In closing, I return to the idea that every cultural tourism encounter is a performance itself in which organizers, producers, musicians, dancers, actors, and audience members are all performers. These encounter performances, when carefully “read,” can reveal to us much about our contemporary world and how we conceive of such matters as culture, identity, difference, the value of artistic practices, and the process of globalization. There are contradictions to be found in every encounter performance. Contradictions can be sensed in the performers themselves, who dress and behave in ways that someone imagines they or their ancestors once did but which is clearly not who they are in their daily lives outside the encounter time-space. They do this because someone not of their community wants to experience them representing themselves as such, which suggests that cultural tourists are seeking something of value for themselves through their participation in the encounter performance. Contradictions can also be sensed in the material presented in encounter performances. The simple reality that tourists are willing to pay to encounter in situ the Others’ representations of themselves has catalyzed people around the world to think in new ways about their cultural heritage. Expressive culture, once integrated into community contexts and lifeways, has been\u00a0transformed, sometimes subtly, other times dramatically, and reconstituted into\u00a0a commodity in the context of the transnational tourism marketplace. It is through the performing and viewing of these artistic commodities in the encounter performance that the participants–producers, performers, audience–explore, each from their own perspective, what the “play” in which they are participating (the performance encounter) means in terms of who they themselves are, who the Other is, what is meaningful and fulfilling in one’s own life, what is meaningful and heartfelt in the lives of the Other, what is real, what is authentic, what is illusion, and so forth.<\/p>\n
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In closing, I return to the idea that every cultural tourism encounter is a performance itself in which organizers, producers, musicians, dancers, actors, and audience members are all performers. These encounter performances, when carefully “read,” can reveal to us much about our contemporary world and how we conceive of such matters as culture, identity, difference, … Continue reading “Concluding Thoughts”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5,1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-49","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-menu-items","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/vetter.sites.grinnell.edu\/tourism\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/49","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/vetter.sites.grinnell.edu\/tourism\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/vetter.sites.grinnell.edu\/tourism\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vetter.sites.grinnell.edu\/tourism\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vetter.sites.grinnell.edu\/tourism\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=49"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"https:\/\/vetter.sites.grinnell.edu\/tourism\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/49\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":334,"href":"https:\/\/vetter.sites.grinnell.edu\/tourism\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/49\/revisions\/334"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/vetter.sites.grinnell.edu\/tourism\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=49"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vetter.sites.grinnell.edu\/tourism\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=49"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vetter.sites.grinnell.edu\/tourism\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=49"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}