A151 - Revision

• Authenticity
• Commodification
• Touristification
• Regime of Value

• Transforms objects into spectacles
• Removes original authentic meaning
• Assigns objects new meanings
• Sacrality replaced by value as commodity
• Manufactured experiences
• It's symptomatic of modern secular society
• Tourism has turned culture into a commodity

• It doesn't de-value sacrality, it gives a new regime of value as parallel biographies are created
• Tourism resurrects religious objects
• Objects become symbols of revitalisation and renewal of religious traditions

• 1a) A kind of religion for modern secular societies
• 1b) Tourist sites are 'shrines' of the contemporary world

2)  Tourism looks at objects with an object driven and symbolic approach

• At end of 17c
• Circuit of European Travel by British aristocracy
• In the early 19c, middle classes went too

• Reasons:
• Personal
• Intellectual
• Health
• Emotional cultivation
• Scientists collecting

Tourism was shaped by changes in the modern world from mid 19c onwards (political, economic, tech, nationalism)

Different types of tourism and gaze - Collective gaze, Romantic gaze

Places and objects are changed to make them more attractive to the tourist gaze

• 1841 First package tour
• Motivated by religious convictions
• Tours were for moral benefit

• Late 19c
• Founder of modern sociology
• Pioneer of sociological study of religion
• He defined religious objects

• Religion invests objects with special meanings and significances
• Sacred quality is of social and cultural construction
• Sacrality is determined by an arbitrary system of rules surrounding the object - not the object itself

• Religious objects = sacred things, set apart

• Annually in May, 1000's of Romani gather for the festival of their patron saint
• Icon carried from the Church to the sea for a symbolic cleansing
• Intertwined with music, historical, and cultural elements

• Although it has vital religious elements, it has evolved into a cultural spectacle
• Journalists and tourists swarm to the village in southern France to watch
• Local tourism office promotes it as a cultural spectacle (touristification from within)

• Tourism has re-contextualised the festival into a new regime of value
• The festival has 2 regimes of value - history & culture
• Dan Brown has given a further level, with his suggestion that St Sara was the daughter of Christ and Mary Magdeline
• This new value is a feminist perspective on Christian theology

• In Indonesia
• Markers of an ancient past
• Symbols of relationship between the living and the dead

• Tourist board driven
• To stimulate local economy
• Promote nationalism
• Integrate cultural minorities into the state
• The tourist board encourages tourists to visit local villages to see how they interact with the stones

Our interpretations of the objects are 'mediated' by collections of images and ideas

We have cultural confusion as the Indonesians are now Catholic so they stone are not as culturally significant to them.