Adaptability Of Traditional Village’s Social-ecological System Under Tourism Disturbance

As an important carrier of traditional Chinese culture,traditional villages are facing the severe challenge of inheritance and development in the progress of modernization.In recent years,tourism development has become a common choice for traditional villages.With the entry of external people and capital,the protection of the ecological environment and the inheritance of regional traditional culture are under great pressure.Meanwhile,the local stakeholders are forced to adapt to the pressure to achieve the goal of revitalizing and inheriting traditional villages.Therefore,based on the social-ecological system theory,taking Hongcun village in Huangshan city as a study case,the paper clarifies the development process and characteristics of the socialecological system of traditional villages in historical period,and discusses the tourism disturbance to the social-ecological system and the adaptability of relevant subjects to the disturbance with the methods of literature research method,questionnaire survey and interview method,observation method and photography method,GIS and RS.The study aims to provide reference for the sustainable development of traditional villages by analyzing the experience of traditional village social-ecological systems in coping with external disturbances in different periods.The conclusions are as follows.(1)The traditional village social-ecological system is a type of rural socialecological system carrying the wisdom of harmonious coexistence between human and land,which completes the development,utilization and governance of natural resources based on local knowledge,traditional culture and subjective initiative,and effectively adapts to the challenges brought by external disturbances to achieve long-term sustainable development within a specific geographical range.The elements of traditional village social ecosystem are composed of natural ecological system,socialcultural system,governance system and subject system.The interaction between different systems responds to external disturbances such as natural environment and human environment with resilience,adaptability and transformation mechanisms.Compared with other types of social-ecological system,the subjectivity,local knowledge and traditional culture of traditional villages have more obvious positive effects on the sustainable development of the socio-ecological system of traditional villages.(2)The relatively stable governance structure and the wisdom of the local villagers living in harmony between human and land are important internal factors for the longterm stable development of traditional villages.In Hongcun,the relatively enclosed geographical environment is beneficial to the development of the system,and the local knowledge guides the formation of a harmonious relationship between human and land.At the same time,the agency of local villagers and self-organization such as initiative and clan governance contribute to the maintenance of social-ecological system stability.(3)As a special external disturbance,tourism development changes the systems and their relationships of traditional village social-ecological systems,challenging the self-organizing ability of the social-ecological systems.But it also creates conditions for the living inheritance and creative transformation of traditional villages.The disturbance of tourism development on the natural ecosystem of Hongcun is manifested in the utilization of land resources and water resources,while the disturbance on the social cultural system is manifested in bringing abundant economic resources.On the other hand,the gap between the rich and poor in villages is widened,changing the social relationship between different subjects.At the same time,he traditional culture of Hongcun has been impacted by tourism.Due to the construction of cultural images catering to tourists’ expectations,the local knowledge and traditional culture formed in the interaction between human and nature in the historical period are gradually losing.(4)Various local entities can actively adapt to the challenges brought by tourism development,but the "soul" of traditional villages needs to be firmly grasped to achieve the goal of living inheritance and creative transformation.This is mainly reflected in the "top-down" adaptive management by the local government and the "bottom-up" adaptation by the local villagers.The local villagers are able to adapt by actively adjusting their livelihood strategies,while tourism development makes them reexamine the value of local culture.The adaptive management of local governments is reflected in the consideration of the potential impact brought by tourism development at the level of ecological governance,the protection of village buildings from single material protection to the protection of the intangible culture contained in ancient dwellings,and the reconstruction of self-organized governance structure at the level of social governance.The main innovations of the paper are as follows.Firstly,the social-ecological system theory,previously applied more to natural ecological environments,is introduced to the highly artificial traditional village context,and the adaptability analysis framework of traditional village social ecosystem under tourism disturbance is constructed.Moreover,the unique value of local knowledge and local wisdom of living together with people and places in the inheritance and development of traditional villages has been discovered by studying the evolutionary mechanism of such socialecological systems in the historical process.Secondly,this paper analyzes how actors adapt to the disturbance of traditional village social-ecological systems from the microscale of tourism development,and discusses the important role of agency of actors for the sustainable development of social-ecological systems.The study makes up for the deficiency of previous studies that focused too much on external factors such as capital and migrant labor and relatively neglected local actors.It provides a new path to guide the multi-agent behaviors in the adaptive governance of socio-ecological systems.