[URBANTH-L] Announcing: "The Heritage-scape: UNESCO , World Heritage and Tourism"

Michael Di Giovine digiovim at uchicago.edu
Fri Feb 27 12:15:08 EST 2009


New Book Announcement

 

The Heritage-scape: UNESCO World Heritage and Tourism

Michael A. Di Giovine

 

 

This is the most thorough and sophisticated examination of the UNESCO
heritage system to date. ... Although he examines events and monuments of
Southeast Asia, especially Cambodia, and in Italy, especially Tuscany, in
ethnographic detail, his knowledge of the heritage-making process is
encyclopedic and critical. This is a book to be enjoyed for its timeliness,
its revealing anecdotes, and its attention to contemporary social theory.

 - Nelson Graburn, University of California, Berkeley & London Metropolitan
University

 

 

Tourism today is recognized as the largest and fastest-growing industry in
the world, capable of producing positive social and economic
transformations, especially in developing countries. Yet for UNESCO, it
works in conjunction with World Heritage sites for a far more ambitious
goal: to produce "peace in the minds of men" by creating a new, global
identity.

 

Anthropologist and former tour operator Michael Di Giovine draws on
ethnographic fieldwork, close policy analysis and professional experiences
in Southeast Asia and Europe to provide a detailed examination of UNESCO's
unusual effort to harness globalization and cultural diversity for the
purpose of creating peace. He convincingly argues that UNESCO's designations
are not impotent political performances that lead to the commercialization
of local monuments, but instead are the building blocks of a new social
system he calls the "heritage-scape" - an imaginative re-ordering of the
world that knows no geopolitical boundaries but exists in the individual
"minds of men."

 

Written for social scientists, and heritage and tourism professionals, The
Heritage-scape is an insightful, detailed, and expansive look at UNESCO's
World Heritage Program in Vietnam, Cambodia, and across the world.

 

Debates continue to rage about the economic, political, and socio-cultural
significance attached to, and conferred by, the UNESCO designation of "World
Heritage." What Michael Di Giovine achieves in this important book, through
detailed research and critical theoretical reflection, is grounding these
debates in a comprehensive and compelling examination of the motivations,
processes, networks, and people which not only shape the meanings of the
past but which also project into the future. ... This is clearly an
essential book for all interested in the relationships and meanings which
lie behind, and are generated by, the notion of World Heritage. 

- Mike Robinson, Director, Centre for Tourism and Cultural Change, Leeds
Metropolitan University

 


LEXINGTON BOOKS


$95.00 . 

Cloth .

0-7391-1434-4 | 978-0-7391-1434-6 .

542 pp

 


$44.95 . 

Paper .

0-7391-1435-2 | 978-0-7391-1435-3 .

542 pp

 

 

www.lexingtonbooks.com/Catalog/Flyer2.shtml?SKU=0739114344

www.michaeldigiovine.com/book

 

 

 



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