ABSTRACT
The point of the exalted tourist is to present tourism as a noble pursuit. A Global Code of Ethics outlines this construction of tourism and the redefining of tourism as ‘sustainable’ reinforces this view of the place of tourism. Indeed, tourism is not only eco-friendly, it is cast in terms which makes it essential if the environment is to be preserved. Within the urban landscape the tourist is exalted for all the benefits he or she brings to the city and its inhabitants. Tourists are seen as a necessity for the regeneration of cities. Tourism is likewise presented as the means by which heritage is preserved for future generations. Of course, we question much of this framework. This discourse of tourism
is often self-justifying and more particularly when cast in these terms can lead to a redefining of cities as sites of consumption which remove citizenship rights from local people and raise the consuming tourist to such an exalted status that their needs override all others. Law can also be harnessed to reinforce this process at various points, or even if not the formal law, then a discourse that borrows heavily from law in its style and language. In the last chapter we discussed the material world of the city and how
tourism has acted to recast the city. The patchwork of heritage, public order and special-event laws support this process, even though most of these laws rarely refer to tourism. However, many official documents and reports do explicitly connect the processes of these laws with tourism and together they construct the discourse to which we refer. In this chapter we examine the notion of culture within tourism particularly as it first applies to movable
culture. This is spatial regulation of a different kind and illustrates the contradictory impulses within law to which we referred at the end of the last chapter. For example, are antiquities plundered from another time to be retained as the property of one country, or repatriated as stolen artefacts? Which stories of a city are to be kept in our museums, our memories? The tourist that travels for cultural purposes is often exalted to a higher
degree than the ‘pleasure seeker’ tourist. To travel to visit a museum is often presented as more worthy than travel for sport or sunbathing. The question we ask is whether the cultural tourist is actually more dangerous than the ‘pleasure seeking’ tourist, as the former’s appetite for more and more ‘culture’ requires the commodification of new objects in museums around the globe. Does the cultural tourist sow the seeds of the destruction of culture rather than assist in its preservation? We also explore in this chapter some aspects of the connection between Indigenous culture and tourism. Again, is the respect for other cultures that is called for in the Global Code of Ethics the protector of Indigenous culture, or does it implicitly create an acceptance that Indigenous culture too is ‘for sale’. In telling the story of Indigenous people, is it to be packaged for tourist consumption by those who control the museums and other urban theme parks, or do we allow Indigenous people to speak for themselves and let the past haunt the present?
The cultural tourist will gravitate to the city to embrace the opportunity to consume those major sites of culture which are heavily promoted as part of the ‘must see’ places on the tourism map. Art galleries and museums are the usual cultural venues which are high on the priority list of tourists, and to that end the museum has undergone radical change in the past decade or so to accommodate tourist expectations. One also has to bear in mind the extent to which museums are now, in effect, competing with other parts of the urban scene for customers. As we discussed in the previous chapter the city generally has remade itself to attract tourism. Museums, as the holders of key items of cultural heritage, are part of that landscape. As Shaw and Williams say of Las Vegas:
