3rd International Critical Tourism Studies – Asia Pacific Conference

By Emmanuelle Peyvel

From February 13 to 17, 2023, Trần Cẩm Thi and Emmanuelle Peyvel joined their colleagues from Hồ Chí Minh, Hồ Trung Chánh (FPT University),  Dương Ngọc Thắng (University of Economics), and Nguyễn Thị Thanh Nga (University of Nguyễn Tất Thành) to attend the 3rd International Critical Tourism Studies – Asia Pacific Conference, hosted at the British University of Hà Nội.

The team presented a paper entitled Tourism as Simulacra: Bana Hills, a Vietnamese Middle-Class Heterotopia, based on their investigations in Ba Na Hills in Central Vietnam. Within our research program, this case study is an exception to the rule: Bana was once a highland resort founded by the French during the colonial era. While it has retained its touristic functions, it has lost the urban ones, a relatively rare instance in our study region, warranting this case study.

Here is a summary:

Our paper focuses on Bana Hills, an iconic landmark of mass tourism in the center of the country, owned by Sungroup. It is the country’s largest and most frequented leisure park, but it is also the target of numerous criticisms, mainly social and environmental. To understand this paradox, we intend to study Bana Hills from the viewpoint of its visitors and its spatial organization. To do so, we will rely on archives, semi-participant observations, photographic surveys and fieldwork carried out in 2007, 2016 and 2022, in the context of a joint university cooperation that united the authors of this proposal.

Although the site was picked by the French to build a colonial hill station, absolutely nothing is left of this era: the entire place has been transformed into a recreational park boasting a French thematization. Bana Hills was rebuilt intentionally as a fake France, using the techniques of simulacra (Graburn, Staszak and Gravari-Barbas, 2019). Visitors are fully aware of that forgery, but for them, Bana Hills is nonetheless a valid experience of France. Rather than the authenticity of the place, the authenticity of the experience prevails (Pine and Gilmore, 1999).

Designed almost exclusively for a domestic clientele, we analyze this place as a “middle-class landscape” (Drummond, 2012). Indeed, Bana Hills is a clear spatial manifestation of global consumption, materializing the “Good Life” as idealized by the current Vietnamese middle-class (Earl, 2014). In this sense, Bana Hills embodies a form of heterotopia (Foucault, 1984), a localized utopia, requiring rigid norms of operation. This results in a strong control of both employees and tourists, who are monitored everywhere and at all times. Aiming towards a form of perfection, Sungroup seeks to make Bana Hills an exceptional dreamland, as evidenced by the many national and world records set by the site. As a heterotopia, the place deliberately maintains a disconnection from its immediate environment, functioning as an island, which can be a source of criticism.

We will therefore end our communication with an analysis of the social and environmental controversies surrounding the construction of the Bana Hills. Evidence that this place has a strong social identity, it has been targeted specifically by a social class having a strong cultural capital exposing the destruction of the natural environment or mocking a monumental faux pas. Rather than a place for THE middle class, it is therefore the place of a certain middle class, from which other social groups seek to distinguish themselves (Bourdieu, 1979).

Bibliographical References

BOURDIEU, P., 1979, La distinction, critique sociale du jugement, Paris, ed. de Minuit.

DRUMMOND Lisa, “Middle Class Landscapes in a Transforming City: Hanoi in the 21st Century” in Nguyen-Marshall Van, Drummond Lisa and Bélanger Danièle (eds.), The Reinvention of Distinction. Modernity and the Middle Class in Urban Vietnam, Springer, 2012, p.79-93.

EARL, C., Vietnam’s New Middle Classes: Gender, Career, City, NIAS Press, 2014.

FOUCAULT, M., 1984, « Des espaces autres », Architecture-Mouvement-Continuité, n° 5,p. 46-49.

GRABURN Nelson, STASZAK Jean-François and GRAVARI-BARBAS Maria, “Simulacra, Architecture, tourism and the Uncanny”, Journal of Tourism and Cultural Change, vol. 17, n°1, 2019, p.1-12.

PINE, J. and GILMORE, J., 1999, The experience economy, Boston, Harvard Business School Press.

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