ARI Working Paper Series

This paper is about the social and cultural significance of hotels in the Nepal Himalaya. Through a socio-semiotic approach, I analyse how the hotel in Himalayan tourism functions as an architectural form that mediates different social domains, and through the process embeds the ideology of ‘development’ in everyday life, producing the power relations that would in turn generate their very contestations.

By treating the materiality of the hotel as an anthropological tool, we are thus able to more fully understand how a community’s pursuit of development and its intense engagement with tourism have resulted in the creation of new forms of subjectivity as well as social and political relationships.