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Destination Culture: Tourism, Museums, and Heritage. By Barbara KirshenblattGimblett. Berkeley University of California Press, 1998. Pp. xvii + 327. 100 black and white illustrations. $50.00 cloth, $18.95 paper.
For students of expressive culture who have participated in the critical examination of the histories of cultural disciplines and who have been concerned with die shift of what we study, Destination Culture is first and foremost one possible and exhilarating point of departure. Disciplinary historiographies have shown us how our scholarly interests have reified "culture" and its constituent parts; postcolonial theory has made us aware of the injustices that built on applied culture theories. This collection of essays cuts through die grief or uncertainty entailed in such introspection and turns to study how culture turned artifact figures within and between life worlds. Reified and segmented culture itself becomes part of new cultural practices, and Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett examines them with the analytic tools of ethnography and textual interpretation which remain viable and forceful even as the location of our field shifts.
Her goal is to work toward a political economy of showing: what does it mean to show (and view), what agency resides within display, what does exhibition emanate from and what does it eventuate? Collections, museums, world's fairs, exhibitions, and, interwoven with them, tourism: these are die sites and sights Kirshenblatt-Gimblett examines, informed by the assertions that "detachment is more than a necessary evil" and that the fragmentation entailed in practices of showing "do for the life world what the life world cannot do for itself (p. 3) . Gathered together are eight essays that some readers will recognize from earlier contexts of presentation or publication. A lucid introduction lays out the four sections into which they have been grouped: The Agency of Display, A Second Life as Heritage, Undoing the Ethnographic, and Circulating Value. What runs as an undercurrent through all these essays are the questions regarding what display seeks to achieve; how the agency inherent in showing classifies and separates not only that which is displayed but also those viewing (or not viewing) it; and, perhaps most crucially, how past, present, and future social relationships are refigured through the prism of display. "Culture" is an increasingly problematic concept for explaining difference, but studied in its...