Cultural and heritage tourism: the great debates

[Extract] Recent decades have seen an explosion of interest in the past embracing everything from fossils and furniture to folklore and faiths: ...No longer are only aristocrats obsessed with ancestry, only the super-rich collectors of antiques, only academics antiquarians, only a culturedmin01ity museum-goers; millions of ordinary folk now search out their roots, mobilize to protect beloved scenes, cherish their own and other people's mementoes, and dote on media versions of history. (Lowenthal,1993, p. 3). In these eloquent statements Lowenthal describes two simple but critical features of heritage - growth and change. Arguably growth and change are characteristics of virtually all aspects of late twentieth-century life. Throughout this book many authors attempt to describe succinctly and analyse critically growth and change in many aspects of society and particularly tourism. The challenge for this chapter is to do the same for cultural and heritage tourism. This author's response to this challenge will be to chart the debates, describe the rival social representations of heritage and cultural tourism and identify the gaps in existing academic discussions of this particular form of tourism