基本説明
Takes the reader on an eyeopening journey from ethnological artifacts to kitsch.
Full Description
"Destination Culture" takes the reader on an eye-opening journey from ethnological artifacts to kitsch. Posing the question, 'What does it mean to show?' Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett explores the agency of display in a variety of settings: museums, festivals, world's fairs, historical re-creations, memorials, and tourist attractions. She talks about how objects - and people - are made to 'perform' their meaning for us by the very fact of being collected and exhibited, and about how specific techniques of display, not just the things shown, convey powerful messages. Her engaging analysis shows how museums compete with tourism in the production of 'heritage'. To make themselves profitable, museums are marketing themselves as tourist attractions. To make locations into destinations, tourism is staging the world as a museum of itself. Both promise to deliver heritage. Although heritage is marketed as something old, she argues that heritage is actually a new mode of cultural production that gives a second life to dying ways of life, economies, and places.
The book concludes with a lively commentary on the 'good taste/bad taste' debate in the ephemeral 'museum of the life world,' where everyone is a curator of sorts and the process of converting life into heritage begins.
Contents
List of Illustrations
Acknowledgments
Introduction
part 1 The Agency of Display
Objects of Ethnography
Exhibiting Jews
part 2 A Second Life as Heritage
Destination Museum
Ellis Island
Plimoth Plantation
part 3 Undoing the Ethnographic
Confusing Pleasures
Secrets of Encounter
part 4 Circulating Value
Disputing Taste
Notes
Index
