Local cultural distortion risk at tourist destinations: connotation deconstruction and theoretical construction

The current accelerating process of cultural and tourism integration has posed severe challenges to local cultural sustainability. However, there is an obvious research gap in tourism culture from the risk perspective. This conceptual study introduced the theory of the production of space and utilized the inductive method to distinguish the connotation of related concepts. Furthermore, this paper developed a concept of local cultural distortion risk at tourist destinations (LCDRTD) and deconstructed its connotation. Moreover, a three-dimensional structure of LCDRTD was highlighted that combines the cultural ontology distortion risk, cultural representation distortion risk, and cultural constructive distortion risk. This concept is more applicable to tourism types that are closely related to local traditional history and culture, such as heritage tourism and cultural tourism, etc. This attempt expands the cultural sustainability research framework and perspective and consolidates the tourism theoretical basis.