Study on Tourists' Rurality Cognition in Rural World Heritage Site Based on Schema Theory: A Case Study of Hongcun in Anhui Province

Abstract

The development of urbanization has fostered the rise of instrumental rationality and the decline of value rationality, leading to a diminishing sense of belonging among individuals in fast-paced urban life. As a result, rurality has become a core attraction for rural tourists. Research on rurality has emerged as a key topic in the fields of rural geography and rural tourism. However, relatively little research has focused on how to realize micro-level human-land interactions and achieve a subjective understanding of rurality in rural tourism destinations from a cognitive perspective. Schema theory offers a framework to explore this issue. Amid the confrontation and integration of modernity and provinciality, the rurality of rural World Heritage sites, by preserving the integrity and authenticity of traditional rural social structures, enhances tourists' local attachment and local experiences. This paper uses Hongcun, a rural World Heritage site, as a case study, introducing schema theory to explore the cognitive schema of rurality and its generation mechanism among tourists by conducting a grounded theory analysis of travel notes on Ctrip. Through open coding, axial coding, and selective coding, a model of rurality cognitive schema and its generation mechanism was constructed. The findings are as follows: 1) Tourists acquire a concrete schema of rurality through embodied experiences and behavioral interactions, which resonate with and enrich their existing schemas, facilitating schema integration across time and space; 2) The existing schema, shaped by cultural background and individual experience, serves as the foundation for tourists to form cognitive schemas. The local characteristics of traditional Chinese rural society and the traditional culture passed down through generations are embedded in individuals' existing schemas. Tourists' existing schemas interact with the rural tourism environment, engaging in both top-down and bottom-up cognitive processing through anticipation contrast, uniqueness contrast, feature association, and cross-temporal imagination. 3) The rural cognitive schema consists of four sub-schemas: the natural ecological schema, life schema, cultural schema, and place atmosphere schema. The natural ecological schema emphasizes tourists' perception of the interplay between rural nature and humanity. The life schema pertains to daily life scenes observed at the tourist destination, while the cultural schema refers to the local culture formed through the development and evolution of the destination. The place atmosphere schema captures the abstract perception and impression of the destination, formed through the interaction between tourists' embodied experiences and their existing schemas. The natural ecological schema provides the spatial foundation for both the life and cultural schemas, while the latter two exert external influences on the natural ecological schema, helping shape the rural area's natural and humanistic characteristics. The cultural schema informs and regulates the life schema, while the life schema simultaneously practices and reshapes the cultural schema. Together, these schemas, along with the place atmosphere schema, form a comprehensive cognitive network of rural nature. This study is significant for deepening the understanding of the connotation and formation mechanism of rurality, exploring human-local interaction from a microscopic perspective, and offering theoretical and practical guidance for the development of rural tourism through the mining of rurality and culture.

Keywords

• rural world heritage sites
• rural cognitive schema
• schema theory
• generation mechanism
• the hongcun village in anhui