Discursive Extraction: Language, Value, and Capital in Myanmar's Tourism Frontier

Abstract

The mid-2010s tourism boom in Myanmar (Burma) shows how discourse creates and extracts value in tourism frontiers. Building on studies documenting tourism's operation as an extractive industry, interviews with 60 tourists, residents, and industry stakeholders in Myanmar in 2018–20 reveal that tourism in frontiers is oriented by an extractivist logic. The high-value symbolic goods pursued by tourists are experiences with people who are otherised as “premodern”, which tourists accumulate and exchange on a linguistic market in a process described as discursive extraction. What is theorised as an extractive relation grounded in colonial hierarchies of value commodifies people and places as repositories of symbolic capital, supporting the territorialisation of spaces for tourism development and revealing discourse to be a constitutive force in the extractive geographies of tourism.