Emma Waterton

Steve Watson

Laurajane Smith

This book is a response to the burgeoning interest in cultural tourism and the associated need for a coherently theorized approach for understanding the practices that such an interest creates. Cultural tourism has become an important and popular aspect of contemporary tourism studies, as well as providing a rich seam of upscale product development opportunities in the industry as a whole. Much of the related literature, however, focuses upon describing and categorizing cultural tourism from a supply-side perspective. This has prompted the taxonomizing of cultural tourists on the basis of their level of involvement and interest in cultural tourism products and/or their economic worth as a sought after market segment. There have been few recent attempts at a rigorous re-theorization of the issues beyond conventional representational theories; this book aims to fill that void. This groundbreaking volume provides a theoretical and empirical account of what it means to be a cultural or heritage tourist. It achieves this by exploring the interactions of people with places, spaces, intangible heritage and ways of life, not as linear alignments but as seductive ‘moments’ of encounter, engagement, performance and meaning-making, which are constitutive of cultural experience in its broadest sense. The book further explores encounters in cultural tourism as events that capture and constitute important social relations involving power and authority, self-consciousness and social position, gender and space, history and the present. It also explores the consequences these insights have for our understanding of culture and heritage and its management in the context of tourist activity. In capturing the ‘cultural moment’, this book provides a better understanding of the motivations, on-site activities, meaning constructions and other cultural work done by both tourists and tourist operators. The volume confronts and explores the cultural, political and economical interrelations between culture, heritage and the tourism industry. In so doing, it also investigates how this co-mingling of identity, representation and social life may be better apprehended with the wider shift in critical thought towards notions of affect and performativity. The book is a fundamental and influential contribution to research in this field. It will be of significant value to students, academics and researchers interested in this broad topic area.

The Cultural Moment in Tourism

Russell Staiff

Robyn Bushell

The complex relationship between heritage places and people, in the broadest sense, can be considered dialogic, a communicative act that has implications for both sides of the ‘conversation’. This is the starting point for Heritage and Tourism . However, the ‘dialogue’ between visitors and heritage sites is complex. ‘Visitors’ have, for many decades, become synonymous with ‘tourists’ and the tourism industry and so the dialogic relationship between heritage place and tourists has produced a powerful critique of this often contested relationship. Further, at the heart of the dialogic relationship between heritage places and people is the individual experience of heritage where generalities give way to particularities of geography, place and culture, where anxieties about the past and the future mark heritage places as sites of contestation, sites of silences, sites rendered political and ideological, sites powerfully intertwined with representation, sites of the imaginary and the imagined. Under the aegis of the term ‘dialogues’ the heritage/tourism interaction is reconsidered in ways that encourage reflection about the various communicative acts between heritage places and their visitors and the ways these are currently theorized, so as to either step beyond – where possible – the ontological distinctions between heritage places and tourists or to re-imagine the dialogue or both. Heritage and Tourism is thus an important contribution to understanding the complex relationship between heritage and tourism.

Place, Encounter, Engagement

Heritage and Tourism

Divya P. Tolia-Kelly

Heritage and its economies are driven by affective politics and consolidated through emotions such as pride, awe, joy and pain. In the humanities and social sciences, there is a widespread acknowledgement of the limits not only of language and subjectivity, but also of visuality and representation. Social scientists, particularly within cultural geography and cultural studies, have recently attempted to define and understand that which is more-than-representational, through the development of theories of affect, assemblage, post-humanism and actor network theory, to name a few. While there have been some recent attempts to draw these lines of thinking more forcefully into the field of heritage studies, this book focuses for the first time on relating heritage with the politics of affect. The volume argues that our engagements with heritage are almost entirely figured through the politics of affective registers such as pain, loss, joy, nostalgia, pleasure, belonging or anger. It brings together a number of contributions that collectively - and with critical acuity - question how researchers working in the field of heritage might begin to discover and describe affective experiences, especially those that are shaped and expressed in moments and spaces that can be, at times, intensely personal, intimately shared and ultimately social. It explores current theoretical advances that enable heritage to be affected, released from conventional understandings of both 'heritage-as-objects' and 'objects-as-representations' by opening it up to a range of new meanings, emergent and formed in moments of encounter. Whilst representational understandings of heritage are by no means made redundant through this agenda, they are destabilized and can thus be judged anew in light of these developments. Each chapter offers a novel and provocative contribution, provided by an interdisciplinary team of researchers who are thinking theoretically about affect through landscapes, practices of commemoration, visitor experience, site interpretation and other heritage work.

Heritage Affect and Emotion

Helaine Silverman

In this textbook we see heritage in action in indigenous and vernacular communities, in urban development and regeneration schemes, in expressions of community, in acts of nostalgia and memorialization and counteracts of forgetting, in museums and other spaces of representation, in tourism, in the offices of those making public policy, and in the politics of identity and claims toward cultural property. Whether renowned or local, tangible or intangible, the entire heritage enterprise, at whatever scale, is by now inextricably embedded in “value”. The global context requires a sanguine approach to heritage in which the so-called critical stance is not just theorized in a rarefied sphere of scholarly lexical gymnastics, but practically engaged and seen to be doing things in the world.

Making the Past in the Present

Heritage in Action

"This book explores heritage from a wide range of perspectives and disciplines and in doing so provides a distinctive and deeply relevant survey of the field as it is currently researched, understood and practiced around the world. Furthermore it establishes and develops through its various sections and chapters an accessible and clearly presented vision of heritage as a cultural process designed for use by students, advance scholars and practitioners alike. This book provides both critical insight and food for thought, directing the reader to key texts in the various aspects of the field and charting a course for future research"--

The Palgrave Handbook of Contemporary Heritage Research

This book presents a new way of understanding heritage tourism that focuses on what people feel and not just what they see. Traditionally, semiotics points to the study of signs and symbols, and how we use them to make sense of the world. Here semiotics is extended into our other senses as part of what it means to experience heritage as tourists.

The Semiotics of Heritage Tourism

Heritage and its economies are driven by affective politics and consolidated through emotions such as pride, awe, joy and pain. In the humanities and social sciences, there is a widespread acknowledgement of the limits not only of language and subjectivity, but also of visuality and representation. Social scientists, particularly within cultural geography and cultural studies, have recently attempted to define and understand that which is more-than-representational, through the development of theories of affect, assemblage, post-humanism and actor network theory, to name a few. While there have been some recent attempts to draw these lines of thinking more forcefully into the field of heritage studies, this book focuses for the first time on relating heritage with the politics of affect. The volume argues that our engagements with heritage are almost entirely figured through the politics of affective registers such as pain, loss, joy, nostalgia, pleasure, belonging or anger. It brings together a number of contributions that collectively - and with critical acuity - question how researchers working in the field of heritage might begin to discover and describe affective experiences, especially those that are shaped and expressed in moments and spaces that can be, at times, intensely personal, intimately shared and ultimately social. It explores current theoretical advances that enable heritage to be affected, released from conventional understandings of both ’heritage-as-objects’ and ’objects-as-representations’ by opening it up to a range of new meanings, emergent and formed in moments of encounter. Whilst representational understandings of heritage are by no means made redundant through this agenda, they are destabilized and can thus be judged anew in light of these developments. Each chapter offers a novel and provocative contribution, provided by an interdisciplinary team of researchers who are thinking theoretically about affect through landscapes, practices of commemoration, visitor experience, site interpretation and other heritage work.

Politics, practices and infrastructures

Heritage, Affect and Emotion

Richard Hyde

Mark Thomson

Wendy Cheshire

The built environment is responsible for an estimated forty-five per cent of all greenhouse gas emissions. As the greatest opportunities for reducing these emissions occur during the briefing and design processes, the pathway to better design lies in preparing environmental briefs, and using these to drive building design and produce buildings of high environmental performance. This process-driven book looks at the theoretical issues involved in an environmental brief, and outlines methods by which architects can approach the writing of a brief that considers all aspects of the natural and the built environment, and relates these concepts to a number of case studies from around the world.

Steve Watson

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