Researching Pilgrimage and Tourism in Collaboration: A Mixed Ethnic Prefecture in West China

Our collaborative project, Contesting the Yellow Dragon, which we are preparing for publication, received four years of chiefly summer support from the National Endowment for the Humanities. Its focus is a World Heritage site in province, specifically the interaction, at a former pilgrimage center, of ethnicity, religious practice, tourism and environmentalism. The timing of an annual festival and the several ethnic groups involved made collaboration essential for fieldwork, and we found it valuable for historical archival and library research across several Chinese cities. Our differences in gender, ethnicity, age and experience were extremely fruitful in field encounters and with Chinese local officials in a politically sensitive border area. The writing has been thoroughly collaborative. To cover more ground, we speak usually at different scholarly venues.