature whose individual
components are cognizant of their own lifestyle, their own place in the system, and
their cosmological position in space and time. Indeed, place is integral to Wallace’s
conceptualization of a mazeway, as he indicates:
This mental image I have called ‘the mazeway,’ since as a model of the cell-body-
personality-nature-culture-society system or field, organized by the individual’s own
experience, it includes perceptions of both the maze of physical objects of the envi-
ronment (internal and external, human and nonhuman) and also of the ways in which
this maze can be manipulated by the self and others in order to minimize stress.
(1956, p. 266)
An important component of Wallace’s revitalization paradigm is therefore the

notion of cultural boundaries, an often spatialized understanding of those inside a
cultural system and those outside. The movement emerges when individuals recog-
nize that their culture has passed from a ‘steady state,’ wherein the culturally recog-
nized techniques for satisfying needs operate with relative efficiency (1956, p. 268)
to periods of ‘increased individual stress’ and ‘cultural distortion.’ These latter peri-
ods are marked by behavioral changes brought about by influences outside the
boundaries established in one’s mazeway and are largely physical in nature;
Wallace (1956) enumerates ‘climatic, floral and faunal change; military defeat;
political subordination; extreme pressure toward acculturation resulting in internal
conflict; economic distress; epidemics; and so on’ as possible pressures. He couples
these spatio-physical stresses with cultural pressure: ‘The situation is often, but not
necessarily, one of acculturation’ (p. 269). Linking the cultural with the material is
important, for as Marshall Sahlins argues, ‘every culture is a cosmological order;
and in thus including the universe within its own cultural scheme … the people
accord beings and things beyond their immediate community a definite place in its
reproduction’ (2000, p. 489); cultures are not hermetically sealed, neither physically
nor conceptually. While the group and the Other continue to conceptualize them-
selves in different ways, all act with the understanding that there is a continuation
of a world outside their conceptual and material boundaries that may impact them.
One’s mazeway is thrown into disequilibrium not necessarily because one’s
perspective of the world and the Other has changed, but because the Other’s
impingement on its boundaries has impacted the culture’s processes on a very real,
material level.
Thus, it is important to note that the revitalization paradigm does not eschew the
intervention of outside forces, such as the often well-meaning tourism developers and
NGO workers. Rather, it recognizes that all groups appropriate within their particular
cosmological schemes an image of the ‘Other,’ just as a bricoleur assembles disparate
chunks of debris into an ‘ideological castle’ (Lévi-Strauss, 1966/1974, p. 17). While
development practice innately incorporates the ‘Other’ into a civilizational scheme,
attempting to translate alternative value systems into standardized plans that are
comprehendible to Westerners, revitalization movements similarly see locals incorpo-
rating the worldviews of outsiders. Indeed, the revitalization paradigm emphasizes the
many processes in which various groups are mutually incorporated; it views cultural
regeneration from a more equitable point of view as the product of a totalization of
multiple procedures that impels locals to make significant changes to their society by
calling upon, yet re-inventing, their narratively understood identity. Unlike a develop-
ment paradigm, the revitalization model brings local ‘hosts’ into a direct and more
equal relationship with tourist ‘guests,’ as well as with the variety of other actors oper-
ating within what I have elsewhere called a ‘field of touristic production’ – a complex
of different subjective communities engaged in struggles of positioning and position-
taking (Di Giovine, 2009, pp. 42–48; cf. Bourdieu, 1993). By participating in mutual
and multifarious interaction, contestation and negotiation, locals drive their socio-
cultural transformation by subtly expanding their very cosmologies and how they
perceive of themselves fitting into it.
This phenomenon occurred in the UNESCO World Heritage site of H i An, a once
sleepy port town in central Vi t Nam that has become one of the socialist country’s
most popular tourist destinations.3 Located on the Thu B n river, at the epicenter of
ancient Champa – a Hindu state that frequently clashed with both the Khmers at
Angkor and the D i Vi t in Hà N i – H i An (or ‘Fai Fo’ as it was sometimes called)
D
o[kr]ts
was an important trading center at the periphery of the Silk Road for its prized cinna-
mon and sandalwood exports. When the Vietnamese took control of the region, the
town continued to flourish, and from the late sixteenth century to the early eighteenth
century it became a melting pot of merchants from China, Japan, Portugal, and, later,
France (ICOMOS, 1999, p. 114). But the closed-door trade policies of the Nguy n
empire – which echoed those of the Chinese and Japanese – coupled with the unfor-
tunate silting of H i An’s ancient harbor, led to sudden and gross economic stagnation.
Locals turned mainly to subsistence fishing or farming. Though many fled the town,
those who remained were impoverished and largely forgotten, eclipsed by the urban
center of Dà N ng. Yet a series of touristic interventions by those outside and inside
D
[orkt]s
the town regenerated H i An, transforming, in the process, the very socio-cultural
fabric of the town. The ways in which tourism was implemented in the 1980s was very
much in line with the global development movement; however, to truly understand this
transformation, we will examine this through the lens of revitalization.
The revitalization of H i An
Like elsewhere in post-war Vi t Nam, the first ‘tourists’ arrived in H i An in the 1980s,
and they were Soviets – mostly advisors and their families on holiday from Hà N i or
possibly Dà N ng, to which they were called to work. According to Tr n Vă n Nhân,
D
[orkt]s aebv[re]
Chair of the local office of the Ministry of Culture and Information, they recognized
the stunning outward ossification of the town, and dubbed H i An ‘old Hà N i.’ Some-
time around 1983, news of this old Hà N i reached a Polish historic preservationist
222 M.A. Di Giovine
affectionately called Kazim (Kazimier Kwiatkowski), who was working at the sacred
Cham site of Mỹ Syon, which was severely damaged during the Vietnamese–
American war. When he arrived in the town, he was ‘surprised’ to see such well-
preserved traditional buildings and lobbied government officials ‘who knew nothing
about the town’ to ‘come in to study it.’ In 1985, the Vietnamese government hosted
H i An’s first domestic symposium in an expansive French villa on the outskirts of
town, now the large H i An Hotel. At the symposium, experts shared their scientific
and architectural assessments gathered through the past few years’ study. Five years
later, over 100 scientists (including 52 foreigners from Western Europe and East Asia)
attended an international symposium in Dà N ng. According to Tr n, this was the turn-
D
[orkt]s
ing point for H i An; the symposium sufficiently raised awareness in the academic
community of this once-forgotten town.
By a stroke of good timing, less than a year earlier a man had arrived in H i An
named Daniel Robinson, a traveler affiliated with Lonely Planet guidebooks. The back-
packer-oriented travel publisher had sent him to research the country, which was on
the cusp of opening up to tourism. His aim was to compile the first edition of a new
guidebook dedicated exclusively to former French Indochina: Vi t Nam, Laos and
Cambodia. He had been allowed to visit Saigon and Hà N i, but ‘probably with special
permission,’ his government guides took him to H i An. Like Kazim almost a decade
before him, he was astonished by what he considered its lack of modernity and its state
of preservation. He dedicated a full 14 pages to this small and relatively unknown town
– stunningly, the same amount he gave to Saigon and Hà N i. This is not insignificant
if a tourist ‘attraction’ is constituted through the dialectic of ‘site-visitor-marker’
(MacCannell, 1976/1999, p. 41) – where the marker is, in this case, the first true touristic
text of Vi t Nam since the colonial era. This parity of pagination served its purpose,
conveying the perceived parity of H i An’s importance compared to Vi t Nam’s well-
known urban centers to the north and south. When the book came out in 1991,
backpackers arrived in such numbers into the small town that the Ministry of Culture
and Information almost immediately established a program of tourist services there.
By now it is clear that H i An was engaged in a type of ‘tourism first’ development
push, which Peter Burns describes as the implementation of a touristic ‘industry’ after
a ‘suitable site’ is located (1999, p. 332). Yet like other such initiatives, the actual
transformation was not influenced merely by a standardized development plan but
rather a unique set of conjunctures between Outsiders and some visionary locals who
represented the town not as a stagnant and economically inefficient place, but a
‘heritage’ site worthy of visitation. But like other development projects, it created
unforeseen problems for locals. H i An had already been a century into its decay, and
the pressures of tourism seemed only to exacerbate the situation by putting stress on
the social and material bones of the town. Colored by expectations of a perfectly
preserved town, backpackers demanded an improvement of the destination’s offerings.
This translated not only to cleaning and restoring the aesthetics of the place, but also
to converting buildings into venues appropriate for tourists, such as restaurants, bars,
and hostels with plumbing and electricity. Toward the end of 1990s, even Internet cafes
were requested. The demand also increased for souvenir shops and other shopping
venues; presumably because most visitors arrive in Vi t Nam from Hong Kong or
Bangkok, two cities famous for low-cost seamstresses, many locals began tailoring
businesses.
In the early days of tourism, the greatest need was to reconstruct the dilapidated
homes, but the situation was not conducive to proper preservation. The Vietnamese
government had imposed a commercial logging ban; wood had to be imported from
Laos. The price thus was so high that the people of H i An could not afford it. ‘The
people were saying, “I can’t do this. My roof will fall and it will kill my family. I’ll
knock it down and build another one in concrete,”’ Tr n recalled. After requesting
help from Hà N i, the central government sent in preservationists to restore a few
exemplary edifices at no cost. To help the others, however, the Ministry of Culture
and Information granted local homeowners licenses to work in the tourist sector.
According to guide Pham Van Anh, non-participating locals could not help but see
tourists visiting newly restored buildings, and it raised their desire to preserve their
own homes in a similar fashion. They began to come up with their own proposals for
restoration and integration into this new touristic situation in order to gain the limited
funds available.
To assist the impoverished locals looking to restore their homes, in 1995, the
Ministry of Culture and Information began a semi-voluntary ticket system where
tourists would be strongly encouraged to pay an entrance fee. The purchase of this
ticket would grant the visitor access to one museum, one Chinese meeting house, and
one historic home out of a pool of three of each. The original tickets were priced at
VND 50,000, or about US$4; the cost has only increased slightly over time. While
25% of the revenue would be dedicated to tourist authority’s management and opera-
tion costs, such as staff payments, printing of tickets, and drafting of brochures, the
remainder would be put into a preservation fund to which local homeowners could
apply irrespective of their engagement in the tourist sector. An application alone does
not necessarily ensure funding, however; ‘groups of advisors’ must first be sent in by
the government to draw up accurate floor plans, assess the needs of the home,
‘suggest’ a team of workers, and propose a comprehensive restoration plan. The
governmental lenders will also investigate the homeowners’ income, including alter-
native sources of funding such as family abroad with whom the homeowner continues
to maintain contact. With this procedure completed, the government may then offer to
pay a percentage of the total cost using revenue from the fund – it could be upward of
80% to 100%, or less than 10%. Today, most – if not all – of the homes within the
historic center of H i An have been restored in accordance to international preserva-
tion standards, and all but a few of its inhabitants are actively engaged in the tourist
industry.
Engagement with outsiders expanded the way in which H i An’s inhabitants under-
stood the world and their place in it; it also created growing material desires from its
enriched inhabitants. Television antennae, satellite dishes, and cables of all sorts began
to be put up haphazardly. In response, the government implemented a number of public
infrastructural ‘development’ projects aimed at maintaining the old world charm of the
town. By 2004, all anachronistic television antennae, satellite dishes, and electrical
wiring were removed from the roofs of homes, and cables were installed underground.
And in 2006, the town enacted a trial program banning motorcycles within the city
center a few days a week, with little adverse reaction.
In many ways, the material and cultural regeneration of H i An mirrors those clas-
sic processes of touristic development which occur elsewhere in the world: plans are
created through the intervention of outside (and often ‘Western’) experts, with little
input from locals save some visionary local leaders who act as mediators; locals react
in unexpected ways, contesting, and sometimes thwarting the efforts of tourism imple-
menters; outside stakeholders feel obliged to ‘educate’ locals on the material benefits
their cooperation will bring; and, as Murphy, Harrill, and others contend, once locals
224 M.A. Di Giovine
experience economic profits, they accept other stressful changes with less complaint.
Yet this type of analysis fails to adequately concentrate on the locals’ role in the field
of touristic production. I have thus attempted to paint a portrait of H i An’s material
and cultural regeneration through a revitalization paradigm: Though the decisions
private individuals made concerning their own property were influenced by very public
elements, they were undertaken organically and relatively independently of a typical
tourism development ‘plan’ imposed by outsiders in Hà N i. Furthermore, the devel-
opment narrative does not focus on how locals alleviated the immaterial, yet imma-
nently perceptible, stresses on their culture by outsiders. Indeed, tourism’s growth in
the region was spurred through the intervention of diverse actors operating within a
field of touristic production. Yet locals in H i An – perceiving a variety of cultural,
economic, and environmental pressures on their way of life – ultimately shaped the
way in which the town reinvented itself, and provided solutions to their problems that
were based on their own value systems. They were able to respond to the tension
between transformation and tradition ‘by attempting to craft unprecedented visions of
themselves and the world around them,’ to appropriate the words of development critic
Arturo Escobar (1995, p. 225). In the next section, I will focus on one such unprece-
dented vision, the Lantern Festival, as a direct manifestation of this revitalization
mentality.
The Lantern Festival

One unique and effective way of responding to – and, it can be argued, alleviating –
the tension between transformation and tradition is by staging H i An’s now-famous
Lantern Festival, an ‘invented tradition’ designed to portray an idealized vision of
H i An’s ‘past.’ Held on the 15th day of every lunar month, H i An’s Lantern Festi-
val was intended to ‘bring back a night in the old days,’ according to one informant.
Artifacts of modernity are eschewed; florescent lights are turned off, and the public
spaces are illuminated by strings of traditional-styled paper lanterns lining the streets.
Motorcycles and even bicycles are prohibited from entering the city center. Many
shops are closed, or are restricted in terms of the wares they are allowed to sell. To
maintain the eighteenth-century air about the town, even television watching in
private is strictly prohibited, since it not only casts an artificial glow, but its sound
and images might break the suspension of disbelief hanging in the town. As one
advertisement puts it:
NO FLUORESCENT LIGHTS. NO MOTORCYCLES. NO TELEVISION. ON THE

15TH DAY OF EACH LUNAR MONTH, THE RIVERSIDE TOWN OF H I AN
GIVES MODERN LIFE THE NIGHT OFF.4
That the monthly Lantern Festival has made an indelible mark upon the economics
of H i An was observable about five years after its inception. Previously, the numer-
ous shops in H i An sold a variety of wares, of which paper lanterns were a very
minor part. H i An, in fact, was not known for lanterns as it seems to be today; to
the extent that it could be marked by any product, it was known in the country for a
type of doughy noodle called cao l u, and a particular type of pottery named after
Thanh Hà, a hamlet nearby. Capitalizing on the World Heritage narrative of the
town, many of these stores dishonestly masqueraded as antique shops, selling inau-
thentic fragments of blue-and-white Delftware, faux opium pipes, and metal objects
that were purposefully weathered to appear hundreds of years old; they would weave
stories that their relics were excavated from shipwrecks nearby. More ‘honest’
proprietors stuck to selling hand-carved wood, Thanh Hà pottery, silk paintings, and
tchotchkes such as chopstick holders, chess sets and statuettes, sculpted of marble
(or sometimes just resin) from the Marble Mountains halfway between H i An and
Dà N ng. But about five years later, many of these same proprietors turned to
D
[orkt]s
making and selling silk lanterns of the type used during the Lantern Festival; they
had found that the majority of tourists who experienced the festival purchased at
least one lantern as a souvenir. These labor-intensive lanterns have already begun to
be exported, first to Saigon and today abroad in Australia and the USA. Indeed, the
buzz surrounding the festival in the international travel community has so shaped
awareness of the lantern’s supposedly strong connection to H i An-ese culture that
travelers today seek out lanterns for purchase, irrespective of their participation in
the festival. Today, the streets are literally lined with shops exhibiting lanterns of all
sizes, shapes, and colors; from the mercantile aspect, the streets are almost unrecog-
nizable from what they were at the turn of the millennium.

The Lantern Festival was designed not solely for economic purposes, but appar-
ently as an educational tool, especially to Vietnamese outside of the town; it is
promoted strongly to young people in the greater region as an ideal location for dates,
where couples can share in an emotional and educational romanticization of their heri-
tage. It is the hope that, as adults, these same people will continue to make day-trips
to H i An for shopping, eating, and entertainment. ‘Someday they’ll be addicted. We
want them to be a lover of the night,’ one informant smiled slyly.
The Lantern Festival is directed inwardly as well. The repetition of this liminal
event can be viewed as a means of further shaping and replicating culture in the minds
of the locals through a uniquely constructed temporality. Temporality is at the fore-
front of this festival; not only is it intended to bring all those within its walls ‘back in
time,’ it is itself a liminal period wherein daily life is suspended. Most tellingly, it is
purposefully connected to the traditional lunar year, not the Westernized calendar. It
should be understood as an intensification of the culture’s sense of ‘heritage time,’
which is illustrated by the basic, paper lanterns, and is defined in opposition to
‘modern time’ represented by technology. Technology is denied during the Lantern
Festival inasmuch as it is a symbol for ‘modern’ contemporary life, but those intangi-
ble elements that truly define a culture – taste, philosophy, politics, and language, for
example – are left untouched, and, I would argue, reinforced by the collective spirit of
effervescence that permeates the townspeople who temporarily deny themselves these
‘modern’ luxuries.
Another informant describes the Lantern Festival in terms of filial piety, remarking,
‘We want to say to the elder generation that the younger generation understands and
appreciates’ their way of life. More than enacting this deep-rooted Confucian tenet,
the Lantern Festival also contributes to the formation of a solidarity constructed on the
unique experience of living within this cultural bubble – an experience of communitas
that transcends generations as well as social status. As Victor Turner argues, commu-
nitas is more than merely a sense of ‘community’ – a term which itself is imbued with
a geographical sense of common living; rather, occurring in the liminal phase of rituals
wherein individuated statuses are suspended as individuals pass from one state to
another, it is the transcendence of traditional boundaries that mark daily social life, a
recognition among individuals temporarily disrobed of their social trappings that they
are all the same (1974, pp. 201–202).
226 M.A. Di Giovine
The Lantern Festival punctuates the locals’ calendar in the same metrical way
traditional festivals and rites do. To use the words of Durkheim, it ‘expresses the
rhythms of collective activity while ensuring the regularity’ of the people’s social life
(1995, p. 10). Unlike other festivals, however, this one is hyper-regular; it occurs
practically all of the time, with barely a repose. Not only does the Lantern Festival
punctuate the calendar illustratively for reinforcing the collective, but it also actively
re-creates temporality for the locals, who in their ‘between’ status are constantly being
pulled by modernity. Throughout the rest of the lunar month, locals are relatively free
to immerse themselves within contemporary culture. They can sell souvenirs and
contemporary art, they can sew the hippest fashions and sell the most popular brands
of athletic ware. They are at liberty to move forward with the rest of society, riding on
their Hondas and watching color cable television, using their indoor plumbing and
their electric lights, singing along to pop music videos, and watching English-
language movies. They may enjoy as unfettered an access to modern ideas as is
allowed in the country, pulling them along with their foreign guests, becoming one
with ‘modern Vietnamese culture.’ But as if to check this so-perceived ‘progress,’

once a month all of this must be denied. Under the glow of the lantern light, like sacra-
mental Confession, the stains of modernity imprinted on the culture are absolved
through the people’s active, collective rejection of this sin; the ideal state is restored
once again. When the sunlight finally bathes the pastel town in its radiance, the locals
emerge from this ritual cleansed and revitalized – only to pick up where they left off,
to catch up to their visitors’ modernity that had continued on without them.
Conclusion
Viewing the material and social transformations brought on by the implementation of
tourism through the perspective of a revitalization movement can be fruitful. Unlike a
‘development’ paradigm, the revitalization model brings local ‘hosts’ into a direct and
more equal relationship with tourist ‘guests,’ as well as with the variety of other actors
operating within the field of touristic production. Instead of merely ‘participating’ in
development, all are equally engaged in processes of transformation: tourists are not
ignorant or passive recipients of ‘pseudo-events’ or ‘staged authenticity,’ tourism
industry professionals are neither the ‘gatekeepers’ nor the authoritative voices for
tourism implementation plans, and locals ultimately are seen as driving their cultural
transformation.
A revitalization paradigm is also sensitive to alternative value systems while also
being responsive to the real material impacts of global forces on the local. While
recognizing the important role outsiders play on the local milieu, it considers cultural
transformation to be ‘organic,’ not unidirectional and not incumbent on the interven-
tion of ‘modern’ nation-states. Focusing on the transformations brought about from
within a culture, in reaction to and in conjunction with outside forces – rather than on
the ‘implementation’ of development strategies from the outside – the revitalization
paradigm can better capture the complex processes of negotiation that occur within a
touristic field of production, as well as the variety of intertwining elements that inev-
itably factor into any ‘culture change’ phenomenon.
Indeed, a revitalization paradigm allows for greater attention to be paid to the
significance of locals’ discourses and practices in relationship to the panoply of others
within the field of touristic production. This is especially significant for post-colonial
states who struggle to define and represent themselves on a newly enlarged, global
stage. Development critic Arturo Escobar argues throughout his monograph that the
‘development discourse,’ as framed from the post-World War II era onward, ‘has been
the central and most ubiquitous operator of the politics of representation and identity’
in many recipient nations (1995, p. 214). It should be understood that, like that of the
development paradigm, this revitalization paradigm is also discursive; it is not only
another way of perceiving and analyzing, but also of discussing, the ways in which
tourism can transform a culture. This is not insignificant. Following Michel Foucault
(1972), Escobar points out that a discourse is itself a historically and culturally
situated practice that produces real material results (cf. Ferguson, 1994, p. 18):
Discourse is not the expression of thought; it is a practice, with conditions, rules and
historical transformations. To analyze development as a discourse is ‘to show that to
speak is to do something – something other than to express what one thinks; … to show
that to add a statement to a pre-existing series of statements is to perform a complicated
an costly gesture’ (Foucault, 1972, p. 209) …. Said differently, changing the order of
discourse is a political question that entails the collective practice of social actors and the
restructuring of existing political economies of truth (Escobar, 1995, p. 216).
That is, the way one discusses tourism development, and their place in the field of
production, will inform its approach, methodology, and practice. It is in this manner
that practitioners can move beyond the teleology of the development paradigm, open-
ing the way for alternative views of how individuals and groups work to ‘improve’
themselves as active agents, and how outsiders can productively contribute to the
process on a more equitable basis.
Notes
1. In Article 22, the League of Nations outlined the ‘stages of development’ that all peoples
will inevitably undergo (Rist, 1997, p. 73).
2. In 1974, after much debate within IUOTO, the association transformed itself into the
UNWTO, whose ‘fundamental aim … shall be the promotion and development of tourism
with a view to contributing to economic development, … pay[ing] particular attention to
the interests of the developing countries in the field of tourism’ (UNWTO, 1974, p. 83).
3. Ethnographic research in H i An was undertaken from 2001–2006. Interviews contained
in this article were conducted in August 2006. This portion of the article is based on a more
detailed discussion of museumification and politics of World Heritage in Chapter 7 of Di
Giovine (2009, pp. 261–274).
4. Retrieved October 29, 2006, from www.vietnamtourism.com/e_pages/heritage/Hoian.asp
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Revitalization and counter-revitalization: tourism, heritage, and the

Department of Anthropology, University of Chicago, Chicago, USA

When employed for development purposes, tourism often elicits a fundamental

other development projects, it is often paradoxically conceived as a means of

Keywords: tourism; development; revitalization; festivals; Vietnam; H i An

ISSN 1940-7963 print/ISSN 1940-7971 online

satisfactoria’. Sostiene que este paradigma abarca mejor un conjunto de procesos,

Palabra clave: turismo; desarrollo; revitalización; festivales; Vietnam; H i An

Employé dans le but de développement, le tourisme suscite souvent une tension

Mots-clés: tourisme; développement; revitalisation; festivals; Vietnam; H i An

Introduction: the problems with tourism development

mandate is to contribute to the alleviation of problems affecting the ‘world society’

which differentiate the theory from that of development. While a development

Tourism and the global development movement

that tourism could be ‘implemented’ in developing countries by a variety of global

Donor-supported tourism master plans focus on creating infrastructure, stimulating

as a ‘basket of goods’ made up of numerous individual businesses and entrepreneurial

Many of these problems were chalked up to ‘structural failures’ in economically back-

An alternative to development: the revitalization paradigm

of such movements is ultimately novel and unprecedented, local leaders consciously

An important component of Wallace’s revitalization paradigm is therefore the

The Lantern Festival

NO FLUORESCENT LIGHTS. NO MOTORCYCLES. NO TELEVISION. ON THE

nizable from what they were at the turn of the millennium.

with ‘modern Vietnamese culture.’ But as if to check this so-perceived ‘progress,’

restructuring of existing political economies of truth (Escobar, 1995, p. 216).

Studies) conference, Bhubaneswar, Orissa, India.

Lévi-Strauss, C. (1966/1974). The savage mind. London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson.

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