Destination Culture: Tourism, Museums, and Heritage

This book provides an exploration and examination of the historical trends in how culture is framed and exhibited. It is well written, but I'm not sure that it provides anything new to the topic.

The central theme in this book is an extended answer to the big question "What does it mean to show?" It's a very broad topic. But I like the way that Kirshenblatt-Gimblett focuses her discussion by posing engaging rhetorical questions and lucid statements of interesting research topics which provide a solid base for her analysis. The variety of topics is fascinating. It's intriguing to read a single volume that deals with the history of museums in connection to tourism, Jewish self-representation in worlds' fairs, Ellis Island as a tourist site, Plimoth Plantation's living history programs, arts and folklife festivals as forms of avant-garde theater, and scholarly analysis of a catalogue of bad taste. The disparate essays are actually pretty unified as they are arranged thematically to explore how the processes of exhibiting cultural artifacts is embedded in a vast network of academic and cultural institutions, how displaying material culture is related to the construction of heritage, how the tropes and schemes of ethnographic study and display are connected with wider issues in museums and festival presentations, and a concluding chapter that examines the shifting criteria for standards of taste and its inherent relationships to the circulation of value within society. The writing is interesting and often challenging, and it opens numerous questions for further reflection and discussion.

Anwell presented, intelligently written book.