Via Media: The Circulation of Narratives and their Influence on Tourists' and Residents' Actions and Memories (original) (raw)
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Catalonian Journal of Ethnology, December 2019, No. 44, 2020
PhD, is an anthropologist. Currently at the University of Basilicata (Italy) she is adjunct professor in anthropological subjects, member of the team of the UNESCO Chair in 'Mediterranean Cultural Landscapes and Communities of Knowledge' and research fellow within the I-DEA Project for Matera ECoC 2019. Since 2012 she has carried out a number of studies and research in Italy (Basilicata and Abruzzo Regions) and abroad (Alagoas-Brazil, and Catalonia). Her main research topics are: museums and heritage anthropology, urban anthropology, anthropology of landscape and anthropology of writing. She is member of SIAC and of SIMBDEA, since 2013 coordinates the editorial staff of the journal "Archive of Ethnography" and has published several essays and articles mainly in journals and volumes of the anthropological field.
The instrumental time of memory. Local politics and urban aesthetics in a tourism context
Journal of Tourism Analysis: Revista de Análisis Turístico, 2019
Purpose This paper aims to show that tourism is one of the most perfect creations of the capitalist mode of production insofar as not only does it consume places and territories and perpetuate dependency relations, but in the expressive dimension, it also produces feelings and meanings and generates a new relationship of the past with the present and future (chronotope). Design/methodology/approach The study was carried out using a socio-anthropological approach with participant observation over several decades. Findings The modes of time are described and how the tourism chronotope shapes the historic centre of a consolidated tourist destination. The case study, analysed with the model of the “conversion of place through the mediation of tourism space”, illustrates the prevalence of instrumental and commercial values over one’s own aesthetic-expressive values in tourism contexts. This fact encourages the emergence of local political projects and the incorporation of uniformities outside the local place. These processes end up uprooting the anchors from collective memory. The definition of territories according to visitors’ imaginaries and expectations encourages the abusive occupation of public space and the adoption of new aesthetic attributes of urban space. Research limitations/implications Because of the chosen research approach and methodologies, the research results may lack generalisability. Therefore, researchers are encouraged to test both the model and the propositions further. Originality/value This study approaches the relationship of the idea Tourism with the idea Development based on the anchors of memory.
International Journal of Arts and Social Science, 2022
Separating fact-based history from its fake version is an ongoing challenge. Hunting down false facts about the past is a matter of anthropology of heritage: false information and mythicised imagery about the past strongly affect the authenticity of the artefact and are meant to be the harbinger of the deliberate creation of fakes ex novo. This happened in the modern history of Alberobello, a town in the Puglia region – Southern Italy – renowned for its typical buildings known as ‘Trulli’. Foundational stories often resort to incorrect or exaggerated narratives and outright lies to compensate for gaps in recorded history. This paper opines two historical untruths that significantly impacted the popularity of ‘Trulli of Alberobello’, an Italian tourist destination among the best known in the world, as a consequence of its recognition as a World Heritage Site in 1996. While the UNESCO badge is an important marketing tool in global tourism, its presence does not bind those responsible for the site’s management to guarantee faithful historical exposure. This has fuelled the increase of inaccurate guided tours and non-authentic merchandising. Consequently, the attempt to restore history faithful to the sources is not a fact that involves only the community of residents. Still, it concerns the entire tourist sector made up of the sale of souvenirs, guidebooks, organised tours, TV shows and even cartoons.
tourismes
the analysis of souvenirs and travel objects has filled many a page of postcolonial studies. In the majority of cases the focus has been the impact that the presence of the “invader” has had on the means of production of those “invaded”, to illustrate how artisan subsistence has given way to a technological or mass-production line approach. When this was not the case, the analysis has focused on the way communities and groups have been obliged to represent themselves through their objects and how that fictionalisation of identity has in some cases led to its demise, in others, to its affirmation and in many others, to a direct invention of the group identity
Mobilising Memoryscapes. Tourist Entanglements at two Catalan Civil War Sites
This paper's ambition is to explore how the material, social and symbolic legacy of conflicts that have taken place since the turn of the 20th century may be made more resonant and comprehensible to visitors. We take the Spanish Civil War sites in Catalonia as emblematic of the issues and entrenchments which to date hinder their full potential as sites of reconciliation, awareness and identity-shaping for Europeans. After analysing their current situation and embedding in place strategies, which is remarkably different – one in a peripheral mountain location and one in the very core of Barcelona's touristscape –, our research examines the way in which historical memory is constructed, narrated and practiced in those spaces, underlining unsolved issues and contradictions. In retrospect, this research contributes to the critique of the very concept of historical memory, its patrimonialisation and the modes of social construction of heritage in the 'age of mobilities'.
Epilogue for Social Memory and Heritage Tourism Methodologies
Over the past several years, social memory studies have become a vibrant interdisciplinary project undertaken by scholars from a wide range of disciplines. Uniting much of this scholarship is recognition of the socially constructed and contestable nature of remembering, identifying with, and experiencing the past. Public interpretation of the past is a selective and culturally driven process structured by uneven power relations among social actors and groups; the politics of identity and cultural representation; the bodily and affective experiences of people; broader political patterns of control, change, and struggle; and, of course, the forces of commercialization and the tourism market (Alderman and Inwood, 2013). To find both social memory and heritage tourism brought together so explicitly in the title and content of this collection of essays speaks powerfully to the idea that each of the subjects really cannot be addressed without the other. Our collective memories are not necessarily dependent upon the dynamics of travel promotion. Yet, can we think of very many instances in today's world in which our understanding of the past and its meaning is not structured by the growing number of sites, performances, and representations of heritage tourism?
This paper concerns tourist narratives, a type of autobiographical narrative condensed by the temporal and spatial constraints of tourism experience, as a place-making tool. While much attention has been paid to the importance of metanarratives both in the construction of tourism sites and in the self-identity process, the role of personal narratives for bridging this divide has been underexplored. As episodes of personal narratives, tourist moments are both socially and semiotically constructed. These narratives are at the nexus of spatial and temporal experience as tourists use multisensory experience, material objects, and landscape cues to connect memories with contemporary events and metanarratives to personal history. Narratives, however, are a construction; as they are (re)interpreted and (re)told events change in terms of their significance. As tourism experiences are incorporated into one's autobiographical narrative, the tourism space takes on new meanings and through this incorporation it becomes place. This process is examined via tourist narratives of Spring Mill Pioneer Village. Collected during survey work at the site, these narratives illuminate the deeper significance of place more than survey data alone could have revealed. By teaming these two data sets, the importance of the social, semiotic, and sensory to the tourist experience, as well as their creation of place, is brought to the fore.
Cultural memory and place identity: Creating place experience
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Studying landscapes anchored in human life, with natural and cultural components interwoven as one fabric, embracing the political and ideological aspects, helps to understand the role of our everyday landscapes in tourism. Tourism, the travel between places and touring of landscapes, is essential to the identity process of both travelers and places. The notions of "home" and "elsewhere," "us" and "them" are constructed through mobility, motility (potentials of mobility) and migration. The scope and scale of mobility and motility has changed in a postmodern world through the intensity in time-space expansion/ contraction. Contemporary European society is fractured in a struggle between conflicts of identity (former Eastern Europe). Renegotiations of past and present, integration and diversity are especially acute after the collapse of the Soviet empire and ongoing enlargement of the European Union. Identity and culture are elastic concepts, involving conscious and unconscious processes through which places are lived and made while giving meaning to the lives of the people involved. Communication of those meanings is essential to each individual in this process and to others beyond the actual lived place. The meaning attached to landscapes is negotiable due to competing social actors involved in a continuous interpretation and variability offered across cultural, historical, individual and situational aspects. iv This case study examines the dynamic between real landscapes, their representations and negotiations of identity under the umbrella of a stabilizing past among foreign and domestic visitors to Saare County on Saaremaa Island in Estonia. The disruptive societal changes, which occurred in recent decades with the collapse of the Soviet regime, guide discussion of interactions of place, identity, landscape and memory, as well as the role of tourism. The central aim of this dissertation is to explore the role of past through individual and collective memory in multifaceted negotiations of place identity and place experience. Huff's (2008) model of landscape, place and identity combined with memory and tourism was used to guide this investigation. Data were collected in three phases: content analysis of online news article debate about the potential bridge connecting Saaremaa Island to mainland Estonia (n=123), onsite tourist survey of visitors to the island (n=487), and in-depth interviews with 16 visitors drawn from the survey sample. Narrative and discourse analyses were supplemented by a multiple/logistic regression of survey data in a mixed methods approach. Results imply that pro-anti bridge sentiment exists among Estonians and foreigners based on socio-cultural and political contexts in a post Soviet society. Memory, well-being, and aesthetics of place with nationality, and education are predictors of perceived effects of environmental changes and effects of a bridge to mainland on future holiday experiences to Saaremaa Island. Past memories from ideological images of place and memories of places elsewhere were intertwined into bodily perceptions of place, yet resulted in somewhat contradictory statements. Evaluation of changes in landscapes correlated with perceived identities of place and self, and reflected upon readings of home. Historical aspects of place were deemed an v important part of place experience. Respondents without prior knowledge or experience similar to the socio-cultural, economic and political context in Estonia were inclined to identify place based on comparisons of home place from their own residency and past memories from places traveled elsewhere. Outcomes suggest a dialogue for further sense of place research in tourism for the marketing and management of sustainable tourism development in general and for island destinations in particular.
Identity and identities on national and regional levels may be perceived to be in constant flux. They are, however, primarily and continuously subject to negotiations. Narratives of history in tourist media provide space for these negotiations and facilitate the mediation of discourses on identity conceptualisations. The present paper will thus investigate how conceptualisations of regional identity in Istria are mediated through tourist historiography. In the introductory part, the relations between identity formation and tourism will be discussed. The empirical part will then investigate tourist historiography from Istria and the discourses on regional identity with specific emphasis on the representational and narrative strategies used to mediate these discourses to a tourist audience.
Tourism, memory and place in a globalizing world
In a postmodern, postcolonial world, new regimes of memory are effectively appropriated, negotiated, and contested by ‘cultural actors,’ communities, and nation states to achieve the agendas of domination, resistance, and categorization. As an integral part of the emerging regimes of memory, tourism is being reconsidered as a crucial instrument toward the historicization of social, cultural, and public memory. In other instances counter-memories when invested in alternative forms of tourism by various oppressed groups can also accomplish the ‘demythologizing of history.’