Creating Heritage for Tourism

Catherine Palmer, Jacqueline Tivers

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781351331869
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Hospitality, Travel & Tourism Industry
• Index: Business

What does 'heritage' mean in the twenty-first century? Traditional ideas of heritage involve places where objects, landscapes, people and ideas are venerated and reproduced over time as an inheritance for future generations. To speak of heritage is to speak of a relationship between the past, the present and the future. However, it is a past recreated for economic gain, hence sectors such as culinary tourism, ecotourism, cultural tourism and film tourism have employed the heritage label to attract visitors.

This interdisciplinary book furthers understanding on how heritage is socially constructed, interpreted and experienced within different geographic and cultural contexts, in both Western and non-Western settings. Subjects discussed include Welsh linguistic heritage, tango, mushroom tourism, Turkish coffee, literary tourism and the techniques employed to construct tourist accommodation. By focusing upon heritage creation in the context of tourism, the book moves beyond traditional debates about 'authentic heritage' to focus on how something becomes heritage for use in the present.

This timely volume will be of interest to students and researchers in tourism, heritage studies, geography, museum studies and cultural studies.

1 Heritage for tourism

Creating a link between the past and the present

Catherine Palmer and Jacqueline Tivers

The traditional understanding of heritage is that it refers to stories about the past drawn from the events, activities, places, objects, landscapes, people and ideas venerated and reproduced over time as an inheritance for future generations. To speak of heritage is, therefore, to speak of a relationship that brings the past into the present. However, this is a socially constructed relationship because it is based upon the concerns of those individuals and groups that choose how the past should be used in the present. As such, what is labelled heritage in the present tells us as much about the here and now as it does about what took place in the past. The association of heritage with the notion that something of value, an inheritance, is being handed down for safe keeping to a legatee in the present is a well established theme in the literature, so it is not our intention to go over existing arguments (see Lowenthal 1998, Ashworth and Tunbridge 2000, Samuel 2012). Our intention here is to explore the ways in which that which is labelled as heritage is created in the first place and what this created heritage communicates about the experience of the past in the present. By focusing upon heritage creation in the context of tourism we move beyond debates about the extent to which what is presented is or is not ‘authentic heritage’ to focus on how something becomes heritage for use in the present.

The sense of there being a legatee is important here because it means that the experience that is created is always personalised; there is always a me, us, our or we written into the uses that are made of the past. Personalising the past is one of the ways in which individuals and communities come to understand their place in the world and its relationship with the world of others. As Graburn (2001: 68) argues heritage ‘as both “own” and “owned” makes necessary the consideration of inter-generational cultural continuity, as well as the conception of “others” and “alterity”’. This is not to say that everyone who encounters the past as heritage through tourism feels a personal connection with what is presented; what matters is that the potential to do so lies at the heart of every heritage experience. This is important because the link between the past and the present needs to be understood on the basis of a felt experience with a past that matters in order to encourage people to visit heritage sites. Indeed, Timothy and Boyd (2006) have argued that the ability of heritage sites to create affective social, psychological and historical links with individuals highlights the significance of heritage in the twenty-first century.

This personalised felt experience could be in terms of the synergy created between the heritage values manifest in a particular site and the personal values of a visiting tourist. These values might, for example, relate to conserving the heritage of a region’s natural biodiversity; thus UNESCO World Heritage Status has been granted to national parks that include the Everglades in Florida, The Serengeti in Tanzania, The Wadden Sea in the Netherlands and the Nanda Devi and Valley of Flowers National Park in India. On the other hand, the values that attract visitors could relate to what have been described as felt kinship ties (Palmer 2005), for example those experienced by a family member visiting a former coalmine where a parent or grandparent once worked or those relating to a wider national or diasporic family (Basu 2007, Levi-Ari and Mittelberg 2008, Gouthro and Palmer 2011). Nadel-Klein provides an excellent example of the motivation behind the drive to create a personal connection between the fishing industry in Scotland, once a thriving employment sector and the local or national heritage tourist; the fishermen felt:

compelled to concretize and embody their memories in texts, collections, performances and displays – many of these housed in museums and heritage centres – so that their own descendants, as well as outside visitors, will not forget them. . . . a way of bequeathing something of ‘to a future that looks increasingly bleak’.

(2003: 173)

Although such experiences of the past relate to a past that has been socially (re)created by the present this does not mean that they are any the less enjoyable for those people who engage with the attractions and activities that comprise the heritage tourism sector. Nevertheless a heritage experience is marketed on the basis that it means something to someone and by engaging with heritage tourism the individual is made aware of the fact that he or she is engaging with a valued past, valued because it is highlighted as being significant to the present.

While the past as represented through heritage tourism is frequently offered as a safe place to visit there are clearly numerous examples where what is experienced is neither enjoyable nor uncontested, and neither does it contribute to a sense of closure between the past and the present. Sites, monuments and museums that relate to war, state-sponsored violence or genocide are illustrative of how present-day experiences of a difficult past provide a very different understanding of the notion of inheritance (Macdonald 2010, Mowatt and Chancellor 2011, Kidron 2013, Giblin 2014). The legacy of such examples has been described by Simon (2006) as ‘a terrible gift’, a useful description because it suggests that what is inherited from the past by current and future generations is the importance of ‘not forgetting’. The creation of heritage in this sense relates to the creation of a wider set of cultural values associated with acknowledging and resisting the role of violence in disrupting as well as controlling human relationships.

A heritage label thus communicates an understanding of value as defined in relation to the prevailing social, political and cultural circumstances of the present. Apaydin’s (2018) research at the medieval heritage site of Ani in eastern Turkey provides a good illustration of how use and values often go hand in hand. Despite being used as a political tool to promote nationalism ‘the heritage site also forms an important place in daily life for local communities whose relationship with the heritage site goes beyond this political level: by bringing out the meaning, value and sense of place at Ani’ (2018: 491). Value is an interesting word here because it not only refers to the beliefs and ideals frequently understood in the wider sense as being representative of a particular way of life, it also, and increasingly so today, refers to what can be gained economically from a past labelled as heritage (Choi et al. 2010, Dümcke and Gnedovsky 2013). This is because what is valued in the present is the fact that heritage sells and as a result the word ‘heritage’ is attached to an ever-increasing number of products, services and activities, within and beyond the tourism sector. In the UK for example, the Heritage Window Company sells aluminium windows for domestic housing, ‘value’ here being associated with a heritage that is defined in terms of British engineering and quality standards (www.theheritagewindowcompany.co.uk). Such an example illustrates that heritage is not only something to be visited, it can also be part of everyday life; it can be bought and installed in your own home.

The underlying narrative in the majority of examples discussed so far is that of nostalgia. Nostalgia has a long association with what Samuel (2012) refers to as Retrochic, the aesthetic use of the past to persuade people in the present to purchase or experience a range of commercial products and cultural experiences. Literary tourism is one such example, which can create a sense of nostalgia linked to a longing for the world associated with the writer (Herbert 2001, Robinson and Anderson 2002). Although not all tourists look for or experience a sense of nostalgia when engaging with the history of a particular experience (see Caton and Santos 2007) Retrochic is a powerful force in the marketing of not just heritage tourism but also products and services (Brown et al. 2003, Cattaneo and Guerini 2012, Orth and Gal 2012); for example, the Along Came Betty range of 1950s-inspired cosmetics, the retro radio, and the above-mentioned Heritage Window Company. Despite the fact that not all tourists experience a sense of nostalgia when engaging with heritage tourism – there are after all many different types of heritage on offer – this particular sentiment cannot be ignored when focusing on the creation of heritage for tourism purposes. This is largely because of its role in creating and communicating the significance of the past in the present, communicating that which should be valued and conserved for future generations. As Smith (2006: 121) notes in relation to historic houses an ‘entire nation is characterised as being overly concerned with gazing over its collective shoulder into a past reconstructed as more gentle and elegant than the present – a sense of elegance apparently personified by the country house’.

Heritage as represented by the country houses, castles, monuments and attractions that comprise the mainstay of heritage tourism does not provide a sufficiently detailed picture of the range of phenomena now claimed as ‘heritage’ for tourism purposes. Primarily for economic, but also in some cases for socio-cultural reasons, tourism sectors such as culinary tourism, ecotourism, cultural tourism and religious tourism, as well as destinations such as post conflict sites and sea ports ‘adopted’ by cruise companies, have employed the heritage label to attract tourists. Thus, the commodification of history has been extended to include the proactive production and reproduction of a multitude of heritage products and experiences (Macleod 2010, Tzanelli 2013). The island of Jersey’s tourism offering marketed as Jersey Heritage, for instance, includes not only the usual references to heritage walks and ancient heritage sites but also the island’s geological record dating back to the Ice Age. References to this record illustrate contemporary preoccupations with climate change providing an excellent example of what a focus on the past can tell us about what matters in the present:

The dramatic landscape of Jersey, its coastline and inland landscape of valleys and fields, has been shaped by long time processes of climate change. The island has an exceptional geological record for the Ice Age documenting over a quarter of a million years of successive changes.

(Jersey Heritage, ‘Ice Age Jersey’ 2018)

In many ways this is heritage as loss rather than as something to be gained, an inheritance that has been wasted rather than wisely invested for the future, hence, for example the naming of the British heritage attraction in Cornwall, The Lost Gardens of Heligan. UNESCO has attached the same description to some aspects of its World Heritage sites, for example the temple city of Khajuraho in the Himalayas includes The Lost Gardens of Khajuraho. The geological environment is not the only aspect of the past to be labelled as heritage in order to further contemporary understandings of what has been saved and what should be worth saving. Wincott (2017) provides a fascinating example of the politics of food whereby a heritage label is attached to seeds, crops and vegetables as a way to legitimise and normalise those who are considered to be appropriate guardians for the foods we eat. These guardians then go on to establish the kinds of places in which such ‘treasured’ resources should be secured, places such as seed banks and walled heritage gardens that are then managed by experts and commercially minded organisations. ‘The treasure metaphor matters because of its use in establishing and justifying the power of some interest groups over resources for food and agriculture’ (Wincott 2017: 13). Interestingly, it is not only the heritage gardens of the type mentioned above that feature as tourist attractions. The seed banks and vaults Wincott refers to have, in recent years also become an established part of the tourism sector; for example Kew Gardens’ Millennium Seed Bank at Wakehurst in south-east England. It seems that the words ‘heritage’ and ‘treasured’ more effectively communicate contemporary conservation agendas because they speak of value in relation to potential loss to future generations.

The above discussion is significant because it demonstrates that the creation of heritage extends beyond the more usual types of attractions and experiences most closely associated with heritage tourism. Attractions such as buildings, the location of specific events, the physical artefacts from the past, and the ideas and inventions of particular people all have heritage value because of their influence on the present. The drive to label an ever-expanding range of phenomena and experiences as heritage for tourism purposes never seems to wane, largely because, as noted above, the past as heritage ‘works’; it works economically and it works because it resonates with people, whether people as individuals and communities or people in terms of the human race or humanity (as is the case with heritage seeds, vegetables and crops). Our focus on the creation of heritage not only includes heritage as it relates to the built or natural environment it also encompasses intangible heritage in the form of language, dance, drinks and food as well as heritage in the form of literary works of fiction. All such aspects are imprinted with the cultural particularities of the group, community, region and nation to which they belong. This illustrates their importance for tourism because references to the heritage of a people are the mainstay of many promotional campaigns designed to attract both domestic and international tourists, whether this is in relation to the UNESCO World Heritage Sites of a country, or because the history of a particular town or city has defined it as having a distinctive heritage identity, for example Rome in Italy, Tallinn in Estonia and Petra in Jordan. Heritage is also put to work in terms of rebranding post conflict and post disaster destinations, for example the Balkan nations of former Yugoslavia – Montenegro, Serbia, Croatia, Macedonia, Slovakia and Bosnia-Herzegovina – and post-Katrina New Orleans (Gotham 2007, Vitic and Ringer 2007).

Within the context of the themes outlined above our purpose here is to explore how heritage is socially constructed; how it is created in the present, how it is ‘used’, interpreted and experienced. While the notion of heritage as a social construct is well established what is less well known is how heritage is created and with what consequences across different geographic and cultural contexts, both western and non-western. The wide-ranging examples and understandings of heritage tourism included in the chapters that follow go beyond the more usual European and North American contexts to provide significant insights into the ways in which heritage is created, used and experienced.

Chapters and case studies

The research-based contributions outlined below are drawn from many parts of the world and address a variety of contexts and subjects; for example, Brazil, Argentina, Mexico, Japan, Turkey, and Estonia, the Welsh language, the tango, mushrooms, coffee, cruise tourism and the techniques employed to construct tourist accommodation.

Following on from this chapter, Kimberly Berg focuses on Creating a destination through language: Welsh linguistic heritage in Patagonia. Berg argues that Chubut Province, in the Patagonian region of Argentina, is the site of a robust Welsh diaspora community, established in 1865 but now serving as a popular tourism destination for Welsh tourists seeking to experience the Welsh language in its pure form, spoken in the streets of the historically Welsh towns. The Welsh language has become central to a heritage narrative that recalls an idealised (though never truly realised) past wh...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Creating Heritage for Tourism
• Current Developments in the Geographies of Leisure and Tourism
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Notes on Contributors
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Heritage for Tourism: Creating a Link Between the Past and the Present
• 2 Creating a Destination through Language: Welsh Linguistic Heritage in Patagonia
• 3 Performing National Identity in Heritage Tourism: Observations from Catalonia
• 4 Heritage Defined and Maintained Through Conflict Re-enactments: The Estonian Museum of Occupations and the Forest Brothers Bunker
• 5 Constructing Heritage, Shaping Tourism: Festivals and Local Heritage Governance at Hampi World Heritage Site, Karnataka, India
• 6 Creating Heritage for Cruise Tourists
• 7 ‘It’s Tango!’: Communicating Intangible Cultural Heritage for the Dance Tourist
• 8 Holmes as Heritage: Readers, Tourism and the Making of Sherlock Holmes’s England
• 9 Creating Heritage for Tourism: ‘consuming history,’ ‘prosthetic memories’ and the popularisation of a folk hero’s story
• 10 Creating (Extra)Ordinary Heritage Through Film-Induced Tourism: The Case of Dubrovnik and Game of Thrones
• 11 Amachan: The Creation of Heritage Tourism Landscapes in Japan after the 2011 Triple Disaster
• 12 Bedrock, Metropolis and Indigenous Heritage: Rendering ‘The Rocks’ Invisible
• 13 Between the Cliffs and the Sea: St Kilda and Heritage from Afar
• 14 Made in China: Creating Heritage through Tourist Souvenirs
• 15 Creative Practices of Local Entrepreneurs Reinventing Built Heritage
• 16 Co-Creating a Heritage Hotel for a New Identity
• 17 Turkish Coffee: From Intangible Cultural Heritage to Created Tourist Experience
• 18 The Reinvention of Crab Fishing as a Local Heritage Tourism Attraction in Northeast Brazil
• 19 Creating Biocultural Heritage for Tourism: The Case of Mycological Tourism in Central Mexico
• 20 (Re)Creating Natural heritage in New Zealand: Biodiversity Conservation and Tourism Development
• Index