“Roots with Wings”: Impacts of Tourism-Induced Mobility on Individuals and Family Ties among the Miao in China’s Individualization Process

Abstract

This article looks at the impacts of mobility on individuals and their family ties in tourist destination communities, paying attention to the individualization process among the rural, ethnic minority population in contemporary China. Based on my decade-long ethnography in Fenghuang county, Hunan province, I explore how the rapid rise of tourism-induced mobility has brought individual autonomy and collective morality under constant negotiation among previously clan-based people, and what the course and consequences of ongoing individualization are for the non-Han population in China. I argue that individuals’ greater mobility may enhance, rather than diminish, the importance of family, and that this is especially true for the rural, ethnic minority population in China. Their experience of dealing with individualization also reveals that the effect of social structure is to some extent unchanged, representing a case of “embedded individualization.”