Destination Culture

Tourism, Museums, and Heritage

Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett (Autor)

Buch | Softcover

348 Seiten

1998
University of California Press (Verlag)
978-0-520-20966-4 (ISBN)

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Takes the reader on a journey from ethnological artifacts to kitsch. Posing the question, 'What does it mean to show?' this title explores the agency of display in a variety of settings: museums, festivals, world's fairs, historical re-creations, memorials, and tourist attractions.

"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 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.

Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett is Professor of Performance Studies and of Hebrew and Judaic Studies at New York University.

List of Illustrations

Acknowledgments

Introduction

part 1 The Agency of Display

Objects of Ethnography

Exhibiting Jews

part 2 A Second Life as Heritage

Destination Museum

Ellis Island

Plimoth Plantation

part 3 Undoing the Ethnographic

Confusing Pleasures

Secrets of Encounter

part 4 Circulating Value

Disputing Taste

Notes

Index

Erscheint lt. Verlag	5.9.1998
Zusatzinfo	98 black-and-white photographs
Verlagsort	Berkerley
Sprache	englisch
Maße	178 x 254 mm
Gewicht	862 g
Themenwelt	Kunst / Musik / Theater
	Geisteswissenschaften ► Geschichte ► Hilfswissenschaften
	Sozialwissenschaften
	Wirtschaft
ISBN-10	0-520-20966-4 / 0520209664
ISBN-13	978-0-520-20966-4 / 9780520209664
Zustand	Neuware