The Tai Lue are a Tai-speaking group who originated from Sipsongpanna in the Southern Yunnan Province of China and then migrated to Northern Thailand in the early nineteenth century. Since the 1930s, the Tai Lue identity in Thailand has been swamped by the Thai national culture because of its national policy, which forced the Tai Lue to conceal their identities. After the growth of tourism in Thailand in the I 970s, the Tai Lue identity has begun to reveal itself to the public more as their culture and their identity can be used to attract tourists. This paper discusses the ways in which one of the Tai Lue ethnic groups in Northern Thailand reconstructed and developed their culture by transforming their cultural resources into their ethnic identity in the context of tourism. I found that ethnic tourism is an area that has allowed the Tai Lue to create, alter, and re-interpret their own culture. It demonstrates that those selected cultural resources are the representations of their culture that creates their sense of identity. The new Tai Lue culture developed by the villagers has become the basis of a unique Tai Lue identity seen only in their village. As such it differentiates them from the other Tai Lue in Sipsongpanna and from the others in Northern Thailand.
ハッタパス et al. (Sat,) studied this question.