Yanwei Han
School of Foreign Languages, Zhejiang Gongshang University
Heritage has now become a major preoccupation of leisure and tourism studies. Heritage interpretation has also been widely employed as a useful instrument by local authorities for city branding and international marketing in the tourism industry. There has been a lack of acknowledgement, however, of the role of tourists and their non-official interpretations in the production, circulation and consumption of heritage places in leisure tourism industry. Both heritage and tourism theories are only beginning to debate issues of multi-vocal narratives of heritage. It is within this context that this study was conducted to explore whether a new understanding of heritage interpretation can be developed. The study is based on the case of Hangzhou, a city with both tangible and intangible cultural heritage resources. In order to brand the city as a destination of leisure tourism in the international market, the local authorities have produced and circulated a number of promotional films with representations of its rich heritage resources. In addition, a large number of travelogues and reviews about city visits have also been created and uploaded by tourists to several tourism sites. Through a comparative analysis of these authorised and unauthorised interpretations of heritage resources, the study examines the complicated relationship between these two kinds of narratives: while the official interpretations attempt to control the communication by offering pre-packaged information to visitors as passive receivers, tourists tend to ‘subvert’ such authoritative accounts with their personalized illustration of heritage experience and act as both creators and consumers in their on-site meaning-making. The study of the role of tourists as co-authors of heritage interpretation and the impact on the physical experience of the heritage sites has thus proposed a complete rethink of the role of heritage interpretation in leisure tourism.
(Presented in the conference : 2017 Chulalongkorn Asian Heritage Forum : Culture of Leisure – Balance of Life, 7-8 August 2017, Mandarin Oriental Hotel, Bangkok, Thailand)