Anthropology & International Affairs

This article revisits the question of tourism's role in the commodification of culture. I argue that an acceptance of a cause and effect relationship between tourism and cultural commodification requires an acceptance of a problematic notion of 'authenticity'. This is because the belief that tourism causes cultural commodification is based on a largely unexamined reliance on Marx's labor theory of value, source of what Barbara Herrnstein Smith has referred to as a 'double discourse of value', in which an intrinsic and sacred cultural sphere of value is presumed to circulate independent of an unstable and profane economic sphere of value. Given the social fact that everything, including 'culture', is a potential commodity, it would be useful for research to focus on how individuals and groups in host societies gain access to new forms of exchange rather than simply on the fact of commodification.

Since 1979, the state-directed opening of the Chinese economy has been a major topic of interest to American scholars, students, and the public at large. These reforms have radically transformed all aspects of economic life in China. Agricultural land has been leased to individual farmers, state companies have been either privatized or forced to compete for market share, foreign investment has been encouraged, and private enterprise has become the foundation of both production and consumption.

Abstract This article examines the rise and fall of the Falun Gong movement in China and its subsequent rebirth abroad. To make sense of Falun Gong requires situating the movement within the social context of post-Maoist China and its appearance at a time when the space of everyday life was, and continues to be, radically transformed by market forces in the name of, paradoxically,'scientific Marxism'.

Interesting work has been done on the striking similarities between the key arguments of the late Jacques Derrida and Daoism. While named otherwise, such Derridean signposts as the metaphysics of presence, the duality of language, and logocentrism are found in Daoist views of the relationship between reality, speech, writing, and knowledge.

This study was part of an ethnographic research project in the 2010 Census Assessment and Research Program to observe the 2010 Census Nonresponse Followup (NRFU) interviews with households that speak a language other than English, in areas of the U.S. with heavy concentrations of residents with limited English proficiency. A multilingual research team consisting of seven sub-teams in the seven primary languages (Arabic, Chinese, Korean, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish, and Vietnamese) was commissioned to carry out the research in the 2010 Census.