Abstract

According to the social identity theory, once people have categorized themselves and others into different group, they will contrast themselves and others, and their thinking and behaviors will become bounded up with in-group membership. There will be an emotional significance to our identification with a group, when outsiders come into a destination, indigenes will find the differences between the outsiders and themselves, then divide them into different groups that can reinforce the identification about their group even awake and strengthen place identity. Based on social identity theory and the comparative case study of Lijiang (a world culture heritage in China) and Palma (a tourist island in Spain), this essay is going to explain how tourism awakes place identity and affects identity boundary which causes a series phenomena that happened in our daily life no matter where we are, such as culture recover, maintaining the link with space, in-group favoritism, out-group bias and conflicts.

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