Heritage Tourism in Southeast Asia

This book focuses on disputes and conflicts over what heritage is, what it means and how it has been presented, re-presented, developed and protected, set against a back-drop of the demands, motivations and impacts of heritage tourism.

This involves examining the different agents or actors involved in encounters and contestation, drawing in issues of identity construction and negotiation, and requiring the contextualization of heritage in national and global processes of identity formation and transformation (also see Hitchcock, King and Parnwell, 2009).

Melanie Smith (2003: 103) usefully summarizes a set of key issues pertaining to heritage, which we shall also revisit in the book; these comprise questions about the ownership of heritage, its appropriate use, access to it as against conservation needs, heritage as a commodity, as entertainment and as an educational medium, and finally the interpretation and representation of heritage forms.

The book explores Southeast Asian heritages, their conceptualizations and representations, set against relationships between culture, nature, tourism and identity. The book arises from and develops a previous contribution to the relation between tourism and heritage which two of us presented in a special issue of the journal Indonesia and the Malay World and which explored a variety of cases of the appropriation, creation, presentation and developmental significance of cultural heritage, principally in Indonesia, Malaysia and Singapore, with additional case material from mainland Southeast Asia and Taiwan (Hitchcock and King, 2003a).

That Heritage Tourism in Southeast Asia collection of essays, covering diverse examples of heritage (e.g. cultural parks, temple complexes, archaeological sites, museum exhibitions, living cultural landscapes', cultural performances), was designed to demonstrate how local communities with varied interests and perspectives interact dynamically with national and global actors, who themselves carry and promote different expectations and images of heritage and the past.

One theme in that collection examined the ways in which heritage has been subject to selection, construction and contestation in the context of more general processes of local and national identity formation (Hitchcock and King, 1993b: 3-13);1 that theme is pursued in much more detail in this current book through a range of examples of World Heritage Sites and the presentation of diverse aspects of cultural and natural heritage.

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