Bounded Performances: Cultural Tourism and Negotiated Authenticity in Northern Vietnam

In tropical postcolonial regions, tourism has reconfigured cultural life through selective visibility. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork (2022–2024) in H’mong, Muong, and Kinh communities, this article examines how identity becomes choreographed for consumption yet remains bounded by community-set thresholds. Practices once sacred—bride-taking, stilt-house hospitality, Quan Họ singing, or Hầu Đồng trance—are transformed into choreographed visibility. Rather than cultural loss, such bounded performativization reflects a survival logic that preserves symbolic autonomy through partial exposure. Methodologically, the study integrates affective ethnography with media analysis to map how tropical materialities—humidity, light, and sound—mediate performance. Conceptually, it advances a framework that recasts performance as ethical endurance: identity lives on by learning how to be staged without surrender.