Appeared in Performance Research 2,2 (summer 1997): 1-10. Keynote address for the Performance, Tourism, and Identity Conference in Wales, September 1996, organized by the Centre for Performance Research. ================================================================= Afterlives Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett "Where history comes Alive!" This is the promise of Llancaiach Fawr Manor, which invites visitors to "Step back in time to the year 1645." That we did. Our conference itinerary took us not only back to the seventeenth century, but also down to recently exhausted mines below the earth's surface and through villages buried beneath new forests. When a way of life disappears with the mining economy that once sustained it or is literally wiped out by the forestration enterprise that replaces it, tourism is ready to step in. The formula for revitalizing the economy of a depressed region is the resurrection theater of the heritage industry. While tourist attractions may seem like oases of time out, they are implicated in a larger political economy of transnational flows of money, people, and symbolic capital. How does this work in Wales? Not only in developing countries is tourism often the largest industry and earner of foreign capital. Developed countries experiencing a decline of their agricultural and industrial economies also turn to tourism. Llechwedd Slate Caverns, like other mining attractions in Wales, speak to structural changes in the economy, specifically the decline of heavy industry, manufacture, agriculture, and what are called the energy industries. These sites are also witnesses to relatively high unemployment. The shift seen here parallels transitions elsewhere to a service-based economy. Tourism is, among other things, a service industry. Most of the money in tourism is in transportation and accommodation. When the industry measures itself, it counts nights, not days, because nights represent accommodation and money spent on lodging represents a large proportion of tourist spending. Tourism 2000, the strategy document for Wales issued by the Welsh Tourist Board in 1994--every country seems to be producing a tourism policy document for the year 2000--reports that tourism here currently accounts for about 9 per cent of the economy or 1.5 billion pounds. An impediment to the expansion of tourism, according to this document, is the fragmented character of the industry. Fragmentation is also a positive feature, for it generally indicates a preponderance of small operators and a low ratio of tourists to locals--that is, a more local style of tourism, with more tourist dollars staying where they are spent. A second feature of tourism in Wales is that the domestic market leads, which means more car and day trips, and lower spending by those tourists. International tourists buy long haul airfares, spend more nights in hotels, and generally spend more per day, but profits are likely to leave the region as they flow through the vertical integration of multinational transportation and lodging industries. The proposal is to increase international tourism is intended to generate more revenue from fewer people, one formula for what is called sustainable tourism. Diversification of the amenity, which is how the industry speaks of its product, is also a way to reduce the strain on popular sites, spread the industry more evenly over the region, and stimulate growth. Third, cultural tourism accounts for two-thirds of the industry in Wales. A 1994 survey identified 426 known visitor attractions, of which museums make up 37 per cent and historic sites make up 27 per cent, an emphasis characteristic of the United Kingdom more generally. Trailing behind are countryside, railways, craft and leisure (sports, amusement parks, commercial entertainment). There is a push to develop environmental tourism, eco-tourism, and athletic encounters with nature, all of them involving interfaces (rafting, abseiling, climbing, kayaking, etc.) more profitable than scenic views enjoyed free of charge. Adventure tourism is also a way to compete for a younger market. Finally, there is business-related tourism. That's us. Conferences bring visitors from afar and usually include opportunities for sightseeing and shopping. Tourism is an export industry. Whereas other export industries move the goods to the consumer, tourism brings the consumer to the site. It does this by producing the local for export. Some types of tourism, like Club Med and Disneyworld, are largely independent of the places where they are located. Others are strongly predicated on "hereness." While they could be recreated anywhere, which is the appeal of themeparks, sites of hereness must be consumed on the spot--precisely here and nowhere else. Virtually all the places on the conference itinerary are deeply connected to the very place in which they are found. In the case of Amgueddfa Werin Cymru Sain Ffagan/Museum of Welsh Life St Fagans, an open air museum, all of Wales, so to speak, has been brought to one place. At Portmeirion, architectural elements from hither and yon have found their final resting place in an idiosyncratic assemblage. Tourisms of hereness can be taken as a barometer and operate as instruments of local and national self-understanding. The first step is to put Wales on the map. Many places on the ground are not on the map. Policy makers say that "The industry must create a stronger identity for the Welsh tourist product abroad." Brands of tourism, to a greater extent than brands of biscuits or buttons, figure prominently in larger identity formations. Tourism 2000 is explicit on this point: "Wales is a distinctive country with its own language, culture and heritage, rather than just another region of Britain. It is often said that the culture of Wales is more of an asset in overseas markets than it is in the domestic market." The problem did not start with tourism. Nor is it confined to tourism, though tourism tends to reduce the problem to one of impression management: "the image is indistinct and sometimes poor. The image of Wales in the larger international tourism market lacks a clear identity. Wales is not seen as a separate country with its own heritage and cultural traditions. Or it is not known at all. Or visitors come with a vision of heavy industry and coal, or not a positive image." As this statement suggests--and as the conference itinerary confirms--identity is not simply a marketing issue, as in image, brand name, and identity of the tourist product. Nor is identity simply a Welsh claim to the territory and borders of Wales. Identity is all of these and more. Tourism is implicated in identify issues through a process of differentiation. Dean MacCannell has discussed this process in his classic work, The Tourist. Not only does tourism figure in the diffentiation of local spots within a global space, but also tourism produces a mobile meeting place--what Edward M. Bruner, in his paper for this conference, calls border zones, what Dean MacCannell calls empty meeting grounds, and what Guillermo Gomez-Pena performs as the border. The differentiations that are performed in the global space of tourism are vital to the formation and deployment of local identities. Heritage tourism in Wales shows this very clearly. Tourism 2000, under the heading "Culture and Heritage," proposes to use the "distinctive cultural language" of Wales and its "unique identity and sense of place" to "reinforce the image of Wales as a distinct and different destination for visitors." The point is repeated: Wales is to be promoted "as a separate and different country offering a uniquely Welsh holiday experience." Distinctive, unique, distinct, different, separate. There is more at stake here than marketing. Such exercises in self-presentation go beyond tourism and are by no means confined to it. Even the tourism planners are quick to recognise that "the Welsh language and the cultural traditions of Wales are vital to the future of Wales as a country. The Welsh Tourist Board believes that the retention of a linguistic and cultural identity of Wales is also important in a tourism context especially for the development of overseas markets." This approach runs counter to the received wisdom that holds tourism responsible for eroding difference, homogenising culture, franchising a limited number of cultural icons, and producing ersatz places, though the appeal to identity does not preclude such outcomes Most important, exercises in self-presentation inside and outside the tourism industry are deeply implicated in one another. It is not simply a matter of being one thing to ourselves and something else to others. First, tourism may be the only place where certain cultural traditions are performed. They may have ceased to be performed in any other context and tourism in a sense becomes a museum for them. Indeed, tourism often speaks of itself as a museum--Turkey as the largest open air museum in the world and the ocean floor off the Bikini Islands as the museum of the dawn of the atomic age. Second, the performances of identity that we see in heritage productions are amplified through tourism because tourism is also a broadcast medium. Not only does the industry use mass media to market its product to a wide audience, but also tourism brings masses of people to the sites themselves. Performances of identity at these sites are in turn amplified through tourism-- they are repeated, canonized, clarified, and seen and recorded by a flow of visitors. Third, tourism can be catalytic in the elaboration of heritage in local contexts, even when tourists are not there. Several papers presented at the conference make just this point, for example, the work of Dorothy Noyes in Catalonia and Ron Jenkins in Bali. The Welsh Tourist Board is counting on this effect as well, though they realize that the commercialization of Welshness for tourists could undermine the intensifying effect of tourism on awareness and appreciation of Welshness in a local context among local people: "We consider that on balance tourism is of significant benefit to the cause of maintaining Welsh cultural and linguistic identity" and "We further believe that pride and interest in this living heritage can be strengthened through tourism." In this spirit, bilingual signage has as one of its purposes "to help create in the mind of the visitor a sense of place." These signs tell you in more ways than one precisely where you are and where you are not. Overriding the specification of this town or street is the message that you are in Wales, not England. A key instrument of localization is the process of historical recovery. Economies that have died stage their return as exhibitions of themselves, as heritage. Tourism 2000 speaks of this process as "Living Heritage". Living heritage, to my way of thinking, is an oxymoron. Why is it necessary to specify 'living'? Why not just heritage? If there is living heritage, there must be dead heritage. The reason that living must be specified is because the very term "heritage" signifies death, whether actual or imminent. "Heritage," the term and concept, endows the dead and the dying with a second life, an afterlife, through the instrumentalities of exhibition and performance. It is in this sense that heritage productions are resurrection theatre. As I have argued elsewhere, heritage is a mode of cultural production, a point that is obscured by the discourse of discovery and recovery. The brochures proclaim that history is waiting for you. While they speak in a language of recuperation, regeneration, restitution, restoration, recreation, the transvaluation of the obsolete, mistaken, outmoded, dead, and defunct produces something new. We may "step back in time to the year 1645," but where do we then find ourselves? In a place where the year is always 1645 and history repeats itself annually. These are repetitions with full knowledge of all that has happened since 1645, a prophetic capacity that the actors at the site must work hard to suppress and that structure the visitor's experience. Indeed, the very term historic can be taken as an indication of obsolescence. In Palmerston North, a town in New Zealand, there is a little yellow arrow marked "Historic Telephone Box." Follow the arrow and you will find a telephone box sitting in front of Harcourt's, a real estate office. The box is freshly painted red and a plaque from the city identifies it as an "historic telephone box" of 1920s vintage. Real estate listings are posted on the inside of the glass. The sign on the real estate agency declares, "Harcourts, in business since 1888," not "historic real estate agency." Harcourts, which is older than the telephone box, is not historic. In other words, the telephone box is finished. Harcourts is still going. The term historic references obsolecence, not age. Policy statements and marketing discourse tend to conflate heritage and culture, thereby eliding several notions of culture. If culture as lived practice refers to our everyday world, it is culture as dead practice that becomes the "living heritage" of tourism. Culture in these senses is to be distinguished from the culture industry, which includes museums, art galleries, film, and various kinds of commercial entertainments, not least of which is cultural tourism. How does a way of life become heritage? Five years ago the local population of Cairns, the jewel in the crown of Australia's Gold Coast, was 70,000. Today it is more than 120,000, with tourists visiting at the rate of 500,000 a year. Long-term residents mourn the loss of "the real Cairns," which is the first step in converting a way of life into heritage. The second step is theatrical mediation--re-enactments, role-playing, audio tours, dioramas, panoramas, cycloramas, and other kinds of installation. Much that is familiar from theatre is deployed in some fashion within the tourism industry. Indeed, the industry is a kind of museum of theatre practice, even as it innovates new variations and forms. While museums set out to preserve their collections, they may also preserve archaic modes of installation, whether for lack of funds or other reasons. With enough time, museums and their visitors may come to appreciate the value of these "historic" installations--the Ackley dioramas at the Milwaukee Public Museum and the American Museum of Natural History in New York, Sir John Soane's Museum in London, the Mtter Museum of the College of Physicians of Philadelphia and the Wagner Free Institute of Science, also in Philadelphia. The third step is "adding value." Like the terms "friendly fire" and "living heritage," "value added" is a soft term for a hard fact. The term "value added" is perhaps most familiar as a kind of tax. Heritage, the concept and the designation, adds value to the ways of life, industries, technologies, things, and persons who, for any number of reasons, have lost value--or never had value. To speak of adding value is to specify value that is not inherent. The term is also a code word for high priced. Death leaves a mess. Castles, forts, ruins, abandoned mines, empty buildings, depleted fisheries, waning economies litter the landscape. Devising ways to "add value" encourages the elaborations we have come to associate with tourism--from the differentiations of classes of service on airlines and the perks and premiums of package tours to the historic houses that generate more revenue as heritage than they did in their former lives. More tourists will pass through Ellis Island, the immigration processing center in New York, than did immigrants during the peak period of mass immigration at the turn of the century. If value is not inherent, if value is added rather than simply restored, recovered or discovered, what is the nature of the value that is added? Heritage productions are defined by the value of "pastness." Rest assured that if Harcourt's went out of business, they would not be celebrating their "heritage," at least not right away. The value of pastness is not a value that can be assumed. Much that has passed is "good riddance." Pastness as a value has to be produced. It also needs to be shown and performed, which brings the value of exhibition to the fore--castles, palaces, forts, and mines must be endowed with exhibition value. On display, they exhibit the value of difference. Whether induced by the market or grounded in historically contested identities, difference is what makes it possible to put Wales on the tourist map. Competition with other destinations often figures difference as precedence--places make claims to the indigenous, primordial, and imperial; to the first, oldest, and biggest; to singularity of any kind, whether the best or the worst. Pastness, exhibition, difference, and precedence are among the values that heritage adds. Why is heritage better adapted to tourism than the life world itself? After all, travel promises to take you somewhere that is essentially unmediated, but delivers you to ever more highly mediated sites. Those mediations are how value gets added to what is otherwise just a beach, mountain, or abandoned mine. The tourist industry cannot charge for the life world, nature, or a mine gone bust because these are what the industry calls a free and inherent resource. For this reason alone, they are technically not part of the industry, though often part of the amenity--the atmosphere or style of a place. Heritage is one way to bring them into the industry. What tourism does, what it promises and what it values, is that which lies outside itself. However, the industry's economy requires that it bring free and inherent resources inside itself. This gives rise to a fundamental dilemma. The life world is low density--too much dead space and down time between high points-- whereas tourism promises high density experiences. The organized tour promises to pack the best into the shortest time for the least money--in other words, to achieve the highest ratio of attraction to logistics, and in the case of mass tourism, the most bang for the buck. The life world is low density. The highlights are not clearly marked or necessarily close together. Strangers lack the insider knowledge to get to them quickly and efficiently if at all. The life world is also easily saturated. Saturation contributes to the problem of sustainibility, an issue that the most visited historic towns in the United Kingdom understand all too well. Three million guests visit 30,000 hosts at Windsor, where the ratio is 300 to 1, and even higher in the peak season. The locals are so resentful that residents in areas such as Bath have been known to turn hosepipes on open-topped buses. While this does not yet seem to be a problem in Wales, there might well come a day when towns that have been overrun with tourists will become uninhabitable. Tourism 2000 proposes to avoid this problem by developing attractions that can accommodate 500,000 visitors a year. However, the infrastructure for accommodating such flows generally dominate the experience of high visitation sites because of the high ratio of infrastructure to attraction. Recognizing that heritage is an intermittent presence on the contemporary, landscape, the Welsh Tourist Board also plans to create heritage regions by linking sites together thematically and marketing them together. Increasingly these sites are depending on distinctive forms of theatrical mediation-- immersive, environmental, improvisatory--to convey their stories. They also come to resemble one another for this very reason. The theatrical mediation that animates these sites is part of the history of heritage production in its own right. This can be seen with special clarity in Plymouth, Massachusetts. In the town of Plymouth today, the history of the heritage production is even more fully visible than the Pilgrim history these productions commemorate. There are historic buildings, plaques, walking tours, museums of artifacts, wax museums, archeological sites, commemorative events, souvenir shops, thematized restaurants, and the recreated village--in sum, the town and its environs are a museum of heritage performance practices. Plimoth Plantation, located on the outskirts of Plymouth, is the most fully realized mediation of pilgrim "heritage." This site holds to the principle of first-person interpretation even more strictly than what we experienced at Llancaiach Fawr Manor. It also holds the line more firmly between pilgrims and visitors. Visitors are not as a rule asked to play pilgrims, whereas at Llancaiach Fawr Manor, "If you fancy yourself as 'Colonel' Prichard you can try on his armour and discover what it was like to carry over 70lbs of weaponry into battle. Children can dress up in period costume and take a turn in the stocks." Llancaiach Fawr Manor takes an existing building and the year 1645 as its point of departure, while at Plimoth Plantation, where the year is always 1626, the village is entirely recreated on the basis of archeological evidence, using entirely new materials, but traditional tools and techniques. Plimoth Plantation is but the most recent interpretive treatment of a site whose primary touchstone was literally a rock, Plymouth Rock, thought to mark the place where the pilgrims first set foot. What's to be done with a rock? Standing at that spot, with little more than a plaque to distinguish this rock from any other, visitors look out over the ocean and are left to themselves to visualize the historical events this site is meant to commemorate. A little portico was eventually added to protect the rock from those inclined to chip off souvenirs. The portico and plaque exemplify what Dean MacCannell calls site sacralization, a process that involves naming, framing, enshrinement, and reproduction. This attraction--it is a very plain, very big rock--is mute. It is incapable of conveying anything about "the pilgrim experience," which is the sine qua non of the recreated pilgrim village. Nor does the little neo-classical portico, whose role is the enshrinement and protection of a relic, help in this regard. Other than reverence and quiet contemplation, there are no protocols for what to do, besides standing along the edge of the portico and staring at the rock. The assumption in years past was that any visitors attracted to the site already knew the story, whether through its frequent retelling as part of the national founding story or history books and tourist guides. The minimalism of this approach--its patently untheatrical character, the absence of mimesis or illusion, the literalism of the rock--is consistent with a Puritan sensibility. If earlier types of heritage performance were responses to a rock, the recreated village is a response to a hole--the hole that was left after archaeologists excavated the pilgrim settlement. At Plimoth Plantation, the settlement is literally recreated and peopled in a spirit of archeological optimism. Given the remains and the documents and archeology's inferential methods, the creators of Plimoth Plantation restore a whole from the fragments. Nothing could be further from the theatre/archeology that Mike Pearson and Michael Shanks performed at Esgair Fraith and Plas Tan y Blwch. Wedding poststructuralist archeology with postmodern performance, their theater/archeology builds on the poetics of fragments and gaps, rather than on materializing a virtual world of the past. At Plimoth Plantation, archeological actualities, the excavated fragments, are staged in the museum, while the virtual pilgrim world is recreated in the village. Both the museum and the village are optimistic statements about what can be found, known, shown, and experienced. Both involve theatrical mediations, the museum operating in the tradition of object theater, the village in the mode of enviromental and improvisatory performance. It is not by accident that one of the most influential exhibition conceptualizers of our time was first a theater director. Jeshajahu Weinberg, former director of the Beth Hatefutsoth/Museum of the Diaspora in Tel Aviv and of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C., was for many years the director of the Cameri Theater in Tel Aviv. I once asked him for his definition of the museum, knowing that his museums were predicated on concept and installation, not on collections. They featured models, dioramas, light boxes, reconstructions, casts, replicas, diagrams, maps, charts, and multimedia. They did not put much stock in original artifacts. His answer: a museum is a story told in three-dimensional space. On its face, this statement does not distinguish museum from theater. Or rather, this statement points to their convergence. Following Carol Duncan's proposition that a defining feature of the museum is the ceremonial walk through its galleries, I would argue that it is precisely the movement of spectators through space that distinguishes museums (and many tourist attractions) from theatres. To make an even finer distinction, things in museums stand still, while visitors move. Forms of tourism in which both the attraction and the visitor move--as at Plimoth Plantation and Llanciach Fawr Manor--are closer to environmental theatre. Heritage production are defined not only by the way they configure space and movement, but also by how they organize time. Historical recreations activate three different clocks. The effects are unexpected, difficult to control, and possible sources of delight in their own right. First, there is the stopped clock of the historical moment chosen for recreation-- 1627 and 1645, in the cases discussed here. Second, there is the heritage clock. While heritage sites stop the historical clock, the heritage clock keeps ticking, one reason why it is difficult to synchronize these two clocks. The historical moment, the designated year, is sustained through repetition. The heritage production is sustained through reversal. The older the heritage installation, the less historically accurate. For this reason, it is necessary to arrest its movement, to turn the clock back, not once but perpetually. Just how this works became apparent to me when I asked permission to reproduce a photograph that I had taken of Plimoth Plantation about fifteen years ago. The person responding to my request told me that my photograph was wrong. How could my photograph be wrong? She explained that the chimneys were from the wrong period. I explained that those chimneys were there when I took the picture. Yes, she responded, but they have been removed. What's more, she continued, Plimoth was seven years old in 1627, whereas Plimoth Plantation is now 25 years old. As a result, when the site closes for the winter, the staff tears buildings down, schedules house-raisings during the tourist season, and prematurely ages the buildings so they will look seven years old, just as they were in the year 1627. At this site, history stands still while heritage continues to age. What looks like a logistical problem is a more profound problem of synchronizing the site's clocks. The third clock is one that visitors bring to the site-- the time of their lives, the time out of a vacation. The term time machine and the discourse of time travel are misleading. The imperatives of marketing promise a seamless experience: "Step over the threshold of Llancaiach (pronounced glan kayack) Fawr and travel back over 350 years to a time of great unrest and Civil War in Wales" and "Follow in the footsteps of King Charles I....if you visit on August 5 you can meet the King himself and experience the bustling excitement of the servants as they prepare to entertain their royal master." But the success of such sites lies precisely in their failure as the perfect time machine. Enter the world of 1627, encounter the pilgrims, be carried away and forget that you ever lived in any other place or time. Have a "pilgrim experience." What actually happens is more interesting than what is intended. Visitors try to get the historical reenactors to break frame, just as we did at Llancaiach Fawr Manor, when we grilled the servants of 'Colonel' Edward Prichard about modern smoke detectors on the ceiling of the 17th-century building. The servant said she could not see what we said we could see, a ploy that obviated any further conversation on the matter. At Plimoth Plantation, the pilgrims express consternation at the strange machines that visitors bring with them from faraway places--their cameras and cellular phones- -and respond with disbelief or attributions of magic and sorcery or accusations of consorting with the devil. They struggle to stay in character all the time. Visitors watch to see if the pilgrims will tear the fabric of time and emerge as 1997 persons, even if only for a flash. This little game is a way to touch and test the historical membrane so carefully fashioned by the recreation. The third clock also operates as a challenge to forgetting. In order to recreate 1627 or 1645, the actors have to "forget" everything that happened thereafter. It is the act of forgetting that creates the necessary gap between themselves and the visitor. In that gap we become prophets because we can see the three centuries that followed, while the actors are supposed to know nothing beyond the year in which they live in perpetuity. While this is not what was envisioned by a time machine, it holds even more possibilities for understanding the theatre of afterlife called heritage. It is in that theatre that we explored the relationships between performance, tourism and identity in this very special place called Wales. References Carol Duncan, Civilizing Rituals: Inside Public Art Museums (London: Routledge, 1995). Deborah Holden, "When All the Fun Is Getting There," New Zealand Herald (30 August 1994), section 3, 6. Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, Destination Culture: Tourism, Museums, and Heritage (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998). Dean MacCannell, The Tourist: A New Theory of the Leisure Class (New York: Schocken Books, 1976). Dean MacCannell, Empty Meeting Grounds: The Tourist Papers (London: Routledge, 1992). Mike Pearson, comments by Julian Thomas, "Theatre/Archeology," TDR The Drama Review 38, 4 (T144), 1994: 133-161. Stephen Eddy Snow, Performing the Pilgrims: A Study of Ethnohistorical Role-Playing at Plimoth Plantation (Jackson: University Press of Mississipi, 1993.) Welsh Tourist Board, Tourism 2000 (1994).