In Asia, national policies are increasingly using tourism as a tool to integrate remote spaces and marginal social groups, often inhabiting peripheral highlands. Reducing poverty, stopping ecological degradation, and limiting autonomist movements, are all adding up as a triple concern which compels governments to link marginal areas to national centres through tourist development. In countries dominated by urban tourism, rural-tourism sites are emerging, often based on the valorisation of ethnic minorities and cultural heritage, a valorisation of people that have long been discriminated against. Ironically, their cultural and geographical specificities now constitute assets and advantages in tourist development. The disparity is obvious: supporting local cultures and maintaining landscapes considered “typical” may, on the one hand, reinforce group identities as states appear to compensate for decades of exclusion and indifference; on the other hand, state policies potentially contribute to the museumification and commodification of folk practices, while simultaneously maintaining policies of political assimilation and cultural homogenisation. The central goal of this project is to focus on rural and agricultural landscapes as the primary sites for the study of these processes, setting aside objects that have been very much studied in terms of folklore and habitats. By focusing on ordinary landscapes, which also attract tourist interest, rather than the exceptional landscapes or cultural landscapes as defined by the UNESCO, we link these landscape mutations. Our project examines cultural representations, landscape discourses and practices of local societies, nation-states, and local actor such as tour-guide operators; in brief, we analyse power relations at play through what we term “landscape grabbing”, to assess how tourism is fostered and how heritage building is articulated. We seek to understand how these approaches indicate i) an increasing awareness of the multi-functionality of rural areas, and ii) a political reconfiguration of these spaces, from a utilitarian view of landscape to the recognition of its heritage value, a recognition which prioritizes living environment and their environmental functions. Five mountainous areas represent our case studies: Kumaon (India), Guizhou (China), Louang Namtha (Lao PDR), Lam Dong (Vietnam), north of Western region (Nepal). These areas will serve to demonstrate national and regional differences, establish a gradient of the varying importance of ethnic tourism, and indicate the impacts of domestic tourism, which is more or less developed according to the countries studied. Our analysis of these various trajectories using a hypothetical Western model of rural management and patrimonialisation, a model concerned about the loss of local identities and biodiversity, will serve to grasp the reasons behind these differentiations in diversified socioeconomic, cultural and landscape structures. To whom do the landscapes of Asia belong (T-LAB)? For each fieldwork location, the analysis will be multiscalar, interdisciplinary (geography, ethnology, agroeconomy), and multi-focused along three axes of inquiry: landscapes (material and dynamic structures vs practices and representations of actors); transformation processes (tourism and patrimonialisation, rural dynamics, territorial governances); structuring principles between socioeconomic dynamics and the reconfiguration of identities (integration/marginalisation, sense of belonging, ethnicity). The proposed comparative reach of this project depends not only on the research schematics common to the five case studies, but also on the research team’s intersecting fieldwork which will result in co-authored publications.