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Discursive extraction: language, value, and capital in Myanmar’s tourism frontier
Smith,Sean
Smith,Sean
Abstract
The mid-2010s tourism boom in Myanmar (Burma) shows how discourse creates and extracts value in tourism frontiers. Building on studies documenting tour- ism’s operation as an extractive industry, interviews with 60 tourists, residents, and industry stakeholders in Myanmar in 2018–20 reveal that tourism in frontiers is oriented by an extractivist logic. The high-value symbolic goods pursued by tourists are experi- ences with people who are otherised as “premodern”, which tourists accumulate and exchange on a linguistic market in a process described as discursive extraction. What is theorised as an extractive relation grounded in colonial hierarchies of value commodifies people and places as repositories of symbolic capital, supporting the territorialisation of spaces for tourism development and revealing discourse to be a constitutive force in the extractive geographies of tourism.
Description
Publisher Copyright: © 2024 The Author(s). Antipode published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd on behalf of Antipode Foundation Ltd.
Date
2024-12-18
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Publisher
Research Projects
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Journal Issue
Keywords
Burma, authenticity, discourse, extractivism, modernity, travel, SDG 12 - Responsible Consumption and Production
Citation
Smith, S 2024, 'Discursive extraction : language, value, and capital in Myanmar’s tourism frontier', Antipode. https://doi.org/10.1111/anti.13124