Tourism as public culture: Horne's ideological commentary on the legerdemain of tourism

Abstract

In 1992 Donald Horne–respected Australian author of The Lucky Country, The Great Museum… and The Public Culture…–produced an entertaining but enlightening work (The Intelligent Tourist) on the role and function of tourism as the modern form of secular pilgrimage. In this text, Horne perceptively explored tourism as public culture –the fashions by which governments and interested parties capture national capitals, towns, villages, museums, art galleries, ancient temples, monuments, festivals and other interpreted performances in order to project the celebrated narratives and/or the ordinary vistas of a given people, its places, and its pasts. In 1994, King reviewed Horne's examination of the makebelieve of public culture in tourism, but appears to have overlooked much of the subtle insight with which Horne examined the objectifications and inspected the commodifications of contemporary tourism, and the exteriority of various tourism presentations. Horne's powerful scrutiny of intelligence-making in the articulations of tourism warrants fuller critique; this current paper therefore recrystallises Horne's work to highlight not only the skilled legerdemain of tourism practitioners in manufacturing preferred versions of public culture, but also the rich and acerbic insight that Horne himself brings to analyses of the ideological ‘power’ of invented presentation in tourism. Thereby, the paper attempts to distill a number of large issues on evocative material symbolism that Horne insists are central to the normalisations at work today in the projected public culture of post-modern ‘nationalist’ tourism, where that representation of tourism serves as a coding machine in the interests of certain or various priviliged groups.Copyright © 1999 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.