Visible Ethnic Boundaries: Heritage, Tourism, and the Visual Making of Bai Identity in Southwest China

Abstract Book of the 5th International Conference on Social Sciences and Humanities in the 21st Century

Year: 2026

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Visible Ethnic Boundaries: Heritage, Tourism, and the Visual Making of Bai Identity in Southwest China

Yunlei Liu

ABSTRACT:

This article addresses an underexamined question in boundary studies and visual analysis: how ethnic boundaries become “seen” in everyday social space and how they acquire stability through the sustained mobilization of visual symbols. Focusing on Bai (Baizu) visual-cultural practices in Dali, it conceptualizes ethnic boundaries as visible social interfaces produced through multimodal semiotic resources. Empirically, the study draws on a corpus of fieldwork photographs across architectural space, dress practices, craft media, and commercial displays, and organizes analysis through layered coding and mechanism tracing. The analytical procedures adopt form-, practice-, and discourse-level coding to translate “interpretation” into a traceable pathway. At the level of form, Bai semiotic resources recurrently occupy boundary sites and are organized through a cross-media visual grammar that stabilizes quick recognition of “Bai-ness.” At the levels of practice and discourse, signs are processed into visibility strategies along a production–use–viewing chain and are further reshaped by recontextualization operations (intensification, simplification, recomposition, hybridization) in heritage contexts. The article proposes the concept of “visible ethnic boundaries” and offers a transferable social-semiotic pathway for analyzing how ethnic identity is visualized, maintained, and updated across space, bodies, and media circulation.

Keywords: Visible Ethnic Boundaries; Bai-Ness; Social Semiotics; Resemiotization