What do the residents of the ruins need to contribute to tourism development?
Villages near the temple complexes in Borobudur and Prambanan, Indonesia, were forcibly demolished to make way for the development of these tourist attractions.
At one point, villagers were relocated to the far eastern tip of Java, about 600 kilometers from their traditional land.
Rebellious community members were intimidated by the military, and compensation allocated by the state was insufficient for land and houses surrendered under duress. In many cases, there is no compensation.
Flynn pointed to a similar situation in Guatemala, where 300 families were driven from their homes in 1996 to make way for tourism development projects. Police reportedly burned down their houses and arrested some of the rebels.
Regrettably, torture, bullying, fraud, imprisonment and even murder are often used to suppress resistance to forced migration for tourism development and to clear heritage areas for protection.
In the field of religious tourism, scams are also rampant. Some of the most historic buildings and locations in the world today are of great tourist significance and are signs of spiritual or religious significance.
Examples include numerous Buddhist and Hindu temples in South and Southeast Asia, churches and cathedrals in Latin America, and mosques and temples in North and Southwest Asia.
Visiting these sacred sites is another source of discontent for communities that rely on tourism. While on the surface it may seem logical that religious-based heritage tourism will produce peaceful or benevolent relationships, the opposite is often the case.
Friction at religious sites occurs in several different ways. First, destination residents have a certain degree of contempt for all outsiders (even devout tourists or pilgrims) for the same reasons as other tourist backgrounds (i.e. mischievous behavior, pollution, crowding, crowding, etc.).
Secondly, local devotees and pilgrim tourists use sacred spaces and artifacts for spiritual purposes: worship, prayer, meditation, healing, reading, chanting, singing and resting.
However, these same sacred spaces and objects also attract a large number of unbelievers. The noisy non-pilgrim tourists, fluttering cameras, irreverent, unseemly dress standards and religious ignorance are very easy for worshippers and detrimental to the spirit of the place.
Cultural change is also often cited as one of the most prominent negative effects of tourism, although some scholars and their research population argue that not all cultural modifications are bad.
While it is well known today that tourism is only a force in various modernization processes, anthropologists and other cultural studies scholars generally agree that tourism, including heritage tourism, is partly responsible for destination societies that lose their cultural traditions or undergo cultural transformation.
One of the most frequently cited side hustles in tourism is cultural commoditization, where culture becomes a product that is packaged and sold to tourists. The problem is particularly acute in more traditional societies.
During the process of commercialization, the spiritual meaning or customary value behind traditional celebrations, music, dances and handicrafts is often lost, as these cultural elements begin to be mass-produced for consumption by tourists.
In Tilley's words, it leads to an environment and performance that is detached from most aspects of native culture, becoming a traditional empty container without emotion.
Traditional art forms were altered to meet the needs of tourists, and they also lost their value, becoming mass-produced, meaningless and unreal tourist kitsch.
This realization led MacCannell to propose early on that society would often "stage" or present some sort of ultra-elaborate illustration or cultural fragment to visitors as a way to preserve rituals, customs, and traditional institutions.
or real-life practices and customs of a particular society. Therefore, the tourist's cultural performance is unreal, but still satisfies the tourist's need for culture.
This theory has been questioned in various ways and applied to many different sociocultural contexts. The thread to all the case studies in the literature is often that indigenous peoples in developed countries often display their cultures extravagantly, thus protecting much of their culture from the gaze of tourists.
On the other hand, in the less developed world, such luxuries rarely exist, and culture in its most primitive form becomes a spectacle for outsiders to watch, imitate and "desecrate".
The commodification of culture often leads to loss of control over cultural resources, as external factors begin to exploit cultural elements that belong to others. For example, many elements of indigenous and minority cultures are incorporated into the commercial development of countries.
So in most parts of the world, minorities have no control over how their culture is presented to tourists. Local traditions of centralized, top-down planning and development prevent grassroots empowerment and communities from deciding what can and should be shown to visitors.
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