Festivals as Indigenous Heritage and Brand: Neolocal Tourism in CHT, Bangladesh

The paper delineates how Indigenous communities in the Chittagong Hill Tracts (CHT) of Bangladesh represent their festivals as both cultural heritage and cultural brand, and how they encounter visual portrayals by tourism actors. It introduces an idea of 'neolocal tourism' that offers both a safeguard against cultural rootlessness and supports a constructed self-space for their well-being within unequal market relations in tourism. While public and private actors stage the CHT through the false images of 'primitiveness', indigenous communities employ a self-mechanism, transforming tourism into a platform for cultural entrepreneurship and resistance. Based on fifty-two interviews, three FGDs, and five case studies of ethnographic research, the findings reveal the dual nature of self-representation: it is both a livelihood strategy and a site of struggle, challenging contested narratives of self-recognition versus subjugation. The research develops a neolocal approach by centring indigenous voices in tourism, reshaping the indigenousness of festivals as a cultural brand.