مقاله انگلیسی رایگان در مورد گردشگری فرهنگی – الزویر 2018

This review article traces the development of cultural tourism as a field of research over the past decade, identifying major trends and research areas. Cultural tourism has recently been re-affirmed by the UNWTO as a major element of international tourism consumption, accounting for over 39% of tourism arrivals. Cultural tourism research has also grown rapidly, particularly in fields such as cultural consumption, cultural motivations, heritage conservation, cultural tourism economics, anthropology and the relationship with the creative economy. Major research trends include the shift from tangible to intangible heritage, more attention for indigenous and other minority groups and a geographical expansion in the coverage of cultural tourism research. The field also reflects a number of ‘turns’ in social science, including the mobilities turn, the performance turn and the creative turn. The paper concludes with a number of suggestions for future research directions, such as the development of trans-modern cultures and the impacts of new technologies. © 2018 The Authors.

Introduction

Culture and tourism have always been inextricably linked. Cultural sights, attractions and events provide an important motivation for travel, and travel in itself generates culture. But it is only in recent decades that the link between culture and tourism has been more explicitly identified as a specific form of consumption: cultural tourism. The emergence of cultural tourism as a social phenomenon and as an object of academic study can be traced back to the surge in post-World War 2 leisure travel. In Europe, travel helped to increase cultural understanding as well as rebuild shattered economies. As incomes and consumption continued to rise in the 1960s and 1970s, so did international travel, and the consumption of culture. By the 1980s the flow of international tourists to major sites and attractions began to attract enough attention for the label ‘cultural tourism’ to be attached to an emerging niche market. Early academic studies of cultural tourism also surfaced at this time, and the World Tourism Organisation (WTO, as it was then) produced its first definition of the phenomenon. In the early 1990s the first estimate of the size of this ‘new’ market also emerged (at 37% of all international tourism) and were attributed to the WTO, even though Bywater (1993) comments that it was not clear how this estimate was derived. Interest in cultural tourism continued to grow throughout the 1980s and 1990s, driven by the ‘heritage boom’ (Hewison, 1987), the growth of international and domestic travel and the identification of cultural tourism as a ‘good’ form of tourism that would stimulate the economy and help conserve culture (Richards, 2001). The beginning of the 1990s indicates a period of transformation of cultural tourism which, unlike the original orientation towards elite clientele, found a new opportunity for development in the orientation towards the mass market. Cultural tourism became a wellestablished phenomenon in many tourism destinations, and was increasingly the target of academic research. The first textbooks on cultural tourism began to emerge (Ivanovic, 2008; Smith, 2003) and a growing range of research papers appeared, linked to many different theoretical and methodological approaches (Richards & Munsters, 2010, Smith & Richards, 2013). Growth in cultural tourism was also marked by fragmentation into a number of emerging niches, such as heritage tourism, arts tourism, gastronomic tourism, film tourism and creative tourism. Just as an expanding notion of culture had helped to stimulate the growth of cultural tourism in the 1990s, so the fragmentation of the cultural tourism concept itself helped to produce a surge in the proportion of publications dedicated to the field. Growth also brought its own challenges, and by 2013 Boniface was already signalling problems with the overcrowding of World Heritage Sites, a phenomenon that is now being linked with the idea of ‘overtourism’.