Cultural Forms 1

Emic and Etic Cultural Forms and their Commoditization:

Comparing the Roles of Festivals and Culture Parks in Jeju and Taiwan

主體和旁觀的文化形式與兩者的商品消費化現象:

濟州和台灣的節慶活動與文化園區之間的角色比較

Cultural Image and Representations in Tourism

觀光學門研究中的文化形象與表徵

In tourism studies, and parent disciplines of sociology and anthropology, the notion of culture has always been problematic. As Clifford Geertz famously wrote, it is highly unlikely that anyone can grasp “so vast a thing as an entire way of life and (find) the words to describe it” (Geertz 1995, p. 43). So a wide array of definitions exists in theory, each with their own set of problems, most of which are related to the functional problems of tourism/leisure promotion and commoditization. There is much less interest in the fundamental reality, or condition or health of local culture until it ceases to be attractive to tourists – and it is then and only then that the problems of ‘sustainability’ or ‘development’ arise.

In tourism and to a lesser degree in leisure studies, operators, managers and policy makers – all the players on the development side are concerned about attractiveness. It is the overwhelming urge to enhance the cultural event, or product, to ensure it conforms to the tastes and interest of the tourist or participant. The tourist gazes on landscapes, townscapes, ethnic groups, lifestyles, historical artifacts, bases of recreation and ‘sand, sun and sea’ (Urry 1990, p. 57), and this ‘tourist gaze’ is structured around “culturally specific notions of what is extraordinary and therefore worth viewing” (p. 66). It is in this sense that stakeholders will invariably favor image over content, and the tastes of the visitor, no matter the effects (immediate or long-term) on those whose culture is being commoditized.

The problem is, however, that an ideal or sustainable means of tourism promotion or commoditization has not yet emerged in spite of 30 years of research and experimentation (MacKay & Fesenmaier, 1997; Gallarza & Saura, 2002). Tourism development remains haphazard, scavenging for the most visual representations of culture that will appeal to the market and totally exploiting them. Representations are the stuff of tourism. They succeed in “presenting the world in a new experience” (Dewey 1989, p. 89), reinforcing a symbolic system already in place within the social cosmology of the viewer. Better yet, representations are already commodities (Laxon 1991, p. 380). They offer an immediacy that motivates visitors to realize carefully contrived events at certain attractions as irrefutably real. The cautious, however, realize as Kenneth Burke did, that “a way of seeing is always a way of not seeing” (Burke 1935, p. 70).

Too often best efforts at promoting a destination come across as contrived. Experience is reduced to image, where “every photographed object is merely the trace left by the disappearance of everything else” (Baudrillard 1996, p. 85). A simulated experience replaces the ‘real’. For tourism there is a real without origin or reality, a hyperreal where image replaces meaning.