Russell Staiff

Interpretation in National Parks: Some Critical Questions

This paper notes an increasing cultural diversity in visitation patterns to protected areas/national parks, and goes on to question a series of assumptions that underpin conservation education and approaches to interpretation in protected areas. It is concerned with content rather than interpretational techniques; it questions the central role of Western, science based ecological thinking in interpretation. The paper stems from research in Minnamurra Rainforest Centre in New South Wales, Australia, which was carried out in a context of multi-culturalism in a postcolonial society, where it is widely acknowledged that Indigenous Australian peoples have significant moral and legal claims regarding the custodianship of natural landscapes. A dialogue between the worlds of museology and protected areas interpretation is developed, which leads to five critical questions for interpretation praxis: Who are the owners/custodians of the areas? How are they and the areas represented? Who speaks for them? What is spoken and why? Who is listening to the messages? There is a description of how the Minnamurra Centre is reacting to the changing conceptual context of its work.

Crossing the Cultural Divide: Western Visitors and Interpretation at Ayutthaya World Heritage Site, Thailand

In 1991, Ayutthaya, the former capital city of Thailand and now an archaeological park, was inscribed on the World Heritage List. Currently, it receives some one million international visitors a year, mainly day-trippers from Bangkok. Despite this, the on-site interpretation put in place in 1992 (largely signage in Thai and English) has never been assessed in terms of the content of the signs and the reactions of visitors. This paper pertains to one part of the first extensive study of the interpretation employed at Ayutthaya, a study that included a visitor survey that was both a demographic study and an initial investigation into the cross-cultural dimension of interpretation at Ayutthaya. The international visitation to this World Heritage Site is overwhelmingly Western and, therefore, a critical issue arises: what do non-Asian, non-Thai and non-Buddhist visitors gain from the experience? If the visitor is not of the same culture being experienced, and if cross-cultural translation itself is a highly complex and sometimes contentious and problematic process, then it is likely that the deeper cultural significance of the site cannot be well understood in a one-day visit. If the deeper meanings of Ayutthaha remain elusive, does it follow that appreciating the cultural and heritage values of the site is, in direct proportion, an unattainable goal? The study points towards what may be possible when heritage interpretation, in an age of unprecedented global travel, is regarded as a negotiation of a cultural divide.

The rhetoric of Loas/French fusion : beyond the representation of the western tourist experience of cuisine in the world heritage city of Luang Prabang, Laos

Inextricably interwoven into the Western tourist experience of Luang Prabang, former royal capital and former French colonial town, is a food encounter increasingly subsumed under the description of ‘Lao-French fusion cuisine’. There has been a conscious exploitation of the connection between the cultural heritage of this World Heritage town, and the distinctiveness of its cuisine as intangible heritage. This article explores the intersections between the way the cuisine is represented, the contestations around these representations (what is included and excluded, the use of the past) and the Western cuisine experience of Luang Prabang. We argue the rhetoric of fusion is partial, selective and strongly influenced by the various ways Luang Prabang (re)presents itself to Western tourists. Further, that the touristic image/experience of Luang Prabangs cuisine camouflages under the fusion description a highly mobile set of dynamics and understanding of the food scenarios within the historic city. In particular, the intermingling of many food traditions; the highly improvized nature of cuisine, the interplay between local farming, markets and food production, food imports from Thailand, China, Vietnam and France, the way cuisine marks and ritualizes social groups (Lao bourgeoisie, students, monks, hilltribe ethnic minorities, expatriates, Western tourists, etc.) and the ebb and flow between these groups in food production and consumption. The heritage tourist rhetoric of fusion masks complexity and freezes an open-ended process into a fixed representation.

History and tourism: intertextual representations of Florence.

The act of worldmaking involves various and complex representations that �produce� places, cultures, institutions, individuals, and heritages. The subject has emerged as a strong concept in the recent conceptuality of Tourism Studies/Tourism Sciences. In this review article, Staiff makes it clear that a lead heritage locale or tourist destination city like Florence (and visitors to Florence!) is (are) unavoidably ensnared in such practices. In this article, the reviewer explores the interrelationship between the various historical representations of the city, and in particular, the myth of Renaissance Florence and the recent revisionist constructions of the 15th century. It suggests that a process of intertextuality is at work in both �tourist Florence,� as a place, and in the way the visitor makes sense of the city within networks of meaning continually being created. Further, this review article explores the coincidence of Florence as a specular culture in the 15th century�one where everything is deemed to mirror everything else�and a tourist display culture in the 21st century and what this coincidence reveals about the role of representation in the past and the role of representation and worldmaking in the present through the mediating agency and authority of tourism, and its collaborative inscriptive industries.

The “old” and the “new”: events and placemaking in Luang Prabang, Laos

The purpose of this paper is to explore Lai Heua Fai, Festival of Light, as a place making ritual in the world heritage town of Luang Prabang, a former royal capital of the Lao-speaking kingdom. It compares this centuries-old traditional festival with a very new place making festival, the Luang Prabang Film Festival which began only six years ago.,Sense of place theorization has developed considerably in recent decades as a number of discourses have co-mingled and as social and cultural research has embraced space/place as a crucial component of knowledge production. The study explores place making in a globalized, post-modern and post-colonial world. Fieldwork was undertaken in Luang Prabang between 2008 and 2016 including interviews, observations, photographic recording and participation, leading up to the 2013 celebration of Lai Heua Fai and the 2015 film festival.,Lai Heua Fai and the Luang Prabang Film Festival are spatial practices that represent the places they evoke. Both these events connect the past, the present and the future in place. The authors argue that separating “events” from “place” sets up a dichotomy that is problematic and unsustainable on many levels: perceptually, as a lived experience, epistemologically and analytically.,The authors suggest that these two identity forming events, in the life of Luang Prabang, herald “place” and “place making” as ongoing dynamic processes of construction and re-construction where the “traditional” and the “contemporary” are constantly re-constituted as markers, in the case of this research, of Luang Prabangan identity and place attachment.

Community-based ecotourism: beyond authenticity and the commodification of local people

ABSTRACT Community-based ecotourism (CBET) aims to empower local communities through participation. Thailand is a good example of a developing country where the local community requires long-term support from stakeholders for empowerment. Given that the inauthenticity and commodification of CBET have yet to be discussed in terms of the influences of policy and external stakeholders, this research connects the missing link in the literature between policy, tourism stakeholders and practices in relation to the authenticity and commodification of CBET. In order to gain an understanding of the policy related to the CBET operation, central Thai government agencies and related non-governmental organisations (NGOs) participated in in-depth interviews. This research involved a case study in the Khiriwong community, the first CBET community (since 1996) in Thailand, through the application of ethnographic techniques. The findings reveal that since the notion of CBET relies heavily on aspects of community participation, cohesion, forest guardianship, self-reliance and sustainability, all of which are part of the picturesque ideal of romanticism, the community itself becomes associated with the identity, subject to the national policy and the expectations of external stakeholders, which eventually fall into the commodification of staged authenticity.

What of Heritage in a Mobile World? Negotiating Heritage/Tourism/Community in Luang Prabang, Laos

There is an odd “conjuring trick” at work when we think of heritage, especially in its Western manifestations. Whether it is a building, a museum display, or a landscape we think of these as things that, while encapsulating processes (change, decay, conservation, restoration, adaptive reuse, and so on), are nevertheless, for all intents and purposes, static objects when apprehended, when visited, when photographed. But what happens when the “conjuring trick” is not part of the intellectual, emotional, and somatic response to the realm of material objects and living organisms? This chapter attempts to make sense of the fissure between this “conjuring trick” in Western comprehension, understanding, and practice and, what could be regarded, as a more “realistic” apprehension and conception of material culture and the living environment in the city of Luang Prabang, Laos, where the “world of things” is animated by movement, dynamism, spiritual energy, and change, all of them as a priori and where the “conjuring trick” of Western perception is somewhat alien. In Luang Prabang heritage is active and mobile. And it implicates diverse segments of tourists and residents in motion, doing things to, as, and with heritage.

Heritage and the Visual Arts

It is not often one can make universal generalizations, but it is axiomatic that cultural heritage places and the visual arts are inseparable. Whether it is the rock art in Kakadu World Heritage Site in northern Australia, the multiple art works that suffuse the urban fabric of Florence, the bas-relief sculptures of the temples of Angkor in Cambodia, the frescoes in the tombs of the Valley of the Kings, the giant sculptures at the temples at Karnak in Egypt, ‘heritage’ collections of paintings like those of the nineteenth-century painter J. M. W. Turner at the Tate Britain, the frescoes and sculptures at Sigiriya World Heritage Site in central Sri Lanka, or the stained glass and the sculptural programmes of Chartres Cathedral, this virtually inexhaustible list denotes heritage, however conceived, as twinned inextricably with the visual arts.

Tourism and Australian beach cultures: revealing bodies

to understand the ways that the built environment can facilitate collective assertions of identity and memory against what they see as a tendency to equate queers with absence and invisibility. They offer, I think, a productive angle. But because of the lack of engagement with contemporary work on either sexuality or memory in geography – along with their fairly one-dimensional reading of Linda Peake’s and Gill Valentine’s work from the mid-1990s – it is an approach that may strike readers of this journal as in need of further elaboration. It should also be noted that, as the authors readily admit, this is an account that is largely about gay men in the USA, and forms of difference other than sexuality (e.g. gender, race and class) are not generally foregrounded. Such a focus, while not necessarily problematic in itself – one must focus on something, after all – does beg the question of how this argument might look if developed in ways that took the mutually constitutive relationship between sexual norms and racial formation, for example, as central to the kinds of (un)remembering analyzed. Taken as a call to understand our relationships to a queer past as a creative and contingent remembering that collectively produces the present and future, this book shines. Sharing a diagnosis of the normalizing tendencies of contemporary LGBT politics with other queer scholars, the authors contribute a critical analysis of the place of (un) remembering in these tendencies that is important and welcome. In doing so, it offers a vision of sexuality and queer memory as relational and generatively collective that provides an instructive counterpoint to ‘anti-social’ tendencies in queer studies. Where the book falls short – not so much of its stated aim, which I think it largely accomplishes, but in terms of the contributions that it could have made – it can, I hope, serve as a provocation for further work that can more successfully integrate queer work on time with queer approaches to space, as well as bring critical approaches to intersectionality and the mutual constitution of various forms of difference to bear on the memories and debates that Castiglia and Reed so productively thematize.