Yorke Rowan & Uzi Baram (ed.). Marketing Heritage: Archaeology and the Consumption of the Past.

Smith, Laurajane

YORKE ROWAN & UZI BARAM (ed.). Marketing heritage: archaeology and the consumption of the past. x+315 pages, 20 illustrations, tables. 2004. Walnut Creek (CA): AltaMira; 0-7591-0342-9 paperback $29.95 & 22.95 [pounds sterling]; 0-7591-0341-0 hardback $75.

The commercial use of heritage places for domestic or international tourists has always been seen as a complex and thorny issue within traditional academic disciplines. Historians, for instance in the United Kingdom during the 1980s, when confronted by the phenomenon of heritage tourism, reacted with deep concern about the mass marketing of 'the past'. Within what became known as the 'heritage industry' critique, 'heritage' became a problematic word--identified with the corruption of an objective past previously authenticated solely by historians and other experts. How the labelling of material elements of the past as heritage, or as a touristic resource, must result in reactionary nostalgia and sanitation has never been adequately addressed. While the heritage critique, as expressed both in the UK and in the North American history literature, has offered useful, if distressing, insight on the reactionary and nationalistic use of heritage--it does not tell the whole story, as demonstrated by the English historian Rafael Samuel (1994). The volume under review 'constitutes one of the first systematic efforts [at least in archaeology] to analyse [the] global marketing of the past' (p. 295) observes Kohl in his conclusion. It represents a considered and wide-ranging archaeological contribution to the analysis of how the past is marketed and commodified as an economic resource. However, how much does it add to this ongoing and inherently interdisciplinary debate?

Marketing heritage is an edited collection of 17 papers, whose aim is to examine examples of the ways in which archaeological and heritage sites have been marketed as commodities, and illustrates the extent to which experiences of this are globally similar. While these are not new issues, this collection extends the subject's geographical scope by presenting papers written largely from archaeological perspectives, discussing case studies from around the world, including North and South America, Europe, the Middle East and Asia. The volume is divided into six sections. The first sets the international policy and historical context of the debate about commodification and its cultural and political consequences--particular attention is paid here to the long running drama of the Parthenon Marbles, with two out of three papers discussing its implications (Kersel and Vinson). The second section deals with the interrelation of archaeology and cultural tourism, drawing on examples from Ireland (Costa), England (Gazin-Schwartz) and Mexico (Ardren). The third section addresses conflicts and tensions over the construction and expression of collective identities through heritage, and the political and cultural consequences of this, particularly when they intersect with a range of economic issues. Examples come from Cambodia (Stark and Griffin) and Germany (James), and discuss sites at the centre of international conflict and dissonance, such as Colonial Williamsburg (Gable and Handler), the Ayodhya Mosque and the Bamiyan Buddhas (Golden). A further section scrutinises the complexities of presenting and interpreting the past in the context of dissonant and divergent audiences--Bauman examines Sepphoris in Israel, while Addison discusses cultural tourism in Jordan and Rowan re examines the idea of authenticity in his analysis of the Holy Land Experience theme park in Florida. The final section of the book presents ways that archaeologists have attempted to engage with, understand and facilitate the multi-vocality of the past (Little and Gero).

Although collectively archaeology has been slower off the mark to handle these issues than historians or sociologists, this volume is an important contribution to the debates on cultural tourism and the marketing of heritage places. There is a tendency in some of the chapters to simplify matters by identifying heritage as something that inherently commodities and corrupts the archaeological past--thus tending to rehearse the earlier debates dominated by historians. However, as Samuel (1994) notes, the past is not a commodity; to assume that it is, and to treat it so, misunderstands the complexities and diversities of how heritage is used and understood by a range of communities. Conversely, many of the case studies do extend previous debates by offering 'thick' ethnographic descriptions of the processes and, more importantly, the consequences of heritage marketing. They provide nuanced accounts, increasing the discipline's understanding of the way the past is used and perceived outside the conceptual frameworks of archaeological knowledge and practice. These take the debate beyond the narrow and naive concerns about how tourism and marketing 'defiles' archaeological research; they force readers to consider the responsibilities that they, as archaeological researchers, have in the creation and use of knowledge, and how that knowledge may be utilised (or not) as either a cultural or touristic resource. I recommend this book to anyone interested in heritage issues and tourism and to any archaeologist wishing to pursue how archaeological knowledge and data is understood and used in the wider world.

Reference

SAMUEL, R. 1994. Theatres of memory: past and present in contemporary culture. London: Verso.

LAURAJANE SMITH

Department of Archaeology, University of York, York, UK