Cultural pillages of the leisure class? : consuming expressions of identity.
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Date
2011
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Abstract
Society ‘obscures itself’ by presenting a world that is self-contained and logical (Barthes, 1973) – a
world underpinned by a transparency of its underlying systems of meaning. This formulation maps
the theoretical location of the dissertation, by which an investigation into tourism, as an economic
and political expression of contemporary culture, occurs. More specifically, the dissertation
addresses the type of tourism that bisects narratives of history and of cultures – that popularly
described under the label of cultural tourism. Thus it employs an array of critical tourism and
cultural theory, to offer an exposition on how best to understand the articulation of meaning in the
consumption of ‘place’, formations of heritage and Otherness.
The study also explores the epistemological nature/agendas of the so-called ‘Image of Africa’ and
the ‘Absolute Other’, and how these are recycled in the parameters of modernity. Using a
genealogical approach to studying discursive formations articulating some kind of Zulu Otherness,
the dissertation grounds these conventions of identity predominantly in the symbolic practice of a
colonial Western society. This exposes the arbitrary, constructed nature by which contemporary
society governs itself.
Methodologically, the research applies participant observation and semiotic analyses,
predominantly in the cultural/filmic village of Shakaland, near Eshowe, KwaZulu-Natal, to explore
how the constructions of identity manifest and are negotiated and consumed in the activity of this
tourism.
Description
Thesis (M.A.)-University of KwaZulu-Natal, 2011.
Keywords
Tourism--Social aspects--KwaZulu-Natal., Cultural relativism., Heritage tourism--KwaZulu-Natal., Theses--Culture, communication and media studies.