CFP - Heritage and Tourism: A Public Interest Approach

[Noel B. Salazar Medina]

Call for papers:

Heritage and Tourism: A Public Interest Approach
American Anthropological Association Annual Meetings, Chicago, IL, USA;
November 19-23, 2003

Organizers: Noel Salazar Medina and Benjamin Porter, Department of
Anthropology, University of Pennsylvania

The session takes up this year's AAA conference theme, 'Peace', in an
exploration of heritage, tourism, and the ways public interest anthropology
can address proliferating conflicts arising in tourism at heritage sites.
Previous studies demonstrate how heritage is packaged for public
consumption at highly formal, institutionalized levels such as government
publications, museums, and the sites themselves. However, a public interest
approach to heritage breaks from this top-down model as it fails to account
for another, more informal sphere of heritage discourse and reality.
Heritage is identified, in its first moments, in the language that people
use to make meaningful claims about their past, meanings that subsequently
embody material culture and practices such as performance and tourism.

Understanding heritage as an objectifying process allows us to investigate
its powerful role in motivating heritage tourism in local and global
contexts. Although tourists possess differing motives for visiting sites,
people who live in and around heritage sites possess their own
representations and attachments that are often unrecognized. Instead,
powerful local, national, and international interest groups impose formal
representations that agree with their economic and ideological agendas. As
a result, conflicts between promoters, tourists, and local people threaten
preservation and sustainability, and can lead to alienation and, in worst
circumstances, violence.

Given its sensitivity to conflict and dialogue within civil society, public
interest anthropology (PIA) is rightly poised to examine ensuing conflicts
in the global proliferation of heritage and tourism. PIA places civil
society at the center of analysis, investigating how groups form and
conflict with other groups in the promotion of their interests. An
important aspect of PIA is participatory-action research, where the scholar
acts as both researcher and public advocate, aggressively investigating the
reasons for conflict, presenting their findings to all parties, and
participating when invited in consensus building. At the same time, the
scholar remains aware of disparities in power across involved groups and
seeks to readdress this imbalance in the debate. As scholarship and
advocacy combined, PIA offers a powerful research design with which to
explore heritage tourism anew, providing the scholar with a means to
further the goals of anthropological inquiry while promoting the need for
dialogue in civil society.

PIA is a four-field approach and graduate students from all of
anthropology's sub-disciplines and other social sciences are strongly
encouraged to submit a paper for this session. Topics may include studies
exploring how local people formulate ideas about heritage and translate
these ideas into special interests, and prescriptive case studies in the
development and promotion of, and conflict resolution at heritage sites.
Other topics may include particular disjunctures between local, national,
and diasporic heritage sentiments, how local people promote their own
heritage interests (e.g. guiding, selling, advocating) when faced with
competing counter-narratives, and case studies examining the role of
international agencies (e.g. World Bank, UNESCO, NGOs) in inadvertently
promoting and actively resolving conflicts in heritage tourism.

If interested in submitting an abstract, please e-mail Noel Salazar Medina
(nsalazar at sas.upenn.edu) or Benjamin Porter (bporter at sas.upenn.edu) by
March 24, 2003. Please submit your name, your affiliation, a title and
abstract limited to 250 words. The annual meetings of the American
Anthropological Association (AAA) will be held in Chicago at the Hilton on
November 19-23, 2003.
http://www.aaanet.org/mtgs/call4papers2003/info/theme.htm

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NOTE:

We are currently also searching one or two respondents (scholars) who want
to provide comments in the final portion of the session.
If you are interested, please get in touch with us as soon as possible.


============================
Noel B. Salazar Medina
B.A.E.F. Fellow - William Penn Fellow
Department of Anthropology
University of Pennsylvania
325 University Museum
Philadelphia, PA 19104-6398, U.S.A.
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