People-Place-Past: The Visitor Experience of Cultural Heritage

Despite the proliferation of research on cultural heritage tourism since the mid1980s, there have been relatively few experiential studies. Within the literature with an experiential focus, common themes have included motivations and expectations (Poria et al. 2006), satisfaction (de Rojas et al. 2007), authenticity (McIntosh and Prentice 1999; Chhabra 2008), learning (Prentice et al. 1998), benets (Beho and Prentice 1998), and commodication (Halewood and Hannam 2001). Recently, consistent with the social sciences in general, interest has shifted towards visitor encounters and the performativity of cultural heritage (Edensor 2000; Crouch 2000a; see Crouch this volume). It is argued in this chapter, however, that although such approaches have made important contributions to the conceptualization of cultural heritage experience, they remain rather tangential to understanding how, in a holistic sense, cultural heritage sites and landscapes are experienced.