Virtual Viewpoints: Multivocality in the Marketed Past?

Abstract

You don’t have to read Neil Postman’s scathing jeremiad Amusing Ourselves to Death (1986) to know that we live in an age of flashing, shallow, and ideologicallyloaded TV images. As the virtual pieces of a fluid, postmodern mosaic, they embody and articulate a breathless public narrative of change, conquest, and consumption that often controls and reinforces – rather than passively reflects – the shape of contemporary society. And you don’t have to open Dean MacCannell’s The Tourist (1976), or such later studies as those of Kirshenblatt-Gimblett (1998) or Young and Riley (2002), among many other works, to understand that the emotional appeal of theme parks, studio tours, and heritage visits is based on a search by work-weary vacationers for “authentic experience.” What do these elements – the TV image and the virtual heritage experience – have in common? And what is their relevance to a volume on archaeological concepts of multivocality? Put simply, I would like to argue that the use of slickly produced multimedia representations of alternative voices from the past that have become increasingly popular at elaborate heritage site presentations in recent years should not be confused with the concept of multivocality, as it is discussed by other contributors to this volume – and indeed as it is generally understood in the scholarly literature of postmodernism. For I believe that an emerging form – one might even say “genre” – of site presentation now widely adopted in the United States and Europe and at major archaeological and historical sites throughout the Mediterranean effectively utilizes the appearance of many voices and multiple stories, while subtly undermining the presumed power of multivocality to contest dominant narratives. It does this, I would argue, by incorporating a mosaic of conflicting or contrasting voices into a single, embodied experience of “heritage tourism,” whose primary motivation is the marketing of leisure entertainment and the stimulation of subsidiary economic activities such as service employment in hotels and restaurants, and the sale of souvenirs and subsidiary merchandise. From the perspective of Brussels, administrative capital of the European Union – and the site of nearly endless planning meetings, press conferences, and funding announcements by international cultural organizations; national, regional, and municipal governments; the European Commission; UNESCO; and the Council of