HERITAGE, TOURISM AND COMMUNITY
A New Book Series from Left Coast Press
Series Editor: Helaine Silverman, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Letters of inquiry welcome, please email: helaine@uiuc.edu 

Heritage, Tourism and Community is an innovative new book series that seeks to address these interconnected issues from multidisciplinary and interdisciplinary perspectives. Manuscripts are sought that address heritage and tourism and their relationships to local community, economic development, regional ecology, heritage conservation and preservation, and related indigenous, regional, and national political and cultural issues.

The series premise is that archaeological and historic sites, specific buildings, museums of various types, performances (intangible heritage), and natural environments are all venues for the construction and display of heritage by the tourism industry and by communities (up to the level of the imagined community of the nation), sometimes in consort with or opposition to each other (heritage as a site of struggle). Of particular interest are policy parameters (including those of the particular governmental and/or non-governmental entities involved) and policy’s implications for the affected communities (for instance, in terms of the construction of identity around heritage and continued access to its tangible manifestations or participation in its ephemeral performances).

Also important to consider are recursive issues of representation: how “others” are represented to tourists and how tourists are perceived by the host (willing or not) community; the different meanings and understandings of heritage held by different stakeholders that revolve around sites/performances; gender issues (from tourism’s differential impact on communities to how men and women travel); and the role of various brokers such as tour guides and travel agents.

The volumes in this series are all single-author case studies. The ideal book will convey the key elements of a specific case of heritage tourism development, highlighting the value of the case study to those practicing in this field (anthropologists, archaeologists, public historians, policy makers, urban planners, etc.). The volume should be driven by theory and practical principles drawn from the cases that demonstrate the book’s relevance to issues of concern to the series’ wide readership. Comparisons to other relevant case studies are strongly recommended so as to contextualize the monograph’s argument. Volumes cannot limit themselves to purely descriptive studies of individual heritage tourism projects and how obstacles were overcome in that setting.

Manuscripts will be 150-300 pages double-spaced (35,000-70,000 words), with up to 40 illustrations.

Manuscripts will be reviewed by the series editor and appropriate members of the 10-member editorial board.

Following a fifty-year period of development, the United Nations’ World Tourism Organization came into existence in 1975 with a stated mission to promote “the development of responsible, sustainable and universally accessible tourism, with the aim of contributing to economic development, international understanding, peace, prosperity and universal respect for, and observance of, human rights and fundamental freedoms.” At the same time (1976) ICOMOS (International Council on Monuments and Sites) proposed an approach to cultural tourism that recognized historic and ancient sites as potential sources of economic development and cultural value for their local communities. By 1995 cultural tourism had become such a global phenomenon that a “Charter for Sustainable Tourism” was proposed by WTO’s World Conference on that issue. This Charter exhorts the diverse tourism entities around the world to be mindful of the impact of tourism on the cultural heritage and traditions of host communities.

As professionals in international and national organizations were working on legislation concerning heritage, tourism and community, scholars were simultaneously conducting research in this area. The “anthropology of tourism” was born in the 1970s with such pioneering works as Dean MacCannell’s The Tourist (1976) and Valerie Smith’s edited volume, Hosts and Guests (1977). Nor did anthropology have a monopoly on this newly coalesced field of inquiry. Architects, landscape architects, geographers, historians, sociologists, urban planners, leisure studies scholars, and the then new field of cultural studies—to name only the most obvious—began conducting comprehensive studies concerned with these same interlinkages. In the late 1980s archaeologists began to address the contemporary context of their research as part of a growing practical and ethical awareness.

Tourism today is recognized as the world’s greatest global industry in terms of revenue generated and human movement. In First World countries and the Developing World, tourism is dramatically impacting the lives and livelihoods of surrounding populations and the economic and political strategies of the nation-states in which they are embedded. So important is tourism in real and symbolic terms that several of the worst terrorist attacks in recent years targeted tourist sites (Luxor and Bali spring readily to mind). Even remote villages seek to market themselves as tourist attactions on the basis of noteworthy sites or traditional cultural performances; regions within a country compete with each other for tourists; and entire countries spend lavishly on slick ads in upscale magazines in an attempt to capture a major share of tourism’s dividends.

Communities around the world, including in the United States, are building and claiming their heritage on the basis of tourist attractions or sites/peformances that they wish to develop as tourist destinations. In the case of U.S. Civil War re-enactments, we are dealing with a multi-sited identity (descendant or adopted). Other heritage identities are more place-fixed. The presidential victory of Evo Morales in Bolivia can be understood in the context of the Aymara peoples’ long-term struggle for physical and ideological control of the great ruins of Tiwanaku with which they identify as a descendant community. Australian Aboriginals vigorously defend their cultural traditions and ancestral territories against intrusive tourism at sites on their indigenous sacred landscapes. African-Americans take tours of slave castles in Ghana whose meanings are multiple and contested for the Ghanians. Some post-Holocaust Jews undertake a “dark” form of heritage tourism to Auschwitz in Poland where both unremitting anti-Semitism and a new chic appropriation of Jewish culture by enlightened Poles compete and co-exist. Maya Indians negotiate their identities, traditions and rights within a booming five-country tourism route.

The richly complex and pragmatically complicated intersections of heritage, tourism and community offer an exciting intellectual space for dialogue, with application to real world situations.

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