Ethnicity and Tourism in Southeast Asia: Culture on the Move

This paper focuses on the relationship between ethnicity and tourism and explores the wider field of cultural identity. The concern is to pursue a conceptual exploration of ethnicity, locating this exercise within a comparative regional context and in relation to tourism development. It then adopts a more applied position with regard to Iban sacred cloths in Sarawak, Malaysia, which have been transformed by tourism and other processes of globalization. It argues for the importance of advocacy and persuading governments to take ethnic identities seriously, acknowledging the role that emblems of identity play in building self-confidence and self-respect and ensuring that traditional knowledge and skills are sustained and that they are deployed in the development of local livelihoods and identities.