How Chinese ethnic villagers perform rurality in tourism: Perspectives of embodiment and new materialism

Abstract

This study explored how Chinese ethnic villagers perform rurality in tourism through the integrated lenses of embodiment and new materialism. By focusing on Mengdong Village, we illuminated the nuanced processes through which rurality is co-generated by humans and non-human materials. The findings reveal that ethnic villagers are not passive recipients but actively engage in re-becoming ethnic rural subjects through embodied practices entangled with both digital and physical materials. These performances are continuous negotiations between local identity, commercial imperatives, and technological engagement, highlighting what this study terms more-than-human beings performing rurality. The authenticity dilemmas faced are structurally embedded in China’s socio-economic agenda. Villagers’ efforts to revive and perform rurality are simultaneously driven by ethnic pride and commercial logic, resulting in a hybrid and evolving version of rurality. Theoretically, this study contributes by moving beyond representational approaches, attending to the materiality of performance to recast villagers as embodied subjects in constant intra-action with materials. However, it also underscores the constraints of digital technologies, which cannot fully compensate for the loss of intergenerational transmission. This study demonstrates that performing rurality is a profoundly embodied, materially engaged, and socioeconomically situated process. Ethnic villagers’ ongoing, imperfect, and deep effort in re-becoming themselves should be acknowledged.