Cultural Tourism and Economic Development

Cultural Tourism in Context

If all communities were created equal, it is safe to say there would be no demand for cultural tourism. It is the differences in our communities that draw people, that pull us toward the experiences we are unable to generate at home. The breadth of these experiences is extreme to say the least. In this section we elaborate some of these experiences to help us approximate the totality of cultural tourism.

Kim, Cheng, and O’Leary (2007) performed cluster analysis of 29 types of cultural tourism attractions. They found four generic types of cultural attractions: Festival and Music Attractions, Commercial Recreation Parks, Local Festivals and Fairs, and Knowledge/Aesthetic Seeking Attractions. Festival and Music Attractions include the wide range of festivals as well as garden attractions, concerts, opera, and dance performances. Theme parks, science and technology parks, and amusement parks all fall within the category Commercial Recreation Parks. Local Festivals and Fairs include farmers’ fairs and markets and local festivals. The fourth category, Knowledge/Aesthetic Seeking Attractions includes theater, historical replicas of cities, historic sites, general history museums, and science and technology museums (Kim, Cheng, and O’Leary, J., 2007).

Cultural tourism encompasses both objects (sites) and experiences. The most obvious object regarding cultural tourism is the built environment, most notably structures and a wide array of museum exhibits. Tourists flock to Bangkok to view the Thai royal palace, an experience quite unlike visiting Versailles or Buckingham Palace. Cathedrals throughout Europe are tourist draws, most notably because of their extreme architecture and historic value. We visit museums to observe artifacts, history, art, and any number of other features of a culture. One might visit a site where a past culture is unusually well preserved, such as the many Maya sites in Central American and Yucatan, Angkor Wat, Pueblos in the Southwest U.S., or the Great Zim in Zimbabwe. Things, objects tend to be easy to classify and are usually more stable than experiences.

Cultural experiences on the other hand are usually more complex. Serena Volo (2009) notes that over decades, “despite considerable research on the topic of ‘tourist experience’, its contribution to tourism theory and its exploitation for the purpose of creating practical benefits for marketing practices remain unclear.” Chhetri, Arrowsmith, and Jackson (2004) conclude that “there is no single theory that defines the meaning and extent of tourist experiences, although a number of authors have made attempts to formulate models. In its broadest sense, one could consider the observation of a structure as an experience in that it generates some sort of feeling, say awe, amazement, or wonder, but by experience we mean something more, especially in terms of context. We share Pine and Gilmore’s (1999) narrower definition, i.e., to engage an individual in a way that creates a memorable event. This latter definition implies interaction between an individual (tourist) and some other actor(s). Of course interactions (experiences) involving two or more actors, say a tourist and a native, are infinitely more complex and thereby more difficult to categorize and measure than interactions with mere things, e.g., buildings. Fortunately for the present effort, we do not need an explicit definition and an ability to measure, simply the ability to observe and broadly categorize the type of interaction, with an object or with a native.