Finally, the fourth is authenticity versus cultural commoditization. In
order to satisfy demands for authenticity, tourism producers and
minority hosts, motivated by the opportunity to create jobs and income, package certain aspects of their culture and create staged representations to make aspects of the culture more accessible and
appealing to tourists. Cultural commoditization can induce local people to alter their behaviors to suit the demands of the market, resulting
in a loss of traditional activities and other cultural manifestations. If
modifications to lifestyles, architecture, and other aspects of culture
are too great, the community risks losing its roots as well as developing
tourism offerings that are rejected by visitors as inauthentic.
These inter-connected tensions provide a basis to compare the roles
of different levels of governments in order to better understand the
interrelationships among politics, culture, and economics within eth-
nic tourism in a prefecture noted for its minority peoples:
Xishuangbanna.