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This book is a fast-paced and thorough re-evaluation of what heritage tourism means to the people who experience it. It draws on contemporary thinking in human geography and heritage studies, and applies it to a sector of tourism that is both pervasive yet poorly researched in terms of the perspective of tourists themselves. In a series of lucid and tightly argued chapters, it traces the use of semiotics as an analytical tool from its theoretical origins in text, through the all-important dynamics of visuality into an expanded realm of feeling and sensuality. Challenging assumptions about the way that heritage is experienced, this book uses examples from around the world to explore the semiotic landscape that surrounds heritage sites, linking what is represented about the past and how it feels to be there.
It is an ambitious, seemingly impossible, task the authors set themselves. Within the narrow space of mere 123 pages the authors review classic perspectives on visuality and representation, discuss them against recent critical positions, and develops their own position that leaves room for embodiment, affect, and performance as a way into exploring the processes and spaces between performance and representation. They also propose a research agenda for heritage/tourism research. All in all, the authors meet the challenges brilliantly. The ambitions of the book combined with the clear and fast-paced style of argumentation and writing provides the reader with a book that easily can be used in graduate/postgraduate courses as well as short welcome reviews of the state-of-the-art of semiotic approaches to heritage, leisure, tourism with a focus on performance, affect and embodiment.
Emma Waterton is a Senior Lecturer at the Institute for Culture and Society, University of Western Sydney, Australia. Her interests include unpacking the discursive constructions of 'heritage'; community involvement in the management of heritage; the divisions implied between tangible and intangible heritage; and the role played by visual media. Publications include Politics, Policy and the Discourses of Heritage in Britain (2010) and Heritage, Communities and Archaeology (2009, with Laurajane Smith).
Steve Watson is Principal Lecturer in Tourism at York St John University in the UK. His research is focused on the ways in which heritage is constructed and understood in tourism and the way that tourism acts as a vector for various social and cultural meanings. He has published widely in the field of heritage tourism and recent co-edited books include The Cultural Moment in Tourism (2012, with Laurajane Smith and Emma Waterton) and Heritage and Tourism: Place, Encounter, Engagement (2012, with Robyn Bushell and Russell Staiff).
List of Figures
Acknowledgments
1. An Introduction
2. Advancing Theory
3. Signing the Past
4. Marketing the Past
5. Remembering
6. Living with the Past
7. Conclusion
References
Index