Paper short abstract:

This paper explores how the dongba as the ritual practitioner perceives his authenticity during the marriage ceremony in the Naxi Wedding Courtyard in Lijiang, China. Through the dongba’s life story, the paper gives rise to the performative experience of the authenticity and offers a deep understanding of the link between memory, habitus and embodied practice. The dynamic process of “becoming” authentic weaves the interaction between the individual agency and the reality.

Paper long abstract:

Being one presentation of global cultural change, tourism has been searching for "authenticity", a movement from the front to the back of human interaction that reflects the desires of tourists and consumers for genuine and credible cultural construction and representation in diverse cultural and heritage contexts. The long term academic discussion on what precisely "authenticity" means to tourism has resulted in three major approaches in conceptualizing the term, namely objective authenticity, constructive authenticity and existential authenticity. However, the existing categories seem to imply a dichotomy of objective-subjective orientation. The reaction to mediatised, commercialized and socially constructed reality is not a "thing" to possess or "a state of mind", but an instrumental embodiment aroused through the dynamic interaction between individual agency and the external world. In this sense, authenticity is neither objective nor subjective, but rather performative.

Taking the life story of a dongba named Fuhua who was born in a Dongba family, trained in the official Dongba Research Institute, and now working as the marriage ritual performer in the Naxi Wedding Courtyard as a case study, this paper aims to explore how this dongba perceives his authenticity of the ritual performance in the marriage ceremony. The notion of performative authenticity here illustrates the dynamic interaction between memory, habitus and embodied practice. The socio-economic and political transition in China, in particular the policy on culture heritage will be used as a window to explore "complex human and social engagement, relations and negotiation" in the process of tourism development.