Book: Destination Culture, Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett

Destination Culture, Kirshenblatt-Gimblett. University of California Press, 1998.

This is a book that opened up for me a whole way of looking at culture, tourism and issues of tradition. The book is a series of articles written by the eminent scholar Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett on ways in which the "display" of people and objects in museum or tourism settings is itself imbued with cultural significance and creates new cultural realities. For her "heritage" is born out of display, since no cultural form is inherently heritage, and only becomes heritage once we decide to preserve it by displaying it in a certain way.

If you are reading this and thinking "what?", well, let me just say that it took me a while to get my head around it, but reading the articles made this thesis so clear and so interesting. Her writing is full of humor and the diverse case studies- from World's Fairs to the Ellis Island Museum to the famed Los Angeles Festival of the 1990s- make for captivating reading. I especially recommend the chapters "Objects of Ethnography" and "Exhibiting Jews".

Nico-