Destination Culture - Tourism, Museums, and Heritage (Paperback)

This volume takes the reader on a journey from ethnological artifacts to kitsch. Posing the question, "What does it mean to show?", the author 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. The 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 marketeted 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 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 converti

General

Imprint:	University of California Press
Country of origin:	United States
Release date:	September 1998
First published:	September 1998
Authors:	Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett
Dimensions:	254 x 178 x 19mm (L x W x T)
Format:	Paperback - Trade
Pages:	326
ISBN-13:	978-0-520-20966-4
Categories:	Books > Reference & Interdisciplinary > Museums & museology Books > Reference & Interdisciplinary > Interdisciplinary studies > Cultural studies > General
LSN:	0-520-20966-4
Barcode:	9780520209664

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