Destination Culture: Tourism, Museums, and Heritage

Book Description

Destination Culture takes the reader on an eye-opening journey from ethnological artifacts to kitsch. Posing the question, "What does it mean to show?" Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett explores the agency of display in a variety of settings: museums, festivals, world's fairs, historical re-creations, memorials, and tourist attractions. She talks about how objects--and people--are made to "perform" their meaning for us by the very fact of being collected and exhibited, and about how specific techniques of display, not just the things shown, convey powerful messages.
Her engaging analysis shows how museums compete with tourism in the production of "heritage." To make themselves profitable, museums are marketing themselves as tourist attractions. To make locations into destinations, tourism is staging the world as a museum of itself. Both promise to deliver heritage. Although heritage is marketed as something old, she argues that heritage is actually a new mode of cultural production that gives a second life to dying ways of life, economies, and places. The book concludes with a lively commentary on the "good taste/bad taste" debate in the ephemeral "museum of the life world," where everyone is a curator of sorts and the process of converting life into heritage begins.

Customer Reviews:

Destinations Discussed -- Culturally Speaking.......2006-11-18

The central theme in this book is an extended answer to the big question "What does it mean to show?" It's a very broad topic. But I like the way that Kirshenblatt-Gimblett focuses her discussion by posing engaging rhetorical questions and lucid statements of interesting research topics which provide a solid base for her analysis. The variety of topics is fascinating. It's intriguing to read a single volume that deals with the history of museums in connection to tourism, Jewish self-representation in worlds' fairs, Ellis Island as a tourist site, Plimoth Plantation's living history programs, arts and folklife festivals as forms of avant-garde theater, and scholarly analysis of a catalogue of bad taste. The disparate essays are actually pretty unified as they are arranged thematically to explore how the processes of exhibiting cultural artifacts is embedded in a vast network of academic and cultural institutions, how displaying material culture is related to the construction of heritage, how the tropes and schemes of ethnographic study and display are connected with wider issues in museums and festival presentations, and a concluding chapter that examines the shifting criteria for standards of taste and its inherent relationships to the circulation of value within society. The writing is interesting and often challenging, and it opens numerous questions for further reflection and discussion.

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Issues in Cultural Tourism Studies
Melanie Smith
Manufacturer: Routledge
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

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ASIN: 0415256380

Book Description

Issues in Cultural Tourism Studies examines the phenomenon of cultural tourism in its broadest sense. Drawing on post-modern perspectives, it emphasizes the importance of popular cultural tourism; alternative or ethnic tourism; and that of working class heritage and culture. Its main focus is the role cultural tourism plays in the globalization process and the impacts of global development on culture, traditions and identity, especially for regional, ethnic and minority groups. This text combines a rigorous and academic theoretical framework with practical case studies and real-life examples, initiatives and projects drawn from both the developed and developing world.

Consuming Tradition, Manufacturing Heritage: Global Norms and Urban Forms in the Age of Tourism

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Consuming Tradition, Manufacturing Heritage: Global Norms and Urban Forms in the Age of Tourism
Nezar Alsayyad
Manufacturer: Routledge
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover

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The Production of Space

ASIN: 0415239419

Book Description

This book reintroduces the idea of the city as a territorial concept. The use of the built environment as a lens will place globalization debates in the specific context of national regional and local expression. This focus on the built environment provides a study of the city infrastructure in terms of economic, social and political issues as well as questions concerning identity.

See America First: Tourism and National Identity, 1880-1940

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A must-read for the 'academic-traveler'!
Mobile Citizenship

See America First: Tourism and National Identity, 1880-1940
Shaffer Ms , and Marguerite S. Shaffer
Manufacturer: Smithsonian
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

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Working At Play: A History of Vacations in the United States
Devil's Bargains: Tourism in the Twentieth-Century American West
Sacred Places: American Tourist Attractions in the Nineteenth Century
Seeing and Being Seen: Tourism in the American West
More Than Just a Game: Sports in American Life Since 1945 (Columbia Histories of Modern American Life)

ASIN: 1560989769

Book Description

"See America First is the first comprehensive assessment of tourism and the formation of a twentieth-century American identity. The voyage of discovery is both individual and national, cultural and personal. . . . Shaffer shows how local and regional businesses collaborated to create a national message that a willing nation embraced." -Hal Rothman, University of Nevada-Las Vegas

In See America First, Marguerite Shaffer chronicles the birth of modern American tourism between 1880 and 1940, linking tourism to the simultaneous growth of national transportation systems, print media, a national market, and a middle class with money and time to spend on leisure. Focusing on the See America First slogan and idea employed at different times by railroads, guidebook publishers, Western boosters, and Good Roads advocates, she describes both the modern marketing strategies used to promote tourism and the messages of patriotism and loyalty embedded in the tourist experience. She shows how tourists as consumers participated in the search for a national identity that could assuage their anxieties about American society and culture.

Generously illustrated with images from advertisements, guidebooks, and travelogues, See America First demonstrates that the promotion of tourist landscapes and the consumption of tourist experiences were central to the development of an American identity

Customer Reviews:

A must-read for the 'academic-traveler'!.......2002-01-04

I speak as both an academic and general reader when I say that Marguerite S. Shaffer's See America First: Tourism and National Identity, 1880-1940, is a "must-read" for anyone interested in travel, tourism, history, nature, marketing, and American culture in general. In December, I received Shaffer's book as a gift right before I went home for winter break - a time when most college students like myself would prefer not to even look at anything that resembles a textbook. However, I found that once embarking on the engaging text, I was hard-pressed to stop!

See America First opens with a passage straight out of a sentimental movie: it is the spring of 1892, and Methodist minister Stephen Merritt is leaving his home in New York City to venture across the country. He writes of his anticipation that he will "see the land (he) fondly call(s) (his) own" (1) on the tour to Alaska and California. Each chapter is introduced in an equally engaging manner, and sheds light on general themes. Shaffer's work is well-organized as it chronicles western tourism after the Civil War - as the nation tried to bind itself together after a divisive four-year struggle at the same time that the seemingly boundless west was rapidly finishing its settlement. As a culture, the nation wanted to create for itself a type of heritage that older European countries could proclaim - but remain unique in its identity. By connecting the emerging consumer culture in the United States with the marketing "national tourism," Shaffer presents a substantiated argument that the shared national identity of America and its values were actually inspired by popular Western mythology. The actual See America First movement thus serves as the bulk of her exhaustively researched work. We learn of the developments in transportation, technology, and communication that the government endorsed in an effort to reach its goal. However, Shaffer also affirms that this was not a "one-sided" lecture by commercialism - it was the foundation for a larger dialogue of values and ideals.

As a history and American studies major, I can't help but appreciate the fact that I now know how these "attractions" got their birth - and how the railroad, hotels, and leisure culture worked together to symbolize the ideal America. On an academic note, Shaffer's bibliography is very extensive - which is useful to anyone who would like to independently follow up on a particular aspect of her original research. Of course, there are also numerous visual features including postcards, photos, and advertisements ("The Call of the Mountains!...Vacations in Glacier National Park" proclaimed one that most readily comes to my mind), all of which served as a way for me to connect with those who enjoyed the national parks and west long before I did. Personally, that is the best part of See America First: it conjured up fond memories of my own trips out west with my family. Even though I was a youth, I remember a powerful sense of beauty, purity, and idealism as we spent time at Glacier, Yellowstone, and other National Parks.

On first reading, I flew through See America First too quickly, so I am now re-reading it just for enjoyment and additional nostalgia - and I am also making plans with my family to take another two-week tour this summer. I look forward to future books by Shaffer!

Mobile Citizenship.......2001-12-06

Gasoline prices falling. The automobile industry urging us to "Keep America Rolling." Chambers of Commerce and tourist bureaus asking us to do our patriotic duty: travel. The national parks opening their gates for free, offering a glimpse of the sublime in service of communal "healing." The aftermath of September 11? Yes, but as Marguerite S. Shaffer shows us in See America First: Tourism and National Identity, 1880-1940 (Washington, DC: Smithsonian, 2001), we've been down this road before.

Shaffer chronicles the rise of what she calls "national tourism" at the turn of the 20th century, in which touring was characterized as not only a ritual of American citizenship but also a form of "virtuous consumption" (39), the perfect melding of patriotism and commercial progress. In the wake of the Civil War, travel was promoted as a means of witnessing the unfolding of a flourishing, united nation: by "consuming" the national narrative through historical landmarks and the spectacle of nature, tourists were able to participate in a larger dialogue about personal and public memory (e.g., through scrapbooks and journals), individual and national identity. Of course, these patriotic questers required an America worthy of their efforts. Enter the See America First movement, which Shaffer describes as a "Western booster campaign" whose purpose was to establish the West as the geographical, commercial, and political equal of the Northeastern United States while simultaneously promoting the "ideal" West as the "true" America. See America First exploited the existing ideological infrastructure of Manifest Destiny to create a "canon" of American tourist attractions that embodied a distinct national mythology based on such nostalgic images as untamed nature, noble savages, and small-town life. Sustaining this mythology, however, required a massive physical infrastructure of roads, hotels, and tourist attractions--all heavily subsidized by boosters and government officials. Thus the marketing of the American West reified a cultural meaning of tourism that depended as much on an expansive rhetoric of commercialism as an expansive body of land.

Like all good histories, See America First not only reveals a vivid past but brings its themes to bear on our own urgent and fraught present. Two examples are particularly worthy of mention. First, Shaffer observes that in the unprecedented prosperity of the post-World War II era, tourism became less a patriotic rite of passage than "the ultimate quest for self-indulgent individual pleasure and hedonistic personal freedom in a culture of mass consumption that revolved around spectacle, fantasy, and desire" (320). These post-September 11 days represent the inverse of that situation: a lengthy period of economic expansion has come to an abrupt and painful end, and travel is being promoted as an antidote to the fear and unease caused by the terrorist attacks and a patriotic defense of "our way of life." Second, this re-emergence of national tourism as a form of virtuous consumption offers us a cautionary tale. For as Shaffer argues, "mobile citizenship . . . redefined political rights in consumer terms, celebrating seeing over speaking, purchasing over voting, and traveling over participating" (6). Given the recent bailout of the travel and tourism industry, the voluntary forfeiture of civil liberties in the name of the war on terrorism, and the daily exhortations to keep the world free for democracy by spending, spending, spending . . . this argument is as timely as it is original.

Book Description

At first glance, the relationships among tourists, tourism maps, and the spaces of tourism seem straightforward enough: tourists use maps to find their way to and through the sites of history, culture, nature, or recreation represented there. Less apparent is how tourism maps and those using them construct such spaces and identities. As the essays in Mapping Tourism clearly demonstrate, the extraordinary interaction of work with leisure and the everyday with the exotic makes tourism maps ideal sites for exploring the contested construction of place and identity.

Construction sites in the "New Berlin," Alabama's civil rights trail, Québec City, a California ghost town, and Bangkok's sex trade are among the spaces the essays examined. Taken together, these essays allow us to see tourist space as it truly is: contested, ever changing, and replete with issues of power.

Contributors: Mary Curran, Eastern Connecticut State U; Dydia DeLyser, Louisiana State U; Owen J. Dwyer, Indiana U; John R. Gold, Oxford Brookes U; Margaret M. Gold, U of North London; Rob Shields; Karen E. Till, U of Minnesota. Stephen P. Hanna is assistant professor of geography at Mary Washington College. Vincent J. Del Casino Jr. is assistant professor in geography and the liberal studies program at California State University, Long Beach.

Marketing and Public Relations Handbook for Museums, Galleries, and Heritage Attractions
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Marketing and Public Relations Handbook for Museums, Galleries, and Heritage Attractions
Sue Runyard
Manufacturer: AltaMira Press
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

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Museum Strategy and Marketing : Designing Missions, Building Audiences, Generating Revenue and Resources

Museum Branding: How to Create and Maintain Image, Loyalty, and Support

Marketing the Museum (Heritage : Care-Preservation-Management)

Marketing for Cultural Organisations: New strategies for attracting audiences to classical music , dance, museums, theatre and opera.

Arts Marketing

ASIN: 0742504077

Book Description

This definitive guide describes the role of marketing and effective marketing and public relations techniques any museum or heritage site can utilize.

Cultural Tourism: Global And Local Perspectives

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Cultural Tourism: Global And Local Perspectives

Manufacturer: Haworth Hospitality Press
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

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Cultural Tourism: The Partnership Between Tourism and Cultural Heritage Management

ASIN: 0789031175

Marketing Heritage: Archaeology and the Consumption of the Past

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Baram and Rowan come out with an informative compilation

Marketing Heritage: Archaeology and the Consumption of the Past
Rowan Yorke
Manufacturer: AltaMira Press
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

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Cultural Tourism: The Partnership Between Tourism and Cultural Heritage Management
Destination Culture: Tourism, Museums, and Heritage
The Tourist: A New Theory of the Leisure Class
Loot, Legitimacy and Ownership: The Ethical Crisis in Archaeology (Duckworth Debates in Archaeology)

ASIN: 0759103429

Book Description

Within this edited volume, original case studies from well-known sites throughout the world are presented to address the complex interaction between archaeology and nationalist, political, and commercial policies. This book should appeal to archaeologists, applied anthropologists, tourism and economic development specialists, and historic preservationists alike, as well others with an interest in the preservation of archaeological sites as historic locales.

Customer Reviews:

Baram and Rowan come out with an informative compilation.......2005-12-24

This book is a comprehensive introduction to a group of case studies that focuses on the constant influx of heritage management issues. The book seeks to present and provide commentary on contributions both positive and negative, and on how to solve them. Commodification and consumption of international past is a key issue to this text, and it should be a staple reader to anyone interested in national parks, marketing, heritage management, hospitality, and historical reconstruction. This book approaches heritage in sundry ways. Most notably, this book provides an interesting introduction to various modern problems heritage confronts.

Culture on Tour: Ethnographies of Travel

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Culture on Tour: Ethnographies of Travel
Edward M. Bruner
Manufacturer: University Of Chicago Press
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

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The Tourist Gaze (Published in association with Theory, Culture & Society)
Native Tours: The Anthropology of Travel and Tourism
Tourists and Tourism: A Reader
Destination Culture: Tourism, Museums, and Heritage
The Tourist: A New Theory of the Leisure Class

ASIN: 0226077632

Book Description

Recruited to be a lecturer on a group tour of Indonesia, Edward M. Bruner decided to make the tourists aware of tourism itself. He photographed tourists photographing Indonesians, asking the group how they felt having their pictures taken without their permission. After a dance performance, Bruner explained to the group that the exhibition was not traditional, but instead had been set up specifically for tourists. His efforts to induce reflexivity led to conflict with the tour company, which wanted the displays to be viewed as replicas of culture and to remain unexamined. Although Bruner was eventually fired, the experience became part of a sustained exploration of tourist performances, narratives, and practices.

Synthesizing more than twenty years of research in cultural tourism, Culture on Tour analyzes a remarkable variety of tourist productions, ranging from safari excursions in Kenya and dance dramas in Bali to an Abraham Lincoln heritage site in Illinois. Bruner examines each site in all its particularity, taking account of global and local factors, as well as the multiple perspectives of the various actors—the tourists, the producers, the locals, and even the anthropologist himself. The collection will be essential to those in the field as well as to readers interested in globalization and travel.

The Politics of World Heritage: Negotiating Tourism and Conservation (Current Themes in Tourism)

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The Politics of World Heritage: Negotiating Tourism and Conservation (Current Themes in Tourism)

Manufacturer: Multilingual Matters
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover

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