Tourism and culture

Over the decades, scholars have sought to understand and explain the changing institutional, political, and socio-economic linkages between culture and tourism. Researchers have long theorized some of the central features of tourism and tourist experiences, and examined the impact of tourism development on local culture. Much scholarship has also investigated the ways in which local cultural practices and identities shape the production and organization of tourism at a grassroots level. In conventional accounts, tourism is a set of discrete economic activities, a mode of consumption, or a spatially bounded locality or “destination” that is subject to external forces. In contrast, recent research conceptualizes tourism as a highly complex set of institutions and social relations that involve capitalist markets, state policy, and flows of commodities, technology, cultural forms, and people. In this conception, tourism is embedded within broader patterns of societal transformation as well as local networks and cultural practices. My scholarship examines the ways in which tourism affects culture (both positively

and negatively), how culture structures the development of tourism in a particular locale, and how tourism and culture transform each other as different actors and organized interests compete for access to and control over political and economic resources. Both tourism and culture are multidimensional, heterogeneous, and fluid categories that attain their significance in relationship with each other. Moreover, the boundaries between tourism and culture are porous and ever changing, in part because these categories become both sites and objects of political struggle among different groups. In what follows, I have developed and applied the concept of “touristic culture” as a

heuristic device to illustrate the ways in which culture and tourism share similar themes, symbols, discourses, and interpretive systems. Whereas a “culture of tourism” showcases local culture to attract tourists, a “touristic culture” blurs boundaries between tourism and other major institutions and cultural practices. Specifically, touristic culture is a process by which tourist modes of staging, visualization, and experience increasingly frame meanings and assertions of local culture, identity, authenticity, and collective memory. Exploring the concept of touristic culture can provide novel insights into several areas of scholarship, including: (1) the relationship between tourism and culture, ethnicity

and race; (2) processes of cultural erosion and invention; and (3) tourism as a catalyst and expression of socio-cultural transformation.