The Cultural Moment in Tourism (Hardcover)

This book is a response to the burgeoning interest in cultural tourism and the associated need for a coherently theorized approach for understanding the practices and processes that such an interest creates. Cultural tourism has become an important and popular aspect of contemporary tourism studies in academic study as well as providing a rich seam of up scale product development opportunities in the industry as a whole. Much of the related literature however focuses upon describing and categorising cultural tourism from a supply-side perspective and taxonomizing cultural tourists on the basis of their level of involvement and interest and/or their economic worth as sought after market segment. There have been few recent attempts at a rigorous re-theorization of the issues beyond conventional representational theories and this books aims to fill this void.

This groundbreaking volume provides a theoretical and empirical account of what it means to be a cultural tourist and a creative and affective user of heritage itself. It uniquely achieves this by exploring the interactions of people with places, spaces, intangible heritage and ways of life not as linear alignments but as seductive a momentsa (TM) of encounter and engagement, performance and meaning-making, which are constitutive of cultural experience in its broadest sense. The book further explores cultural encounters in heritage tourism as events that capture and constitute important social relations involving power and authority, self-consciousness and social position, gender and space, history and the present. It will also explore the consequences these insights have for our understanding of heritage and its management in the context of tourist activity.

In capturing the a cultural momenta (TM), this book provides a better understanding of the motivations, on-site activities, meaning constructions and other cultural work done by both tourists and tourist operators, the volume confronts and explores the cultural, political and economical interrelations between heritage and the tourism industry. In so doing, it also investigates how this co-mingling of identity, representation and social life may be better apprehended with the wider shift in critical thought towards notions of affect and performativity.

The book is a fundamental and influential contribution to research in this field. It will be significant value to students, academics and researchers interested in this broad topic area.

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