Examining international case studies including USA, Asia, Australia and New Zealand, Laurajane Smith identifies and explores the use of heritage throughout the world.

Challenging the idea that heritage value is self-evident, and that things must be preserved because they have an inherent importance, Smith forcefully demonstrates that heritage value is not inherent in physical objects or places, but rather that these objects and places are used to give tangibility to the values that underpin different communities and to assert and affirm these values.

A practically grounded accessible examination of heritage as a cultural practice, The Uses of Heritage is global in its benefit to students and field professionals alike.

Uses of heritage

Keywords: a Vocabulary of Culture and Society

Mostafa ADIMY Directeur de Recherches à l’INRIA Dir. de thèse Ionel S. CIUPERCA Mâıtre de Conférence à l’Université Lyon 1 Examinateur Michael C. MACKEY Directeur de Recherche à l’Université Mc GIll Dir. de thèse Sylvie MÉLÉARD Professeur à l’Ecole Polytechnique Examinatrice Sophie MERCIER Professeur à l’Université de Pau et des Pays de l’Adour Rapportrice Laurent PUJO-MENJOUET Mâıtre de Conférence à l’Université Lyon 1 Dir. de thèse Marta TYRAN-KAMIŃSKA Professeur à l’University of Silesia Examinatrice Bernard YCART Professeur à l’Université de Grenoble Rapporteur

Sous la direction de

We would like to take this chance to welcome readers to this new journal and sketch out some of its aims at what we think is an exciting and challenging time for work on tourism.The main impetus for founding a new tourism journal was that in our view and in the minds of many key contributors to the tourism field, tourism studies had become stale, tired, repetitive and lifeless. At a time when John Urry has just launched his Sociology Beyond Societies ‐ Mobilities for the Twenty-First Century (in which mobilities are argued to have ‘reconstituted social life in uneven and complex ways’); when Anthony Giddens’ 1999 Reith Lectures were called ‘Runaway World’ and when the subject of the 2000 Theory Culture & Society conference in Finland was cosmopolitanism, it seems almost impossible not to see tourist studies as one of the most exciting and relevant topics in these transnational times (Urry, 2000; Giddens, 2000).And yet, it is not. The first trouble with tourism studies, and paradoxically also one of its sources of interest, is that its research object, ‘tourism’ has grown very dramatically and quickly and that the tourism research community is relatively new. Indeed at times it has been unclear which was growing more rapidly ‐ tourism or tourism research. Part of this trouble is that tourist studies has simply tried to track and record this staggering expansion, producing an enormous record of instances, case studies and variations. One reason for this is that tourist studies has been dominated by policy led and industry sponsored work so the analysis tends to internalize industry led priorities and perspectives, leaving the . . . research subject to the imperatives of policy, in the sense that one expects the researcher to assume as his own an objective of social control that will allow the tourist product to be more finely tuned to the demands of the international market. (Picard, 1996: 103) Part of this trouble is also that this effort has been made by people whose disciplinary origins do not include the tools necessary to analyse and theorize the complex cultural and social processes that have unfolded. How many schools of tourism hire the specialist skills of social and cultural theory? Most tourist studies © 2001 sage publications

The trouble with tourism and travel theory

Authenticity and sincerity in tourism.

"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.

Destination Culture: Tourism, Museums, and Heritage

"Throwing open to debate the practices of museums, galleries, and festivals, Exhibiting Cultures probes the often politically charged relationships among aesthetics, contexts, and implicit assumptions that govern how cultural differences and art objects are displayed. This innovative volume brings together museum directors and curators, art historians, anthropologists, folklorists, and historians to examine how diverse settings have appealed to audiences and represented the intentions and cultures of the makers of objects. The essays address such major issues in the politics of culture as how the learned experience of everyday life is used to make exhibitions comprehensible, what happens to minority and exotic arts when they are assimilated into the hegemonic context of the "great" museums, and why ethnographic museums have been neglected in an age of museum expansions" -- p.[4] of cover.

Exhibiting Cultures: The Poetics and Politics of Museum Display

(2004). Intangible Heritage as Metacultural Production1. Museum International: Vol. 56, No. 1-2, pp. 52-65.

Intangible Heritage as Metacultural Production

Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, a world-renowned anthropologist, is a professor at the Performance Studies Department of the Tisch School of the Arts, New York, where she teaches the history and theory of museums, world fairs and tourism in conjunction with the school’s Museum Studies programme. Her work, Destination Culture: Tourism, Museums and Heritage (1998) explores the museum as a historical formation and emergent medium in relation to its changing role in society. Barbara Kirshenblatt also consults for many museums, most recently the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum and the Museum of the History of Polish Jews (Warsaw).

Intangible Heritage as Metacultural Production1: Intangible Heritage as Metacultural Production

Mayers Ranch is a tourist attraction near Nairobi, privately owned by the Mayers, a British ex-colonial family who are now Kenyan citizens. The site features Maasai "tribal" dancing followed by tea and scones on the Mayers' lawn.' We will argue that the site enacts a colonial drama of the savage/pastoral Maasai and the genteel British, playing upon the explicit contrast between the wild and the civilized so prevalent in colonial discourse and sustained in East African tourism. The master narrative of tribal resistance and colonial contain-

Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett

Papers

Destination Culture: Tourism, Museums, and Heritage

Exhibiting Cultures: The Poetics and Politics of Museum Display

Intangible Heritage as Metacultural Production

Intangible Heritage as Metacultural Production1: Intangible Heritage as Metacultural Production

Maasai on the Lawn: Tourist Realism in East Africa