ABSTRACT
Tourism, according to Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, compresses life and eventually displaces it: ‘organizing travel to reduce the amount of down time and dead space between high points’, and, where it works through museums, historic buildings and other objects of the past, it ‘escalates the process by which life becomes heritage’ (1998, 7). Heritage is thus produced within dynamic processes of cultural production that select and present objects and embed them in the representational practices associated with tourism. As heritage attractions they in turn become the very media through which culturally important values are displayed and consumed, especially where these are associated with nation building and identity. The notion of consumption is particularly important here because of the tensions it creates between heritage in the form of museums, buildings and archaeology, and the visual modalities of interpretation and marketing that are central to the demands of the tourism industry (Allcock 1995; Dicks 2000, 180; see other authors in this volume).
