Staging locality: staged authenticity and the production of locality in Lanna food and cultural tourism in Northern Thailand

This study examines how Lanna food is constructed and performed through cultural tourism in Northern Thailand. The study develops the concept of staged locality to observe the process by which communities mobilize their food practices as strategic performances of local food identity for domestic tourist audiences. Ethnographic fieldwork was conducted across eight villages in Northern Thailand between October 2023 and May 2024. The findings reveal three distinct characteristics of Lanna food through which staged locality operates: ecological belonging, the performance of neighboring cultures, and the invention of new fusion dishes. This study identifies a critical structural dimension of this process: institutionally staged locality, or double staging, in which the Thai state operates through a certification process that authorizes particular food narratives while the act of staging recursively reconstitutes the communities’ own sense of collective memory. These findings extend existing theories of staged authenticity and offer concrete implications for cultural tourism policy in Thailand.