Abstract: In the context of the tourism industry, the time-use behaviors of ethnic women have been most profoundly impacted by tourism development within Chinese ethnic communities during their rapid transformation from being traditionally closed living places to open spaces of tourism. Therefore, community tourism is one of the important factors that can change the time-use model of local residents, especially the women. Nevertheless, this issue has received scant attention in the tourism literature. Taking Taoping Qiang village in Sichuan Province as our study area, the current study comply time-use diaries and conducts semi-structured interviews to obtain data from local ethnic women engaged in tourism, and compare the structure and distribution of their time-use behaviors with those of nonparticipating women. In the context of tourism development in rural China, an examination of the time use differences among rural groups defined by whether or not they participate in the tourism industry, is a useful approach for assessing the effects of tourism development on local communities. Given the importance and specificity of the tourism labor of local ethnic women, this study classifieds tourism labor based on participant observation, semi-structured interviews and data obtained from time-use diaries. The results indicate that the engaged women spend more time on labor activities than the unengaged women, and the compressed time that they otherwise have spent on the maintenance and leisure activities for getting involved in tourism. And the “dual roles” resulting from participation in tourism have changed the time-use structural patterns of women for their engagement in “dual labor”. Considering that home-based production labor is currently the best solution for addressing the contradiction between traditional private sphere and the public realm, community tourism provides ethnic women the precious choice to balance the traditional roles and the new one.
Key words: time-use; community tourism; ethnic women; dual labor
The Chinese version appeared in Journal of Zhejiang University, 2016(1).