Destination Culture: Tourism, Museums, and Heritage

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Binding: Paperback Dewey Decimal Number: 306.074 EAN: 9780520209664 ISBN: 0520209664 Label: University of California Press Manufacturer: University of California Press Number Of Items: 1 Number Of Pages: 311 Publication Date: 1998-09-05 Publisher: University of California Press Studio: University of California Press
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Editorial Reviews: 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.
Spotlight customer reviews: Customer Rating: Summary: Destinations Discussed -- Culturally Speaking Comment: 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. More Reviews