Located in China's far southwest, the village of Manchunman is a popular tourist destination. The village is home to some 410 people, and has, according to legend, existed as a village since the time of the Buddha (5th century BC). Long known to artists and scholars for its rich Dai culture, legendary Buddhist temple and monastery, and picturesque setting along the Mekong River, the village of Manchunman began attracting tourists in the early 1990s. In 1998, drawn by the region's natural beauty, extraordinary preservation of ethnic markers, an increase in tourism, and the village's proximity to the prefectural capital of Jinghong, a Han Chinese company and a local state farm leased land from Manchunman and four neighboring villages, built a tourism center and an entrance gate, creating the area's first large-scale tourism development, called the Xishuangbanna Dai Minority Folk Customs Park In this dissertation, based on 15 months of fieldwork in Yunnan Province of southwest China, I explore the extremely intense negotiations of ethnic identity in the Park, where Dai villagers live their lives on the 'stage' of ethnic tourism, yet the Han (majority Chinese) management company inserts themselves as the 'directors' of the cultural performance of Dai culture. I demonstrate that the Dai Park acts as a living demonstration of all three inter-related components of ethnic tourism: the search for or display of the authentic or 'Otherness', the commodification of culture, and the performance of culture. In the village of Manchunman, ethnic tourism is no longer just the Dai vs. a faceless, commercialized world or a remote discourse of authenticity. Instead, as two parties---the Dai villagers and the Han management company---endeavor to represent and display Dai culture, the essence of Dai-ness is contemplated by both sides. I argue that the resulting intense negotiations of Dai ethnicity in the Dai Park go beyond the dichotomy of Primordial/Instrumental, resulting in a triangle in which Primordialism, Instrumentalism, and Performativity are bound together and are constrained within the overarching constructionalist viewpoint of the Park authorities.
