Visualizing Indigeneity as a Local Defense: Tourism in the Chittagong Hill Tracts, Bangladesh

Abstract

This paper portrays both how indigenous people reframe indigeneity as a local defense against tourism politics through active participation rather than passive performance, and how touristic actors redefine Indigeneity in tourism marketing through visual depletion and depiction in the Chittagong Hill Tracts (CHT), Bangladesh. The research adopts an ‘otherness’ vs. ‘belongingness’ approach to question the dual position of tourism promotion in the context of indigeneity. Focusing on three research sites in the two districts of CHT, it employs ethnographic analysis of eighty-eight in-depth interviews and three focus group discussions, and netnographic analysis of twenty-five tourist blogs and posts and reviews of six travel websites. The findings unearth that the construction of indigenous ‘otherness’ invokes the reproduction of stereotypes such as ‘primitivism’ and ‘exoticism’. In contrast, indigeneity serves as a local mechanism to control the representation of exogenous agents in opposition to such categorization. The research contributes to reckoning indigeneity as a defensive mechanism for self-visualization in response to one-sided representations of indigenous lifeworlds.