‘Presence’ and ‘absence’ in themed heritage

Christina Goulding, Michael Saren and Andrew Pressey

Annals of Tourism Research, 2018, vol. 71, issue C, 25-38

Abstract: We take the case of an industrial museum portraying the Victorian period and investigate the commercial staging of history. We argue that this re-enchants the past through the culmination of a series of factors, including: ‘the spatial and temporal organization of material history’; ‘the material ‘re’-production of history’ and; the ‘politics of absence’. We posit that absence is not simply a case of what is not there. Rather, absence can be experienced, it can be felt and it can be evoked through the medium of heritage. Absence also has agency and can be political in that it can conceal or render invisible, alternative, subaltern or excluded narratives to those of the master discourse. This in turn has consequences for how the past is experienced and understood.

Keywords: Absence; Presence; Themed heritage; Material history; Participatory observation; Industrial museum (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2018
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0160738318300434
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:anture:v:71:y:2018:i:c:p:25-38

DOI: 10.1016/j.annals.2018.05.001

Access Statistics for this article

Annals of Tourism Research is currently edited by John Tribe

More articles in Annals of Tourism Research from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().