Destination Culture: Tourism, Museums, and Heritage

by Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett

Destination Culture takes the reader on an eye-opening journey from ethnological artifacts to kitsch. Posing the question, "What does it mean to show?" Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett explores the agency of display in a variety of 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.

Her engaging 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 marketed 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 lively 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 converting life into heritage begins.

Genres: Anthropology, Nonfiction, Folklore, Cultural Heritage, Cultural Studies, Museums

348 pages, Paperback

First published August 6, 1998

Reviews

[tirill svaler · Rating 3 out of 5]

i really like the writer’s “voice” in this book, but once again i find this to be a cultural studies book explaining in a chapter what could have been explained using three sentences. perhaps it is the history student in me who hates this, having been told before that being short and concise while still explaining the point well, is much better than using too many metaphors and analogies in order to explain your point to the reader and in turn ending up making them much more confused than they were five paragraphs ago. nevertheless, many interesting points and themes.

[Terri · Rating 3 out of 5]

If you're into ethnography, then this book is for you! Visuals are also presented to showcase the theme of "spectacle". Very interesting but I wouldn't recommend it to people who wants a "fun" book to read.

[Reza rakhsh]

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