Destination Culture: Tourism, Museums, and Heritage [Paperback]

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Product Details

Paperback: 311 pages
Publisher: University of California Press; 1 edition (Sep 5 1998)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0520209664
ISBN-13: 978-0520209664
Product Dimensions: 23.2 x 17.4 x 3.8 cm
Shipping Weight: 953 g
Amazon Bestsellers Rank: #155,719 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #18 in Books > Nonfiction > Social Sciences > Anthropology > Ethnology
- #23 in Books > Nonfiction > Social Sciences > Museum Studies & Museology

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Product Description

Book Description

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.

From the Inside Flap

"Destination Culture is a book of discovery. Reading it is to accompany Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett through fairs and museums, as a tourist and as an always sharp observer of people. The power of this book is to show how first-rate ethnographic work is also the stuff of cultural studies. This volume, including her widely cited "Exhibiting Jews," shows why there are few commentators on the cultural scene who are as insightful, critical--and often funny--as Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett."--Sander L. Gilman, author of Smart Jews

"A book of wide appeal that has few rivals . . . . It develops an original perspective on museums and other forums for displaying culture and art and does so in a witty and accessible style."--Ivan Karp, coeditor of Museums and Communities

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First Sentence
Moon rocks, a few small strips of meat dried Hidatsa-style before 1918. Read the first page

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Amazon.com: 5.0 out of 5 stars (1 customer review)

12 of 13 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Destinations Discussed -- Culturally Speaking, Nov 17 2006

By grasshopper4 - Published on Amazon.com

This review is from: Destination Culture: Tourism, Museums, and Heritage (Paperback)

The central theme in this book is an extended answer to the big question "What does it mean to show?" It's a very broad topic. But I like the way that Kirshenblatt-Gimblett focuses her discussion by posing engaging rhetorical questions and lucid statements of interesting research topics which provide a solid base for her analysis. The variety of topics is fascinating. It's intriguing to read a single volume that deals with the history of museums in connection to tourism, Jewish self-representation in worlds' fairs, Ellis Island as a tourist site, Plimoth Plantation's living history programs, arts and folklife festivals as forms of avant-garde theater, and scholarly analysis of a catalogue of bad taste. The disparate essays are actually pretty unified as they are arranged thematically to explore how the processes of exhibiting cultural artifacts is embedded in a vast network of academic and cultural institutions, how displaying material culture is related to the construction of heritage, how the tropes and schemes of ethnographic study and display are connected with wider issues in museums and festival presentations, and a concluding chapter that examines the shifting criteria for standards of taste and its inherent relationships to the circulation of value within society. The writing is interesting and often challenging, and it opens numerous questions for further reflection and discussion.

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