Discourses with the past: Tourism and heritage in South-East Asia

Abstract

This special issue is intended to explore in some empirical detail the relationships between culture (including ethnicity) nature, tourism, development, and political action, and in this connection to focus specifically on what is widely called ‘heritage’ and its conceptualization and representation in South-East Asia. Heritage is both a narrow concept, literally ‘what is or may be inherited’ (Little Oxford English Dictionary, 1996: 294), and a broader one pertaining to notions of ethnicity and nationalism, and even global identity. Heritage has become something which the state and its agents, as well as tourists and local communities appropriate and create as an object worthy of touristic attention, though only certain items are selected for this purpose and others are discarded. It has been remarked upon frequently that the concept of heritage is difficult to define and that, in popular discourse, its meaning is very wide and flexible. A useful starting point is the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), which designates World Heritage Sites as of either ‘cultural’ or ‘natural’ or ‘mixed’ (both cultural and natural) importance. According to the World Heritage Convention, 1 which was adopted by UNESCO in 1972, ‘cultural heritage’ embraces a group of buildings or a site of historical, aesthetic, archaeological, scientific, ethnological or anthropological value’. In contrast UNESCO defines ‘natural heritage’ in terms of outstanding physical, biological, and geological features; habitats of threatened plants or animal species and areas of value on scientific and aesthetic grounds or from the perspective of conservation. We are using the term heritage here to refer primarily to tangible and concrete elements of the past which are presented and re-presented in the present: archaeological finds, historical sites, monuments and buildings, urban and rural landscapes, and material artefacts (usually housed and displayed in museums). What is more ‘the sites selected to represent the country’s heritage will also have strong implications for both collective and individual identity and hence the creation of social realities’ (Black and Wall, 2001: 123). We also recognize that the term is used in a wider sense to refer not just to ‘traditional’ material objects but also to ‘traditional’ ways of life (often such overt, sensory and ‘aesthetic’ cultural forms as dance, drama, music, and the visual and plastic arts), which are usually brought into association with the material evidence of the past. The importance of these cultural forms as heritage is enhanced precisely because governments in promoting tourism tend to focus on those which are immediate, accessible, colourful, and visible to the ‘tourist gaze’, and which can be more easily shaped and constructed (Wood, 1997: 10). The concept of heritage therefore shades into the more general concepts of culture and tradition, and it is bound up with issues of national and local identities. However, as we shall see, even the natural environment can be defined and sanctioned as heritage and moulded in particular ways for the tourist market, although it is usually presented and given meaning, as is cultural heritage, as ISSN 1363-9811 print/ISSN 1469-8382 online/03/890003-13  2003 Editors, Indonesia and the Malay World