Cultural Heritage

Adriana Campelo, Laura Reynolds, Adam Lindgreen, Michael Beverland, Adriana Campelo, Laura Reynolds, Adam Lindgreen, Michael Beverland

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781351606554
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Architecture
• Subtopic: Architecture générale

Cultural Heritage is a systematic, interdisciplinary examination of cultural heritage, which provides an up-to-date view of the field by drawing on various disciplines. The book offers a thorough, structured review of extant literature on heritage in tourism and pertinent challenges for cultural heritage.

This book offers new ways of looking at cultural heritage assets against a backdrop of increasing economic and environmental pressures. It comprises a number of sections that each examine cultural heritage from the perspective of ethics and values, community relations and development, cultural entrepreneurship, economic viability and conservation, methodologies, impacts of tourism research, consumption, and urban and immaterial heritage.

Encompassing global research perspectives from public management, visual culture, environmental management, and cultural entrepreneurship, Cultural Heritage is a crucial text for those working or interested in the heritage field.

1Heritage and tourism

A literature review

Zara H. Hosseini, Florian Kock and Alexander Josiassen

Introduction

According to the United Nation World Tourism Organization, tourism ranks as the world’s third largest export category after chemicals and fuel and ahead of automotive products and food. International tourist arrivals (overnight visitors) in 2016 have reached a total of 1,235 million worldwide, an increase of 46 million over the year before, and the seventh year of uninterrupted growth in international tourism (UNWTO Tourism Highlights, 2017).

Today, visiting heritage sites and cultural areas are among the most popular purposes behind traveling (Timothy, 2011). Many destinations thus count on their culture and heritage for their tourism performance, and even the destinations not known as heritage destinations offer some components of culture and heritage to the visitors as a part of their product mix (Timothy, 2011). However, profit is not the only value heritage adds to the local communities. Heritage can also provide cultural and educational benefits for destinations, or create local or national identity and pride (Alazaizeh, Hallo, Backman, Norman, & Vogel, 2016). It is thus not surprising that there is a large and growing body of literature on heritage. The purpose of this chapter is to provide an extensive review of seminal works in the field of heritage and heritage tourism.

First and foremost it should be clarified what we are referring to when talking about heritage. United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) classifies heritage into two main categories: Cultural heritage and natural heritage.

Cultural heritage

The first aspect is cultural heritage. Cultural heritage encompasses the legacy of physical artifacts and intangible attributes of a group or community that are inherited from previous generations, maintained in the present and conserved for the future (UNESCO, 2017). Cultural heritage is further divided into tangible and intangible forms:

• Tangible cultural heritage: Tangible heritage has many variations and can exist in different scales “from single buildings to entire cities and, arguably, countries” (Mckercher & Ho, 2005). In UNESCO’s classification, tangible heritage is divided into three categories:

○ movable cultural heritage (paintings, sculptures, coins, manuscripts)

○ immovable cultural heritage (monuments, archaeological sites, and so on)

○ underwater cultural heritage (shipwrecks, underwater, ruins and cities)

• Intangible cultural heritage: Includes but not limited to oral traditions, customs, performing arts, ways of life, social practices, rituals, festive events, or the knowledge and skills to produce traditional crafts (UNESCO’s Intangible Cultural Heritage document).

Natural heritage

The second category in UNESCO’s classification is natural heritage, which involves natural sites with cultural aspects such as cultural landscapes, physical, biological, or geological formations.

By reviewing the existing literature on heritage, we can find different examples of heritage from tangible heritage in the museums ( Hede, Garma, Josiassen, & Thyne, 2014; Hede & Thyne, 2010; Poria, Reichel, & Biran, 2006) and built heritage sites such as the Petra archaeological parks (Alazaizeh et al., 2016), to intangible heritage such as Flora Macdonald Scottish Highland Games (Chhabra, Healy, & Sills, 2003) and flamenco dance (Gonzalez, 2008) as the case or location of scholars’ studies.

However, other examples of heritage can be found in the literature as researchers’ case studies that are not specifically named in the UNESCO’s classification of heritage. War heritage, intangible archeological heritage, and contemporary tourism heritage are three examples for the limits of the UNESCO heritage classification. War heritage involves artifacts and areas associated with war and other armed conflicts (Timothy & Boyd, 2003). The battlefield of Gettysburg (Chronis, 2005, 2012) and Kinmen battlefield (Zhang, 2017) are among war heritage areas that have been under scholars’ examination within the heritage field of study. The second group of heritage which is not placed in UNESCO’s classification is intangible archaeological heritage. In their study, Ross, Saxena, Correia, and Deutz have defined intangible archaeological heritage as “knowledge emanating from actors’ own interpretation of archaeological sites that have either become physically inaccessible or been destroyed since initial exploration” (2017, p. 1). Further, they point out that this type of heritage should not be confused with intangible cultural heritage which involves customs and oral traditions inherited from previous generations. The third example of heritage type is acknowledged by Weaver (2011) as ‘contemporary tourism heritage’. Contemporary tourism heritage is examined by Weaver and acknowledged as a valid form of heritage that has been mostly ignored by scholars as well as industry professionals (2011). According to Weaver (2011), contemporary tourism heritage includes the local heritage of tourism cities, created through the contemporary mass tourism industry. He provides evidence from Las Vegas and the Gold Coast, two famous tourist cities in the world for supporting his argument. For instance, he uses the ‘Welcome to Fabulous Las Vegas’ highway sign as an example of tourism heritage, belonging to a recent past and at the same time legitimate for being acknowledged as tourism heritage and ultimately being safeguarded.

On the one hand, as discussed above, there are some forms of heritage, mostly recognized in recent years, which are not clearly placed in UNESCO’s category of heritage. On the other hand, the division between heritage categories is unnatural and out of date (Alvarez, Go, &Yuksel, 2016). Similarly, Kirshenblatt-Gimblett (2005) notes that the division between cultural and natural or tangible and intangible heritage is “arbitrary, though not without its history and logic” (p. 2). For instance, it can be discussed that many of the sites considered as world natural heritage sites have been in fact affected and reshaped by the interaction between humans and nature through time (Kirshenblatt-gimblett, 2005). As a result, considering the uncertainty of UNESCO’s heritage classification and the complexity of heritage, in this chapter we use the term ‘heritage’ in the broad sense, encompassing these different types of heritage.

In this chapter, our aim is to offer a better understanding of heritage as it relates to tourism. The chapter is structured as follows: First, we examine the various definitions suggested by scholars for heritage. We then provide a comprehensive review of existing literature on heritage, addressing the following key topics: Heritage production, heritage management, heritage tourism, and heritage tourism motives.

Heritage definition

As stated by Timothy and Boyd (2003) , heritage should...