The Commodification of Tourist Space─A study of the Sun-Moon Lake Scenic Area

• Main Authors: Hsiu-Ping Chen, 陳秀萍
• Other Authors: Sue-Ching Jou
• Format: Others
• Language: zh-TW
• Published: 2001
• Online Access: http://ndltd.ncl.edu.tw/handle/50662959126745240274

碩士 === 國立臺灣大學 === 地理環境資源學研究所 === 89 === The tourist industry is one of the most rapid growing industries of all in the second half of the twentieth century. Although the amount of tourist studies has been grown significantly for the most recent two decades, studies on the commodification of the tourist space are relatively few. If there are some, they usually take a structuralism perspective, ignoring how the “tourist places” are produced and consumed in concrete contexts. This thesis attempts to investigate how “the image of place” is consumed commercially and how the “public-owned tourist space” is privatized in tourism activities. Britton (1991) differentiates the commodification of tourist space into two patterns. The first one is with regards to the privatized consumption of places, which guarantees the property rights. The second one is regarding to where the scenic attractions cannot be privatized directly. The commodification of tourist place will be related to how the tourist experiences or attributes of the scenic areas can be transformed into saleable commodities. Owing to the characteristics of the Sun-Moon Lake scenic area, the second pattern of tourist space conceptualized by Britton is adopted in this study. The major findings of the empirical research are as below: 1. The public sector usually plays a significant role in commodifying a tourist place. It takes leading to develop a scenic area by providing the major infrastructures and shaping the image of that scenic area. 2. The private sector takes the advantages of the infrastructure providing and place-image making by the public sector to create their own salable goods or consumable services. The place commodities can be divided into two categories based on their transportability. The first category is the commodity that can be consumed on site via a certain physical environments such as hotels and restaurants. Besides, the direct “gaze” by the tourists via yachts or staged performance is included in this category as well. The second one is the commodity, such as souvenirs, crafts and specialties, which is produced to enhance the place consumption. They are the so-called “tourist loots” that are mostly not produced locally and do not have local materials as constituents. However, they are labeled with the local features and images, which will carry the memory and experience of a tourist place for tourists. Moreover, the study also finds that there is a specific relationship between the degree of place commodification and the quality of the place. The more commercialized the space becomes, the more heterogeneous the place commodities will be.