Abstract
This thesis explores how tourism policy becomes part of everyday life within Mosuo households at Lugu Lake, a border region straddling Yunnan and Sichuan provinces in southwest China. Around the lake, policies arrive through a range of tourism-related regulatory measures, including environmental regulations, building restrictions, and relocation programmes. Yet for those who live there, these policies are not encountered as abstract plans. Rather, they take shape in the arrangement of houses, the organisation of family life, and the rhythms of everyday routines.
The research is based on seven months of ethnographic fieldwork conducted across three villages, Daluoshui (Yunnan), Lige (Yunnan) and Gesa (Sichuan). Through sustained engagement with households and everyday activities, it follows how tourism policies are encountered, interpreted, and adjusted in practice. Although these villages share the same lake, they have followed different trajectories of tourism development and governance, revealing how policy does not unfold uniformly, but takes form through situated conditions and responses. A multi-scalar analysis moves between the lake, the village, and the household to trace how policy is articulated, translated, and lived across different scales. Within this, a dwelling perspective keeps attention on what people do, how space is organised, how daily rhythms are coordinated, and how relationships are maintained as policy settles into the routines of the home. Rather than treating policy as something external to be implemented, the study follows how it becomes embedded in everyday practices.
Across these scales, tourism development and policy reshape the Mosuo home in uneven and often ambivalent ways, creating new opportunities while also introducing new constraints. At the level of the lake, ecological governance redefines the shoreline as a managed landscape, altering how people relate to water, land, and ritual space. At the village level, different trajectories emerge: Daluoshui becomes highly visible and commercially active, Lige experiences spatial rupture through relocation, while Gesa remains more restrained under a cautious approach to development. At the level of the household, these processes are felt through the reorganisation of domestic space, shifts in family roles and labour, and the adjustment of everyday and ritual practices.
The findings point to an ongoing mismatch between governance priorities oriented towards regulation, visibility, and spatial order, and dwelling practices grounded in matrilineal relations and everyday social life. This mismatch is not experienced as a single moment of conflict, but as a continuous condition that unfolds through everyday adjustments. In response, villagers accommodate, recalibrate, remain silent, or selectively participate, through which daily life is sustained. These dynamics are approached here as forms of ontological negotiation, through which households work to maintain coherence as the conditions of dwelling are gradually reconfigured. By following policy into the home, this thesis shows that tourism governance is not only implemented, but lived through the ongoing effort of maintaining everyday life. In doing so, it reframes policy not simply as an intervention imposed on place, but as something entangled with how people continue to dwell, adjust, and make sense of home as change unfolds.