Destination culture : tourism, museums, and heritage / Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett

By:

Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, Barbara

Publication details: Berkeley ; Los Angeles ; London : University of California Press, cop. 1998Description: xviii, 326 pISBN:

0520209664

Summary: 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 the powerful messages conveyed not only by the objects shown but also by specific techniques of display. Kirshenblatt-Gimblett's engaging analysis shows how museums compete with tourism in the production of "heritage." To make themselves profitable, museums now market themselves as tourist attractions. To make locations into destinations, tourism stages the world as a museum of itself. Both promise to deliver heritage, which she sees not as a simple representation of the past but rather as 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 and the process of converting life into heritage begins. (Font: Editor)

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Holdings
Item type	Current library	Collection	Call number	Copy number	Status	Date due	Barcode
Book	Centre d' Informació i Documentació del CERC Sala	General	S 02864	1	Available (Disponible)		1900057981

List of Illustrations -- Acknowledgments -- Introduction -- 1. The Agency of Display: Objects of Ethnography ; Exhibiting Jews -- 2. A Second Life as Heritage: Destination Museum ; Ellis Island ; Plimoth Plantation -- 3. Undoing the Ethnographic: Confusing Pleasures ; Secrets of Encounter -- 4. Circulating Value: Disputing Taste -- Notes -- Index

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