UNIT 10 CULTURAL IMPACTS

Structure

10.0 Objectives
10.1 Introduction
10.2 Cultural Tourism
10.3 Post-Modern Tourism and Culture
10.4 Culture: Natural and Contrived
10.5 Commercialisation
10.6 Trends
10.7 Let Us Sum Up
10.8 Clues to Answers

10.0 OBJECTIVES
After reading this Unit you will be able to:
understand the role of cultural attractions in tourism,
differentiate between the real and the staged forms in cultural tourism,
know the reasons behind the emergence of the contrived forms of culture for tourism,
realise the impact of commercialisation on culture, and
know the recent debates and trends in this regard.

10.1 INTRODUCTION
Culture, cultural attractions, experiencing culture, marketing culture, etc. are certain terms that are
frequently used in relation to tourism. Off late, attention is being given to what bearing tourism has on
the culture of host communities at the destinations. Hence, it is no more a question of culture being
used as a tourist attraction but also an issue of tourisms impact on culture. Similarly, there are
contradictory views in relation to the methods and modes of presenting the culture to tourists.
After defining cultural tourism, this Unit mentions the aspects related to post-modernism tourism and
culture. It deals with the debate related to the use of culture in tourism and the various trends that have
emerged in this regard.

10.2 CULTURAL TOURISM

When we discuss the issue of cultural tourism we have to inform ourselves of the shift from the
normative (good/bad/negative/positive) nature of the debate on the links between culture and tourism,
to the interventions of the sociology and anthropology of tourism. Researchers have accepted the
difficulty in determining the role of cultural attractions in tourism. How many views of a culture
people can have is a vital question. Is it the quality of the hotel, the air connections and the availability
of air-conditioned cars that determines the popularity of a destination (say, the North Indian Golden
Triangle) or its cultural components?
Valene Smith (1972) has suggested a five-fold typology:
1) Recreational or sun lust tourism
2) Environmental tourism
3) Historical tourism

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4) Ethnic tourism
5) Cultural tourism
Valene Smith defines cultural tourism as including the picturesque or local colour, a vestige of the
vanishing lifestyle that lies within human memory with its old style houses, homespun fabrics,
traditional transport and technology and handmade crafts this is the peasant culture, illustrated by
the case studies of Bali and Spain. Ethnic tourism is defined by its direct focus on people living out a
cultural identity whose uniqueness is being marketed for tourists; tourists are interested in the cultural
practices, which define a unique ethnicity as for example the Western Himalayan Buddhist enclaves.
Cultural tourism on the other hand defines situations where the role of culture is contextual, where it
shapes the tourists experience, without a focus on its uniqueness. It emphasises artefacts rather than
concrete cultural activities of people. Ethnic tourism and cultural tourism thus have boundaries which
maybe crossed by the presenter in formulating tours or staging performances.
According to James Clifford, Culture is a coherent body that lives and dies. Culture is enduring,
traditional and structural (rather than contingent, syncretic, historical). Culture is a process of
ordering, not disruption. It changes and develops like a living organism. It does not normally survive
abrupt alterations.
For him, cultural identity is an ongoing process, politically contested and historically unfinished. It is
always mixed, relational and inventive. Cultural concepts are used by ethnic groups to interpret
themselves to themselves, to one another and to the other.
Let us see how this links to Third World cultures in the face of tourism and development. Tourism
uses:
not mere tradition but its ongoing symbolic reconstitution;
not authenticity but its attribution;
not inherited identities but relational, contested and improvised ones;
not culture but cultural invention and local discourse;
not internalised values but strategies for action.
The reason this is so has to be understood. When we look historically into the phenomenon of
tourism, we often confuse indigenous forms of travel, whether for economic or religious reasons, with
tourism. However, tourism as we know it today is essentially a modern Western phenomenon. When
we began to look at the possibilities of development through tourism as an agency, we invited Sir
John Sargent to develop a thrust for India to enter the world market. In 1949, Sargent and then
Allchin recommended that a region with almost continental diversity of languages, religions, ethnic
groups and cultures as well as a monumental heritage that dated back to antiquity, should theme its
tourism activity around cultural forms and attractions. For the first two decades after Independence,
India had a tourist landscape that was centred on the Mughal architecture and mountains that had
fascinated the British colonizers. It was after the advent of mass tourism, and low cost package tours
that local colour tourism to Rajasthan and other agrarian states began to develop. It is only today
that we have begun to look south, to its Temple towns, medieval ruins, natural attractions and wild
life.
A similar trend can be observed in the form of tourism that the Asian elites are participating in today,
courtesy package tours. The changes that have occurred in their motivations, roles and institutional
structures indicate a cultural transformation that reflects a relationship between tourism and
modernity. It is from this relationship that the concern with authenticity has arisen. Dean
MacCannell coined the term staged authenticity to describe the artful presentation of cultural forms
and symbols at sites, as for example, the Son-et-Lumiere as historic forts. Such staging was seen to be
creating a tourist space which separated the sphere of tourism from the flow of local life. In this
separation space, height, temperature, lack of sounds and smells, enclosure and encapsulation led to
an extreme cultural space, i.e., the tourist bubble. The tourist was caught in a trap in the process of
the transformation of travel from the religious quest into a secular quest. To break out of this trap
there emerged the growing concern with alternative tourism, spearheaded by the Ecumenical
Movement for socially and culturally responsible tourism. Cohen called this movement the counter-
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culture alternative. This was a kind of travel that studiously avoided the route of mass and packaged
tourism.

10.3 POST-MODERN TOURISM CULTURE

The issue between the mass and the counter mass movement was one of salvation, or the
Transformation of the Self, through the touristic experience, by engaging with the Other on equal
terms. This would help to reach a territory beyond the limits of the tourist space, as for example the
Golden Triangle, compared to the authentic experiences like the Kumbh Mela. This form of tourism is
said to be sustainable with low impact on the environment and resources of the destination. Its success
depends on low frequency, remote locations and low numbers. The more sensitive the natural and
cultural environment, the greater is the chance of even alternative tourism creating a tourist space.
This can be seen in the rapid decline and cultural degeneration of Jaisalmer, which could not survive
the onslaught of tourism and the continued prosperity of Jaipur as the Pink City of tourism, where the
tourist space enlarges as the environmental and cultural features become less and less authentic.
A number of studies have focussed on post-modern tourism and culture, which have emerged from
the restructuring of capitalism and the resulting cultural shifts in tourism types and tourist motivation.
The question that we are concerned with is whether there is acceptance or resistance to mainstream
tourism from the other post-modern tourism. The consumption of services and experiences is said to
have an important symbolic meaning and to play an important role in helping to establish and
maintain social differentiation and social distinction amongst the middle classes. The new middle
class has an important role in producing and consuming new forms of travel, particularly to the Third
World. There is some interest, therefore, in attempting to trace a relationship between post-modern
culture, class fractions and tourism.
Urry suggests the concept of real holidays, which involves a spatial separation of real holiday
travellers from mass packaged tourists. These two distinct forms then involve the emergence of
specialist agents and tour operators. They are needed to create more individual and flexible holidays
for the first category, which is called new tourism, along with other mass and package market agents
and operators to cater to the old tourist. This distinction reflects consumer reaction to being part of a
mass. To be flexible, more personalised and customised is to get away from the tastelessness of the
mass product. There is also a sense of exclusiveness in the designer holiday as against the
conventional holiday. A title like the Magic of the Orient reflects convention whilst trekking in India
and Nepal reflects the extra dimension through Macro Polo Holidays.
What then is the real traveller in comparison to the mass tourist? The real reflects the desire
amongst the middle class for authenticity, for honesty, and more truthful tourism. The mass tourism
brochure is traditionally glossy with large, colourful pictures showing sunny beaches, palms and
loving couples with very little text. The emphasis is on the image of paradise. The other brochure can
be recycled paper, containing line drawing or ethnic artefacts, some black and white photographs and
a text that speaks for the authentic. For example, it could say, tropical destinations have ants,
mosquitoes and cockroaches, which are harmless but can be a nuisance. This indicates the sensitivity
of the industry towards the consumer, who imagines he is a 21 st century adventurer, explorer or
traveller.
Secondly, in addition to the more honest approach to the holiday there can be a marriage of activity
and academic interests such as anthropology, environment or archaeology. Industry representatives
like The International Eco Tourism Society have expanded their operations to Third World
destinations like Nepal, Thailand and South America in response to the new consumer. The WTO and
the WTTC have also put the new consumer in the foreground by developing environmental impact
analysis and sustainable production and consumption. They promote the new consumer as a business
opportunity.
Thirdly, there is the dimension of otherness and its association with new social movements. Here the
focus is on mass and minority non-western cultures, religious traditions, ethnicity, environment and
ecology. An agency Explore, set up in 1982, offers real qualities and real places to know the other
side, the host society. This has led to the emergence of a new movement often called the tourism
critique. This movement began with appropriate tourism, then defined itself as alternative tourism
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and finally came up with responsible tourism, which became the basis of the sustainable tourism
target of NGOs, local Governments, Trade Unions and multinationals in the field of tourism. In this
movement, from the consumers side there is the attempt to subsume culture under the environmental
concerns of sustainability while on the host side there is the attempt to ensure the survival of cultural
uniqueness in the process of conserving the environment.
Alternative tourism attracts the mass tourist. It spearheads the penetration of mass tourism into the
alternative space, as is evident in the Heritage movement. This works around buildings that are more
than 50 years old being transformed into hotels that reflect the times and life style of a bygone age.
These are alternative spaces that welcome mainstream tourists off the beaten path. Their core
attraction is that they represent cultural authenticity. It is this dynamic element in tourism that raises
serious issues of sustainability. Should we allow tourists to roam around freely, invading new
frontiers, or should we contain them within the tourist spaces we have created for their benefit?
It is this conflict between economic and social policy that has led to the view of those who are
concerned with sustainability that local nature and culture that is organically related to it, should be
protected from tourism impacts. It is this debate that has shifted the focus of the sociology of
tourism from the tourist to the destination . This concern is not limited to protecting local cultures
from undesirable impacts, but rather protecting them from the tourist gaze. They seek the deflect
tourism from the sensitive back regions of the real life and culture and communities to man made
attractions like Disney World. The cultural consequence of tourism has come full circle. The
imposition that the demand for authenticity made on the private and ethnic domain of culture has led
through the process of analysing the tourist space and the tourist gaze, to the inauthentic, the
artificial, and the man made .

10.4 CULTURE: NATURAL AND CONTRIVED

We now have two poles to debate the issue of culture and sustainability: the natural and the
contrived. The former are completely unmarked, in the sense that they have not undergone any
physical or symbolic changes to make them more accessible or appealing, as has been done in the
case of world heritage sites like Taxila, Takth-e-Bahai, Angkor Wat or the Ajanta and Ellora Caves.
Museums, although they contain authentic exhibits, display them in artificial and contrived settings.
In contemporary museums many of the exhibits are not real or authentic but reproductions. These
above named sites have been tampered with to make them noticeable. National Parks, which are
natural sites, have been symbolically and physically marked off. Their animal populations have been
artificially controlled and native human populations have been prohibited their traditional access. In
this on going process of appropriation land transformation, the distinction between the natural and the
contrived does not remain so clear.
Let us see how this happens. Folk dance and music retain their authenticity as long as they are not
staged. Classical systems develop their canons on the basis of acceptance by scholars of their
foundations having scholastic legitimacy. As they move out of their traditional spaces, like village
celebrations, religious ritual and urban public spaces on to the stage, they create a new structural space
in their meaning and importance to a culture. When performed in cultural festivals at home or abroad,
they lose their local or ritual structure and become a part of the contrived cultural space. The
audience is not so much concerned with the originality as with being able to meaningfully access a
cultural symbolism that may not be understood through its uncontrived form. Some of its authenticity
has been compromised but if it gives enjoyment and pleasure to the viewer, then it is said to be valid
to make this shift.
The post-modern shift in making the contrived a representation of a culture is then the latest position
in the tourism and culture relationship. Why do we consider Sentosa Island a part of the Singapore
experience or a visit to Disneyland a part of the American experience? Is Cinderellas Castle less real
than the Red Fort? Should we then, in the interest of sustainability, encourage tourists to visit
simulated sites, which recreate, like museums, lost worlds and lost cultures? When we deflect tourists
from intrusions into the real worlds of the hosts to contrived attractions, are we able to sustain both
the real and the contrived?

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Beyond environmental preservation, it is the preservation and promotion of the primitive, the
indigenous, and the original, in which authenticity becomes the principal commodity. This aspect of
real tourism reflects the nostalgia for ancient traditions and unspoilt environments, most visibly
evoked by the TV Channels. It also creates nostalgia for a travel style of the past. The combination of
tourism and environment is both ideological and rhetorical. Many promoters of tourism have begun to
see tourism as an ecological phenomenon.
To understand why anything that deviates from mass tourism movement towards independent travel is
a movement of resistance and not merely intellectual snobbery, we have to enquire into the
relationship between cultural shifts and the emergence of a new middle class. Jameson has coined the
term yuppies who through their cultural practices and values have articulated a hegemonic
ideological and cultural model for the current stage of capitalism. According to Bourdieu, classes
engage is classificatory struggles, seeking to distinguish themselves from each other by education,
occupation, residence and the consumption of commodities that include both objects and experiences,
such as vacations. This is what is understood by the term mediation of domination by taste. While
travel has been a matter of taste since the days of the Grand Tour, it has never been so widely used as
an indicator of taste as in the present.
This new middle class is located in the service sector in finance, marketing and sales, which makes
them controllers of finance and cultural trends. For example, eco tourism, its not in any dictionary
yet, but if you want to impress at your next dinner party, its a dead cert.
The second fraction that Bourdieu identifies is the new petit bourgeoisie, who function as the new
cultural intermediaries. They are not as well off as the first fraction and they have to adopt strategies
to professionalise consumption. They adopt an intellectual lifestyle and transmit new ideas to a wider
audience. They classify themselves as the excluded ; the dropped out, or in the popular discourse
form, the alternative. They dream that they are above classification and can defy the power of gravity
of the social field.
Theirs is a tourism that is less formalized, involving longer holidays abroad, especially in the Third
World regions. They could be called the ego tourist. They try to compensate for the lack of economic
capital with a quest for authentic experiences. The encounter with the exotic, the whole, the human
and the primitive contribute to their own sense of indiv iduality and authenticity. The ingredients
should conform to this holistic view, whether they are coral reefs, rainforests or indigenous cultures.
Bourdieu defines tourism as a cultural good, a key commodity, where experiences and symbols are
consumed. Niche marketing that defines much of the new tourism is a part of the commodification
process, which gives authenticity its prime value but is built on the international tourism
infrastructure.
The transformation of the self that the tourism experiences is said to bring about in the tourist,
because it confers character, adaptability and sensitivity. The new tourist is really a part of the
accumulation of cultural capital. Signs, which are of immense, value in the addition to ones cultural
capital play an important part in giving meaning to new tourism. A reflection of this is the fact that
organizations like the Asiatic Society, The Smithsonian, The London Times and Societies formed in
the 80s have promoted special interest travel and exclusive journeys with renowned academics as
guest leaders. Holiday features catering to this group are usually located in the feature sections that
deal with exotica.
The younger members of this category of travellers, with less economic capital go even further in
their search for the real through over landing and individual holidays based on the new format tourist
guides like Lonely Planet and Rough Guide. A long stay in a third world country is considered a
sabbatical for the new tourist. The supply side is also adapting to the process of intellectualilsation.
This means that a tour leader should not only have a deep insight into the area being visited but should
also have credentials and expertise in the field. Travelling has emerged as a qualification that is equal
to art, history or French. Host based holidays are run by such professionals who may have come from
development work or the NGO sector.
Professionalisation is often taken to an exaggerated degree. Management executives are often put
through an activity-based holiday, with team and individual games to assess their capability.
Similarly, tourists who wish to go River Rafting or on a Himalayan Expedition have to submit a CV
to show their experience in that particular activity. A tourist Code of Conduct put out by the ECTWT
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is reproduced in many of the networks that provide such holidays. A Himalayan Tourist Code
formulated by the Himalayan Club with the help of NGOs are transforming students in the institutes
of tourism where they provide ethical yardsticks to evaluate the activities of the industry.
What had begun as a distinction between Tourist and Traveller, when Boorstin had attacked the
tourist, who was defended by Victor Turner and Dean MacCannell, in their comparison of the
tourist with the pilgrim, resulted in the maximization of the cult of individual travel. It is the host
society that has pointed out that to them there is no individualism in the new tourist in terms of their
discourse, dress code, and the packages they follow according to their travel guides . They have turned
large regions into travel circuits, like South-East Asia, Central America etc. Going around the world
as a traveller rather than a tourist makes the difference for an authentic experience.
Travellers create their own aura. For the upper fraction tour operators have unpackaged the term
exclusive, for the select few to create the image of more tasteful yet luxury tourism, within a
modified tourist bubble. For the lower economic and age group the distinguishing feature is the
participant traveller rather than the passive tourist who is the consumer. They promote trucking
holidays for people who want more than a cheap wine and a suntan. The stereotype tourist is mocked
and the conventional package is ridiculed. Tourists are called lager and litterlouts and claims for the
traveller as the custodian of the new relationship with the native, which will realize the potential for
peaceful contact between cultures.
What are the qualities that the new tourist has retrieved from the traveller? The list is a number of
adjectives that claim that the traveller is experienced, discerning, broad-minded, imaginative,
independent, intrepid, modern, real. For example, most guides on India expect the traveller to have
patience, stamina, humour, and adaptability. For Latin America what is needed is emotional balance,
maturity and good companionship. Bodily fitness is a must as is fellowship with likeminded
travellers. The group should be small and intimate. This type of action and involvement will lead to a
feeling of accomplishment. However, who applies these adjectives to whom indicates the intense
struggle over the issue of authenticity.
The final push for authenticity comes from what Hirsch calls positional goods, for example claiming
that a point on the circuit has very few tourists. National Parks are said to be tourist free and therefore
authentic. These alternative marketing strategies for more off the beaten track places or rarely
visited places, transform places which have their own peoples, cultures and production environments
as romantic, exclusive or unique. As tourism is globalising, the individualization determines
what is travel and what is mass. How far do we have to go to find an unvisited trail or a traditional
village? A village that is not exposed to western influences or modernization? It is within
environmentalism that the industry has found the key to exclusiveness, and therefore inclusiveness
in a classification of the traveller.

Check Your Progress 1

1) Define Cultural Tourism.

2) Discuss the difference between natural and contrived cultural tourism.

3) What do you understand by ego tourist?

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10.5 COMMERCIALISATION
The issues raised in the previous Section deal with the problems of commercialisation and deception,
in which a falsified reality confirms and satisfies the false expectations of the tourist already
politicised by representations in the media and the brochure. As the industry continues to master the
art of staging authenticity, the tourist continually demands to break through the front spaces to enter
the back spaces where the real exists. This is what many have called the Fourth World of ethnic
minorities, indigenous peoples and remnants of hunting and gathering bands. Since most cultures are
rapidly urbanising, it is only the fourth world that has remained real, in the sense of its archaic and
uncontrived nature. The proposal to develop this kind of tourism to the North East and the Andaman
and Nicobar islands is an attempt to compete for the attention of the metropolitan elites through
staged authenticity, without regard for the sensitivity of the people who are to be elevated for viewing.
The naming and framing process has used the growing importance of the past to the tourism industry,
where all acts of barbarism, inequality, slavery, etc. have been polished with the patina of age,
through the heritage industry. From this has emerged the historic theme park, which conjures up the
remnants of a bygone age through the use of modern technology. Ethnic villages, living museums
where you can walk through an earlier age, touching and feeling, and interact with models, are like
science fiction. Tourism has created a contrived Time Machine, with no uncomfortable or frightening
consequences for the tourist. Local people are dressed in costume to add a living flavour to the
reconstruction. This has been carried to its logical extreme with the reconstruction of the environment
with themes like Jurassic Park and Dinosaur Land. Where Spielberg ends and a willing suspension of
disbelief begins, is difficult to define.
Although the museumification of our past claims legitimacy on the basis of research, we find that
reconstructions and their claim to authenticity depend heavily on present cultural values, ideological
perspectives and commercial interests. The reason they succeed is that they play on the nostalgia that
we have for the past as a golden age when compared to the present as a period of uncertainty and
alienation.
The other aspect of post-modern tourism, which carries the modern as a memory of the past, is the
growing popularity of Future Worlds. On a visit to Epcot Centre some years ago nobody could have
imagined that Mr. Tito would be the first tourist in space in the year 2001. In these future worlds one
can enter the world of fantasy with the belief that given the advances in science and technology Magic
Worlds will become real one day. There is the charm of taking an imaginary journey and the
transition from the pre-historic to the future world is often made in the same historical park, with
equal interest and enjoyment. The Paris Exhibition in the 19 th century was the first step towards the
future worlds that we enter so blithely today. However, these parks are not based on the local
entertainment industry. They are massive investments for very large-scale projects. They employ the
very latest advances in technology and human management.
Multinational Organizations first began to sponsor environments that their businesses first threatened.
Now tour operators are members of environmental societies and participants in Conservation
programmes at places where they take their travellers. Sustainability is built on the same premises,
natures exclusiveness (or carrying capacity) to which contemporary tourism is moving in its search
for the authentic. There is thus very little that is oppositional in such tourism or anything more
progressive in such holidaymaking. What this tourism suggests is a cultural and social reaction, a
shift, of the middle class to their own crassness, which the objects of their holidays have identified as
the most unacceptable part of tourism. The golden hordes spent money to accomplish their dream
holidays; the authenticity seekers live of the land and community. This movement began with the now
famous $5 per day guidebooks, but after facing local resistance and benefiting from the progressive
exchange rates for their hard currencies, the new tourists are once again facing the dilemma. They
have to once again create the social and spatial distinction from the staged authenticity to real or
authentic travel.
In most countries of the world, tourism has divided space between marked attractions and unmarked
landscapes inhabited by the host society. The relationship between the hosts and guests or tourists
is viewed as economically, politically and culturally important. The tourist shares attributes of the
explorer, the crusader, the missionary and the trader. In Bathkins terminology, all of them leave a
bounded region called home to encounter the other in another culture. They all return with some
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sign of loss or gain to reflect their experience. The western style facilities and services that inhabit
other space is a mediation between the two worlds, and one that provides a cultural perspective on
the model of culture of the tourist and the host. A version of the local culture, through interiors,
cuisine and song and dance of a Fair or Festival is the only show that is put on for tourists who wear
their safari outfits and impose themselves on small communities.

10.6 TRENDS
We have now moved from the concern for the quest for authenticity to the quest for enjoyment and
pleasure. We have moved back from penetrating the appearance for the reality into pure aesthetic
enjoyment. This superficial pleasure-seeking, self-indulgence is being culturally sanctioned. The use
of virtual reality in tourism promotion is an expression of a cultural preference for the visual and the
surface rather than more deep meaning and content. Consequently, the quaint charm of unique
destinations is being replaced by sameness. That which distinguished tourism from Leisure and
Recreation, the destination, is losing its primacy.
In cultural tourism, the attraction was the distance, both spatial and social. The strangeness of a new
environment, not encountered at home, the attraction of novelty, the need for change are all displaced.
The much faster growth of domestic tourism shows a trend in the growing lack of interest in cultures
and the deflection towards more post modern motivations. These motivations are creating new
cultural trends, which are much more transitional. The desire for real and un-programmed adventure
that is taking the tourist world by storm may be leading to new cultural motifs. These will be created
from a growing secularisation and the breakdown of the absolutes in evaluating culture. Thus, we see
a democratisation of the boundary between high and low, elite and popular culture and art. When
Boorstin criticised the mass tourist in 1964 as a Philistine, he could not have imagined that the new
form of sophistication was to be non-discerning. This lack of discrimination comes from the throwing
overboard of all criteria by which we once judged the social construction of our identities. These are
no longer seen as distinct forms of dress, speech, beliefs and values, cuisine, rituals and activities in a
globalised world.
Just as the globalisation trend picks its way across cultures this is a contradictory trend at work, which
is equally radical, and this is the trend towards the preservation of monuments, ethnic cultures and
nature. However, this trend has within it two contesting forms, to preserve for tourism and to
preserve from tourism . Heritage is a problematic word. This problem arises because the past is
always contested. The inherited past is a fragile concept. Yet one generation holds the relics of the
past in trust for the generation to follow. For those who are committed to preservation, this form of
cultural tourism is a threat. Greater access means greater pressure of numbers. The demand for
heritage tourism has to be balanced with the control of usage.
The tourism industry, both in the private and the state sector responds to the tourist gaze by
transforming itself into an image-maker. According to Prentice, in tourism the term heritage has
come to mean not only landscapes, natural history, buildings, artefacts, cultural traditions and the like,
which are literally and metaphorically passed on from one generation to the other, but those amongst
these things which can be portrayed for promotion as tourist products. In this sense, heritage as a
cultural form of present tourism is linked with people events, and activities and is a wider sense with
cultures, societies and economies.
As the range of heritage sites has grown a lot of spurious antiquations and false signification is being
given to sites to lure tourists. As these sites have become economically important, there should be
conservation funds, which should be used through national, regional and local interest groups to
ensure that falsification is not used. As local stakeholders, they can attempt to contain the
entrepreneurial desire to pad up the heritage for tourism. This process can revive the stakeholders
link with their heritage and can create employment for those in the services, which will benefit the
community.
On the negative side, we have Umber to Ecos concept of Hyper -reality as an acute observation of the
lack of authenticity of much of cultural and heritage tourism. The second problem is that of
selectivity. All selections have a bias. Much of Dark Tourism, like Nazi war camps, war memorials
and sites, sites of massacres and inhumanity of mankind is often promoted for ideological reasons.
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The Great Wall of China was built by forced labour under terrible conditions and yet it is considered a
World Heritage site. The third negative impact is that local people feel tourism is invasive, a threat to
the environment, leads to traffic congestion and disrupts local lifestyles and cultures. For us these
issues take on a different dimension. What is presented to the tourist, as heritage is very much a part
of our present. We become a part of the spectacle. Unless the host has a desire to tell the tourist has to
contain the desire to ask and to demand to see.
Natives respond by making themselves invisible. In more frequently visited areas the resistance is
more complex, like asking for money to be photographed; refusing permission to photograph rituals
and ceremonies; hostility and wilful misrepresentation of their culture; misinformation and in extreme
cases violence. Tourism is produced by the high productivity of the industrial system based on a war
machine, unequal trade and an international political structure that determines the global economy. It
has a period surplus consuming quality of feasting, which is prevalent in traditional societies. This
is a social value to becoming a member of the jet set. Exotic destinations raise the social class of a
tourist temporarily. A favourable exchange rate makes the tourist a prince in the local economy. Many
have compared third world tourism with nostalgia for colonialism. A suntan, mementos, tourist art
and souvenirs strengthen the status that an exotic destination bestows on the returning tourist.
Dean MacCannell has put forth the key concept of authenticity in his analysis of tourism. According
to Boorstin the touristic experience is necessarily inauthentic and the tourist likes it so. Baudrillard
has suggested that Tourism in America and the West is centred around the material fiction of the
image; Umber to Eco calls this hyper-reality; Alienation and the search for authenticity are
therefore seen as the basis of the drive to exotic tourism not only by western tourists but also by the
native elite. The quest for authenticity is essential to all prestigious forms of tourism. It focuses on
people not only as objects, who it is hoped are living true to their tradition, but also on material
objects which it is hoped are representatives of the use of the cultures that the tourist is viewing. The
Taj Mahal, the Chandni Chowk, the Khajuraho Temples, when replicated are sacralised through the
aura of seeing with ones own eyes the original.
The Taj Mahal is considered one of the wonders of the world because it has an aura that is imbedded
in a structure. In the same way, Ghalibs house is being restored so that those who know Urdu poetry
may visit it. This familiarity has emerged after a serial on his life and times on television, which
revived memories of a Delhi in the past, with an intellectual and cultural life. Similarly, a visit to
Karims, one of the oldest restaurants in Old Delhi is a marker of authenticity, since it serves Mughlai
food in the Mughal part of Delhi. However, what is considered authentic and what is touristic is not so
distinctly marked. It can be fluid. What locals like to do is a kind of marking system as well, which
the tourist needs, to make it authoritative and authentic.
Authenticity and historicity go hand in hand. The signs of history in buildings, artefacts, institutions
and works of art, makes them tourism sites. Contemporary peasant culture is said to bring back the
past. Historical reconstruction through sound and light shows or documentation and exhibitions,
create history through a narrative closure, that is artificially created. This is because a tourist also
tries to relate any new experience to his or her life, to what is familiar. For example, a package tour
creates the desire to do something more authentic. On the next visit the tourist may opt for a less
organised tour; may even go off the beaten track to search for the authentic rather than the
picturesque. A tourist seeks orientation to make sense of the tourism experience. The search for
authenticity is a way of expanding the horizons of ones own world and life experience. Repeat
tourism is, therefore, based on feeling at home and tourism circuits follow this pattern. For North
Indian tourists summer at hill stations, winter in the South and pilgrimage at festival time creates
cyclic seasons at which tourists would go to a particular destination.
Sightseeing focuses on not only marked attractions but also on how people live. Every visitor to
Europe fancies that Europeans spend their time in sidewalk cafes. For us, Paris is exotic. For the
Parisian, we are exotic. These specific contents of exotic may vary, but it describes the alternative
to domestic experience and discourse. Stereotypes are conventions placed in exotic contexts. They
reduce the cultural other to a member of ones own culture. The domestication of the exotic assumes
the superiority of the domestic and the exotic is a subsidiary form. The media pushes this ideology by
promoting a global mass culture in which significant differences are effaced. MTV or Channel V use
this inversion to ride to success. Disneys Epicot Centre which houses pavilions that represent exotic
countries, culturally different societies in a package that is translated into an American form so that
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ethnic celebrations and restaurants appear just like ours. The suggestion that tourist sites should
have interpretation centres stems from this hegemonic tendency.
Tourist sites become over determined by too many markers and become less authentic and more like
the frames in which they are seen. The objective, therefore, becomes not to know what societies are,
in their own evaluation, but to discover how they differ from ours and from others, even those that are
like them. This is the only way in which tourism can construct the cultural other. The exotic has to
be seen as an object, an episodic experience through the process that goes through several stages, like
particularisation, differentiation, universalisation and totalisation. The concept of the Orient as being
the other of the Occident is a part of this process. This is a reduction of more complex realities that
difference and cultural otherness possess.
It is here that travel agents become brokers of ethnicity with the brochure as a tool. In the process of
marketing images of exotic places and peoples, they draw upon a small set of ethnic markers,
establishing a grid through which the tourist filters perceptions while abroad. These brochure
images become indicators of authenticity. The stereotype created by the selective use of markers
becomes an indicator of authenticity. Tour Operators associated with modern mass tourism thus
become powerful shapers of ethnic identity. The image is that all of this identity can be bought by the
tourist since it is all for sale. Hence, many feel that the folk dancers wear co-ordinated costumes,
make up, fixed smiles, stage jewellery and behave in a manner that is most unnatural, since they are in
an unnatural setting; the meaning of the dance has disappeared; tourism has turned it into an
ornamental hoax.
In tradition, for example the hula of Hawaii was performed as a sacred offering. Its purpose was also
to pass on an oral tradition and finally to create social and cultural cohesion. Tourism turns it into a
voyeuristic form of gratification. A similar example is the Bhangra of Punjab, which has been
transformed into an ornamental hoax through the Festivals of India approach. Steps have been
choreographed to following a narrative form, with a performance rhythm. The dancers are not
representatives of a living cultural tradition, they have been turned into a professionalised fantasy by
tourism.
Tourists flock to native lands to escape, and they escape to a state of mind. They do not see that the
process, which they are a part of, is destroying the host people and their lands and cultures. As
tourism takes over the land and the livelihood to locate hotels, roads, airports, shopping malls and
restaurants, the expelled people turn into street vendors. From being peasants and workers in the
fields, mountains and forests, they live in slums working on construction and other projects while
their wives make artefacts to sell to tourists and their children sell gum and soft drinks or are
employed as child labour in local eateries.
Knowing and seeing all this happening, alternative tourism is becoming popular as concern for the
damage being caused to people and places becomes more and more visible. As tourists become aware
of the rights of host communities, they imagine that they are helping to redress the damage through
tourism and work or tourism and research or tourism and aid projects. Hill Tribe Trekking in Thailand
is an illustration of how alternative tours lead to mainstream tourism. In the70s a few youngsters
penetrated beyond Chiang Mai, where six tribes lived. The attraction was the growing of Opium. The
tribes began to transform their traditions and customs through the penetration of development
schemes. Tourism claimed to be an alternative form of development to preserve the culture of the
tribes. By the 80s tour companies had changed the face of Northern Thailand.
Marketing authenticity involves going native in all aspects of the operation. The office is simple and
unadorned. Pidgin English and poor spelling adorn the notices for services available. They claim that
the people are untouched, remote from the modern world, simple and natural. The companies mask
the changes that have taken place. They stress the visual appearance, the outside and the tourist being
a temporary visitor sees the native as a timeless representative of his culture. Walking in the jungle
is a search for ones own dream and not to learn about the native people. In fact, the natives have
learned more about the tourist. They know that for tourism to be authentic, they must have control.
When we look at the issue of cultural tourism, we can see that in the sweep of sustainability, culture
has been identified as one of the aspects of our lives that is being undermined, if not destroyed. To
approach the question of maintaining cultural integrity and honesty, therefore, is a complex problem
that requires careful thought and concrete action. Certainly culture should not be seen as a resource to
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be promoted as a product in a market. The cultural arena is to be approached with extreme caution and
sensitivity. This unfortunately is not the case. Take the example of Kerala Tourism using the Thrissur
Elephants March as a display of caparisoned Temple Elephants marching for tourists in an arena for
convenient viewing and photography. This secular use was extended to the inaugural of a sporting
event where the elephants were transported miles away from their home and environment, because the
Elephant March has become a symbol of Indias culture. The contrived nature of most of our culture
displays is painful since they do not reflect the meaning and the symbolism they represent. Similarly,
harvest dances of the hill tribes on Rajpath are a vain attempt to bring marginalized communities into
the mainstream. The audience does not react to the cultural values such dances provide a glimpse of.
These dancers are seen as primitive and backward. What enhances the majority ego is an attraction of
local colour for the tourist.
How then can we preserve and regenerate our culture? Although it is claimed that dying arts and
cultures have been given a new lease of life through tourism, from experience and research we can see
that they reflect a totally new life, that has lost its meaning. For culture to survive, those who are
custodians of the culture must have the right to decide how they want to present their culture or if they
want to present it at all. If their culture is being lost either its foundations have been eroded to such a
degree that there is no possibility for it to survive as a repository of the communities shared
experience or that external influences have devalued such experience and replaced it with an alien
culture. Tourism, if it is to sustain itself requires vital, dynamic cultures that are an expression of the
intelligence and creativity of communities that have retained their environmental, social, economic
and cultural autonomy and control.

Check Your Progress 2

1) Discuss the concept of Fourth World of ethnic minorities.

2) Explain the statement Authenticity and historicity go hand in hand.

10.7 LET US SUM UP

Cultural tourism defines a situation where the role of culture is contextual, where it shapes the tourist
experience, without a focus on its uniqueness. Over the years its been observed that cultural tourism
have boundaries which maybe crossed by the presenter in formulating tours or for staging
performances. Even researchers agree that its difficult to determine the role of cultural components in
tourism.
India, for example, centred/focussed its initial cultural tourism thrusts based on Mughal Architecture
and mountains. But with the advent of low cost package tours and mass tourism, new themes like the
local colour of Rajasthan and attractions down south were explored.
A number of studies focussed on post-modern tourism and culture indicate the changing role of the
cultural components in tourism. Dean MacConnell coined the term staged authenticity to describe
the artful presentation of cultural forms and symbols at sites. Such staging creates tourist space
which separates the sphere of tourism from the flow of local life, this in turn leads to the creation of
tourist bubble. The cultural representation to the tourists in this tourist bubble is in its contrived

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form. The originality and the authenticity of a cultural event loses its cultural symbolism in the
contrived form in which its presented to the tourists.
Travel has been a matter of taste since the days of Grand Tour, but its never been so widely used as an
indicator of taste as in the present. There has been a rise of ego tourists as well as the intellectual
snobbery in tourism. People/Tourists are willing to go an extra length to have an exclusive or
unique or rarely visited or off the beaten track places experience. This has led to what many
call as the Fourth World of ethnic minorities, indigenous people and remnants of hunting and
gathering bands.
Heritage is the latest concern in cultural tourism. Essentially in tourism the term heritage has come to
mean not only landscapes, natural history, buildings, artefacts, cultural traditions and the like, which
are literally and metaphorically passed on from one generation to the other, but those amongst these
things which can be portrayed for promotion as tourist products.
The various cultural events and heritage related tourism is an attraction of local colour for the
tourist. The audience react to the cultural symbolism but vie for the local flavour and authenticity
attached with the activity. It is often said that dying arts have been given a new lease of life but one
fails to see the degeneration and commercialisation of the cultural elements for the sake of tourism.
For culture and tourism to co-exist, it is necessary to find a new degree of co-relation between the two
and keep a check that external influences do not replace culture in its original form to an alien culture.

10.8 CLUES TO ANSWERS

Check Your Progress - 1

1) Read Sec.10.2.
2) Refer Sec.10.4.
3) Go through Sec.10.4.

Check Your Progress - 2

1) Refer Sec.10.7.
2) Go through Sec.10.6.

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