Selecting Optimal Cultural Tourism for Indigenous Tribes by Fuzzy MCDM

Abstract

Unique Indigenous cultures have become increasingly attractive and prevalent in the tourism market. More and more Indigenous tribes wish to improve their economic situation by developing a tourism industry with ethnic culture as the core attraction. The main arguments regarding Indigenous tourism involve cultural vicissitudes between the past and present, indicating that appropriate tourism development and cultural conservation should be carried out. As cultural features are characterized by symbols, complexity, shareability, and diversity, it is challenging to measure the aspects of cultural vicissitudes. This study adopted a mixed multiple-criteria decision-making (MCDM) model, in which the fuzzy analytic hierarchy process (FAHP) and fuzzy technique for order preference by similarity to ideal solution (FTOPSIS) were established to assist Indigenous tribes in selecting an optimal cultural tourism mode. Based on a literature review, a hierarchical structure for cultural vicissitude criteria selection is constructed. FAHP was applied to determine the importance and weights of criteria. Among the considered criteria, material culture, institutional culture, and spiritual culture with the values of 0.5478, 0.2791, and 0.1731 were determined as the most effective criteria for developing Indigenous tourism rankings, respectively. The optimal cultural tourism model ranking was obtained using the FTOPSIS approach.

Keywords

• Indigenous tourism
• cultural vicissitude
• fuzzy set
• analytic hierarchy process (AHP)
• technique for order preference by similarity to ideal solution (TOPSIS)