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In 2014, when Islamic State (ISIS) forces were still in power in some regions of Iraq, almost two million Iranian pilgrims headed into Iraq and joined Arbaeen religious procession which is one of t...

The logic that a site of universalized value leads to a universalized sense of stewardship that transcends national interest adheres to the Convention text, in which “the States Parties to this Convention recognize that such heritage constitutes a world heritage for whose protection it is the duty of the international community as a whole to co-operate”. The development and publication of the World Heritage List and the World Heritage in Danger List are “fundamentally acts of knowledge creation and dissemination”— short-term “awareness-raising campaigns [that] will inspire international conservation and tourism efforts in the medium-term”. A place of local interest is converted into a site of “universal value” through a complex, political, and bureaucratic process that involves national and supra-national entities. The Nomination File also includes the technical and managerial aspects of the property. A property’s understood sacred nature and religious affiliation may also change over time and is often subject to political control.

The papers in this special issue, Geographies of Religion and Spirituality: Pilgrimage beyond the ‘Officially Sacred,’ are placed in the context of a comprehensive theoretical overview of the role ...

This work is a book review considering the title Heritage Keywords: Rhetoric and Redescription in Cultural Heritage edited by Kathryn Lafrenz Samuels and Trinidad Rico.

While dominant discourses, media representations and corporate entities in China downplay the presence of Chinese mainland gambling in Macau, Beijing sanctions millions of its citizens to make the journey to Macau to gamble each year. While Macau’s success is often put down to the extent to which visitors are drawn to a secular destination with integrated resorts to engage in individualistic activities, our approach explores Chinese gambling tourists’ movements, rituals and behaviours along post-structuralist lines, so as to generate new insights. The analysis shows how the metaphor of pilgrimage is an important lens to address individual and communal practices amongst outbound Chinese gambling tourists and brings to light the hyper-meaningfulness, shared values, ritualization, play, risk, and liminal conditions that characterise the processes of their entanglements and the centrality of commercial and political interests. In particular, the analysis indicates the need to explore the significance of cultural, spiritual, economic and social dimensions of Chinese outbound tourism, as well as the unique discourses of power and control affecting their movement and practices. By reframing and reconceptualising gambling tourists as a Chinese pilgrimage, we account for manifestations of culture, governmentality and intentional ritualization as well as contribute an alternative construction of pilgrimage beyond euro-centric accounts, which in turn, will stimulate discussion on geographies of pilgrimage.

Escrito pelo autor de O Patrimonio - Paisagem: UNESCO, Patrimonio Mundial e Turismo (Lexington 2009), este artigo e uma reflexao critica do conceito de patrimonio historico cerca deuma decada da sua introducao na literatura. Incluindo historias pessoais que apresentam um panorama das origens intelectuais e inspiracoes para o termo, o artigo discute a teoria que sustenta o Patrimonio - Paisagem, a contribuicao do conceito para a literatura e sua recepcao por teoricos do turismo e patrimonio. Como um conceito teorico idiossincratico destinado a descrever um modelo particular e utopico da ordem geopolitica, ele ainda assumiu vida propria, e o artigo aborda alguns desses equivocos, bem como os esclarecimentos feitos pelo autor, ao longo da ultima decada. Articulando um modelo mais holistico do Programa do Patrimonio Mundial, o autor tambem apresenta futuras areas de pesquisa – mais estudos sobre a inter-relacao entre turismo e patrimonio e uma melhor integracao com a sustentabilidade e a etica. O artigo conclui com uma nota de encorajamento aos jovens pesquisadores, que se identificam com as contribuicoes do autor, que sentiram que havia algo instigante a ser debatido no mundo academico.

Written by the author of The Heritage-scape: UNESCO, World Heritage and Tourism (Lexington 2009), this article is a critical reflection of the heritage-scape concept nearly a decade after it was introduced in the literature. Including personal background stories that paint a picture of the intellectual origins and inspirations for the term, the article discusses the theory behind the heritage-scape, the concept’s contribution to the literature, and its reception by tourism and heritage theorists. As a theoretical buzzword meant to describe a particular, utopian model of the geopolitical order, it has nevertheless taken on a life of its own, and the article addresses some of the misconceptions, as well as clarifications made by the author, during the course of the last decade. Articulating a more holistic model of a World Heritage Program, the author also presents future areas of research — including more scholarship on the interrelatedness of tourism and heritage, and better integration of sustainability and ethics. The article concludes with a note of encouragement for junior scholars, who like the author a decade ago, felt they have something notable to communicate to the academic world.

L’auteur de The Heritage-scape : UNESCO, World Heritage and Tourism (Lexington 2009), développe dans cet article une réflexion critique sur le concept de heritage-scape, introduit dans la littérature il y a presque dix ans. Evoquant une série de récits autobiographiques qui campent les origines intellectuelles du terme, l’article met en discussion la théorie qui sous-tend le concept de heritage-scape, sa contribution à la littérature et la manière dont les théoriciens du tourisme et du patrimoine y ont réagi. Terme à la mode pour décrire un modèle particulier et utopique de l’ordre géopolitique, il a acquis une vie propre ; l’article s’intéresse à certains malentendus dont il a fait l’objet et revient sur certaines clarifications faites par l’auteur au cours de ces années. Tout en proposant un modèle plus global pour l’analyse du Programme du patrimoine mondial, l’auteur identifie des domaines de recherche pour l’avenir, appelant notamment à plus de recherche sur les interrelations entre tourisme et patrimoine, ainsi qu’à une meilleure intégration de la durabilité et de l’éthique. L’article se conclut sur un encouragement à l’attention des jeunes chercheurs qui, comme l’auteur autrefois, ont le sentiment d’avoir quelque chose d’important à communiquer au monde académique.

Michael A. Di Giovine s’adressant a des pelerins au sanctuaire de Saint Pie de Pietrelcina a San Giovanni Rotondo (Italie) Au cours de la derniere decennie, j’ai mene d’intensives recherches ethnographiques sur le pelerinage, le patrimoine et le renouveau du culte de Padre Pio (1887-1968), qui recut les stigmates et est connu comme le saint le plus populaire du Catholicisme. J’ai defendu ailleurs (2011) l’idee que la recherche en tourisme peut etre menee comme une “ ethnographie globale » qu...

Michael A. Di Giovine lecturing to pilgrims at the shrine of St. Padre Pio of Pietrelcina in San Giovanni Rotondo For the past decade, I have been conducting intensive ethnographic research on pilgrimage, heritage, and revitalization in the cult of Catholic stigmatic Padre Pio (1887-1968), known as Catholicism’s "most popular saint." Elsewhere I’ve argued (2011) that tourism research can be undertaken as a “global ethnography” that moves between scales, temporalities and networks. As I do wh...

Food has long been considered a primary marker of cultural heritage, and in many places around the world it helps foster cultural revitalization movements—bottom-up, community-based undertakings that stand in stark contrast to traditional economic development paradigms. A revitalization movement is a deliberate, organized, conscious effort by members of a society to construct a more satisfying culture that draws upon selective understandings of the past to posit a way forward for the future. In this chapter, the authors find remarkable comparisons between Vietnam (Hội An), Italy (Pietrelcina), and the USA (Tucson, Arizona) in which food and food-based festivals are deployed within broader preservation initiatives to emotionally, socially, and even physically move diverse groups of stakeholders within societies suffering from socioeconomic stresses into favorable and productive engagements with each other. The authors argue that food represents heritage in action in three ways: First, as an element of heritage, food moves through time as it is reinvented, reconceptualized, and, in certain places like Pietrelcina and Tucson, recultivated after years of falling out of favor. Second, food moves locals emotionally, tugging at their memories, conveying value-based moral claims concerning their society, and bringing them together in festivals, pilgrimages, and community gardening projects. Finally, the same foodstuffs move through space in their communities of origin and circulate abroad, creating equally moving tourist imaginaries and associations that serve to put these places on the map. All of these movements help to foster more sustainable and engaged revitalization programs. Grounded in anthropological theory and long-term engagement in heritage conservation initiatives, the authors present a model of how heritage (and its associated heritage tourism) can positively impact local communities in intangible ways that go beyond mere economic benefits to sustainably reorient and re-center the identity and values of communities struggling with ways to remain relevant and viable amid the upheavals of globalization and modernization.

Contents: Introduction: food and foodways as cultural heritage, Michael A. Di Giovine and Ronda L. Brulotte Re-inventing a tradition of invention: entrepreneurialism as heritage in American artisan cheesemaking, Heather Paxson Terroir in D.C.? Inventing food traditions for the nation's capital, Warren Belasco Of cheese and ecomuseums: food as cultural heritage in the northern Italian Alps, Cristina Grasseni Edible authenticities: heirloom vegetables and culinary heritage in Kyoto, Japan, Greg de St. Maurice The everyday as extraordinary: revitalization, religion, and the elevation of cucina casareccia to heritage cuisine in Pietrelcina, Italy, Michael A. Di Giovine Take the chicken out of the box: demystifying the sameness of African American culinary heritage in the U.S., Psyche Williams-Forson Caldo De Piedra and claiming pre-Hispanic cuisine as cultural heritage, Ronda L. Brulotte and Alvin Starkman Hallucinating the Slovenian way: the myth of Salamander Brandy, an indigenous Slovenian psychedelic drug, Miha Kozorog Haute traditional cuisines: how UNESCO's List of Intangible Heritage links the cosmopolitan to the local, Clare A. Sammells Reinventing edible identities: Catalan cuisine and Barcelona's market halls, Josep-Maria Garcia-Fuentes, Manel GuA rdia Bassols and Jose Luis OyA(3)n BaA+/-ales French chocolate as intangible cultural heritage, Susan Terrio Daily bread, global distinction? The German bakers' craft and cultural value-enhancement regimes, Regina F. Bendix The Mexican and transnational lives of corn: technological, political, edible object, Erick Castellanos and Sarah Bergstresser Cultural heritage in food activism: local and global tensions, Carole Counihan Index.

There is something beguiling, something seductive, about these words of passion written by thirteenth-century Mechthild of Magdeburg (c. 1260-1294). These are not necessarily, or not only, words of love, but a testament to a series of mystical experiences in which the speaker is captivated, swept off her feet. Mechthild is not simply attracted to her lover; she is drawn to him in such an all-encompassing, insatiable way that her thoughts and actions are entirely consumed with the object of her passion, leaving her memories and attachments to everything else to fall away. This, she tells us in a later stanza, is incredibly painful: “I am wounded to death by your fiery love … and my senses ask me again and again/what is wrong with me” (1998: 94). Her body is powerless to stop her urges, and her lover, for his part, seems to relish in the chase. Stanzas alternate between her voice and his; he switches between affirming their attachment to one another, pledging love and protection, and withdrawing from her for her own good. His actions are strategic, designed to prolong-and indeed to grow-her obsession to the fullest. He holds the power; she almost seems powerless. This is no ordinary lover; he is a seducer.

This article ethnographically examines the symbolic importance of seafood and its ritualized consumption in demarcating ideals of “authenticity” and “intangible heritage” in the famed Italian-American Christmas Eve feast, La Vigilia. The Vigilia is a rite of intensification intended to revitalize a community in a climate of schism and “acculturation,” and a rite of incorporation for integrating American spouses into the family's heritage. While continually transforming as participants entertain new culinary understandings, cultivate “Americanized” tastes, and integrate spouses into the ritual, the practices of selecting, preparing, and ritually consuming the Vigilia's food serve to maintain traditional gender roles, reinforce ethnic bonds through commensality, and denote “authenticity” through taste preferences. Suggesting that authenticity is conveyed not through a particular object or its taste, but rather through intangible processes, the author argues that the Vigilia feast becomes a central means of ...

When employed for development purposes, tourism often elicits a fundamental tension between locals’ desire (and need) to both change and to stay the same. Like other development projects, it is often paradoxically conceived as a means of empowering and ‘bettering’ hosts that necessarily rests in the hands of the guests. After briefly tracing the historical conjunctures between development discourses and tourism, the author argues for the adoption of an alternative theory, one that eschews development’s tautologies and evolutionary notions: Anthony Wallace’s classic revitalization theory, a ‘deliberate, organized, conscious effort by members of a society to construct a more satisfying culture’. He contends that this paradigm is a more totalizing set of processes, since it accounts for environmental, religious, psychological, and biological pressures stemming from extra‐cultural challenges. Using ethnographic fieldwork to explore the emergence of Hội An from a sleepy Vietnamese town into the country’s most ...

Religious sites seem to have always been viewed as profitable and popular loci for heritage and heritage tourism as they are highly affective mediators (between people, places, and the divine) deeply implicated in a society’s cosmology and values, and often attest to important syncretisms and networks of socio-cultural exchange. However, this chapter argues that extreme tensions may arise at the popular level when heritage practitioners attempt to transition a site from a locus of popular religion—with its own specific style of embodied devotion practices—to one of modern heritage and tourism. Tracing the theological and philosophical turns of thought underlying both (pre-Tridentine) popular devotion and (post-Enlightenment) heritage tourism, and based on long-term ethnographic research in Italy, this chapter examines the contemporary difficulties religious site managers in the Italian pilgrimage town of San Giovanni Rotondo have encountered in turning their shrine to twentieth century stigmatic and saint Padre Pio of Pietrelcina into a modern cultural heritage site akin to Assisi, which, in the popular imaginary, is more famous for its UNESCO-designated art and architecture than it is of its extremely influential saint, Francis of Assisi. The author argues that, to mitigate such tensions, more ethnographic attention should be paid to the divergent goals and values of popular religion and popular heritage, and to the oft-conflicting ways in which pilgrims and heritage tourists and practitioners discipline their bodies and senses to achieve these objectives.

This chapter explores different historically and culturally contingent ethical models that inform archaeologists’ and anthropologists’ practices concerning heritage sites and their preservation. Rather than seeing the meanings of heritage sites as produced primarily through an authorized, hegemonic discourse, the author argues that such significances—and the concomitant notions of ethical (“right, fair, just or good”) actions towards such sites and the social worlds they occupy—are continually shaped through the positioning and position-taking of many diverse epistemic groups who stake claims to the site within a “field of heritage production.” Two distinctive ethical paradigms appear to be most prominent among archaeologists and anthropologists. The first is what the author terms “paternalistic ethics,” which is manifested when these groups assume an explicitly dominant position as both “experts” and self-defined stewards of cultural property over other epistemic groups that may lay claim to it. The second is termed “multicultural ethics,” which posits a distinctively explicit openness (if only superficially) to incorporating alternative or “minority” voices in acts of designating and preserving objects of cultural heritage—voices that specifically come from equally alternative epistemic “cultures.” Yet building on critiques of multiculturalism from Asad and Gnecco, among others, the author argues that even this paradigm does not adequately take into consideration the fact that a heritage site exists on many different and oft-conflicting planes and scales (local, regional, national, transnational), is valued by different groups for different reasons, and is strategically deployed for different ideological reasons. The author suggests that a new ethical paradigm should be adopted, which he calls “patrimonial ethics.” This model focuses both on the multi-vocality of all stakeholders (including “indigenous” and “Westerners,” or “insiders” and “outsiders”) as well as on the heritage object itself, pregnant as it is with myriad meanings.

The academic study of tourism has long suffered from deep inter and intra-disciplinary divides, which has often impeded its development, despite certain efforts by a few interdisciplinary publications to bridge these boundaries and constraints. The publication of the sweeping new Sage Handbook of Tourism Studies (2009), edited by Tazim Jamal and Mike Robinson, represents a step closer to the construction of a more unified, interdisciplinary genre of "tourism studies". In addition to serving as a reference text for tourism researchers of many disciplines, the reviewer argues that it explicitly helps establish a new field of research that transcends disciplinary boundaries in a way may be more effective than in the past. It does this first by thoroughly presenting the current state of tourism research from both the perspective of various disciplines (i.e., "the anthropology of tourism," "development studies and tourism") as well as through thematic, interdisciplinary perspectives. Second, more importantly than simply indexing the current state of affairs, the reviewer argues, it actually constructs this new "discipline" or field by bringing top and emerging scholars engaged in tourism research into meaningful engagement with each other under the marked title of "tourism studies" ‒ a conscious effort, it seems, to processually create a more cohesive, interactive community of tourism scholars who may build on the contributions of their colleagues from across disciplinary divides.

In this introduction to Tourism's special issue, 'Pilgrimage: Communitas and Contestation, Unity and Difference,' guest editor Michael A. Di Giovine explores the intellectual history of the anthropological theory of communitas — which Victor Turner has argued is a foundational element of pilgrimage — and its broader application to tourism research. Communitas denotes a spontaneous sensation of mutual communication and unity that arises among pilgrims, which transcends the quotidian markers of social structure, such as class, status, education, employment, or political affiliations. While the theory has proven to be foundational in the social scientific study of pilgrimage and, later, (secular) tourism, it was also met with criticism, particularly in John Eade and Michael Sallnow's volume, Contesting the Sacred. Arguing that the analytical discrepancy between those who find communitas in pilgrimage and those who find contestation is predominantly based on one's view of the social structure of pilgrimage/tourism itself, the author posits an alternative model, the field of touristic production. In addition to referencing this issue's interdisciplinary papers, the author illustrates his model of pilgrimage through recourse to his ethnographic fieldwork at the Italian shrine of contemporary Catholic saint and stigmatic, Padre Pio of Pietrelcina.

This article re-conceptualizes processes whereby religious tourism is adopted to generate socio-cultural “betterment” in small-scale societies by presenting an in-depth case study of the Southern Italian village of Pietrelcina, the birthplace of recently canonized St. Padre Pio of Pietrelcina. “Tourism development” has long been considered central for economic development, employment, and poverty alleviation; it has also been criticized as fostering neocolonialism, inauthenticity and museumification. Arguing that the pervasive “development paradigm” creates a tautology whereby outside forces create and attempt to alleviate local tensions between maintaining tradition and transformation, the paper argues that such initiatives be organic and focused on tourism’s potentialities and intangible effects; an adaptation of Anthony Wallace’s classic anthropological model of revitalization movements is then proposed. In contrast to the “development paradigm’s” linear, top-down, and anti-organic approach, a revitalization movement posits society as a life-cycle, wherein members organically look to past practices to resolve present problems. Drawing on data collected over more than two years of fieldwork, the paper presents an ethnographic analysis of the variety of responses by Pietrelcina’s locals and site managers to tourism’s revitalizing potential, ultimately urging practitioners and researchers alike to consider revitalization theory as a model for sustainable tourism development.