ABSTRACT
A critical approach to the phenomenon of tourism – itself a complex and multi-faceted aspect of modernity and globalisation – requires a nuanced approach to the understanding of the role of time. In considering the tourist exploitation of vernacular or domestic architecture, a major motor of gentrification in tourism-dominated economies, at least five distinct kinds of temporality are in play. Against the remorseless march of time – the time that forever denies Ozymandias immortality and afflicts the entire range of architectural heritage despite the energetic claims of monumentality to a lien on eternity – another kind of temporal contest lends urgency to the tourist operators' efforts. Tourist interest in 'ways of life' may be a peculiarly Eurocentric preoccupation; it is a search for an 'authenticity' that does not conform to the officialising language of national history, religious orthodoxy and social respectability but seeks places that reveal how real life is lived.
