Cultural and heritage tourism : whose agenda?

There continues to be a substantial gap between tourist-centred thinking about cultural and heritage tourism and the thinking that is characteristic of those who are from within the cultural and heritage industries. This paper asks the question "whose agenda?" when considering cultural and heritage tourism. If two recent "events" are any guide, the tourism industry, in all its guises, is not the most important stakeholder in the cultural and heritage tourism arena, despite the significance of "culture" and "heritage" as resources for tourism (at least, not in the narrow sense of cultural and heritage tourism as it pertains to museums and heritage sites). The two "events" consist of the recent Congresses of the International Council of Museums (in Melbourne, 1998 and Barcelona, 2001) and the spate of charters that have emanated out of heritage bodies like ICOMOS, ICOM and the AHC. The paper analyses these as a way of articulating the need for a much better understanding, by the tourism industry, of the significant and complex issues facing museums and heritage site managers. It is apparent, from considering only these two "windows" onto the cultural and heritage world, that the cultural and heritage tourism agenda is one to which the tourism industry does not have a primary claim

Whose penis is that on parade? : history and tourism : intertextual representations of Florence

There are various complex representations that produce ‘Florence’ and the visitor is unavoidably ensnared in them. This paper explores the interrelationship between the various historical representations of the city – the myth of Renaissance Florence and the recent revisionist constructions of the 15th century – and suggests that a process of intertextuality is at work in the tourist Florence. Further, the paper explores the coincidence of Florence as a specular culture in the 15th century and a tourist display culture in the 21st century and what this coincidence reveals about the role of representation in both past and present

Taboo desires? : James Baldwin, African Americans, homo-eroticism and the frontiers of mind/place/race and sex

This essay charts a powerful triad of frontier/border crossings: the mobility of imagination, of places real and imagined and of sexual desires, obsessions and behaviours that criss-cross national boundaries, racial divides and notions of ‘normality’, that mobilize a transgressive and ‘secret’ self-made all the more potent by words like ‘taboo’. My mode of analysis is remembrance, a type of archaeology of the self/body that attempts to recall the power of these frontier/border crossings and the implications of such a narrative for our understanding of the complex ways imagination, desire, corporeal travel, racial cartographies and sexual behaviour are animated and performed in motion, where everything is improvised, fluid and lacking fixity (see Eguchi 2015). Only in retrospection is there a type of stasis, a pinning down in analysis, the illusion of solidity when, in fact, there was none at all. I have chosen a narrative mode because of its constant drive forward, its relentless movement, its fusion of action and time, its ability to reshape time and place, its focus on character and its first-person capacities. But I also employ narration with extreme caution because of its often inbuilt teleology, its plot determination and its urge for resolution. These aspects of narrative will be eschewed. One thing that cannot be ignored is that my narrative/analysis is a representation of fluidities that are, almost wholly, experienced outside of representation. However, there is no way this conundrum can be easily circumnavigated

History and tourism : intertextual representations of Florence

The act of worldmaking involves various and complex representations that “produce” places, cultures, institutions, individuals, and heritages. The subject has emerged as a strong concept in the recent conceptuality of Tourism Studies/Tourism Sciences. In this review article, Staiff makes it clear that a lead heritage locale or tourist destination city like Florence (and visitors to Florence!) is (are) unavoidably ensnared in such practices. In this article, the reviewer explores the interrelationship between the various historical representations of the city, and in particular, the myth of Renaissance Florence and the recent revisionist constructions of the 15th century. It suggests that a process of intertextuality is at work in both “tourist Florence,” as a place, and in the way the visitor makes sense of the city within networks of meaning continually being created. Further, this review article explores the coincidence of Florence as a specular culture in the 15th century—one where everything is deemed to mirror everything else—and a tourist display culture in the 21st century and what this coincidence reveals about the role of representation in the past and the role of representation and worldmaking in the present through the mediating agency and authority of tourism, and its collaborative inscriptive industries

Re-Imagining Heritage Interpretation: Enchanting the Past-Future

This book challenges traditional approaches to heritage interpretation and offers an alternative theoretical architecture to the current research and practice. Russell Staiff suggests that the dialogue between visitors and heritage places has been too focused on learning outcomes, and so heritage interpretation has become dominated by psychology and educational theory, and over-reliant on outdated thinking. Using his background as an art historian and experience teaching heritage and tourism courses, Russell Staiff weaves personal observation with theory in an engaging and lively way. He recognizes that the 'digital revolution' has changed forever the way that people interact with their environment and that a new approach is needed

Strategically planning heritage interpretation for visitors : issues and processes at Minnamurra Rainforest Centre, NSW

This paper describes the strategic planning of interpretation for an established tourism destination – the Minnamurra Rainforest Centre, in Budderoo National Park, NSW. There is a surprising paucity of models in the interpretation and environmental education literature. This paper examines a research-driven planning process for interpretation that utilised the McArthur and Hall (1996) model, as a starting point, and discusses the research that resulted in a considerably expanded version of their approach and more integrative process. The Minnamurra Rainforest Centre case study illustrates why strategic planning is critical for interpretation if such programs are to respond to the demands of contemporary heritage interpretation for visitors

Swords sandals and togas : the cinematic imaginary and the tourist experiences of Roman heritage sites

This chapter is an exploration and meditation about some aspects of the imagination as it applies to the ways in which certain iconic heritage sites are visualised. It takes seriously the power of the imagination in visitor engagement and in the 'dialogue' that is established when the visitor encounters material culture that has already been marked out as both 'heritage' and 'historical'. In particular, the spotlight is on material culture that is overdetermined by the sheer density of representations under the descriptor of 'Ancient Rome'. The proposition is thus. There operates a type of heritage iconography when it comes to certain sites and certain periods of history: for example, ancient Rome and ancient Greece, Medieval Europe, Feudal China, eighteenth century aristocratic and revolutionary Europe, especially France, nineteenth century rural and urban European landscapes and various twentieth century war sites. The tourist brings to the encounter/production of place a strong set of mental images and associations that, in a sense, 'give life' to the materiality and distinctly lifeless forms of ruined buildings, crumbling walls, traces of road or remnants of the past now dwarfed by subsequent urban developments. In the case of ancient Rome, the tourist (seemingly marked neither by geography nor culture in a globalised economy) carries in their imagination a strong image of life in the time of the Romans. Imagination and memory, of course, are intimately connected (McGinn 2004), but the focus here is not on memory per se, but on the visual repertoire that memory conjures. The cinema is a particularly rich archive for the evolution of a heritage iconography although it is, of course, not the only one. Museum objects, illustrated histories, television documentaries, paintings, computer games, photography, Google images, descriptions in historical novels and in histories (etc.) all contribute to what has become a standardised and profoundly ahistorical and ageographical set of images about life in ancient Rome. My particular interest is cinematic representations (including television series) because cinematic virtual worlds are complete in a way that archaeological sites never can be. And these virtual worlds feed the tourist imagination

From 'sacred images' to 'tourist images'? : the fourteenth-century frescoes of Santa Croce, Florence

In 2006, Cambridge University Press published a collection of essays entitled Renaissance Florence: A Social History. Many of the leading Florentine scholars working in English are represented in this volume and together they build on the historical research that has been undertaken about the Tuscan city in recent decades and extend this work by assembling a composite picture of the social life of the city from the fourteenth to the sixteenth century ce. This time frame is, of course, the three centuries synonymous with Florence’s reputation as the crucible of the Italian Renaissance. In his conclusion, Jonathan Nelson’s contribution about sacred spaces and the memorial chapels in Florentine churches notes the radical disjunction between the family chapels of the distant past – with their decorations, sacred objects and rituals – and what they have become in the present

Heritage interpretation in the digital age : a new paradigm?

This paper examines the ways heritage sites and tourists engage, hypothesizing about a necessary re-thinking of heritage interpretation for visitors that goes beyond interpretation as the transfer of information/significance/knowledge as didacticism grounded in learning theory, and moves towards an interpretation praxis that embraces an embodied experience and an experience where vision and visuality is privileged. Both these dimensions are at the forefront of the ways digital media are reconfiguring the relationship between heritage places and visitors and perhaps producing a new paradigm for heritage interpretation

Communicating heritage values : re-thinking heritage interpretation in an age of digital media

This paper examines the ways heritage and tourists engage, hypothesizing about a necessary re-thinking of heritage interpretation for visitors that goes beyond interpretation as the transfer of information/significance/knowledge as didacticism grounded in learning theory, and moves towards an interpretation praxis that embraces an embodied experience and an experience where vision and visuality is privileged. Both these dimensions are at the forefront of the ways digital media is reconfiguring the relationship between heritage places and visitors