Collective Memory and Tourism: Globalizing Transmission through Localized Experience

Abstract

The articles in this issue highlight the relationship between collective memory and tourism. In what ways are practices of collective remembering implicated with those of tourism? Where do collective memory scholarship and tourism studies meet? How might the two interdisciplinary academic fields be shaped through each other’s concepts? We suggest that experiencing the collective past is integral to specific forms of tourism, particularly what is called ‘heritage tourism’. So, too, are certain kinds of public practices of collective remembering increasingly connected with the tourism industry. In the absence of, or complementary to, financial support for the historic preservation efforts, the entrepreneurial approach to the collective past turns objects of such memory into tourist attractions to keep them economically viable. Thinking about collective remembering in relation to tourism directs our analytical focus to the authority of experiencing the past in a specific tourist place in the present. It centres our attention on what is involved in making this experience possible. How heritage plays a role as means of preserving the collective past varies according to the context. In some parts of the West, as Urry (1990: 104) comments, ‘it seems that a new museum opens every week or so’. These conservation efforts seem to be spearheaded by nostalgia for fastvanishing ways of life and the public places they sustained (Lowenthal 1985). Auge (1995) provides an insight into this longing for the past. Much of our public life today, he suggests, revolves around motorways, airports or shopping centres – nondescript spaces that tend to individuate people and discourage attachment to place. In contrast, the public places we are trying to preserve encourage sociality and people’s identity with that social life so