Re-Packaging the Pilgrimage: Visiting the Holy Land (Orlando). (original) (raw)
Related papers
Heritage and cultural tourism: The present and future of the past
Tourism Geographies, 2009
Heritage and culture have long been recognized as core components of tourism. Whether we are dealing with pilgrimages and visits to sacred sites, visits for cultural interaction with ‘other’ host societies, or elaborating on other forms of spiritual activities, tourism has always been an important platform for such meetings and interactions. This report is a summary of the conference ‘Heritage and Cultural Tourism: The Present and Future of the Past’. The conference was held on 17-19 June 2008, at the Brigham Young University, Jerusalem Center for Near Eastern Studies, in Jerusalem, Israel. It brought together 75 tourism researchers from fifteen countries, and was organized by the Department of Geography at Brigham Young University (Utah, USA) with the assistance and sponsorship of several partners.
Ideologies in Archaeology, edited by Reinhard Bernbeck and Randall H. McGuire, pages 107-129. University of Arizona Press, Tucson, 2011
With the rapid growth of the tourist industry, archaeology is being drawn into heritage tourism. Recent studies have examined the intersection of archaeology and tourism within globalization. The widely recognized potential of the partnership includes new funding sources as well as expanding popular support for archaeology. The two major demands of tourism on archaeology are access and relevance. For tourism, relevance focuses on meeting the demands of consumers, particularly those who want access to authentic or entertaining presentations. The notion of access is a positive demand, until one raises concern for the fragility of archaeological sites. Access and relevance raise an additional paradox of heritage tourism: engagement with a vague concept of public, a felt sense of what people are willing to see, reproduces assumptions about the past and of archaeology in society. Within the various definitions of archaeological heritage, the key concern falls to the present needs of consumers of the past. While the previous public archaeology sought to serve a generalized and vague future, today's engagements with heritage tourism are focused on the present. Similar to other work on the sociopolitics of archaeology, a critical examination of the shifts in public archaeology allows illumination of the implications of archaeological actions within the parameters influenced by the new discourse. Two studies from Florida are used to problematize the notion of public, with consequences compared in global perspective.
Heritage Tourism and its Representations
At most destinations, the haphazard collection of brochures and related paraphernalia can generally be used to piece together an official sanctioning of what a heritage tourism site ought to 'look like'. Images, in this context, operate as perhaps the most critical element. No doubt incorporated so as to simply portray or mirror 'the real thing' -the physical realities of a site or place -they are simultaneously unsettled from this role by their capacity to also 'speak' of embedded, underlying meanings and tensions. Thus, while the images used are likely to be quite blatant in terms of promotion and marketing, their composition will also have far more subtle things to say about issues of power and exclusion. To put it briefly, this occurs by virtue of the role images play in the construction or creation of meaning; a process that is also inevitably filled with hidden silences and obfuscation. This tells us something significant about the act of signification: any negotiation between what is hidden and what is made manifest is meditated by discourse.
Can Heritage Tourism Save the Past? Archaeology, Aesthetics, and the
A critique of the tendency of antiquities collectors and museums, abetted even by otherwise progressive contemporary artists like Ai Weiwei, to reduce the materiality of archaeological artifacts to aesthetic phenomena. Privileging the aesthetic is not just a conceptual matter, however: it lurks behind heritage policy, in particular the World Heritage List, that focuses attention and resources on a select number of picturesque or monumental sites while starving the budgets of those who are trying to fend off tomb robbers. The paper ends by offering three suggestions for policy changes that might redirect resources towards protecting the yet-unexcavated past.
G Richards (ed) Cultural tourism: global and local perspectives, 2007
Paragraphs from pages 170 and 171 in lieu of an abstract: Social processes, often conflictive, contribute to the making of heritage products. In these processes, we have to consider a range of groups and social agents who have different political and economic interests and different cultural conceptions, stemming from their distinct positions in social space. Opposed to the discourses that see heritage as something natural and as a product of a consensus, often because of ingenuity as well as dishonest intentions, it is important to stress the dynamic, processual, and conflictive nature of heritage product-making, particularly when it concerns enormously sensitive questions such as identity or memory. That is, heritage-making is inseparable from questions of influence, politics, interests, and authority -in short, power. On the other hand, this conflictive dimension becomes even worse when we move from heritage to heritage tourism, since the commercial exploitation implied by heritage tourism usually arouses resentment. It is not only the fact that commercial exploitalion may be viewed by certain groups as illegitimate when applied to heritage objects of a sacred or inalienable nature, but also the fact that commercial exploitation entails complex political and economic decisions. These issues include lhe kind of public for which the product is designed (which often does not match with the owners of the ascribed meanings), and the fact that the urban speculation that usually accompanies heritage tourism can lead to a rise in the price of land, to processes of use replacement, gentrification, etc. In fact, these latter issues become especially relevant since heritage tourism is mainly a kind of urban tourism and focuses on the historic centers of cities, which become, as a whole, public spaces made heritage (and therefore not only the meanings become problematic, but also spatial practices and uses of space). This is hardly surprising since historic city centers, besides offering a high concentration of heritage referents, usually characterize themselves by their function of centrality and their symbolic contents, particularly their role in representing the city as a whole. Nevertheless. "touristification/heritagization" is still problematic, and it is in these spaces that most of the conflicts regarding heritage and tourism become visible. These conflicts create social discomfort, hence negatively influencing the political success and the economic viability of heritage tourism: consequently, it seems there is a need to develop common criteria for assessment of the complex factors affecting heritage.
Heritage tourism: The dawn of a new era?
For many years tourism has been one of the principal ways through which the relationship between heritage and globalisation is analytically articulated. Countless studies since the 1970s have considered the arrival of tourism as the precipitator of modernity, of modernisation and of widespread social transformation. There is little doubt this tradition of scholarship will continue to thrive and evolve. By way of a contribution to this research, this chapter sets out to illustrate why current debates in this field need to shift direction, and why frameworks which better reflect the realities of today's global tourism industry need to be developed, most notably ones which can better account for the ongoing rise of non-Western forms of tourism.
The double bind of World Heritage tourism
The significance of World Heritage: Origins, management, consequences, 2013
World heritage sites across the globe are adapting themselves to the homogenizing standards of tourism at the same time as trying to maintain, or even increase, their local particularity. While local and national tourism authorities and tour agencies package and sell so-called 'authentic' cultural landscapes or 'traditional' cultures, what counts as world heritage -be it material or intangible -and the way it is interpreted is increasingly defined and controlled supra-locally. This paper sketches the broad picture of world heritage tourism in the 21st century and illustrates the general trends with examples of on-going ethnographic research on world heritage sites. chapter 8 world heritage and tourism 275