Destination Culture: Tourism, Museums, and Heritage, Volume 10Destination 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 settings: 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. |
Contents
Objects of Ethnography | 17 |
Dried meat | 19 |
Specialized Tests for Sense of Elegance | 26 |
Specimens on shelf | 36 |
Sinhalese caravan | 43 |
Great Excitement at the Worlds Columbian Exposition | 48 |
Purim Williamsburg Brooklyn | 63 |
Factory workers in Troy New York present | 77 |
Destination Museum | 131 |
Morse Museum Warren New Hampshire | 140 |
Generic Post Card | 154 |
Rap jumping in Auckland New Zealand | 172 |
Ellis Island | 177 |
Souvenir medals commemorating immigrants | 186 |
Confusing Pleasures | 203 |
Secrets of Encounter | 249 |
Exhibiting Jews | 79 |
Implements of circumcision and spice box | 93 |
Pavilion containing the H Ephraim Benguiat | 106 |
Balkan Territories booth at the Exposition of | 113 |
Hanukkah Table from The Jewish Home Beautiful | 127 |
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Common terms and phrases
aesthetic African Art American Folklife Angeles Festival approach artifacts artistic attractions audiences authenticity avant-garde bad taste Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett Benguiat celebrated Center ceremonial Chicago City civilization Coco Fusco collection communities context costumes created cultural curatorial curators Cyrus Adler dance destinations Ellis Island Ephraim Benguiat essay ethno ethnographic ethnographic display European experience featured Festival of American Folklore foreign villages gallery Guillermo Gómez-Peña heritage homelands exhibitions Ibid immigrants industry interest international expositions Isaac Strauss Jews Judaism kitsch labels living London Los Angeles Festival Louisiana Purchase Exposition Maori ment Midway Midway Plaisance multicultural Museum for African Mütter Museum Native nineteenth century objects offered pageant Palestine participation performance Plimoth Plantation present production re-created religion religious secrecy Sellars seum Smithsonian Institution social Society specimens stage theater theatrical theme park tion tourism traditional trans University Press virtual visitors Weisgal World's Columbian Exposition Zealand