RETRACTED CHAPTER: When Culture Becomes Commodity: Tourism and Development in the Chittagong Hill Tracts of Bangladesh

The Chittagong Hill Tracts (CHT) has long been represented as a region of multi-ethnic background, cultural diversity and beauty of ecological setting in South Asia. The panoramic scenario, landscape, and cultural diversity of indigenous communities attract the tourists to visit the CHT region. By taking the advantage of panoramic beauty of this region, recently, the public and private actors of tourism development gradually intensify their attention to relocate the natural resources and use the multi-cultural distinctiveness to tourism mainly through the development agencies as well as local agencies with less consideration to local environment, biodiversity and multi-ethnic settings. It is evident that the outcome of tourism is accountable widely for regional development. This belief has been largely based on mere quantification of economic indicators with a lack of qualitative analysis of potential challenges and problems beyond figure increases. This study found that indigenous people and culture are gradually represented as commodity by the recipients (tourists) and the agents (development authorities). Against such a background, this chapter provides a qualitative analysis of the impacts of tourism on Indigenous culture in Bangladesh. This chapter unveils the dynamics of market relations where indigenous people and their culture are used as money making project. It also travels around how the entire idea of tourism renders indigenous culture a resource as a saleable object and how such objectification is promoted by the development authorities in the name of tourism against the notion of indigenous culture. For this study, 100 samples have been selected with some purposive sampling, and unstructured interviews, closed observation and FGD methods have been applied to collect the data.