关键词: 自然的社会建构, 野生动物旅游, 生命权力, 广州鳄鱼公园

Abstract:

"Social construction of nature" has emerged as a new approach within recent Western human geographical agenda in re-examining the relationship between society and nature. In this article, we consider the metaphor of "construction" not only as a social constructionist approach that emphasises the role of power, discourse and text in meaning formation, but also as a network that assemblages human and non-human actors. Based on this formulation, this paper seeks to explore the human-animal relationship and in particular the power relationship in wildlife tourism with an empirical focus on Crocodile Park, Guangzhou. Wildlife tourism which shows animals in their natural habitat is an important part of human's accessibility to experience of nature in the context of late-modernity. Drawing on Foucault's scope of biopower, we investigate the way in which biopower exercises and embeds into the actor network organized by animals, park, government and NGO. We found that: First, in Crocodile Park, management practices imposing on animals have become heavily reliant on the use of disciplinary techniques and biopolitics of animal, for example the population and health control and manipulation of gender, thus to reconcile the park with the changing demands of tourism market. Second, the park not only utilizes a series of disciplinary techniques to generate the “docile bodies” of animals subjected to the tourism activities, but tactfully manipulates tourists' embodied experience towards animals. This paper argues that tourists' embodied experience is embedded into double desires that intend to closely discover animals on the one hand and conquer animals on the other. Third, the exercise of biopower is in an ongoing process of negotiation between different human and non-human actors. We point out that the re-assemblage of actor network in essence provides a legal and moral framework in which biopower is legitimatized and thus can constantly operate in wildlife tourism. In conclusion, we argue that the operation of biopower should not be understood as a representation of social construction, but an outcome of the interaction of society and nature within the actor network. This article seeks to provide a new insight in analyzing the social construction of nature for Chinese human geography.

Key words: social construction of nature, wildlife tourism, biopower, Crocodile Park