Destination Culture


Book Description

With the question, "What does it mean to show?", the author explores the agency of display in museums and tourist attractions. She looks at how objects are made to perform their meaning by being collected and how techniques of display, not just the things shown, convey a powerful message.







Kyoto Revisited


Book Description

There is a charm to Kyoto. Surrounded by lush green hills, the city feels alive with nature, history, culture—and tourists. At once ancient capital, modern city, and home to numerous cultural heritage sites, Kyoto looms large in the promotion of Japanese culture at home and abroad. In the wake of years of economic recession followed by the national promotion of “cool Japan” in popular culture and tourism of the twenty-first century, anthropologist Jennifer Prough sets out to examine how the city’s history and culture have been mobilized to create heritage experiences for today’s tourists. The heart of her book, Kyoto Revisited, centers on what it means to produce these for visitors, why seeing and feeling culture and tradition appeal to both domestic and international travelers, and the challenges faced by a heritage tourism city. As Prough’s study suggests, heritage has multiple meanings. It is created as interested parties—state and local, public and private—tell different stories about the past, which are marketed in response to tourists’ desire for face-to-face engagement in an experience economy. Her work examines several prominent features of Kyoto tourism, including promotion plans, heritage neighborhood renovation, the role of the seasons and traditional aesthetics in citywide events, the appeal of sites commemorating the Meiji restoration, and the trend of walking in the heritage district in a rented kimono. Throughout Prough brings together scholarship from Japanese studies, heritage studies, and the anthropology of tourism to highlight the interplay between the romantic desire for heritage tourism and the emphasis on “personal experience” (taiken) in the visitor industry today. Experience has long been an integral part of tourism—even as what counts as experience has shifted across time and place (from taking a photo to staying with locals to trying one’s hand at a traditional craft)—yet these touristic desires take on a new tinge in the experience economy. Kyoto Revisited demonstrates not only how the past has been used to construct the city’s identity and shape understandings of Japan for travelers, but also how these speak to broader trends in our contemporary moment.




Heritage and Tourism


Book Description

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.




Agritourism and Nature Tourism in California


Book Description

Agritourism has emerged as a viable financial option for many farms and ranches. Since the publication of the first edition of Agritourism and Nature Tourism, the landscape has changed as counties and local governments incorporate agritourism into their local plans. This new edition builds on the concepts of the first, and adds updated information on regulations, risk management, and new marketing trends.




The Heritage-scape


Book Description

This book explores how the mere designation of World Heritage sites can achieve UNESCO's goal of creating lasting worldwide peace. Drawing on ethnography, policy analysis, and a sophisticated fusion of anthropological theories, Di Giovine convincingly reveals the existence of a global heritage-scape and provides a detailed yet expansive look at the politics and processes, histories and structures, and the rituals and symbolisms of the interrelated phenomena of tourism, historic preservation, and UNESCO's World Heritage Convention.




Gateway to Alta California


Book Description

The story of this journey through northern Baja California's unexplored wilderness to San Diego is actually two stories, crafted by artful and incisive historian Harry Crosby. The first begins well before the expedition commences and involves world events, politics, and the characters who were destined to forge this momentous march. The second is a daily record of the trek itself, told through first-person diary excerpts and the author's own comments as he followed in their footsteps, mapping this historic route for the first time. Together, they show not only the hardships and victories of blazing the difficult trail, but the resolve of this company of fifty heroic men. Gateway to Alta California contains the author's color maps, which provide a graphic statement of the journey into terra incognita, as well as his black-and-white photos of the largely unchanged terrain. Also included are lists of all Hispanic members of the expedition party -- many identified here for the first time -- plus pertinent information on their backgrounds and future lives (including those who continued on in July of 1769 with Gaspar de Portola, seeking the port of Monterey). Book jacket.




Cultural Heritage and Tourism


Book Description

Cultural heritage is one of the most important tourism resources in the world. This book provides a comprehensive theoretical overview and applied knowledge of the issues, practices, current debates, concepts and management concerns associated with cultural heritage-based tourism. The second edition has been updated to include timely and emerging topics such as geopolitics, conflict, solidarity tourism, overtourism and climate change. It also expands on important areas such as environmental change, technology, social media, heritage economics, Indigenous knowledge and co-created experiences. This edition includes up-to-date data, statistics, references, case material, figures and pedagogical tools. It remains an important and accessible text for undergraduate and postgraduate students of cultural and heritage tourism, cultural resource management, and museum management.




Mining Heritage and Tourism


Book Description

Many former mining areas have now lost their industrial function and are now turning to tourism for regional revitalization and community economic development. The transformation process of these industrial, and in some cases derelict, mining sites and landscapes into an area of interest for tourists is a major challenge both for planners and for tourism managers. It involves complex consideration to both the preservation of the physical site and community mining heritages as well as the health, safety and environmental factors inherent in opening these vast sites to the public. Mining Heritage and Tourism includes contributions from internationally recognized authorities and is the first book to focus on the issues, challenges and potentials in redeveloping mines as cultural heritage attractions which are explored thematically throughout the book. It draws on multidisciplinary research to consider the dichotomy between heritage preservation and tourist development goals for mining heritage sites as well as to explore the practical challenges of developing these sites. These themes are illustrated by case studies from a vast range of geographical locations around the globe to offer operational insights into the planning and management of these sites for both heritage and tourism purposes, as well as innovative site management techniques. There has never before been a more comprehensive book on mining heritage tourism representing the latest developments in strategy, policy and practices. This book serves as an invaluable guide for students, researchers, academics and practitioners in the areas of Tourism and Heritage Management.




California Mission Landscapes


Book Description

“Nothing defines California and our nation’s heritage as significantly or emotionally,” says the California Mission Foundation, “as do the twenty-one missions that were founded along the coast from San Diego to Sonoma.” Indeed, the missions collectively represent the state’s most iconic tourist destinations and are touchstones for interpreting its history. Elementary school students today still make model missions evoking the romanticized versions of the 1930s. Does it occur to them or to the tourists that the missions have a dark history? California Mission Landscapes is an unprecedented and fascinating history of California mission landscapes from colonial outposts to their reinvention as heritage sites through the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Illuminating the deeply political nature of this transformation, Elizabeth Kryder-Reid argues that the designed landscapes have long recast the missions from sites of colonial oppression to aestheticized and nostalgia-drenched monasteries. She investigates how such landscapes have been appropriated in social and political power struggles, particularly in the perpetuation of social inequalities across boundaries of gender, race, class, ethnicity, and religion. California Mission Landscapes demonstrates how the gardens planted in mission courtyards over the past 150 years are not merely anachronistic but have become potent ideological spaces. The transformation of these sites of conquest into physical and metaphoric gardens has reinforced the marginalization of indigenous agency and diminished the contemporary consequences of colonialism. And yet, importantly, this book also points to the potential to create very different visitor experiences than these landscapes currently do. Despite the wealth of scholarship on California history, until now no book has explored the mission landscapes as an avenue into understanding the politics of the past, tracing the continuum between the Spanish colonial period, emerging American nationalism, and the contemporary heritage industry.