Heritage and Tourism in The Global Village

Priscilla Boniface, Peter Fowler

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2002
• ISBN:
  9781134908424
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Commerce
• Subtopic: Administration des musées

A nation's heritage is one of the most potent forces for generating tourism: the Tower of London is the greatest 'visitor attraction' in Britain. But it is pushed into insignificance by comparison with the visitors travelling to Disneyland, Epcot and the other entertainment complexes in the USA; and it will be dwarfed by Euro-Disneyland east of Paris. So how should heritage attractions respond: should they find their own specific audiences and resources? This book, written by a leading hertage specialist, is essential reading for all those concerned both with heritage and leisure managment. International in scope, it examines successfgul examples of heritage management for tourism, and equally some failures. It aims to lay some useful ground rules which should underpin all heritage developments designed to attract tourism on a major scale.

1
Introduction: setting the global scene

In 1961, when the era of package travel was in its infancy, Lewis Mumford, an American polymath, depicted a ‘new human personality— that of “One World Man”’.¹ He continued, describing the new world citizen thus: ‘The old separation of man and nature, of townsman and countryman, of Greek and barbarian, of citizen and foreigner, can no longer be maintained; for communication, the entire planet is becoming a village; and as a result, the smallest neighbourhood or precinct must be planned as a working model of the larger world.’

In the modern world, politicians, economists, businessmen and the people on whom they depend, those primed in the skills of marketing and communication, have heeded this creed. The message has been: to get big, think global. As the head of the luxury goods conglomerate L.V.M.H. Moet Hennessy Louis Vuitton, Bernard Arnault, has said, ‘Nowadays you have to launch a product worldwide, if you hope to recover the costs of creating and marketing it’.²

And in the area of tourism, countries have courted a world market; their chosen object of enticement, more often than not, heritage. How else to be a distinctive ‘product’, distinguished from others, on a world scene? So far so easy, but of a heritage, what features should be selected? What is attractive to a chosen market? And, just as important, what will be repulsive and to whom?

These are some of the questions posed by the projection of a heritage as a tourist lure for foreign consumption. But what, meanwhile, of the home crowd?

How, and by whom, these questions have been answered, and why, is the subject of this book. For, an attempt to present a homogenized, yet locally satisfying, heritage may go against grains, rooted deeply in time.

That travel has become very big business, and very quickly at that, is now a truism. According to the chief executive of Forte pic, Rocco Forte, ‘Travel and tourism is now the world’s largest industry’.³ At the beginning of The Good Tourist the authors inquire, sharing the amazement of many, ‘Who would have thought, even one generation ago, that tourism and travel would be the largest industry of the 1990s?’⁴ And within this burgeoning industry, multiplying too, is the industry of heritage, richness and recognition through roots, economic amelioration by means of ethnicity: cultural commodification as a cure for all.

But dangers are rife. And warnings of these have been made. Already by the mid-1970s, in their book The Golden Hordes: International Tourism and the Pleasure Periphery, Louis Turner and John Ash were stating unequivocally, ‘Tourism is, everywhere, the enemy of authenticity and cultural identity’.⁵ They comment on the situation of Haiti: ‘Haitian culture is in danger of being prostituted as tourism prospers; it is already falling victim to the “deep-frozen folklore” syndrome. The “primitive” paintings are already being mass-produced for tourist consumption, and voodoo ceremonies are staged purely for the benefit of tourists.’⁶ Little difficulty exists in bringing similar examples to mind. It is a premise of this book that, essentially, such interactions have inbuilt potential to debase both presenter and onlooker. We regard the Caribbean as particularly interesting in tourism and heritage terms, and in Chapter 3 we shall consider it further.

From an anthropological point of view, the problems of commodification of culture are only too apparent. Cultural marination is profound. In alluding to different practices in different parts of the world, Edward T.Hall cites the example of ‘American city planners and builders…in the process of designing cities in other countries with very little idea of people’s spatial needs and practically no inkling that these needs vary from culture to culture’ (our italics).⁷ Later in the book, Hall comments: ‘We learn from the study of culture that the patterning of perceptual worlds is a function not only of culture but of relationship, activity and emotion.’⁸ His conclusion is ‘people cannot act or interact in any meaningful way except through the medium of culture’.⁹ Anthropologist Dr Desmond Morris believes we find it difficult to identify even with national groupings. In The Pocket Guide to Manwatching,¹⁰ he offers the view that cultural groups are innately small. If this is still so in the modern age, the possibilities for culture clash in touristic, and other, situations multiply correspondingly. Morris opines in his book:¹¹

Today each nation flies its own flag, a symbolic embodiment of its territorial status. But patriotism is not enough. The ancient tribal hunter lurking inside each citizen finds himself unsatisfied by membership of such a vast conglomeration of individuals.... He does his best to feel he shares a common territorial defence with them all, but the scale of the operation has become inhuman [our italics].

How then is our experience of heritage tourism affected and effected by our various culture sets?

Why then is there all this activity of heritage tourism? On the part of the presenters it usually boils down to one or both of two reasons: money; status. On the part of the user it is customarily escapism and/ or status that are the essential components of the experience of heritage and tourism. With such high stakes, such a big investment in the situation, it is scarcely surprising that it is desirable that any element of chance be removed from the scene. But in the very effort, all too understandable in the circumstances, to find a formula and fix it, to remove any element of doubt or variability, can be the roots of disaster; for not all the people can be pleased all the time, and in the service of one group, offence may be given to another. Who to ‘be’ or who not to ‘be’ is a difficult question. What a dilemma to be in, if your livelihood or self-esteem, as continent, nation, region, city, organization, individual, depends upon it.

As has been mentioned, a prominent feature of contemporary life is the ‘global product’, borne of a high-tech, fast-moving society, frequently allied with the motive to maximize profit.

Such global products can be services as well as things. In the Western world, generally agreed star of the 1991 Gulf War in media terms was CNN International. Its slogan is ‘For a global perspective’: CNN is a North American organization. A precursor, albeit disinterested, as purveyor of information to the world is the BBC World Service, upon which returning Western hostages showered praise. The Service is a voice of civilization no doubt, but is nonetheless emblematic, wreathed in tones of a certain Reithian ‘Queen’s English’ British mode of civilization.

Images projected on to sites across the world are a potent force. In his book Ideology and Modern Culture,¹² John B.Thompson gives the view that ‘in the era of mass communication, politics is inseparable from the art of managing visibility’.

As well as on its TV screen, the First World can have the whole world on its dinner table. A massed feast of cultural images are placed before us. Ingredients of many cultures, divorced from context, are blended into a hotch-potch global dish. Comparable are the uprooted buildings grouped in ‘history parks’ such as the North of England Open Air Museum at Beamish in the UK, and museum collections the world over: aliens put together, and thus in the process telling a new cultural story; that of their presenters.

Whether we stay at home as armchair tourists, or venture from home as field tourists, our view of foreign places may be coloured by what we have been told in the media. Guidebooks have their particular character and emphases. The advertising description for The Cambridge Guide to the Museums of Europe¹³ is interesting in several respects. Assuredly it is the ‘unique guide’ it is claimed to be, since each tourist guide has its own perspective. No doubt, too, to people of the same mind as Cambridge University Press, it is ‘the perfect travelling companion’ of the advertisement claim. Finally, it claims to provide ‘a cultural tour of Europe in one convenient…volume’: how easy to ‘paint in’ Europe with the same brush and in one sweep of the brush at that. No nasty idiosyncrasies to grapple with. Such a book can be seen as a, doubtless unconscious, attempt at cultural colonization.

We shall explore the subject of cultural colonization in a touristic context more fully in Chapters 2 and 3. Here, in this general introductory chapter, we would mention in passing that the family credited with founding the tourist ‘package’, the Cooks, were colonizers of a kind, more especially in Egypt. As Alex Hamilton has judged of the Cooks,¹⁴ ‘Their effect was to be the bellows of a phenomenal leisure blaze and as the inevitable corollary, to tame travel and domesticate the exotic’. As early as 1873, the ‘Cookii’, socalled by Arabs in Egypt, reportedly inspired the contempt of boatmen. By the later nineteenth century, aversion to tourists had arisen in various places.

As we have seen, a view may be projected or imposed consciously or unconsciously. Where it takes root, there is cultural empathy; where it does not take root, there is cultural difference, and potentially disharmonious clash. To cater successfully to tourists from other cultures, a producer must avoid offending his customers. His product must be ‘market-led’. But how much will his product have to be fashioned in an alien image to suit his audience? And in satisfying one market, will another be repelled?

Thompson¹⁵ reminds us that ‘human experience is always historical’. He warns too that ‘The residues of the past are not only a basis upon which we assimilate new experiences in the present and the future: these residues may also serve, in specific circumstances, to conceal, obscure or disguise the present’. An example would be areas of obsolete industries, where the only lucrative way forward seems to be to start up an industry romanticizing for outsiders the old industrial society. The tale, told for tourist consumption, may, or may not, be remembered differently by those who experienced the real thing. As Professor Stuart Hall, a Jamaican by birth, observed in his televisual guide to the islands of the Caribbean Redemption Song,¹⁶ ‘tourism distorts reality, obliging people to produce themselves for tourist consumption’. Just how ‘never-never’ a story may be can depend; sophisticated editing can result in a cleverly contrived production.

Fundamental variables are the elements peculiar to a tourism situation. As Douglas Pearce has noted, the context of a tourism experience is influential. He says ‘the social and cultural characteristics of a host society will influence its attractiveness to tourists, the process of development and the nature and extent of the impacts which occur. A distinctive culture may appeal to certain groups.... Class and political structure may also determine the type of tourist development that occurs.’¹⁷ Pearce reproduces the tourist-type table from V.Smith (ed.) Hosts and Guests: the Anthropology of Tourism;¹⁸ in which, essentially, the level of sophistication of a tourist is matched by the level of his/her integration with a ‘host’ life-style. So, the perceived degree of gullibility/education of an audience may influence the presentation offered.

A revealing case study was that portrayed by Robert Chesshyre in the Telegraph Magazine:¹⁹

Advertised in its early days as ‘exotic’, The Gambia is scarcely that now. A western diplomat said:‘… If you think you’re coming to Africa, you’re going to be very disappointed.... The average tourist doesn’t know what Africa is anyway. Most couldn’t find The Gambia on the map.’

Given some of the in-hotel entertainment, such imprecision is hardly surprising. On Night One we were offered a Doncaster group dressed as cowboys who mimed country and western songs, games such as throwing darts at balloons, and a Russian pop band on a cultural exchange.

Ten minutes away in Banjul, with its pitch-black rutted streets,shops were still open selling individual cigarettes and sticks of chewing gum; garment makers worked at treadle sewing machines, creating shirts from tie-dye cloth; a ripe stench crawled from the sewers.

Whether it is more dangerous to separate or attempt to integrate in the presence of cultural chasms is debatable. By 1975, Turner and Ash had concluded, ‘ultimately tourism will only survive if it helps create societies which are less divided than they are at the moment’.²⁰

Below is a haphazard collection of quotations exemplifying cultural dissonance in heritage contexts.

Alexander Prater on the trail of ‘the Olde Civil War’ in Virginia, USA:

I talked to a man who said the wrong side had won. You get into conversations like this on the Virginian Civil War circuit, though it occurred to me afterwards that he may have been talking about another war entirely—the one against the British.²¹

Keith Elliot Greenburg in Pennsylvania Dutch country, USA:

When a tourist from New York saw the Amish farmer, with his long beard, 18th century-style black hat and horse drawn plough, she removed the lens cap from the camera, ‘Why don’t you bring your horse over here, get off that plough and take a picture with me?’ she said.

As the farmer’s faith preaches being a ‘stranger and a pilgrim’ in the world, he ignored the request and the tourist reported him to a Pennsylvania state trooper. ‘She thought he was in costume to entertain her,’ says Catherine Emerson, a museum educator in Lancaster County.... ‘The Amish live this way all the time, whether tourists are around or not, but she just didn’t get it.’²²

Advertisement (decorated with, amongst others, Pharaonic sphinxes) for Windsor Safari Park near (Royal) Windsor in Berkshire, UK:

An African Adventure…
…in Berkshire?

The new Windsor Safari Park is all this and more. You’ll find everything from a Moroccan Bazaar to the Serengeti Plain and discover a host of thrilling rides in the Port Livingstone Village.²³

Sean O’Neill at a pub rodeo in Camberwell, London, UK:

Big Ray…[whose] cowboy hat has a battery motor to power flashing red and green bulbs which illuminate Old Glory on its front.

His wife of 43 years, Diamond Lil (‘I don’t know where he got the name, I haven’t got any diamonds’) explains, ‘It’s not just for tonight, he dresses like that all the time.’ Big Ray causes quite a stir on Camberwell High Street.

‘The gang is small tonight.... But as Crystal, Bronco’s sister explains: ‘a lot of them are on the social. Once a fortnight you get more cowboys in because they’ve just got their giros.’²⁴

This last example seems to indicate that if circumstances do not permit travel for an experience of heritage tourism, then where there’s a will a way is found for the sensation to be experienced on home territory.

The contra-thrusts of individuality versus homogeneity are a constant in the contemporary world of heritage tourism. From among the more culturall...