Indigenous culture and nascent tourism in Muanenguba, Cameroon
type: CreativeWork
description: This study is an ethnography of the early stages of tourism development (nascent tourism) in Muanenguba - especially in Mwaam, the tourist destination in the Bakossiland - one of the most celebrated mountain regions of Cameroon. It is a narrative on the emerging relationship between local culture and nascent tourism. The research was carried out through a fieldwork process that can best be described as being sensibly native, through ethnographic interactions with the hosts - indigenes (villagers and elites), developers (councils, hoteliers and hotel staff), regional government department officials and immigrants (nomadic and others) - in order to gain indigenous knowledge, and to capture tourism practices via collaborative, access-point-generated research strategies: checkpoint inquiries and registration, destination tours, questionnaire surveys and visitor monitoring. The study makes an original contribution to knowledge by discovering that Muanenguba has experienced a century of tourism without progress beyond the nascent stage. Consequently, there is a nascent tourism discourse and practice, featuring the coexistence of exploration and local action with the concept of sustainability understood to varying degrees and mobilised rhetorically and symbolically by various actors for different purposes. As part of an indigenous political ecology of nascent tourism, the factors of status and power ascribed to custodians, and achieved by the developers, bias participation in and benefit from the nascent stages of tourism development. The wider local community is oriented towards both tradition and modernity as values. The dominant processes of change (modernity) comprise, historically, Westernisation, post-colonial government influence and non-tourism-led immigration, and currently, modernisation and in situ shifting conceptions in indigenous culture. Nascent tourism, accommodated by indigenous principles of access, is a marginal but emerging agent of change, exacerbating…
abstract: This study is an ethnography of the early stages of tourism development (nascent tourism) in Muanenguba - especially in Mwaam, the tourist destination in the Bakossiland - one of the most celebrated mountain regions of Cameroon. It is a narrative on the emerging relationship between local culture and nascent tourism. The research was carried out through a fieldwork process that can best be described as being sensibly native, through ethnographic interactions with the hosts - indigenes (villagers and elites), developers (councils, hoteliers and hotel staff), regional government department officials and immigrants (nomadic and others) - in order to gain indigenous knowledge, and to capture tourism practices via collaborative, access-point-generated research strategies: checkpoint inquiries and registration, destination tours, questionnaire surveys and visitor monitoring. The study makes an original contribution to knowledge by discovering that Muanenguba has experienced a century of tourism without progress beyond the nascent stage. Consequently, there is a nascent tourism discourse and practice, featuring the coexistence of exploration and local action with the concept of sustainability understood to varying degrees and mobilised rhetorically and symbolically by various actors for different purposes. As part of an indigenous political ecology of nascent tourism, the factors of status and power ascribed to custodians, and achieved by the developers, bias participation in and benefit from the nascent stages of tourism development. The wider local community is oriented towards both tradition and modernity as values. The dominant processes of change (modernity) comprise, historically, Westernisation, post-colonial government influence and non-tourism-led immigration, and currently, modernisation and in situ shifting conceptions in indigenous culture. Nascent tourism, accommodated by indigenous principles of access, is a marginal but emerging agent of change, exacerbating…
author: Ngwese, Ivo Melle
keywords: 330 Economics
date published: 2011
date modified: 2026-07-24T02:54:41Z
provider: London Metropolitan University
publisher: Networked Digital Library of Theses and Dissertations
type: WebPage
source organization: London Metropolitan University