La construcción de las identidades urbanas

An extensive Western literature has been critical of mass tourism, believing the meaning of heritage has been eroded by commodification, as well as the sanitisation of history and

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culture to amuse 'inauthentic' tourists for tourism income (McCrone et al. 1995; Schouten 1995; Brett 1996; Lowenthal 1998; Choay 2001; Gable and Handler 2003). Ashworth (2009), Hall (2009), Smith (2006, 2012) point out that the mainstream tourism literature has simplified tourism activity, focussing on marketing and consumption. As Smith (2006:44) has indicated these criticisms of commodification and uncultured tourists from the international literature 'share too much space with the authorised discourse', and to some extent facilitate the AHD (see also Harvey 2001). Consequently, it is necessary to discuss the alternative discourses and understandings of heritage beyond the AHD.

Harvey (2001:327) argues that heritage does not only speak to the past, but is a contemporary phenomenon that relates to human action, experience and agency. These phenomena are not only embodied in economic practices, but are rather a wider complex process with national and other cultural identities. Scholars such as Harvey (2001) and Dicks (2000) have identified that heritage consists of social and cultural experiences and practices. However, they failed to identify what social and cultural work people 'do' or how people 'act' at heritage sites. Therefore, Bagnall (2003), Poria et al. (2003), Selby (2004), Palmer (2005), Smith (2006, 2012, 2015), Byrne (2009), Cameron and Gatewood (2012) and Waterton and Watson (2012) have started to fill this blank in the Western context, and argue against the traditional heritage tourism literature, which obscures the legitimacy of tourists’ activities in heritage sites. They argue people have agency, and heritage visiting is an embodied experience replete with emotional experiences. For instance, Poria et al. (2003) identified that visitors' sense of places links to their personal feelings, and further influences their behaviours at heritage sites. His research, based on interviews with people visiting heritage sites at The Wailing Wall, Jerusalem, argues that when tourists feel that the site is tied to their family or ethnic connections, a strong sense of feeling emerged. Smith (2006, 2012) observed that visitors often experienced strong emotional engagements, based on her research within Australia, England and the US. She argued that each visitation constructs heritage meaning:

Heritage sites are not simply 'found', nor do they simply 'exist', but rather they are constituted at one level by the management and conservation processes that occur at and around them and, at another level, by the acts of visiting and engagement that people perform at them. (Smith 2012:213)

Crouch (2010), Smith (2012) and Waterton and Watson (2012) have identified the linkage between heritage and tourism that they labelled 'cultural moments', during which the

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performances and actions of tourists ultimately give an active sense of meaning to heritage sites in the contemporary world. They criticised the traditional ethic that considered heritage as being frozen in time and space, displayed behind glass, to be gazed upon, but not to be engaged with. They argue that heritage is a verb, that it is about an active sense that people are 'doing', performance and experiencing an encounter with heritage sites.

The idea of the tourist gaze put forward by John Urry (1990) criticises the tendency of heritage authorities to normalise touristic activities and experiences. Crouch (2010, 2012) developed Urry's arguments, and indicates that the tourist gaze is not only about consuming and doing visual and detached activity, rather they are doing cultural work embodied with the engagement of remembering, commemorating, emotional affecting and making sense of their identity. These individual processes of performance construct and reconstruct their sense of identity, place, nostalgia and belonging, which creates a series of 'cultural moments'. In these cultural moments, people remember, forget, reminisce, and make sense of place and their identity in the present. Therefore, tourists and the act of heritage visiting create the contemporary meaning of heritage.

Scholars such as Urry (1996), Misztal (2003) and Smith (2006, 2012) have identified that the association between heritage sites and the engagement of remembering and reminiscing is significant for the study of heritage. Although traditional heritage literature has acknowledged that memory is linked to identity, it has seen memory as a subaltern and insignificant nationalising discourse (Hall 2001). Within the context of the AHD, experts and heritage authorities use their perspective to construct memories, which inevitably link to a sense of nationalism or cultural pride in identity. However, memory is often subjective, and it is not the same as the AHD, and can even be oppositional. As Smith (2006:58) argues:

'Thus, while heritage sites may help societies to remember, it is the legitimacy or facts of that remembrance or commemoration that is privileged and given critical attention, and not the emotional or subjective activity itself that is acknowledged, nor the possibility of meanings that this activity may have outside of the AHD.'

Memory is not an object but rather a process, as Crouch and Parker (2003: 396) argue memory is recalled by a process of 'doing'. Misztal (2003) defines memory is our ability to conceive and understand the world, and it is an active process of remembering and forgetting. Wertsch (2002) argues that remembering is an active process in which links to contemporary requirements of collective or individual memory from the past are involved in the

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construction of new subjective meanings. When tourists visit a heritage site, physically being at the site helps them to elicit memories. Those memories further reflect tourists' sense of place, belonging and identity. In this sense, heritage becomes a cultural tool that facilitates tourists' remembering (Wertsch and Billingsley 2011). Therefore, as Smith (2012:214) argues, the 'cultural moment' builds a linkage between tourism and heritage, therefore:

heritage, tourism and remembering interplay with each other to create meanings and understandings of the past that speak to and help people make sense of their sense of place, their own 'identity' or that of those 'others' being visited and explored.

The concept of authenticity is essential to understand the interrelation between heritage and tourism. Authenticity here neither refers to inherent material qualities within the heritage authorised management ethic, nor the traditional idea of the commodification of touristic experience. It is about emotional authenticity and the idea that how people feel, and the intensity of that feeling, helps people to remember and underpins that remembering with a sense of legitimacy and accuracy (Prentice 1998, 2001: Bagnall 2003: Smith 2006, 2012; Zhu 2012; Smith and Campbell 2015). The characteristic of emotional authenticity challenges the traditional understanding of authenticity, which assumes that heritage tourists are inherently passive, rather than acknowledge that authenticity is about an in-depth emotional engagement with experiences (Bagnall 2003; Belhassen et al. 2008). These arguments are based on acknowledging tourists have agency, and engage in various activities activity rather than passively receive authorised messages (Bagnall 2003). As Zhu argues (2012:1150), based on his work in Lijiang in China, authenticity is performative, and is 'embodied in the dialogue between practice and individual engagement and understanding'. Therefore, heritage visiting is not only physical experiences, but also provides tourists with a sense that 'measure the legitimacy of their own social and cultural experiences outside of the heritage sites' (Smith 2006:71).

In this thesis, my analysis will develop critiques base on the meaning of heritage put forward by Laurajane Smith (2006:44). She considers heritage is not reducible to sites, places, buildings or the other material objects, nor can it be simply be viewed as an educational resource; rather it is a 'cultural process engaged with acts of remembering that work to create ways to understand and engage with the present, and the sites themselves are cultural tools that can facilitate, but are not necessarily vital for, this process'. This idea builds on the idea of heritage developed by Kirshenblatt-Gimblet (1998), who argues that heritage is part of an

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ongoing process of cultural production, Dicks’ (2000) idea of heritage as a communicative act, and Harvey’s (2001) argument that heritage is a ‘verb’. For Smith (2006), heritage is an affective embodied practice of meaning-making in which cultural values and the historical narratives and meanings they underpin are continually made and remade through the interaction with not only things and places labelled heritage, but also intangible qualities. Those things and events, often defined as ‘heritage’, are the cultural tools individuals, governments, communities and international agencies like UNESCO use to help them define and legitimize individual and collective remembering and the meanings that this makes (Smith 2006: 65; see also 2012, 2016). This idea as heritage as a cultural process of meaning making is adopted in this thesis.