Heritage for Tourism: Creating a link between the past and the present

This chapter explores the ways in which that which is labelled ‘heritage’ is created and what this created heritage communicates about the experience of the past in the present. Traditional understandings of heritage refer to it as stories about the past drawn from the events, objects, landscapes, people and ideas venerated and reproduced over time as an inheritance for future generations. To speak of heritage is, therefore, to speak of a relationship that brings the past into the present. However, this is a socially constructed relationship because it is based upon the concerns of those individuals and groups that choose how the past should be used in the present. What is labelled heritage in the present tells us as much about the here and now as it does about what took place in the past. A heritage label thus communicates an understanding of value as defined in relation to the prevailing social, political and cultural circumstances of the present.