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.
1. Theoretical Issues 2. Tourism and Heritage - Pluralist Imaginings 3. Heritage Discourse and its Representations 4. Sandals and Togas. The Cinematic Imaginative and the Tourist Experiences of Roman Heritage sites. 5. Empty Promises and Historical Amnesia. The Dangers of Heritage Tourism as a Development Strategy. 6. Complexifying the notion of heritage inscription and the unauthorised interpretation 7. Using immersive and interactive approaches to interpreting traumatic experiences for tourists. potentials and limits 8. Country Matters. the rural historic as an authorised heritage discourse - in England 9. Shanghai Expo. meeting the world, hosting a people 10. Surface Collection… integration of traveller, travel sensibility and discipline. ways of seeing and being in place 11. Cambodian experiences of the manifestation and management dynamics of intangible heritage and tourism at a World Heritage Site 12. Heritage for Sale. the misrepresentation of voice and Indigeneity in Northern Chile 13. Local Heritage Tourism in Cuzco, Peru. Palimpsests of Monumentality and Spatialized Identities in the Land of the Incas 14. Clustering Industrial Heritage Tourists. Motivations for Visiting a Mining Site 15. Indigenous Australian heritage and story telling 16. African natural heritage
Key Issues in Cultural Heritage is a new and unique series which aims to identify interdisciplinary debates within the changing and under-theorized field of Heritage Studies and to explore how they impact on the practices not only of heritage management and conservation, but also the processes of production, consumption and engagement with heritage in its many and varied forms. Each volume brings together a selection of international contributors and global case studies, providing a balance of theoretical and empirical content.