Heritage of the senses

Abstract

Tourist sites are seen not merely as stages where tourists perform, but as the physical platforms for collective reflection and articulation of group identities. In the context of a Byzantine exhibition in Thessaloniki, Greece, it is argued that notions of Byzantine heritage for contemporary Greeks are a joint enterprise among multiple constituents. Museum organizers purposefully design heritage exhibitions in order to shape a national character anchored on a `golden' past. Recontextualizing tangible objects of the Byzantine everyday life into cultural artifacts that deserve collective recognition, they participate into a certain kind of memory management shaping modern Greek subjectivity. On their side, tourists actively reflect on the exhibited artifacts, identifying their traces in contemporary life. It is argued that the exhibited objects function as tangible mnemonic devices and emit perceptions of cultural continuity due to their multi-sensory bodily associations and ritualistic performances in the everyday life of the tourists. The institutionalization of these reflective acts (re)produces an ethnic subjectivity when the tourists' situated and embodied interpretation of the artifacts meets the organizers' efforts to establish these objects as significant for the collective identity.