As an accounting major, much of the coursework I will encounter in my years at USC will be business and statistics related. In my first semester, I jumped at taking a cultural anthropology class, which forever changed the way I looked at different representations of cultures. As a Chinese student growing up in the first state to secede from the Union, I have encountered many instances where my culture was reduced to a general stereotype. However, I never exactly thought other Chinese people would also promote these stereotypes until I took the anthropology class. By learning of the tourist gaze, I realized the crossroads I face as an individual thinker. The tourist gaze is economically profitable to the people who run the show, but also harmful to the tourist, as the tourist develops a mental image of a culture based on simple performances. I often side with people who promote economic greatness as the most important aspect of today's society, but because I have been labeled by racial generalizations, I can see where people would oppose the idea. While taking a single anthropology class does not exactly constitute a trusting image of myself onto my audience, I do believe that my own personal experiences can overcome this weakness, as it presents a first person account of how the tourist gaze affects people's views of a heritage. 

First, looking at Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education & Society, Semali describes the way African people are portrayed in filmic representations shown by the West, and how people used said images to create a picture for themselves to view the indigenous peoples of Africa. He claims filmic analysis approaches to viewing the ways of the heritage end with the heritage being culturally misrepresented, and a different outcome being produced by the actual people of Africa. Semali wrote this article to disprove many of the current representations of Africans, as he is of African descent himself. Like me, Semali has most likely been a victim to cultural stereotypes created by visual representations of his own people, and has decided to write about his findings in said visual representations. Dr. Semali has a Ph.D. from the University of California Los Angeles, in Education and Information Studies, as well as many other achievements in various fields. While this may not mean much, he is a current professor at Pennsylvania State University for "Learning and Performance Systems, specializing in many fields, including non-Western Educational epistemologies." 

When looking at "Cultural 'Authenticity'" by Davydd Greenwood, I find a similar message towards the idea of heritage commodification. In Greenwood's article, he looks at how tourism causes a change in culture. By mentioning the Alarde of Fuenterrabia, Haitian Voodoo Dancing, and the Black Clubs of Bermuda, he presents the argument that while appealing to what the consumer tourist wants in terms of a performance, it comes at the cost of a heritage potentially losing cultural identity. While on the socio-economic portion, it potentially brings a good source of income, by giving into a tourist's wants of a heritage, the indigenous culture usually will lose themselves in appeasing the public, that they become confused as to what their original culture was all about. In this article, Greenwood wants cultures to realize the balance between economic wealth, preservation of cultural identities, and portrayal of true living styles. Davydd Greenwood has been elected for a lifetime as a part of  Spanish Royal Academy of Moral and Political Sciences, meaning he has done substantial work in the field of anthropology and earned his title in said area. In addition to this, he also teaches at Cornell University, a highly prestigious institute of education. 

Finally, looking at Jenny Chio's "Fieldwork, Film, and the Tourist Gaze: Making Peasant Family Happiness," compares two rural and ethnic villages in modern China, as part of an ethnographic film. The source I am using is an article written by her about her film. In her article, she claims that people in the village acted strangely unfamiliar to a Western eye, as they quote Deng Xiaoping with a disdain for the inequalities and consequences of tourism development. In this environment, the people of the village act the lives of poverty, depicting the life of a stereotypical peasant in China. However, this is all an act, as these people are part of a tour, and are required by their boss to put on their best image of a Chinese peasant. As an anthropologist, Jenny Chio filmed the interactions between the tourists, and actors, as well as her own interactions with the actors in order to create a contrast between what tourists are paying for, and what an anthropologist is observing. Jenny Chio has been hired as a professor in the department of anthropology of Emory University. Emory University is a highly renowned private college in the Southeastern United States. For a high ranking college to hire a person, they must have good credentials, and good knowledge of the subject they have written about, in this case, the tourist gaze.

The idea of the tourist gaze, and whether it should exist, is an arguable matter because similar to the way general politics operates (economic versus social needs), a culture requires the same. It needs the infrastructure of an economy to operate, but also requires the social needs to morally, and accurately portray the cultural identity to which they are loyal. Though usually I would agree with the economical perspective, my personal experiences have overcome that aspect, and I now agree an accurate representation of culture will help with decreasing the generalization of cultures, resulting in stereotypes. As a former victim to racial generalizations regarding my descent from Chinese blood, I believe that the tourist gaze is a negative way to portray one's culture.

