National culture of folk tourism

Since1990s, on many occasions, folk culture has not been degraded as "backward", "superstitious", "primitive" and "ignorant" by power politics, but has been invented as a tourism resource to carry forward the national traditional culture and show the local image to foreign tourists. For a time, there were countless folk villages and gardens in China, and the frontier minority areas broke the tranquility and simplicity of the past. Crowds of tourists from home and abroad shuttled back and forth, and many lost folk customs were excavated and invented by intellectuals, and were planned and packaged into dynamic and participatory tourism products to show the ancient folk life. At the same time, the project planning of the tourism department either consciously incorporates local culture into the modern discourse of the nation-state, or caters to tourists' imagination of different cultures in time and space, or just for the purpose of investing economic capital. Once folk culture is pushed into the tourism market for the above reasons, the consumption behavior of tourists as cultural consumers is not only passive consumption to meet personal needs, but is brought into a space-time imagination about power politics, market and globalization. In other words, the shock of different cultures experienced by tourists in the process of folk culture tourism is not only a personal experience, but also integrated into the local power politics and market system in the era of globalization. It is in this sense that the folk cultural tourism experienced by tourists has the following characteristics.

As a kind of cultural capital that can produce economic and social benefits, folk cultural tourism is invented by power and political capital. It is intended to generate social benefits through the shock of folk culture and different cultures, promote the development of tertiary industries such as catering, accommodation, shopping, transportation, employment and investment attraction, and promote the integration of regional economy into the global market system. In the process of China's current economic development, cultural capital has also begun to intervene in the modernization movement in many places. Some special forms of cultural capital, such as local folk culture and traditional culture with historical charm, have risen from the edge of the original modern discourse of the nation-state to cultural capital that can be transformed into economic capital, and are increasingly commercialized. It is in this commercialization process that folk culture and other traditional cultures can gain legal status in modern discourse, thus gaining a wide social reputation and improving the status of folk culture in the social symbol level. In addition to the dominant concepts such as modernity and universal history, progress, power politics and aesthetic ideal, the original symbol hierarchy has expanded a relative space. From vulgar and despised "feudalism" and "superstition" traditions to cultural goods that are eagerly sought after by power politics and economic capital, it can be said that this is also a process in which folk culture enters another lost state from one lost state. Because folk culture not only promotes local economic development and shapes local image, but also becomes more and more deformed because of the stripping of its living state by power politics and economic capital.

In essence, the tourism projects planned and displayed by the tourism department can be said to be the result of the joint action of power politics, economic capital and local cultural capital under the background of globalization, and in a sense, it is also a global post-modern cultural phenomenon. In the era of globalization, people's understanding of culture tends to be diversified, and people also agree with different cultures. Moreover, the enterprise behavior of local government regards the image of local culture as a brand, and naturally, folk culture with its own characteristics is favored by all kinds of power politics and economic capital. In the current situation of China, the process of globalization has provided new cultural forms and broader symbolic experience. With the commercialization of folk culture as a form of cultural capital, financial capital, power politics, mass media and local culture, tourists from different cultures have gained a brand-new symbolic experience.

Although tourism developers try to let tourists get the real feelings of different cultures in the process of traveling, folk culture tourism is actually a cultural symbol produced by the interaction of various powers and capitals. What it tries to achieve is not to truly reproduce a culture, but to express the cultural imagination of power politics and capital in the consumption era. Tourism developers advocate that in the process of developing folk culture tourism projects, the content must be carefully selected. What is the principle of choice? This is a tourist attraction. Attraction is mainly determined by the cultural differences between the local area and the places where tourists come. The more distinctive the local folk culture is, the more attractive it is. Therefore, when choosing content, we should carefully select the distinctive parts. Anthropology believes that when two different cultures collide with each other, cultural shock will occur. The greater the difference between cultures, the stronger the cultural impact, and the intensity of this cultural impact is the cultural psychological basis for the tourism department to plan folk tourism projects. Undeniably, although the current development of folk culture tourism projects seems to give full respect to minority cultures, and although the government's achievements in protecting minority cultures are obvious to all, the progressive beliefs and evolving social development patterns in the modernization process in the past century are different from those of backwardness, primitiveness, feudalism and irrationality. This classification and definition contains the rational hegemony of the Enlightenment, and the spirit of seeking truth held hostage by rational political forces is advertised as bringing history and human liberation to human society. In fact, this modernism suppresses diversity and difference with the illusion of "seeking common ground while reserving differences", which is just another traditional system different from pre-modernism. This concept of historical progress and knowledge about cultural classification have been woven into the discourse of modernization demands by modern nation-States, and become a knowledge norm, even reflected in the implementation of political measures. This kind of modern knowledge has evolved into a force to discipline, shape and constitute the subject, which not only oppresses the subject's thinking about historical progress and knowledge classification, but more importantly permeates the productive forces in the whole social life field, shapes each subject into an individual who meets the demands of modernity of the nation-state, and makes it obey and integrate into the social order regulated by the nation-state. We can see that the knowledge generated from discipline practice becomes a kind of power at the same time. The subjects regulated by the modernization process of the nation-state in the past century, such as education system, subject classification, media, libraries, exhibitions and previous political movements, have strengthened people's understanding of cultural classification from the institutional level. This kind of knowledge consciously or unconsciously regulates the social practice of the subject and forms the recognition of the modern demands of the nation-state. The hegemonic nature of modern nation-states' demands for modernity controls people's knowledge imagination of marginal, folk and non-mainstream cultures. Under the condition of high modernization, people's understanding and imagination of social life objects are increasingly dependent on the education, publicity and clamor of experts and media. The effect of this is not only to produce a kind of knowledge and hegemony about cultural classification, but more importantly, this kind of knowledge and hegemony has been internalized into the mechanism of people's self-identification, which in turn has continuously shaped the knowledge about cultural classification in the modern social system. The formation of self-identity mechanism means that one's interests, desires, opinions and desires are in contrast with others, and then a corresponding image of oneself and others is formed between oneself and others. For a long time, the rejection of folk, marginal and non-mainstream cultures by modern discourse has given it a series of images of superstition, backwardness and ignorance. Holders of folk, marginal and non-mainstream cultures internalize this series of superstitious, backward and ignorant images into one aspect of self-identity and become one of the most successful means for modern discourse to oppress others.

Therefore, in the face of the increasingly developed folk culture tourism, we can't think that a series of cultural phenomena represented by folk culture are labeled as superstitious and backward by modern discourse. In the current cultural situation of China, power politics and capital have also recognized these marginal words. We prefer to think that the prosperity of folk culture tourism caused by the interaction of power politics, capital and local culture is a manifestation of "localized modernity". While acknowledging that modernity serves the revitalization of local culture, we should also realize that this revitalization process is actually continuing the hegemonic nature of modern discourse on folk and marginal cultures.