Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Presenting Selves And Interpreting Culture: An Ethnography Of Chinese International Tourism In The United States, Fangheyue Ma

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

I situate my dissertation research within cultural sociology, specifically the cultural phenomenon of international tourism, and social psychology, particularly the subfields of identity, interaction, and emotion. I conducted a qualitative study of participants in international package tourism and individual travelers, more specifically, Chinese tourists who travel to the United States. Main topics of exploration included tourists’ experience of their trips and package tours, how they interpreted American culture and compared it to their own, how they constructed and performed identities both as tourists and as Chinese nationals, their emotional experiences and how they made sense of an environment that they …