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New book: Heritage and Tourism: Place, Encounter, Engagement

The cover of the book Heritage and Tourism which shows tourists at an Asian site where there are statues carved into the rock.

Heritage and Tourism: Place, Encounter, Engagement is a new book edited by Robyn Bushell and Russell Staiff from the Institute for Culture and Society, and Steven Watson. The book also includes chapters from ICS members Fiona Cameron, Juan Francisco Salazar, Emma Waterton and Tim Winter.

Book description

The complex relationship between heritage places and people, in the broadest sense, can be considered dialogic, a communicative act that has implications for both sides of the ‘conversation’. This is the starting point for Heritage and Tourism. However, the ‘dialogue’ between visitors and heritage sites is complex. ‘Visitors’ have, for many decades, become synonymous with ‘tourists’ and the tourism industry and so the dialogic relationship between heritage place and tourists has produced a powerful critique of this often contested relationship.

Further, at the heart of the dialogic relationship between heritage places and people is the individual experience of heritage where generalities give way to particularities of geography, place and culture, where anxieties about the past and the future mark heritage places as sites of contestation, sites of silences, sites rendered political and ideological, sites powerfully intertwined with representation, sites of the imaginary and the imagined.

Under the aegis of the term ‘dialogues’ the heritage/tourism interaction is reconsidered in ways that encourage reflection about the various communicative acts between heritage places and their visitors and the ways these are currently theorized, so as to either step beyond – where possible – the ontological distinctions between heritage places and tourists or to re-imagine the dialogue or both. Heritage and Tourism is thus an important contribution to understanding the complex relationship between heritage and tourism.

For further information see Heritage and Tourism: Place, Encounter, Engagement (opens in a new window) on the Routledge website.

Chapters by ICS members

  • 'Place, Encounter, Engagement: Context and Themes', by Robyn Bushell, Russell Staiff and Steven Watson.
  • 'Authorising the Unauthorised - Liquidity, Complexity and the Heritage-tourist in the Age of Social Media', by Fiona Cameron and Sarah Mengler
  • 'Heritage Tourism and its Representations', by Emma Waterton.  
  • 'Swords, Sandals and Togas: The Cinematic Imaginary and the Tourist Experiences of Roman Heritage sites', by Russell Staiff.
  • 'Cultures of Interpretation', by Tim Winter.
  • 'Heritage for Sale: The Misrepresentation of Voice in Northern Chile', by Juan Francisco Salazar and Robyn Bushell.

25 January 2013