What is it about?
Tourists often travel to experience places, traditions and stories that seem distinctive and local. Yet tourism is a global industry that brings international expectations, standards and familiar ways of presenting places to visitors. This chapter explores what happens when these global and local forces meet. It shows that tourism can help protect heritage and create economic opportunities, but can also standardise, commercialise or change the very culture that attracts visitors. Using examples from Central Java in Indonesia, the chapter examines how governments, international organisations, tourism businesses, local communities and tour guides all participate in deciding what counts as heritage and how it should be presented. Rather than seeing globalisation and local culture as opposites, it shows how they continually interact to reshape heritage.
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Why is it important?
Heritage tourism involves a fundamental paradox. Destinations compete in a global tourism market by emphasizing that their culture, history and traditions are unique, but they often make those distinctive qualities accessible through increasingly standardised global tourism practices. International heritage classifications, professional standards, visitor facilities, marketing techniques and expectations about service can help protect heritage and make sites accessible to visitors. At the same time, these processes can simplify local histories, marginalize alternative interpretations or privilege the interests of tourists and authorities over those of local communities. The chapter argues that we cannot understand this situation by simply opposing “the global” to “the local.” Globalisation itself can increase the value attached to local distinctiveness, while local actors actively adapt, negotiate and sometimes resist global influences. This is what glocalisation helps us understand: global and local processes do not merely confront each other, they become intertwined. This matters especially for the sustainable management of heritage. Heritage sites are not empty attractions. They are places to which people attach different histories, identities and meanings. Tourism can provide resources for conservation and livelihoods, but it can also produce conflicts over ownership, access, representation and whose version of the past is told. The chapter therefore highlights the importance of interpretation, participation and collaboration between tourism and heritage professionals, local communities and other stakeholders.
Perspectives
For me, one of the most fascinating paradoxes of heritage tourism is that people travel globally in search of the local. Tourists often want to encounter something distinctive, authentic or rooted in a particular place, while the systems that enable them to do so are increasingly global and standardised. The same heritage labels, tourism practices, marketing techniques and expectations can be encountered in very different parts of the world. My research in Central Java made this tension particularly tangible. Heritage sites such as Borobudur and Prambanan are simultaneously local places, symbols within Indonesia, internationally recognized monuments and global tourism attractions. Their meanings cannot be reduced to any one of these scales. Nor are those meanings determined by a single actor. Governments, international organisations, tourism businesses, local communities, visitors and guides all participate, although certainly not with equal power, in defining what these places represent. Tour guides are especially interesting to me because they operate precisely at this intersection. They translate local histories and cultural meanings for visitors from elsewhere, but they do not simply repeat an official script. Their interpretations can combine globally circulating tourism narratives with local knowledge, personal experience and improvisation. In doing so, guides become active participants in the continuous remaking of heritage. This is why I find the concept of glocalisation useful. It prevents us from telling an overly simple story in which globalisation destroys authentic local culture or, conversely, tourism merely preserves and celebrates it. What happens on the ground is far more dynamic. Heritage is continuously selected, interpreted, negotiated and transformed as different actors encounter one another. For me, the larger question is therefore not whether heritage should be global or local. It is how we can make these encounters more equitable, sustainable and attentive to the multiple meanings that heritage holds for different people.
Professor Noel B. Salazar
Katholieke Universiteit Leuven
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This page is a summary of: Heritage and Globalisation, June 2010, Taylor & Francis,
DOI: 10.4324/9780203850855.
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