ABSTRACT
Dominated by leisure pursuits and mass tourism, and perceived as disembedded, carnivalesque ‘elsewheres’, resorts are too often read as being superficial, depthless and homogenous. This chapter problematises such assumptions through an exploration of burgeoning cultural tourism initiatives in resorts. Increasingly, resorts are attempting to diversify their tourism offerings and appeal to visitors interested in culture, nature and heritage (rather than only sun, sand and sex). These types of tourists are often understood to be motivated primarily by a desire for intellectual (more so than bodily) pleasures and to have ‘authentic’ experiences through encountering sites like landmarks, museums, galleries or urban precincts (rather than beaches, nightclubs and shopping malls). In the process of catering to these tourists, resorts are capitalising on their local specificity to cultivate a strong symbolic economy. Thus, culture and heritage are being staged in the face of pervasive stereotypes of resorts as ahistorical and inauthentic. The chapter explains how these stereotypes stem from wider discourses regarding the influence of globalising processes like tourism on local cultures. In doing so, binaries of culture/capitalism, real/staged, authentic/inauthentic, difference/familiarity and local/global are critiqued.
