Fluidity and persistance of cultural narratives: Heritage tourism and cultural narratives for insiders and outsiders in Western Mongolia

Abstract

Framed within contemporary debates
about the implications of cultural heritage tourism
for rural ethnic minority populations, this paper
explores the case study of cultural heritage tourism
in Bayan Ulgii Mongolia, juxtaposing arguments
about place and identity with those of economic
benefits. Preliminary results suggest that growing
attention paid to the Kazakhs as aminority ethnic
cultural group in Mongolia, and narratives of their
lifeway persistence, increase international
acknowledgement that mayfoster greater tourism.
However, one of the key outcomes of the production
of this heritage landscape is the consumption of
ethnic cultural identity narratives by ethnic Kazakh
out-migrants who desire to reinscribe “traditional
cultural lifeways” in their children’s identities. This
thus serves to promote a shared sense of identity
amongst a rapidly dispersing population but also
challenges the notion of production and
consumption as competing, rather than
complimentary processes, in emerging rural tourism
locations of the Global South.