The Renaissance of the cultural heritage
Landscape experiences between politics and market
The old concept of cultural heritage has returned in full force in the Swedish debate of the 1990's, but this time it is very much tied to questions about marketing the past or making it available to new groups of consumers. The new emphasis on "culture tourism" creates a different focus. What kinds of landscapes or historical monuments can be marketed as "a rich experience"? In this process of selection some historical settings will be overlooked or ignored, as unappetizing, problematic or just boring. Many of these aesthetic and emotional principles for judging a three-star sight can be traced back to the pioneering days of modem tourism at the end of the 18th century. In countries like Sweden the nationalization of the landscape became an important part of the construction of a national heritage during the 19th century. Certain landscapes and scenes were selected as "typical" and charged with powerful symbolic meanings, through a process of cultural condensation in which history and landscape became intertwined.
As communities, minorities, regions and nations compete for tourist attention or media coverage a standardization of culturai difference also emerges. The uniqueness of the local is moulded into accepted standards of "what an interesting culture should look like".
The paper explores some arenas where conflicts over the cultural heritage bring out these often rather unconscious criteria of selection and discusses the cultural politics of remembering and forgetting, of looking and overlooking.
