scholarly journals The virtual cultural tourist: Film-induced tourism and Kubo and the Two Strings

2021 ◽  
pp. 3-20
Author(s):  
Dennis Yeo

Over the past two decades, there has been growing research in film-induced tourism. Much of this research is focused on how film influences tourist destination choices. There has been less emphasis, however, on the nature and types of movies that may induce this attraction to such locations. By examining Kubo and the Two Strings (Knight, 2016), a stop-motion animation produced by Laika Studios, this paper aims to apply film studies to explore current understandings of film-induced tourism. This paper argues that Kubo is itself a form of film-induced tourism by positioning the viewer as a virtual cultural tourist whose cinematic experience may be likened to a veritable media pilgrimage through Japanese culture, history and aesthetics. The movie introduces the viewer into an imagined world that borrows from origami, Nō theatre, shamisen music, obon rituals and Japanese symbolism, philosophy and mythology. The resulting pastiche is a constructed diorama that is as transnational and postmodern as it is authentic and indigenous.

Author(s):  
La Ode Yusuf ◽  
I Wayan Cika ◽  
I Gusti Ketut Gde Arsana

Globalization has caused tradition to change, meaning that globalization has caused the sacred tradition to change into the propane tradition as it has been used as a tourist attraction. This present study discusses the Bangka mbule-mbule tradition used as a tourist attraction in Wakatobi Regency, South East Sulawesi. The study is intended to inform the public that the Bangka mbule-mbule has been performed as a cultural tourist destination. The study uses the descriptive qualitative method. The data which were obtained from the field were qualitatively described. The social theory combined with the theory of cultural tourism department was used to analyze the data. The result of the study shows that Tradition can be defined as a right heritage or a heritage from the past which is still currently found in society. One of the traditions which is still performed is the bangka mbule-mbule tradition. It is still performed by Mandati people in Wakatobi Regency, South East Sulawesi. The owners of the tradition still believe in it. It has been performed to support the cultural tradition in Wakatobi. The implication is that it has increased the number of tourists visiting Wakatobi, South East Sulawesi.


2006 ◽  
Vol 7 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 77-118 ◽  
Author(s):  
James M. Hegarty

Cardiff University The Mahābhārata has, for millennia, been pivotal to processes of the construction of ideas of the cosmic and social past in South Asia. The text has also been of critical importance in establishing connections between Vedic and post-Vedic cosmic and social self-understandings. The key theoretical issue that underlies both these roles is of the nature of the relationship between narrative and the construction of forms of significant social knowledge in human social groups. The investigation of this relationship presents challenges to received conceptions of culture, history and structure within the academic disciplines of both Anthropology and History. Thisstudy explores the complex orientation to the past evident in the Sanskrit Mahābhārata. It also addresses the relationship between ideas of the past and issues of self-presentation in the text. I argue that the text constitutes itself as a ‘reflective’ or ‘theoretical’ technology in early South Asian religious discourse and that this strategy is intimately related to antecedent Vedic forms of knowledge and practice. I argue that this understanding of the text can shed light on wider processes in the formation and consolidation of Sanskritic knowledge systems in early South Asia. I also suggest that the example of the Mahābhārata can help refine more general theoretical orientations to the relationship between narrative, history and culture.


Author(s):  
Engelina Du Plessis ◽  
Melville Saayman ◽  
Annari Van der Merwe

Background: Tourism is an evolving and changing industry, and keeping up with these changes requires an understanding of the forces and changes that shape this industry’s outcomes. Tourism managers struggle daily to stay ahead in the competition to attract more tourists to destinations. Understanding the strengths and weaknesses of the past could shed light on the advantages of the future.Aim: The aim of this study was to do a temporal analysis of the competitiveness of South Africa as a tourism destination.Setting: This research investigated the competitive position of South Africa as a tourism destination just after the 1994 elections and compared those results to the results of a similar study in 2014.Methods: In this article, a frequency analysis revealed South Africa’s strengths and weaknesses, after which t-tests indicated the relationship between the strengths and weaknesses of the destination and the factors that contribute to South Africa’s competitiveness.Results: South Africa’s strengths include the quality of the food and experience, scenery, variety of accommodation climate and geographical features. It is clear that respondents identified different attributes that contributed to the strengths of the destination in comparison with 2002, where the strengths were wildlife, scenery, cultural diversity, climate, value for money, variety of attractions and specific icons.Conclusion: This research is valuable for South Africa because it informs tourism role players about what respondents perceive to be South Africa’s strengths. Role players can then form strategies that incorporate the strengths to create competitive advantage. This article also indicates the areas in which the country has grown in the past decade as well as indicating which weaknesses remain a problem.


Author(s):  
Kirk A. Denton

The Landscape of Historical Memory explores the place of museums and memorial culture in the contestation over historical memory in post–martial law Taiwan. The book is particularly oriented toward the role of politics—especially political parties—in the establishment, administration, architectural design, and historical narratives of museums. It is framed around the wrangling between the “blue camp” (the Nationalist Party, or KMT, and its supporters) and the “green camp” (Democratic Progressive Party, DPP), and its supporters) over what facets of the past should be remembered and how they should be displayed in museums. Organized into chapters focused on particular types of museums and memorial spaces (archaeology museums, history museums, martyrs’ shrines, war museums, memorial halls, literature museums, ethnology museums, ecomuseums, etc.), the book presents a broad overview of the state of museums in Taiwan in the past three decades. The case of Taiwan museums tells us much about Cold War politics and its legacy in East Asia; the role of culture, history, and memory in shaping identities in the multiply “postcolonial” landscape of Taiwan; the politics of historical memory in an emergent democracy, especially in counterpoint to the politics of museums in the People’s Republic of China, which continues to be an authoritarian single party state; and the place of museums in a neoliberal economic climate.


Author(s):  
GORDON F. McEWAN

Linguistic studies have shown that the traditional idea that the expansion of the Inca Empire was the driving force behind the spread of all Quechua cannot be correct. Across much of its distribution, Quechua has far greater time-depth than can be accounted for by the short-lived Inca Empire. Linguistics likewise suggests that Aymara spread not from the south into Cuzco in the late Pre-Inca period, but also from an origin to the north. Alternative explanations must be sought for the expansion of these language families in the culture history of the Andes. Archaeological studies over the past two decades now provide a broad, generally agreed-upon outline of the cultural history of the Cuzco region. This chapter applies those findings to examine alternative possibilities for the driving forces that spread Quechua and Aymara, offering a clearer cross-disciplinary view of Andean prehistory.


2020 ◽  
pp. 89-138
Author(s):  
Kamilla Elliott

Chapter 3 discusses how, just as new copyright laws were legitimizing intermedial adaptations, modernist theories drastically diminished the theoretical fortunes of adaptation with their rejection of the past and celebration of the new. Modernism shattered adaptation into allusions: studying allusions as adaptations would indubitably help to restore the theoretical fortunes of adaptation under modernism. Modernism’s hostility to mass culture was often aimed at adaptation: even theorists valorizing other popular cultural forms opposed it. Requiring film to dissociate from other art forms in order to emerge as an art in its own right, rather than as a craft or a recording device for other arts, medium specificity theory undermined adaptation in literature-and-film studies. Affecting all kinds of adaptation, the formalist turn diminished the theoretical fortunes of adaptation by rejecting the cultural theories that had valorized adaptation in prior centuries. Joined to medium specificity theories and structuralist semiotics, intermedial adaptation became not only aesthetically undesirable but also theoretically impossible under theories that content cannot separate from form to appear in another medium. With the advent of the theoretical turn in the humanities, adaptation became a battleground upon which theoretical wars were fought, battles that, paradoxically, foregrounded it. By the 1990s, adaptation was becoming an established, if divided, diasporic field, engaging a panoply of theories.


Author(s):  
Gustavo Procopio Furtado

The introduction offers an overview of the documentary in contemporary Brazil and discusses the significance of archive concepts for the documentary in general and for Brazilian documentaries in particular. The archive has been undervalued as a heuristic concept in documentary film studies, which have tended to discuss it only in the literal sense of film archives and to speak of repurposed footage. The documentary, however, has an inherent affinity with the concept of the archive that becomes crucial in the work of many filmmakers. Taking Eduardo Coutinho’s Cabra marcado para morrer (Man Marked For Death/Twenty Years Later, 1964–1985) as a point of departure, the introduction argues that the documentary has a Janus-faced relationship with the archive, at once producing lasting records for the future and de-archiving materials from the past, returning what was hidden and stored away to the present.


2006 ◽  
Vol 13 ◽  
pp. 143-154 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ian Barber

The selective pressures and processes of cultural heritage management effectively disinherit some interest groups. Where this occurs in the context of postcolonial or nationalist conflict, the material archaeological record may be referenced to support or reject particular views. The disciplinary assumptions behind the archaeological evidence so produced are not usually contested in judicial contexts. A review of archaeology’s theoretical foundations suggests that this naivety itself may be problematic. A descriptive culture history approach dominated archaeology over the first half of the twentieth century with a strong political appeal to nationalist politics. Subsequently archaeology became concerned with processual explanation and the scientific identification of universal laws of culture, consistent with postwar technological optimism and conformity. A postprocessual archaeology movement from the 1970s has promoted relativism and challenged the singular authority of scientific explanation. Archaeologists caught within this debate disagree over the use of the archaeological record in situations of political conflict. Furthermore, the use of archaeology in the sectarian debate over the Ayodhya birthplace of Rama suggests that the material record of the past can become highly politicized and seemingly irresolvable. Archaeological research is also subject to other blatant and subtle political pressures throughout the world, affecting the nature and interpretation of the record. A system that privileges archaeological information values may be irrelevant also to communities who value and manage their ancestral heritage for customary purposes. Collectively this review of theory and applied knowledge suggests that it is unrealistic to expect that archaeology can authoritatively resolve strident claims and debates about the past. Instead, an important contemporary contribution of archaeology may be its potential to document cultural and historical contradictions and inclusions for the consideration of contemporary groups in conflict.


Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document