Footnote:
In: Tourism Recreation Research 32(3):23-30
Nach Informationen von SSRN wurde die ursprüngliche Fassung des Dokuments October 1, 2007 erstellt
Description:
Natural and cultural heritage destinations worldwide are adapting themselves to the homogenizing corporate culture of the global tourism industry at the same time as trying to maintain, or even increase, their local distinctiveness. While local and national tourism authorities and travel agencies package and sell so-called ‘authentic’ natural landscapes or ‘traditional’ cultures, what counts as heritage and the way in which heritage is interpreted are increasingly defined on a global scale (e.g. UNESCO’s World Heritage policies). By way of a comparative case study, this paper examines how local tour guides in Yogyakarta, Indonesia (cultural heritage tourism), and Arusha, Tanzania (natural heritage tourism), learn to tell foreign tourists seducing tourism tales. A combination of an in-depth ethnographic study of the local tourism industry with a discourse-centred analysis of guiding narratives is used to study the relationship between global tourism discourses and local tour guiding in both destinations. The focus is on how guides, through their own interpretations of local heritage, act as key actors in mediating the tension between ongoing processes of globalization and localization. Paradoxically, guides seem to rely on fashionable global tourism tales to interpret and sell cultural and natural heritage as authentically ‘local’. This is partly because tourists appear to appreciate heritage interpretations that combine narratives about the particularities of a destination with well-known tourism imaginaries that are circulating globally. However, this does not mean that guides merely reproduce normative templates. In the interaction with tourists, they become themselves creative producers of seducing tourism tales