From:  Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, Destination Culture: Tourism,
Museums, and Heritage.  Berkeley and Los Angeles:  University of
California Press, 1998.  Please see published version for revisions,
notes, and illustrations.
=============================================================================


                            Destination Museum
                       Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett

     When Gatwick Airport's theme park opens in 1996, visitors
for whom the experience of actual travel is no longer enough
will be taking "a tour through baggage, security and emergency
facilities, a mock control tower where visitors can have a go
at landing planes and a 'white knuckle' ride through a replica
of a baggage handling system."  The very trials and
tribulations of travel are becoming attractions in their own
right through principles that have long connected tourism and
museums.
     Whole countries market themselves as "the world's largest
open air museum."  Deep in this marketing ploy for Turkey is
the unnerving insight that tourism may beat museums at their
own game by enabling travellers to encounter "some of the most
stunning, intact, works of art and architecture anywhere. 
Such as St. Sophia, the Blue Mosque and the sumptuous Topkapi
Palace" and to experience them in situ, before they have been
dismantled and shipped off to a museum.  The Bikini Islands
are developing an atomic theme park in the areas devastated by
nuclear testing.  The United States National Park Service
characterizes the ships and bombs at the bottom of the lagoon
as an "unmodified museum of the dawn of the era of the atomic
bomb."  Such promotions promise an experience that is more
real, more immediate, or more complete, whether they deliver
an actuality (Gatwick Airport) or a virtuality (Gatwick
Airport theme park)--or both, at the very same place.   
     Immersion in a world other than one's own is a form of
transport, whether one travels 26 hours from Europe to New
Zealand, strolls from Samoa to Fiji within the virtual space
of the Polynesian Cultural Center in Hawaii, or crosses the
road separating Chinatown from Little Italy in Manhattan. 
What is most ordinary in the context of the destination
becomes a source of fascination for the visitor--milking cows
on a farm, the subway in Mexico City during rush hour, outdoor
barbers in Nairobi, the etiquette of bathing in Japan.  Once
it is a sight to be seen, the life world becomes a museum of
itself.   
     Tourism needs destinations, and museums are premier
attractions.  Museums are not only destinations on an
itinerary.  They are also nodes in a network of attractions
that form the recreational geography of a region and,
increasingly, the globe.  Increasingly, museums, by whatever
name, are also an integral part of natural, historical, and
cultural sites.  Such facilities orient the visitor to
Napier's art deco district, the Waitomo Caves, or the
Waitakere rain forest in New Zealand.  Some businesses
establish full-fledged museums devoted to their own history
(Atlanta's Coca Cola Museum) or the history of their product
(Toronto's Bata Shoe Museum).  Museums are also events on a
calendar.  Blockbuster exhibitions are known in the trade as
event tourism.
     Museums have long served as surrogates for travel, a
particularly important role before the advent of mass tourism. 
They have from their inception preserved the souvenirs of
travel, as evidenced in their collections of plants, animals,
and minerals and evidence of the arts and industries of the
world's cultures.  While the collection itself is an undrawn
map of all the places from which the materials have come, the
floor plan, which determines where people walk, also
delineates conceptual paths through what becomes a virtual
space of travel.  
     Exhibiting artifacts from far and wide, museums have
attempted from an early date to reconstruct the places from
which these things were brought.  The habitat group, period
room, and re-created village bring a site otherwise removed in
space or time to the visitor.  During the nineteenth century
exhibitions delivered a world already made smaller by the
railroad and steamship to your door.  Panoramas featured
virtual Grand Tours and simulated the sound and motion of
trains and ships and the atmospheric effects of storms at sea. 
A guide lectured and otherwise entertained these erstwhile
travellers.  Such shows were celebrated in their own day as
substitutes for travel that might be even better than actually
going to the place depicted.  As one commentator explained in
Blackwood's Magazine (1824), panoramas were a painless form of
travel:   
     Panoramas are among the happiest contrivances for saving
     time and expense in this age of contrivances.  What cost
     a couple of hundred pounds and half year a century ago,
     now costs a shilling and a quarter of an hour.... The
     affair is settled in a quarter of an hour.  The mountain
     or the sea, the classic vale of the ancient city, is
     transported to us on the wings of the wind.... If we have
     not the waters of the Lake of Geneva, and the bricks and
     mortar of the little Greek town, tangible by our hands,
     we have them tangible by the eye--the fullest impression
     that could be purchased, by our being parched,
     passported, plundered, starved, and stenched, for 1,200
     miles east and by south, could not be fuller than the
     work of Messrs Parker's [sic] and Burford's brushes.  The
     scene is absolutely alive, vivid, and true;  we feel all
     but the breeze, and hear all but the dashing of the wave.
Viewers might prefer the panorama of Naples to Naples itself
because it is "even more pleasant to look upon in Leicester
Square, than is the reality with all its abominations of
tyranny, licentiousness, poverty, and dirt."
     Furthermore, not everyone could travel and for them
panoramas and dioramas were, in the words of Charles Dickens,
a "mode of conveyance."  Mr. Booley's travel account in
Household Words (1850), turns out to be based on a panorama--
"all my modes of conveyance have been pictorial."  The
panorama's value, in Booley's words, lay in its ability to
convey "the results of actual experience, to those who are
unable to obtain such experiences for themselves."  In
addition, the panorama might convey "aspects of soil and
climate...with a completeness and truthfulness not always to
be gained from a visit to the scene itself."  Displaced by
cinema and amusement parks by the end of the century, this
exhibition tradition can be found today in the atavism of
museum dioramas, the futurism of IMAX projection, the special
effects of rides like Back to the Future at Universal Studios,
and the hi-tech panoramas at the Museum of Sydney.  Museums
continue to enact transformations in perception linked to the
technologies and practices of travel.
     They now also serve as travel agents and organize
exclusive tours to distant places. Travel With a Purpose
tours, many of them led by curators from the Powerhouse Museum
in Sydney, focus on ecotourism and the arts. These tours are
intended to be "informative expeditions into other cultures
for those of us not interested in poolside tourism
experiences."  During the last months of 1994, tour groups
went to Bhutan, France, Nepal, and India. The cost of the tour
includes a donation to one of the sponsors--World Wide Fund
for Nature--and to the Powerhouse Museum.  
     Instead of waiting for the tourists to come to them,
museums are going to the tourists.  Thanks to an exhibition
program inaugurated in 1980 by the San Francisco Airport
Commission, more than one person making a connecting flight
stepped off the motorized walkway to stroll through a display
of kitchen equipment and tableware from the Ritz Collection at
the California Academy of Sciences or slowed down for an
exhibition of vintage ukeleles from the collection of Akira
Tseumara in an otherwise bleak corridor.  
     Museums are even reproducing the protocols of travel. 
Visitors can purchase a Museums Passport to more than 190
museums in Queensland, Australia, get their documents stamped
as they complete each visit, and save the passport as a
souvenir.  The American Museum of Natural History in New
York, to celebrate its 125th anniversary in 1995, thematized
visits to its galleries as an expedition comparable to those
the museum once sponsored to collect the specimens on display. 
Expedition Passport, available at two Base Camps in the
building, welcomes the young visitor:  
     Most explorers travel to far-off places, but your journey
     will take place right in the footsteps of those
     scientists who have travelled the world and who have
     brought back many of the treasures you will see today. 
     On this expedition, you can move back in time to the Age
     of Dinosaurs.  You can touch a meteorite as old as the
     solar system.  You can see a young Chinese woman on the
     way to her wedding.  You can visit the woodlands,
     savannahs, and mountain regions of Africa.  You can even
     shrink to the size of an ant.  A great adventure lies
     before you today.  To begin, turn the page.
At field stations in five galleries, visitors get their
"passports" stamped.
     Such tropes form an archive of historical understandings
that go uncontested.  Their playfulness insulates them from
the very critiques that destabilized celebrations of the
Columbus Quincentenary and that have brought museums
themselves to task for their historic role in grand projects
of discovery and conquest.  Marketing a troubled history that
glorifies colonial adventure and a repudiated anthropology of
primitivism, tourism provides a safe haven for these ideas.  A
1987 Iberia Airlines promotion began, "With 100 tours to
choose from, Spain is once again open to invasion," and added
tourists to a list that included Phoenicians, Greeks, Romans,
and Visigoths--"Get ready for a vacation that's destined to go
down in history."

     Museums need visitors and the tourism industry, more than
any sector of the economy, can deliver the hoards to its
doors.  By one estimate, seven billion tourists will be moving
around the globe annually by the year 2000.  Museums hope to
draw many of them into their galleries.  Because the number of
visitors, not the number of visits, determines the total
disposable income brought through the museum's doors, tourists
generate more revenue for museums than "a relatively small
core of repeat visitors."  The newly refurbished Louvre
attracted more than six million visitors in 1994, most of them
tourists.  Tourists make up two thirds of the visitors to the
Metropolitan Museum of Art at the present time.
     As the tourism industry moves from a product-driven to a
market-led approach--and from an experience based on seeing to
one based on doing--it positions museums in the rearguard of
the industry.  Travel itself has become almost effortless,
compared with its arduousness in earlier periods and tourists
look for "action" elsewhere.  They fly in comfort to endure
the rigors of whitewater rafting and abseiling.  Scenic
tourism gives way to adventure tourism, which the industry
classifies as active (doing).  In this taxonomy of tourist
amenities, cultural attractions, including museums, are
passive (seeing).
     Museums have long epitomized a product-driven ethos,
reserving for itself the prerogative (in the public interest)
to determine what it wants to say and show.  This prerogative
is a legacy of the bifurcation of entertainment and
edification during the last half of the nineteenth century,
when the public museum and art gallery as we know them came
into their own, as Tony Bennett has analyzed.  A long history
of public service, scientific research, education, social
amelioration, cultural elevation, and local enthusiasms has to
insulated museums until recently from the customer focus of
the modern tourism industry.  
     Writing about twenty years ago, the art historian E.H.
Gombrich complained that museums had become exhibition
centers, which he attributed to tourism and the pressure to
increase attendance figures.  People who would not bother to
visit the permanent collection would line up to see paintings
that had been moved into the gallery from across the road--
"Any windowdresser, if I may put it so bluntly, can place an
isolated Greek vase under a spotlight in an empty room and
force it upon our attention."  He bemoaned the price of
accessibility.  Lost was the "almost religious awe" with which
visitors used to approach a museum and the possibility of
"scanning and grouping" the collection on display according to
one's perceptions and interests.
     Today some critics bemoan not just the spotlight, but
also the displacement of the Greek vase itself by the ideas it
is made to illustrate.  Such critics note a decline in the
"museum product," as museums "move away from object-based
museum services to the contextual approach advocated by the
New Museology."  This move, as they see it, takes objects out
of the spotlight and emphasizes education and visitor
services, at the cost of curatorial research based on museum
collections.
     This self-conscious shift in orientation away from the
museum's artifacts and towards its visitors is signalled by
the term "experience," which has become ubiquitous in both
tourism and museum marketing--the term indexes an engagement
of the senses, emotions, and imagination.  Museums were once
defined by their relationship to objects--curators were
"keepers" and their greatest asset was their collections. 
Today, they are defined more than ever by their relationship
to visitors.  In its brochure, the Powerhouse Museum promises
"good service" to what it now calls its "customers" and in
this way is consistent with a shift within the tourism
industry itself, where service has become more important than
product.  A focus on visitors is also why exhibitions, which
is how museums produce experience, have become their major
activity.  
     The complaints signal a crisis in museum identity.  With 
long histories sedimented in the very buildings many have
occupied since their inception, museums must negotiate the
competing expectations of diverse constituencies.  And they
must do so in contexts very different from those in which many
of them were first established.  What is today's museum?
     *    A vault, in the tradition of the royal treasure
          room, the Schatzkammer.
     *    A cathedral of culture, where citizens enact civic
          rituals at shrines to art and civilization.  
     *    A school dedicated to the creation of an informed
          citizenry and serving organized school groups as
          well as adults embarked on a course of lifelong
          learning.
     *    A laboratory for creating new knowledge.
     *    A cultural center for the keeping and transmission
          of patrimony.
     *    A forum for public debate, where controversial
          topics can be subjected to informed discussion.
     *    A tribunal on the bombing of Hiroshima, Freud's
          theories, or Holocaust denial.
     *    A theater, a memory palace, a stage for the
          enactment of other times and places, a space of
          transport, fantasy, dreams.
     *    A party, where great achievements and historical
          moments can be celebrated.
     *    An advocate for preservation, conservation,
          repatriation, sovereignty, tolerance.
     *    A place to mourn.
     *    An artifact to be displayed in its own right,
          including its history, operations, understandings,
          and practices.
     *    An attraction in a tourist economy, complete with
          cafes, shops, films, performances, and exhibitions.
     And, what is the fate of the "museum product," however it
is defined, in today's tourism economy?  The presumption in
some quarters is that visitors are no longer interested in the
quiet contemplation of objects in a cathedral of culture. 
They want to have an "experience."  Museums worry that they
will be bypassed as boring, dusty places, as spaces of death--
dead animals, dead plants, defunct things.  This is why MoNZ
(Museum of New Zealand), in its Wellington Visitors' Center,
has made a preemptive strike, first anticipating the negative
image of the museum as a solemn place, "somewhere you have to
whisper like a church" and are not allowed to touch old things
in glass cases.  Then it tells the visitor that "We are re-
imagining the term 'Museum,'" as a place that is alive,
exciting, and unique--exactly what tourism markets.  The flyer
announcing MoNZ defines the museum experience as "an amazing
adventure--one in which all New Zealanders are travellers,"
for "The Museum is going to take us on a journey."  The
destination is collective self-understanding.  Museums engaged
in the task of imagining the nation must define its location,
a responsibility that has repercussions beyond the journey
within its walls.  
     Even as museums model themselves on tourism--the promise
of "experience" indexes the immediacy of travel--the industry
in parts of the world like New Zealand and Australia has been
slow to develop "cultural tourism."  Most of the tourists in
these relatively young states is based on nature and the rest
on purpose-built tourist attractions.  There are several
reasons for this emphasis.  
     First, there is the problem of how to define the
uniqueness of a destination the better to market it in a
competitive industry.  What makes this place different? 
Australia and New Zealand have tended to identify their
uniqueness as tourist destinations with the indigenous and to
identify Culture with the places from which settlers came. 
Yet, despite a high rate of endemism, their difference from
other places is not natural but cultural--that is, difference
is produced, not found.  For Anthony Trollope, writing in
1873, "the great drawback to New Zealand,--or I should more
properly say to travelling in New Zealand,--comes from the
feeling that after crossing the world and journeying over so
many miles, you have not at all succeeded in getting away from
England.  When you have arrived there you are, as it were,
next door to your own house, and yet you have a two months
barrier between yourself and your home."  Identifying New
Zealand's specificity with unique aspects of its natural
endowments is a cultural practice.  Judging from Trollope's
observation, it is not an obvious one.  More than a century
later, the information pamphlet in a Dunedin motel room keeps
alive the idea that "Packed into this small country is
seemingly a piece of every part of the world.  England's
countryside, Norway's fiords, Switzerland's alps, Canada's
lakes, Oregon's coast, and Hawaiian beaches are but a few of
the similarities one may find while travelling around this
South Pacific gem."
     Tourism can be taken as a barometer, and operates as an
instrument, of local and national self-understanding.  As
Christopher Wood, art historian and founder of Australians
Studying Abroad, comments, "in trying to package itself to
attract a burgeoning new class of curious and sophisticated
travellers, Australia is in a real sense having to invent
itself.... What we're doing, if you like, is creating a whole
new cultural geography based on things other people want to
learn about; making Australia into a bounded place with a vast
typology of things to see."  That process is museological.  
      New Zealand tourism projects an imagined landscape that
segments the history of the country into three hermetic
compartments.  The nature story stops with the coming of
people. The indigenous story stops with the coming of
Europeans.  And the Europeans (and more recent immigrants)
have until recently not been convinced that their story is
very interesting.  The divided consciousness of colonial
societies, with one foot here and the other there, is
registered in the very history of tourism.  Where tourists
once travelled all the way from Europe only to arrive in
"Europe," today they land in "the world's oldest land,"
according to Welcome Australia, the guest information book at
the Brisbane Hilton.  The map of Australia found there
features flora, fauna, sports, Uluru, aborigines, and a few
buildings--in other words, natural attractions, indigenous
people, and sports.
     Second, the tourism industry is a business and as far as
the industry is concerned, culture is not.  Wellington Region
Tourism Strategy explains: "Tourist attractions within the
industry are events and facilities oriented to experiential
opportunities.  Most attractions are in themselves outside the
scope of the industry," including "free, inherent and natural
resources" or "incidental resources from various industries." 
Technically, then, museums are not within the tourism
industry.  
     Because many museums in Australia and New Zealand still
do not charge admission, they fall into the category of "free"
resource.  Nor, according to the industry, are they
"experiential."  At least not in the way that climbing Ayers
Rock (Uluru is not for climbing), scuba diving, eating and
shopping are "experiential."  The introduction to The New
Zealand's Tourist & Visitors' Guide explains that "Tourist
activities can be divided into two categories, passive and
adventure.  There are many activities for the older or less
physically active tourist, including sightseeing, jet boating,
arts and crafts, and enjoying the Maori culture and heritage
which is unique to the country.  Adventure tours are
constantly being invented."  More sophisticated marketing
speaks not of passive activities, but of soft adventure.  ORCA
(Wairarapa) features "Gentle Adventures--For family groups,
the nervous, the less mobile, photographers.  No heavy lifting
or fitness required.  Ages 5-90."  Active is identified with
physical exertion.
     In Queensland, it is the Office of Arts and Cultural
Development that is advocating for cultural tourism to a
tourism industry that needs to be persuaded of its
profitability.  For its part, the art world and museums--what
Hans Magnus Enzensberger called the "consciousness industry"--
must be profitable to survive and are looking to cultural
tourism for income.  
     Consider the Queensland Government Cultural Statement:
"The Business of Culture" is predicated on "what makes
Queensland culture distinctive--our social history and
heritage, our Indigenous cultures and natural environment, our
quality products, regions and many diverse cultures--and
promote this to the world."  Or Destination New Zealand's
proposition: "while our cultural heritage can be presented as
'entertainment' in the hubs, it can be experienced as
'lifestyle' in the regions."  These formulation elides
several notions of culture--culture as lived practice; culture
as heritage; and the culture industry.  It also raises several
questions.  How does a way of life become "heritage"?  How
does heritage become an industry?  And, what happens to the
life world in the process?
     There is a reciprocity, a recursiveness, between the
exhibition of the world and the world as exhibition of itself. 
Museums, through their exhibitions, create "an effect called
the real world."  That effect is one of tourism's most
valuable assets.  But, it is not enough, from the industry's
perspective, to open the bus and release tourists into the
lifespace of their destination--the "real world world,"
available everywhere, always open, and free of charge.  The
industry prefers cultural precincts and formal performances.  
     First, model villages and performing troupes are
transportable.  Maori cultural performances were exported to
Australia and England during the 1860s and to the Festival of
Empire Celebrations in England in 1911.  Tourists to Bali
today can see performances related to those created for
international expositions in the course of the last hundred
years and specially during the thirties in Paris.  Second,
designated precincts are more profitable than the lifespace
because they "add value" to it.  Controlled access to an area
makes it possible to charge a fee.  Third, model villages and
cultural concerts are more manageable and less intrusive,
hence less destructive of the lifespace.  
     The appeal of the lifespace is its high resolution, its
vividness and immediacy.  One problem with the lifespace is
its low density, the dead space between attractions.  A second
problem is saturation--as they increase in number, tourists
fill the space and displace what drew them to it in the first
place.   To address the saturation issue, the industry markets
exclusive sites to high-end tourists, thereby generating more
revenue from fewer visitors.  This is the promise of the empty
beach.  This is the message of photographs that show the site,
but not the tourists.  
     To address the density issue, the industry develops
linkages among sites in a region to form "heritage corridors"
and itineraries that link sites in a region.  The
International Express: A Guide to Ethnic Communities Along the
7 Train provides reasons to get off at every stop on the
route:
     The #7 train passes above to many ethnic and immigrant
     communities on its seven-mile route through northwest
     Queens [New York City] that it has been dubbed The
     International Express.  We invite you to experience it
     yourself.  Get off in Sunnyside, spend an evening at
     Spanish theater and a night at a Romanian disco; get off
     in Woodside, rent a Thai video and strike up a
     conversation at an Irish pub; get off in Jackson Heights,
     visit an Indian sari shop and dance at a Colombian night
     club....
Or, the industry designs cultural precincts like Brisbane's
riverside district, which will provide "a showcase for the
finest performers, artworkers and the State's cultural
heritage, integrated with food, shopping, and other exciting
lifestyle experiences," a convention and exhibition center and
a casino--"It will be a model cultural tourism concept that
will promote an integrated lifestyle and local cultural
experience."  In this way the district brings "free, inherent
and natural resources" or "incidental resources from various
industries" within the scope of the tourism industry proper.  
     Purpose-built tourist attractions like the Polynesian
Cultural Center in Hawaii, where you can experience the Cook
Islands, the Marquesas, Samoa, and Fiji all in one spot, are
not only dense.  They also insulate the lifespace represented
there from tourists, while controlling its representation and
bringing it firmly within the industry.  Guides to the site
are Pacific people who have converted to Mormonism, many of
them students at Brigham Young University.  Through their
performance of a way of life they no longer live, made safe
for display by that very fact, they also exhibit their
conversion.  
     Theme parks achieve the highest density of all--the whole
world within a few acres, often in places that have nothing
else to draw tourists.  Theme parks generally stand in an
arbitrary relation to the sites where they are built, since
fantasy has no fixed geographic location.  Nor do re-
creations.  New Yorkers who visit the New York-New York resort
in Las Vegas may wonder why they left home.  The orange groves
and swamps of Central Florida have been displaced by highways,
motels, and restaurants that serve the 34 million tourists who
"visit Orlando each year to see the world," or rather the
"world's showcases"--including Key West, a rival destination
nearby.  Key West World "will distill the essence of the tiny
island into a land-locked five-acre theme village" at Sea
World, just seven hours away from Key West itself.  The park
is to offer charm without crime and "introduce guests to the
island's 'fascinating inhabitants' as well as to its
subtropical ecosystem."  Is the theme park competition or free
advertising for Key West itself?  One pundit has proposed that
Key West create an "Orlando World," in which "They'd park in
gigantic parking lots, ride trams to the main gate, purchase
tickets and spend the remainder of the day standing in an
enormous, nonmoving line," after which "they would buy ugly T-
shirts, get back on the trams, spend an hour or so trying to
find their cars, then spend the rest of the evening driving
around trying to decide which one of 317 Sizzler restaurants
to eat dinner in."  In a word, a theme park of a theme park--
all infrastructure, low density, dead space.  
     When these same tourists return home, they may well
discover that the places they left have themselves become
destinations.  Small towns in Britain have become so popular
that they are turning visitors away.  The Age reported in 1994
that "'Town Full' is a sign of the times."  Three million
guests visit 30,000 hosts, at Windsor, where the ratio is 300
to one, and even higher in the peak season.  So resentful are
the locals in areas such as Bath that residents have been
known to turn hosepipes on open-top buses.  Tourists, it is
said, are spoiling the towns for each other and making it
uninhabitable for residents, who are fed up with congestion,
pollution, and erosion of the site itself.  Some towns,
conceding that they cannot keep tourists away, are drafting
"visitor management plans."  Others, like Cambridge, are
refusing to promote themselves at all.  
     The only way to keep visitors away from sites that they
are "loving to death" is to hide them.  Visitors to the
Indian ruins at Hovenweep National Monument, which straddles
the border of Utah and Colorado, have doubled in five years to
30,000.  Some sleep in them.  Others loot them.  The locations
of Indian ruins have been removed from maps so they cannot be
found.  
     Density levels are specially high at Gettysburg.  This
Pennsylvania town of 8000 serviced an influx of 1,748,000
tourists in 1995, a decline from the peak of more than two
million visitors in 1963, the centennial of the Battle of
Gettysburg.  The vast battlefield is the main attraction and
the town's economy depends on tourism, most of it day
trippers, for the income it generates.
     Roratonga projects a doubling of its tourism industry and
a ratio of 10 tourists for every local.  The Uluru National
Park Cultural Center is to be jointly managed by the Mutitjulu
Community and the Australian National Parks and Wildlife
Service.  About 2000 visitors a day are expected to visit the
center during peak periods, hopefully not only to shop for
aboriginal art and souvenirs and see exhibits, but also to
meet aboriginal people.  Despite great sensitivity in design
of this site, one can only imagine what it will be like for
the Mutitjulu Community to welcome 2000 guests a day, day in
and day out in peak periods.  "Tell the tourist where to go"
has been heard in at least one part of Australia.  
     Five years ago, the local population of Cairns, the jewel
in the crown of Australia's Gold Coast, was 70,000.  Today it
is 120,000, with tourists visiting at the rate of 500,000 a
year.  Longtime residents mourn the loss of the "real Cairns,"
which is the first step in converting a way of life into
heritage.  

     Heritage, in this context, is the transvaluation of the
obsolete, the mistaken, the outmoded, the dead, and the
defunct.  Heritage is created through a process of exhibition
(as knowledge, as performance, as museum display).  Exhibition
endows heritage thus conceived with a second life.  This
process reveals the political economy of display in museums
and in cultural tourism more generally.  The following
argument proceeds from seven propositions:
     *    Heritage is a new mode of cultural production in the
          present that has recourse to the past.
     *    Heritage is a "value added" industry.
     *    Heritage produces the local for export.
     *    A hallmark of heritage is the problematic
          relationship of its objects to the instruments of
          their display.
     *    Heritage is produced through a process that
          forecloses what is shown.
     *    Heritage tests the limits of the alienability of
          inalienable possessions.
     *    A key to heritage is its virtuality, whether in the
          presence or the absence of actualities.  

     I.   Heritage is a new mode of cultural production in the
          present that has recourse to the past.
     Heritage is not lost and found, stolen and reclaimed. 
Despite a discourse of conservation, preservation,
restoration, reclamation, recovery, re-creation, recuperation,
revitalization, and regeneration, heritage produces something
new in the present that has recourse to the past.  Such
language suggests that heritage is there prior to its
identification, evaluation, conservation, and celebration--
"Pieces of history are yours to find....the past is waiting
for you to explore in The Central West Coast" of the South
Island of New Zealand, the flyer beckons.  By production, I do
not mean that the result is not authentic or that it is
invented out of whole cloth.  Rather, I wish to underscore
that heritage is not lost and found, stolen and reclaimed.  It
is a mode of cultural production in the present that has
recourse to the past.
     Heritage not only gives buildings, precincts, and ways of
life that are no longer viable for one reason or another a
second life as exhibits of themselves.  It also produces
something new.  If a colonial past, a past of missionaries and
forced acculturation, threatened to produce "de-culturation,"
the heritage industry does not so much reverse that process,
even though its discourse of reclamation and preservation
makes such claims.  Rather, the heritage industry is a new
mode of cultural production and it produces something new. 
There is no turning back.  If heritage as we know it from the
industry were sustainable, it would not require protection. 
The process of protection, of "adding value," speaks in and to
the present, even if it does so in terms of the past.  

     II.  Heritage is a "value added" industry.
     Heritage adds value to existing assets that have either
ceased to be viable (subsistence lifestyles, obsolete
technologies, abandoned mines, the evidence of past disasters)
or that never were economically productive because an area is
too hot, too cold, too wet, or too remote or that operate
outside the realm of profit because they are "free, inherent
and natural resources" or inalienable possessions.  Heritage
organizations ensure that places and practices in danger of
disappearing because they are no longer occupied or
functioning or valued will survive.  It does this by adding
the value of pastness, exhibition, difference, and where
possible indigeneity.
     
                           The Value of the Past  
     "The past is a foreign country" thanks to the heritage
industry.  The notion of time travel is explicit in
invitations to "Take a trip through history" (Taranaki
Heritage Trail) or "walk down memory lane" (Howick Historical
Village), both in New Zealand.  The very term "historic" can
be taken as an indication of obsolescence:  no calls can be
placed from the "Historic Telephone Box" on the Heritage Trail
in Palmerston North.  It is enshrined by the City Corporation
with the words, "This is a protected building," but its
windows now display real estate listings for Harcourts, a
business older than the box.  Harcourts, which has been
operating since 1888, is not on the Heritage Trail. 

                          The Value of Exhibition
     Tourism and heritage are collaborative industries,
heritage converting locations into destinations and tourism
making them economically viable as exhibits of themselves. 
Locations become museums of themselves within a tourism
economy.  Once sites, buildings, objects, technologies, or
ways of life can no longer sustain themselves as they once
did, they "survive"--they are made economically viable--as
representations of themselves.  Heritage projects in
Pennsylvania address the massive deindustrialization of the
state--by one estimate, "65 percent of land zoned for
industrial use lies abandoned"--by providing new uses for
derelict buildings and jobs for unemployed industrial workers,
who serve as guides to their former lives as miners and
steelworkers, to what has become industrial heritage.  
     Dying economies stage their own rebirth as displays of
what they once were, sometimes before the body is cold.  In
East Germany, tourism is stepping in where the heavy industry
encouraged by the Communist regime is in decline.  Thuringa is
selling the good old days of Luther and Goethe, by featuring
its medieval castles, Renaissance town hall, and churches. 
Just north of Berlin, on a former army base, "the bad old
days" are the subject of a museum and theme park.  The museum
will present the political and social history of East Germany. 
The theme park will re-create Communist life in East Germany. 
"Clerks and shopkeepers will be surly and unhelpful.  The only
products for sale will be those that were available in East
Germany." 
     The fall of communism and end of the Cold War has created
a large zone of ambivalence, if not repudiation, which prompts 
uneasy nostalgia, irony, or historical reassessment.  With the
shift from making nuclear weapons to dismantling them--and the
end of government contracts--Los Alamos is turning to tourism
to boost its declining economy.  Scotland has transformed "an
underground bunker, once a nuclear shelter for British
Government Ministers," into a "national museum to the Cold
War."  Golfers putt on the lawn, while 33m beneath them
"Visitors can explore the nuclear command, computer and
communications rooms, dormitories and broadcast studios, all
equipped with original artifacts."  Tourism thrives on such
startling juxtapositions, on what might be called the tourist
surreal--the foreignness of what is presented to its context
of presentation.  

                          The Value of Difference
     To compete for tourists, a location must become a
destination.  Tourism and heritage are collaborative
industries, heritage converting locations into destinations
and tourism making them economically viable as exhibits of
themselves.  To compete, destinations must be distinguishable,
which is why the tourism industry requires the production of
difference.  It is not in the interest of remote destinations
that one arrive in a place indistinguishable from the place
one left or from any of a thousand other destinations
competing for market share.  The Queensland Government
Cultural Statement understands this all too well when, under
the heading "The Business of Culture," it states that "The
Government will expect the subsidized arts sector to ensure
the cost effective delivery of distinctive Queensland cultural
products and services to the State's audiences."  It is about
"profiting from difference," as the report put it, and
benefitting from the 'spillover effect' of "a positive
Queensland image."
     "Sameness" is a problem the industry faces. 
Standardization is part and parcel of the economies of scale
that high volume tourism requires.  First, vertical
integration in the tourism system places much of the
infrastructure in the hands of a few national and
multinational corporations--the biggest earner is
international flights, followed by hotel accomodation, and
airlines often own interests in hotels.  Not surprising that
tourists spend much of their time in the grips of the
industry, in the planes, hotels, buses, and restaurants. 
Second, the industry requires a reliable product that meets
universal standards, despite the dispersal of that product
across many widely separated locations.  Tourism marketing is
so consistent that only the insertion of place names tells you
which getaway or which natural wonder you are being sold. 
Third, the very interchangeability of generic products suits
the industry, which can quickly shift destinations if one
paradise or another is booked solid or hit by a typhoon,
political unrest, or currency fluctuations.  For this and
other reasons, the discourse of tourism marketing is so
consistent that only the insertion of place names tells you
which getaway or which natural wonder you are being sold.  "It
took over 5000 years to build the perfect resort."  Where? 
"Israel, on a TWA Getaway vacation."
     Getting away is different from going somewhere.  Because
escapes are defined as departures rather than arrivals, the
actual destination is somewhat arbitrary.  The very term
"getaway" or "escape" suggests that the push away from home is
stronger than the pull towards a particular place.  "No
crowds. No hassles."  But where?  Only for those who chose to
"Get lost at Capricorn" in Queensland.  Being generic (sand,
sun, sea, sex), paradise can be found as easily in the Bahamas
as Bali.  Noting that the "undifferentiated beach market
becomes more and more competitive," the Queensland Government
Cultural Statement proposes a cultural tourism strategy that
will "encourage visitors to stay longer, spend more and make
return visits"--and "to broaden [and increase] the tourism
base."

     III. Heritage produces the local for export.
     The heritage industry "exports" its product through
tourism, Tourism is an export industry and one of the world's
largest.  Unlike other export industries, however, tourism
does not export goods for consumption elsewhere.  Rather, it
imports visitors to consume goods and services locally. 
Tourism is one of the largest earners of foreign revenue in
many countries, for example Egypt, and the largest industry in
places like Utah and like the Virgin Islands, where tourism
sustains 70 percent of the economy.
     To compete for tourists, a location must become a
destination.  Heritage is one of the ways locations do this. 
Heritage is a way of producing "hereness."  However many
tourists arrive in Auckland, Wellington, Christchurch, or
Dunedin, these cities complain that they are only gateways. 
Tourists pass through them on their way to tourist regions on
their outskirts, rather than stay for several days.  While a
boon to those promoting recreational fishing in Auckland
reservoirs, Ben Wilson's dream of "the day when Auckland will
have fishing guides based in the city to whisk international
travelers straight from their plane or hotel by helicopter to
the dams to chase rainbows" is the urban tourism industry's
nightmare.  As a visitor information leaflet tries to
persuade the tourist to the desolate west coast of New
Zealand's South Island: "Hokitika, 'A Place to Stay for More
than a Day.'" 
     Protected by legislation and supported through tourism,
heritage becomes an instrument of urban redevelopment.  Salem,
Massachusetts, has attempted "For almost a decade...to augment
its declining industrial and regional retail economy with a
more vibrant  tourism industry."  Two hundred million dollars
are being infused into this small town of 38,000 to capitalize
on its 600 buildings dating from the 1600s.  Kevin J. Foster,
Chief of the National Maritime Initiative of the Park Service,
projects that "Salem--which in the late 18th and early 19th
centuries was an important mercantile center--could become an
even greater tourist attraction."  Similarly, more tourists
will pass through the Ellis Island Immigration Museum, located
on a small island off the tip of Manhattan, than did
immigrants through Ellis Island, a processing centre, in its
heyday at the turn of the century. 

     IV.  A hallmark of heritage is the problematic
          relationship of its objects to the instruments of
          their display.
     The heritage industry produces something new.  A key to
this process are its instruments.  Dance teams, heritage
performers, craft cooperatives, cultural centers, arts
festivals, museums, exhibitions, recordings, archives,
indigenous media, and cultural curricula are not only evidence
of heritage, its continuity, and its vitality in the present. 
They are also instruments for adding value to the cultural
forms they perform, teach, exhibit, circulate, and market. 
Much is made of the traditions themselves, as if the
instruments for presenting them were invisible or
inconsequential.  This point is not missed by those who oppose
the placing of Maori weaving on New Zealand's National
Qualifications Framework on the grounds that this would
"tamper with the traditional methods of transfer of
knowledge," with negative effects on community cohesion.
     Landmarking, historic re-creation, and cultural
conservation are instruments with a history.  They leave their
own traces on the sites they mark as heritage.  When one site
is landmarked repeatedly, each time for a different reason,
and used for different purposes, even at one point in time,
the result is a heritage palimpsest.  The George Gustav Heye
Center of The National Museum of the American Indian,
Smithsonian Institution, at the Alexander Hamilton U.S. Custom
House, in Lower Manhattan is a case in point.  The Beaux-Arts
architecture and its iconography, dating from the turn of the
century, stand in an equivocal relationship with the Reginald
Marsh murals gracing the grand rotunda, which were executed
during the Great Depression as part of a government work
scheme.  Visitors today choose at the entrance to follow the
sign into the Museum or the one to U.S. Bankruptcy Court
occupying the same building.  The Museum's Resource Centre is
located in the Cashier's Office, its signage still in tact.  
     Commemorative language now identifies the site on which
the museum stands with "the southern end of the Wiechquaekeck
Trail, an old Algonquin trade route."  An earlier plaque
honors Alexander Hamilton, for whom the Custom House was
originally named.  A plaque mounted in 1890 by the Holland
Society memorializes Fort Amsterdam, which occupied the site
from 1626 to 1790.  The Museum neither eradicates the layers
of historical landmarking, nor does it attempt to create a
closer fit between the history of the heritage for which it is
responsible and that represented by the building.  The ironies
play out willy nilly, eluding any easy resolution between the
mode of exchange symbolized by the Custom House, the
"inalienable possessions" on display, the market past and
present for Indian artifacts, and the public trust represented
by the Museum itself.
     In these ways, instruments such as landmarking connect
heritage productions to the present even as they keep alive
claims to the past.  It is therefore important to examine
their assumptions, not only what the instruments produce but
also how.  How is value added or lost when taonga, Maori
treasure, are exhibited in an art gallery or museum of natural
history or used on a marae?  When Maori weaving is taught in
school?  When the Pintubi paint on canvas rather than on their
own bodies and circulate their work within an international
art market?   When farmers gather for a World Ploughing
Championship in Dunedin?  When sheep line up on a stage?  When
their shearers' "demonstrate" their work?  
     Heritage productions tend to conflate their effects with
the instruments for producing them.  But, a hallmark of
heritage productions--perhaps their defining feature--is
precisely the foreignness of the "tradition" to its context of
presentation.  This estrangement produces an effect more
Brechtian than mimetic and makes the interface a critical site
for the production of meanings other than the "heritage"
message.  The interface--folk festivals, museum exhibitions,
historical villages, concert parties, postcards--are cultural
forms in their own right and powerful engines of meaning. 
Messages of reconciliation, of multiculturalism or
biculturalism, or of development--messages other than
heritage--are likely to be encoded in the interface.  
     This in part explains why exhibitions at the United
States Museum of the American Indian take the form that they
do--and disappoint many visitors expecting to learn more than
they do about the history of the objects on display and the
way of life they once represented.  Many splendid objects from
the legendary Heye collection are indeed on display.  But they
are not all that is exhibited. 
     First, the museum's own infrastructure is visible,
including what is now a largely Native American staff and
their control over what is shown and how.  Labels are signed
and in several cases there is more than one label for each
object.  Those who wrote the labels are identified by name,
profession, and tribe (in the case of Native Americans). 
Photographs are rarely if ever identified, a comment in itself
about their status in the exhibition--they are about, but not
by, those they represent.  
     Second, in the exhibition All Roads Are Good, twenty-two
Native Americans have been invited to explore the collection
and select objects for exhibition.  Their choices did not
necessarily conform to their "identity."  Rather, the guest
curators ranged freely across the collection and made
connections that were at once intensely personal and
contemporary.  
     The advertisement for the museum that declares: "Meet the
Real Native New Yorkers" exemplifies the statement by Jonathan
Mane-Wheoki at the 1995 Museums Australia conference in
Brisbane that museums are about people not things.  What is
on display above all is the presence, the vitality, the
survival of Native Americans themselves.  What visitors
discover in these galleries is what the objects on display
mean to Native Americans today.  This is how this museum
addresses the historic foreclosures of ethnographic
exhibitions that the collection itself exemplifies.  

     V.   Heritage is produced through a process that
     forecloses what is shown.
     Exhibition is instrumental in the foreclosing of what is
shown.  The destruction of cultural forms under the pretext of
preservation has precedents in the Protestant Reformation, the
French Revolution, the formation of colonial empires, the
emergence of nation states, the reform of Judaism in the
nineteenth century, to mention but a few cases.  Utopian
longings notwithstanding, the world imagined under the banner
of heritage is a battlefield.  Which is not to say that all
combat waged there is equally bloody.  Or that the terms of
the conflict are the same.
     Paradoxically, remembering is a prelude to forgetting and
the collecting of error an overture to its eradication. 
During the royal entry into Rouen of Henry II in 1550,
Brazilian villages stocked with Native Americans for the
occasion and supplemented with appropriately attired
Frenchmen, was the scene of a mock siege and French triumph. 
Steven Mullaney's analysis of this event focuses not so much
on its re-creation as on its erasure: "The ethnographic
attention and knowledge displayed at Rouen was genuine,
amazingly thorough, and richly detailed; the object, however,
was not to understand Brazilian culture but to perform it, in
a paradoxically self-consuming fashion."  He argues further
that the interest in Brazilian culture displayed at Rouen
served "ritual rather than ethnological ends, and the rite
involved is one ultimately organized around the elimination of
its own pretext."  Such performances, he continues, are
rehearsals, in the legal sense of the term, and are to be
understood within a dramaturgy of power that first exhibits
what it "consigns to oblivion."
     Long processes of "cultural evolution," violent
revolutions, systematic programs of reform, and processes of
absorption leave behind what they have rejected.  Zones of
repudiation, where the outtakes of a cultural editing process
are to be found, form a geniza of sorts.  In this way,
Catholic Europe became a source of fascination for Protestants
eager to see what the Reformation had repudiated.   
     Similarly, the attempt to reform Jewish life by
repudiating customary practices created a large domain of
cultural trash, which was to return as "folklore."  During
the early nineteenth century, Sulamit, a popular little
magazine in German for Jewish readers, ran a column entitled
"Gallery of Obnoxious Abuses, Shocking Customs, and Absurd
Ceremonies of the Jews."  Writing in what might be called the
ethnographic burlesque--what Mona Ozouf calls "shameful
ethnology"--the author first contrasts the simplicity and
naturalness of life in the Bible with the bizarre
ceremonialism introduced by the rabbis.  He then urges
readers to adopt the aesthetic and refined manner of
cosmopolitan Jews. In an account of wedding customs, for
example, the author objects to matchmaking because it seems to
ignore the desires of the young couple and focus on crass
financial transactions.  The author questions the use of an
incomprehensible language, Hebrew-Aramaic, for something as
important as the marriage ceremony.  He is offended by the
public spectacle of outdoor processions accompanied by music
because the bridal couple is put on public display in a filthy
courtyard.  How much preferable are the refined practices of
the Jews in Leipzig who hold their wedding ceremonies
discretely in the nicest room in the city.
      Reform is here promulgated not at gun point but through
a process illuminated by Norbert Elias's notion of "What may
be described as an advance of the threshold of embarrassment
and shame, as 'refinement,' or as 'civilization.'"  The
ethnographic burlesque induces shame at thresholds of its own
making.  This art of rhetorically induced estrangement
mobilizes the will of the reader to abandon established custom
and internalize new forms of sensibility and conduct.  
     By narrowing the domain of what could be considered
normative, critics of traditional ceremonies and customs
simultaneously expanded the field of the non-normative.  What
one was too ashamed to do, one could study, collect, and
display.  Fifty years later, the vituperation we see in
Sulamit would give way to nostalgia and the very wedding
customs that had been burlesqued would be offered as a
critique of Jewish respectability:
     The marriages of Jews of quite recent times have only
     this one peculiarity that need engage attention, that
     instead of the old tone of natural and religious joy
     which sprang from the heart, we now too often see the
     stiff etiquette of the salon, and it is only in a few
     localities that the old forms, artless and happy as they
     were, have  held their ground against the general
     tendency to sublimate and refine away what antiquity
     handed down.
          Particularly interesting in this connection is the
     account from the pen of a French tourist, of a Jewish 
     marriage celebrated not long ago in Alsatia. Here we see
     the "Marshaliks," who have so long disappeared from our  
     weddings, still amusing the guests with their improvised
     discourses abounding in surprising twists of thought; the 
     costumes, so singular and of such venerable antiquity,
     defy the universal supremacy of French fashion, and the
     man of the world from Paris who witnesses and reports the
     scene, tells us that he could not help fancying that he
     sat a table with hosts that had risen straight out of the
     grave of the preceding century.
The tourist stands at the edge of an open grave, not with
spade in hand to bury old traditions but with a pen to record
them.  
     The process of negating cultural practices reverses
itself once it has succeeded in archaizing the "errors"--
indeed, through a process of archaizing, which is a mode of
cultural production, the repudiated is transvalued as
heritage.  The very term "folklore" marks a transformation of
errors into archaisms and their transvaluation once they are
safe for collection, preservation, exhibition, study, and even
nostalgia and revival.  How safe is another matter.  In the
words of John Comaroff, "folklore...is one of the most
dangerous words in the English language," because it often
obscures "a highly unreflective populism."  
     Documentation and exhibition are implicated in the
disappearance of what they show, whether to induce disgust in
those still internalizing the new norms, justify genocide, as
the Nazis intended their planned exhibition of an extinct race
to do, or demonstrate improvement, in the case of a sanitized
Maori model village.  These rehearsals of culture, which
Mullaney likens to the rehearsal of evidence and presentation
of exhibits in a court of law, entail "the exhibition of what
is to be effaced, repressed, or subjected to new and more
rigorous methods of control."  This principle guides the
exhibition on drugs at the Justice and Police Museum in
Sydney, where a text panel reads:  "For legal and ethical
reasons the layout of this [drug] laboratory is not detailed
or complete.  Its purpose is only to suggest the chemistry and
equipment used at different stages in the production of
amphetamines."  After answering a boy's questions about the
drug paraphernalia on view, a mother murmured her concern to
me, "If you tell them too much, it raises their interest." 
Show just enough to foreclose the subject.
     The atavism of a recent effort of Burmese authorities to
relocate "long-necked" minority women from their homes in
eastern Burma to Rangoon to live in a model-village tourist
attraction" is a reminder of the implication of exhibition in
the disappearance of what it shows.  A Burmese opposition
group protested the forced removal of "ethnic minority people
from more than two hundred villages in Thandaung township in
the hills of northern Karen state," including "members of the
Padaung ethnic group whose women put metal rings around their
necks giving them a "long-necked" look."  Some of them "will
be forced to live in a model village, which is being built
near Rangoon in time for next year's "Visit Myanmar Year" and
is described by the dissidents as an "ethnic human zoo."  This
is not the first time that "Padaung people have been promoted
as tourist attractions," nor is it the first time that human
exhibits have been featured in zoos.
     According to a plan for the "New Luxor," "the 100,000
residents of Qurna, currently living above and among ancient
tombs, will ultimately be relocated from this archeological
zone to Al-Taref."  To encourage tourists to stay longer--if
not for a thousand and one nights, then for "Six Egyptian
Nights"--developers plan a golf course and, as part it, "a
model village that portrays aspects of Egyptian life--
Pharaonic, Bedouin, Nubian and rural cultures." 
     Bushmen, "routed almost out of existence" by early
settlers and now few in number, were expelled from Kalahari
Gemsbok Park in 1970, because "management decided that
tourists did not like seeing hungry-looking Bushmen.  The
tribesmen's lack of materialism made them unreliable, many
employers say, and they were eating too many animals."  Twenty
years later forty Bushman have been brought from a shantytown
to the Kagga Kamma Game Park to the north of Cape Town, where
for $7.00 a tourist can view them ($1.50 of the fee goes to
the Bushman).  Bushman activists hope to reclaim ancestral
land, some of it in the Kalahari Gemsbok Park, which they
consider essential to their survival and way of life.  
     Cultural precincts have a long history.  Model villages,
open air museums, and theme parks, the legacy of foreign
villages at international expositions in the nineteenth
century--the popular Cairo Street and Javanese Village, for
example, were fully inhabited by people brought to the site
(sometimes supplemented with immigrants living in the host
country), along with materials for recreating their habitat. 
Likely inspired by these examples, a model Maori village was
proposed by the Department of Tourism and Health Resorts in
1902 and conceived from the outset in museological terms:
     As an additional attraction to the Rotorua district, I
     recommend that a model Maori pa or kainga should be
     established in the Whakarewarewa Reserve between the
     water supply setting basins, and the Native school. 
     There is ample land of a substantial nature available
     there, also some very interesting thermal action and
     fresh water lagoons.  My proposals provide for the
     erection of a runanga (meeting house), pataka (food
     store-house)--these to be carved in the old Maori style--
     and several comfortable whares;  a shed to be built near
     the schoolhouse, in which the young Native boys should be
     taught carving and the girls matmaking, the whole to be
     fenced in the Maori manner.  Later on a model fighting pa
     could be added.  Selected native families to be given
     residence at this pa, and sanitation be a salient feature
     of it.  The villagers could make carvings and mats for
     sale, thereby earning sustenance.  Thus, two important
     object-lessons would be provided for the Maoris
     generally, and visitors would have an opportunity of
     seeing a replica of old Maori life.  The total cost need
     not exceed œ500.
The village materialized, but it was not inhabited.  However,
the long history of Maori involvement in tourism became part
of the site.  Celebrated guides and performers are
immortalized in the form of carved figures at the tops of
totara posts along a path to the thermal valley.  And,
"cultural performances" developed for tourists have themselves
coalesced into such notions as the "classic old style
programme."  They also serve new roles within Maori
communities.  Some even credit tourism with stimulating the
continued vitality and creative transformation of Maori
performance, carving, and weaving, though certain practices
(carving and weaving) and performance forms (wero, haka, poi)
have become icons, while many other areas of Maori history and
contemporary culture are not presented to tourists.  Almost a
century later and at considerably greater expense, an
"interactive Maori living village" is planned for Rotorua as
part of "a $10 million redevelopment programme which will
include a modern gallery area for contemporary Maori artists
[and] a geothermal interpretation centre."  
     Efforts are now being made to increase Maori
participation in the tourism industry, in its planning and
policy, and as entrepreneurs.  Marae tourism, which has been
operating on a small scale since the seventies, is coming into
sharper focus and debate.  There is concern that in committing
much of daily life to displaying Maori culture to tourists,
actual marae life would confine itself to designated
occasions.  

     VI.  Heritage tests the alienability of inalienable
     possessions.   
     Native peoples are taking charge of the disposition,
handling, access, ownership, and interpretation of their
patrimony--whether artifacts or performances--the spaces in
which they live and their ways of life.  A new generation of 
museum professionals is pro-actively addressing the
stewardship of cultural property, its presentation and
interpretation in museums.  These changes have important
implications for the tourism industry, which often defines the
uniqueness of its product in terms of indigeneity, both
natural and cultural.
     In the words of Raymond Williams, "a culture can never be
reduced to its artifacts while it is being lived," which is
what museums have tended to do.  Promising to bring its dead
specimens "to life" through the theater of installation,
museums produce the lifelike, the work of the undertaker,
which is not to be confused with life force, the work of
survival.  For taonga the issue is not a second life as an
exhibit.  What is at stake is the restoration of living links
to taonga that never died.  They were removed from
circulation.  They were withheld.  Some will forever remain
orphans, their provenance unknown, which is a point brought
home by the permanent installation of taonga at the Manawatu
Museum in Palmerston North, New Zealand.  The vibrant
relationship of particular objects in the collection to actual
people and communities is dramatically displayed in the
opening gallery.  Nearby, artifacts about which little is
known are exhibited separately.  Severed links, these isolated
objects are a poignant reminder of the circumstances of their
acquisition, of their alienation. 
     The life force of taonga depends not on techniques of
animation but on the living transmission of cultural knowledge
and values.  What's at stake is not the vividness of a museum
experience, but the vitality, the survival, of those for whom
these objects are taonga.  That survival depends on intangible
cultural property, which lives in performance.  It must be
performed to be transmitted.  This is the source of its life. 
This is the source of its vividness.
     Folklorist Barre Toelken remembers the consternation of
students at the University of Oregon who signed up to learn
how to make baskets from Mrs. Matt, a Native American from a
Northern California tribe.  The class met daily for several
weeks during which she taught them songs and they kept asking
when she would start to teach them to weave baskets--"That's
what we're doing," she responded.  They sang songs when they
gathered plants.  They hummed songs and were to think of the
words as they softened the materials in their mouths, because
the words are "addressed to the materials themselves."  When,
finally, by the end of the course, they "began" actually
assembling a basket, she explained, "After all, you people are
missing something here.  You're missing the point.  A basket
is a song made visible."

     VII. A key to heritage productions is their virtuality,
     whether in the presence or the absence of actualities.  
     Claims to the contrary notwithstanding, heritage and
tourism show what cannot be seen--except through them--which
is what gives such urgency to the question of "actuality" and
the role of "experience" as its test.  The atavism of
something genuine or real, even if it never materializes, can
be seen in cases where the question of authenticity is either
irrelevant or fails to illuminate the matter at hand. 
Consider pilgrimage itineraries.  The most ambitious pilgrim
can trace a circuit through the entire Indian subcontinent. 
Alternatively, he can walk a circuit within a region, or
within a town, or in a temple, or on a miniature map of India,
or even, contemplatively in his own mind.  One can trace
Christ's last steps anywhere, which accounts for the Stations
of the Cross processions on Good Friday all over the world. 
And, more to the point, no one asks if the locations of the
stations are authentic.  I prefer to think in terms of
actualities and virtualities--to posit a collaborative
hallucination in an equivocal relationship with actualities.
     Both heritage and tourism deal in the intangible, absent,
inaccessible, fragmentary, or dislocated.  These are features
of the life world itself, one reason for the appeal and
impossibility of the wholeness promised by the various worlds
and lands of exhibitions, whether in museums or theme parks. 
For museums, re-creations of natural habitats are (hopefully)
not just clever simulations of something somewhere else--
surrogates for travel to inaccessible places.  They must
reveal something about the nature of what is shown that a
visitor would not be able to discover at the site itself. 
They must show more than can otherwise be seen.  Guides
routinely refer to what cannot be seen--the people and events
and places of years ago.  They animate a phantom landscape on
the back of the one toward which attention is directed.  
     The AA Book of New Zealand Historic Places depends
entirely on the power of information to create interest in
places, specially those lacking noteworthy visual attributes:
"Some buildings or sites included in this book may at first
glance look uninteresting" or "may initially disappoint those
who make an effort to visit them."  The organizing metaphor
for experience is discursive, centered in language and the
process of reading: "For the informed traveller, the landscape
is an open history book.  It is not difficult to learn how to
decipher its blurred and indistinct pages, so that one is able
to 'read' the human landscape in a way that adds interest and
enjoyment to journeys around New Zealand."  
     But, the guide insists, information is not enough. 
Imagination is what animates sites: "Many of the historic
places...will only come to life if visitors use their
imaginations.  This is especially true of the 'prehistoric'
sites from which we can learn much about Maori life in New
Zealand before the arrival of Europeans.  It is not always
easy to visualize people living, working--or fighting--on a
site hundreds of years ago when all that can be seen today is
a grassed-over ditch and bank, a faint terrace or a heap of
old sea-sells.  But it is important to make an effort of
imagination to see such sites as they were when peopled by
past generations."  In this scheme, purpose-built tourist
attractions can prepare visitors to use their imaginations
when visiting actual sites: "No West Coast gold-mining town
ever looked like Shantytown, but a visit there can help to
fire the imaginations of those who later visit abandoned,
overgrown gold-mining township sites."   
     The reassurance of hypervisibility--close encounters with
the actual or the virtual--is fragile.  Not everything that is
to be known or understood is so directly available to the
senses.  While the marketing of heritage promises experience,
and specifically to engage not only sight and sound, but also
touch, smell, and taste, heritage interpreters often locate
truth in what cannot be seen, in the invisible heart and soul
of the site.  Their expressed desire to make sites real and
vivid indicates that sites cannot do this for themselves.  The
inability of sites to tell their own story authorizes the
interpretation project itself.  Nor is sensory involvement
and intellectual understanding enough.  Getting Started: How
to Succeed in Heritage Tourism, issued by the National Trust
for Historic Preservation and underwritten by American
Express, stresses the importance of making "heritage resources
emotionally accessible," or "As the salesmen say, sell the
sizzle as well as the steak."
     Rather than thematize what is not there and re-create
Government House, Australia's Museum of Sydney (and Hyde Park
Barracks) take as their subject not only the site on which
they are located but also the nature of themselves as
museums.  The Museum of Sydney exhibits itself--its methods,
fragments of evidence unearthed from the site, the process of
coming to terms with the place and its history.   At the
Barracks, a large vitrine with live rats is located next to
the cash register.  Rats are honored at this site as the
minions of history, for it is thanks to them that much
evidence survived in their nests between the joists.  Not
these very rats, of course, but much is to be learned by
watching how they create their nests and tuck things away
there.
     The Museum of Sydney exemplifies the inadequacy of many
actual sites to reveal what they are about.  As the AA Book of
New Zealand Historical Places (1984) explains, "Throughout our
history, people have left very different marks on the New
Zealand landscape, some faint and some clear.  In some cases
there is no mark at all, but the place is still historic
because we know some important event occurred there."  This
is precisely why both museums and tourism are largely in the
business of virtuality, but claim to be in the business of
actualities--of real places, real things, and real
experiences.  "Hereness," as the AA Book of New Zealand
Historic Places understands all too well, is not given but
produced. 
     The production of hereness, in the absence of
actualities, depends increasingly on virtualities.  Consider
the case of the Abbey Church of St. Peter and St. Paul (1088-
1804) in Cluny, a church the size of two football fields.  The
church outlived its usefulness with the decline of the vast
Benedictine monastic order for which it had been the centre. 
Shortly after the French Revolution, the Burgundian village in
which it was found allowed the massive church to be dynamited
and the stone sold.  Not until protective legislation halted
the process in the late nineteenth century did the village
realize the value of what had been destroyed.  As Robb Walsh,
a travel writer, recently reported, "Last year 700,000
tourists came to see Cluny and the church that isn't there." 
As he explains, "the only thing larger than the empty space
where a church once stood is the legacy of its destruction....
Like an amputee who still feels sensations in his phantom
limb, the ancient village of Cluny is still haunted by its
phantom church."  What do visitors find there?  "Towers of the
transept, and bases of the interior pillar, the great church's
foundations exposed and left vacant."  They also find a
virtual church:
     A museum dedicated to the church stands a few feet away
     from the excavation.  Inside, I look at an animated,
     three-dimensional computer re-creation on videotape tat
     shows views of the structure from all angles while a
     Gregorian chant fills the background.  Back outside, I
     stare again at the void.  The computer model is still so
     fresh in my mind that an image of the enormous edifice
     seems to appear before me.  I'm not alone in this optical
     illusion:  Everyone leaving the museum seems to do the
     same double take outside.  It's as if we're having a mass
     hallucination of a building that no longer exists.
The museum is an integral part of the site.  The museum does
for the site what it cannot do for itself.  It is not a
substitute for the site but an integral part of it, for the
interpretive interface shows what cannot otherwise be seen. 
It offers virtualities in the absence of actualities.  It
produces hallucinatory effects.  On the basis of excavation
and historical reconstruction and in collaboration with
visitors, the museum openly imagines the site into being--in
the very spot where it should be still standing but is no
more.  This is also the beauty of the Museum of Sydney, a
museum that finds the truth of the sight as much in the
poetics of the documents as in the "facts."
     Like museums, tourism is predicated on dislocation--on
moving people and, for that matter, sites from one place to
another.  Take Luxor--Luxor Las Vegas that is: 
     Luxor Las Vegas, which opened on October 15, is a 30-
     story pyramid encased in 11 acres of glass.  The hotel's
     Egyptian theme is reflected in the decor of its 2,526
     rooms and 100,000 square foot casino.  Guests travel by
     boat along the River Nile from the registration desk to
     the elevators, which climb the pyramid at a 39-degree
     angle.  Other features include an obelisk that projects a
     laser light show in the pyramid's central atrium; seven
     themed restaurants, and an entertainment complex offering
     high tech interactive "adventures" into the past,
     present, and future.  Double rooms at the Luxor, 3900 Las
     Vegas Boulevard South, are $59 to $99.
Is getting to and from the registration desk to the elevators
by boat along the River Nile any stranger than squeezing the
Temple of Dendur into the Metropolitan Museum of Art?  Any
stranger than travelling to Luxor, Egypt, itself?  Travel
Plans International promises a cruise up "the legendary Nile
in a craft that surpasses even Cleopatra's barge of burnished
gold.... It is a yacht-like 44-passenger vessel carefully
chosen for its luxuriously intimate appointments.  Each cabin
provides panoramic views through picture windows as well as
the convenience and comforts of private showers, individual
climate control, and television."  What Travel Plans
International (1988) does not tell you is that several years
later "Tourism in Luxor has all but ended because of
violence."  Islamic militants planting bombs in Pharaonic
monuments, both to drive out tourists and to wipe out traces
of idolatry.  
     Go to Las Vegas, experience Egypt.  Go to Stockholm,
experience all of Sweden--at the Skansen open air museum.  Go
to Elancourt, outside Paris, and experience the glories of
France-Miniature--including scale models of the Arc de
Triomphe, the Cathedral of Notre Dame, and the Alps.  Stay in
the Acapulco Motel in Auckland or the Sahara Guesthouse and
Motel in Dunedin or the fully generic Heritage Motor Inn, in
faux Tudor, in Rotorua.  In Christchurch, at Orana Park, where
African cheetahs, rhino, and giraffe roam, "The Serengeti
Restaurant offers brilliant views over the African Plains,"
just 25 minutes from the heart of the city.  The International
Antarctic Center invites you to "Experience Antarctica Right
Here"--"It's better than being there."  
     Increasingly, we travel to actual destinations to
experience virtual places.  This is one of several principles
that free tourism to invent an infinitude of new products.  As
The Business of Tourism, a recent textbook, states, "The
beauty of tourism is that the number of products that can be
devised to interest the tourist is virtually unlimited."  The
market is king.  In New Zealand, you can "spend the night in
jail for a farm stay with a difference," at Old Te Whaiti
Jail, as it advertises itself.  Refashioned as a living
accomodation, this historic jail wears the irony of its second
life as heritage with pride and humor.  The Cowshed Cafe
markets itself as "New Zealand's only restaurant in a once
operating dairy shed (no shit)." 
     To the degree that they operate in the public interest
and with public funds, museums have a responsibility to their
"product" that distinguishes them from market-driven
amusement.  They are responsible for giving form and space to
concerns animating public life in the communities they serve. 
This difference is enough to stop even Disney in its tracks. 
Those most likely to benefit economically from the locating of
the proposed new theme park, Disney's America, near Haymarket,
Virginia, were bitterly disappointed by the announcement that
Disney had abandoned the site.  Disney's decision was prompted
not only by the vehement protests of organizations and
families in the region who were concerned about congestion and
smog, but also by the objections of historians that "the
project would desecrate nearby Civil War battle sites like
Bull Run."
     The campaign waged by Protect Historic America "argued
that the project, which was to include virtual reality battles
and a Lewis-and-Clark white water raft ride, would not only
destroy important Civil War sites but would trivialize and
sanitize American history."  Disney history--Distory or
Mickey Mouse History, as some call it--has a poor track
record.  Not even the willingness of some of America's most
distinguished historians to help the company get the story
right could inspire sufficient confidence to allow Disney to
work the magic of virtuality so close to the actual sites. 
Manassas National Battlefield, with its "somber hills and
statues and authentic stone houses" and its "brief movie and
booklets about the Civil War and...a walking tour," has been
attracting as many visitors in a year (about 130,000) as
Disney had hoped to reach in four days--"There's not much
exciting there for a child," complained the head of the
Haymarket Historical Commission and supporter of the Disney
project.  The problem lies deeper than getting the facts
right or making the site more exciting.  And, as critics
hastened to point out, attendance is down at Disney's theme
parks, in large measure because fewer foreign visitors are
going to them.  
     Nearby, at Colonial Williamsburg, controversy raged over
the reenactment of a slave auction.  Ostensibly on surer
ground, a respected historic site tested the threshold of
virtuality.  Its aim was not to cash in on the glamour of
battle or the excitement of rafting, but to mobilize moral
outrage and stimulate critical reflection on a shameful aspect
of national history.  But there is fear that "education could
be trivialized into entertainment" or that "the re-creation
might be inaccurate or sensationalized for entertainment." 
Christy S. Coleman, who supervised the department responsible
for the re-enacted slavery auction, "contended that only by
open display and discussion could people understand the
degradation and humiliation that blacks felt as chattel.  She
compared the pain of the slave auctions for blacks to that of
the Holocaust for Jews and said that if museums were built to
illustrate the horrors of one, why should not efforts be made
to illustrate the other."  
     The term "illustration" suggests that display techniques
are neutral, which they are not.  It is inconceivable that the
United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C.
would re-enact mass murder.  That the Museum of Tolerance in
Los Angeles re-creates a gas chamber, which functions as a
gallery for videos, reflects their more theatrical (than
evidentiary and televisual) approach to display. 
Controversies have erupted over the propriety of exhibiting
hair shaved from the heads of those who perished at the hands
of the Nazis, part of a larger problem of displaying human
remains.  Religious Jews question the ethics of showing
photographs of naked victims, humiliated and terrified--
particularly in relation to those today who recognize their
own relatives in these images.  Such disputes suggest the
limits of what can be show and how, even when the objectives
are worthy.  They also point to culturally specific
sensitivities--and insensitivities--to exhibition.  As does
the Nazi theme park at Wolf's Lair, in Poland.
     Distory, at least to date, is about history as it should
have happened--the best, only the best, nothing but the best. 
To the degree that the tourism product is "the concrete
expression" of the "most attractive images possible," it too
is in the Distory business.  But the perfect world projected
though the virtualities of tourism may well be at odds with
the actuality of corporate policies and the infrastructure of
the site.  The Walt Disney World Hotel was recently taken to
task for what employees characterize as its "English only"
policy.   
     The dependence of tourism on unlimited entitlement in a
hedonocracy of dreams come true is fundamentally at odds with
what counts as "action" in the cultural sector, though this
sector is by no means immune to Distory.  If the market has no
conscience, what then is the role--and the fate--of the
consciousness industry?   Welcome to Australia, the Brisbane
Hilton's guest information book, devotes a page to "History at
a Glance."  It starts with 1606 and the first written record
kept by the Dutch ship Duyfken and proceeds through a series
of fleets, discoveries, foundings, and wars.  There is no
indication in this chronology of aboriginal presence before
Mabo (1992), which mandated a process of reconciliation.  We
have here an exhibition of understandings sloughed off by the
consciousness industry.  
     Where do old ideas go to die?  Tourism, a museum of the
consciousness industry.