NON-PLACES OF THE PRESERVED PAST1

Ljiljana Gavrilovi

Abstract: The protection and preservation of

cultural heritage has increasingly been spoken
about in the context of the intensive, industrial touristification of heritage, which leads to the
remodeling of the protection process from (assumedly, but also clearly defined by different international and domestic regulations) a
non-profit (and simultaneously expensive) activity to an extremely commercialized activity changing the basic idea of the keeping and
usage of heritage. That was initiated by what
is called the Bilbao Effect today, although, approximately at the same time, all big metropolises with significant historical edifices and/
or museums, protected city wholes, as well as
the most diverse ethno-spaces became flooded with multitudes of tourists, which caused
them to lose all that had used to define them
16

as a space/place necessary to preserve, turning them into classical Augs non-places. In a

conflict between the idea of the preservation
of heritage for the reason of the most various
identity needs and global hunger for exotica (either located back in the great past of European antique times or the Middle Ages, the
geographical remoteness of small Mediterranean towns/African villages or some other sort
of foreign and unknown culture) used in the
maximal popularization of cultural tourism,
the local identity loses the battle with a profit.
By insisting on its intensive touristification, protected/preserved heritage is turned into its opposite: a space (physical, and cultural, too) completely deprived of a meaning, emotions, and
simultaneously a sense.

Key words: cultural heritage, tradition, neoliberalism, industrial tourism, touristification

Apstrakt: O zatiti i ouvanju kulturnog naslea
sve vie se govori u kontekstu intenzivne, industrijske turistifikacije naslea, ime se postie
preoblikovanje procesa zatite iz (prepostavljeno, ali i jasno definisano razliitim meunarodnim i domaim propisima) neprofitne (i istovemeno skupe) delatnosti, u izrazito komercijalizovanu aktivnost koja menja osnovnu ideju
uvanja i upotrebe naslea. To je zapoeto onim
to se danas naziva Bilbao-efektom, iako su,
otprilike u isto vreme, sve velike metropole sa
znaajnim istorijskim zdanjima i/ili muzejima,
zatiene gradske celine, pa i najrazliitiji etnoprostori postali preplavljeni gomilama turista,
ime su izgubili sve ono to ih je definisalo kao
prostor/mesto koji/koje je bilo neophodno sau-

vati i pretvorilo u klasina Oeova ne-mesta. U sukobu osnovne ideje uvanja naslea iz
najrazliitijih identitetskih potreba i globalne
gladi za egzotikom (bila ona locirana u veliku prolost evropske antike ili srednjeg veka,
geografsku udaljenost malih mediteranskih gradova/afrikih sela ili neku drugu vrstu strane i
nepoznate kulture) upotrebljene u maksimalnom omasovljavanju kulturnog turizma, lokalni identitet gubi bitku sa profitom. Insistiranjem
na njegovoj intenzivnoj turistifikaciji, zatieno/
sauvano naslee se pretvara u svoju suprotnost: prostor (fiziki, ali i kulturni) koji je u potpunosti lien znaenja, emocija, pa time i smisla.

The paper has resulted from the work on the Project No. 177026, Cultural Heritage and
Identity, funded by the Ministry of Education and Science of the RoS.

NON-PLACES OF THE PRESERVED PAST

The old crafts and skills havent been forgotten, but preserved. Like a dead pig in a
jar of alcohol.
Tad Williams,
Sea of Silver Light
Cultural heritage does not only concern the past although it concerns it as
well nor does it relate only to material things although it does relate to them,
too: heritage is a process of engaging, an
act of communication and an act of bringing meanings in the present and for the
present (Smith 2006: 1). The total heritage (cultural, natural, industrial, tangible, intangible or of any other kind) is not
the things, the behaviors or the beliefs that
have remained over from the past until today, in their own right those are the stories which, on the basis of them, we tell
ourselves and, at the same time, we tell
others about ourselves. Although, pursuant to the most diverse UNESCOs documents defining different categories of heritage, those should first of all be stories
of local communities, for which heritage
should be the basis and the image of what
they are or of what they would like to be in
the present, on the basis of which different
group identities are created, or yet stories
of overall humanity telling about the variety and high reaches of cultures all over
the world and throughout time, in practice, individuals, local communities or
amorphously understood overall humanitys views are significantly less important
than those that states and/or meta-national bureaucracy aspire to tell. The former can only operate if those two higher
levels, too, manage to also write their story
in heritage, whereas of course it is not
necessary for the stories to be the same, as
in fact most frequently they are not, either.
Heritage is always discursive and, according to Bender (2002: 104), it clearly be-

longs to the western discourse, which locates it not only geographically, but also
explains the historical source of it power, which belongs to the post-enlightenment, expansionist, capitalist world. It further means that the manners of defining,
understanding and using it change coherently with changes in discourse, first
of all with changes in capitalism. 2 Simultaneously, it is elitist discourse, which selects/singles out some objects/buildings/landscapes/knowledges/beliefs from
some cultures fully in compliance with
the western-as-a-global view of the world
and ascribes them a value greater than
it does with respect to all other objects/
buildings/landscapes/knowledges/beliefs from those, or some other, cultures.
The manners of choosing elements of heritage to be taken care of/protected and the
way those already protected are treated in
changes in compliance with the values
they are ascribed, values incorporated in
discourse. So it happened that, once capital took the position of power at the level of states and meta-national bureaucracy, during the last, neoliberal period of the
development of capitalism, the story told
by capital instead of stories told by its
bearers began being written in in the
processes of heritage protection.
Yet, an idealized narrative is still preserved,
which, according to the definitions ICOM
has been offering ever since its establishment, i.e. since the establishment of the
concept of heritage protection at the world
level, says that what has been selected to
be defined as heritage should be available
to the whole humanity, and that the very
process of its protection, maintenance and

The post-enlightenment and expansionist

aspect of discourse have not been more
importantly modified since the establishment
of the heritage concept, although some of their
manifestations have undergone partial change.

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LJILJANA GAVRILOVI

representation should be fully non-profit

because it is about activities with a higher
goal.3 Yet, is it really the way it should be?
The non-profit as the useless and the
touristification of heritage
In the contemporary, neoliberal view of the
world, the only activities capable of surviving are those that do not generate a profit, and exclusively understanding a profit
in its financial meaning, failing to pay any
attention whatsoever to culture, emotional and/or social capital,4 i.s. a profit.5 In the
neoliberal perception of the world, the traditional concept of the non-profit protection of heritage makes no sense: its preservation/maintenance is expensive, and
at the same time yields (returns) no money,
so, therefore, the whole process of traditionally understood heritage protection is
understood as a completely useless one.6
18

As the process of globalization, however, has simultaneously made culture

which all the way to the last decade of the
twentieth century had only been the dealt
with by anthropologists and those professionally oriented towards the protection of cultural heritage an important

A narrative itself could be treated as the intangible

heritage of modern age because it still remains as a
narrative, although in practice, it does not work.

Only in the neoliberal period does the idea of being

able to treat emotions, the approach to culture or
social relations in the same/very similar manner as/
to accumulated tangible/financial assets, and that all
those are different forms of capital, appear at all. For
exactly that reason, today it is possible to say that
heritage is the knowledge representing simultaneously
economic and cultural capital (Graham 2002: 1003).

The so-called sustainability is also based

on that perception of the world only what
can be self-funded is sustainable.

This is where a reduction in the budget for the

museum activity (museums are the first and the oldest
institutions for the protection of heritage) and constant
expectations that museums should be self-funding/
self-sustaining themselves at an increasing percentage,
not only in countries where the museum activity
traditionally relies on private funds (the USA), or only in
transition countries, but also in countries where, from
the very establishment, museums have been taken
care of by the state (e.g. Great Britain), fully fit into.

resource which is managed, conserved, developed and invested in in order to reduce

a social conflict, incent economic development and protect biodiversity (Coombe
2005: 36), in the same manner, protected/
preserved cultural heritage started more
and more frequently to be perceived as an
economic/commercial resource, which implies the most different manners of its use.
In that way, the very process of protection
has (assumedly, and also clearly defined by
various international and state legal regulations) been remodeled from a non-profit
activity into an extremely commercialized
activity that has changed the basic idea of
both the preservation and the use of heritage.7 Today, even UNESCO considers that
the exceptional universal value of the
monuments inscribed in the World Heritage list must be understood in the context of sustainable development (World
Heritage: Benefits Beyond Borders: 2012),
which to a great extent deviates from
the concept of nonprofitness, and the total
heritage has become
the most profitable and powerful instrument (...) to acquire a competitive advantage in a world marked by globalisation. New (...) policies that are structured
through neoliberalism as a new governance mode of globalisation necessitate
the use of cultural heritage as a tool to respond to the rapidly changing socio-economic conditions of the new economic order (Gunay 2008: 1).8
Culture with a special accent on cultural heritage has become especially signif-

Intangible heritage, which as a separate category was

singled out early in this century, has particularly well
fitted into the neoliberal concept of the world, since
considerably less money is invested in its maintenance
than it is in the protection of tangible facilities, so
the profit margin is also considerably higher.

He speaks about it on the example of

cities, but it can also be understood and
applied considerably more broadly.

NON-PLACES OF THE PRESERVED PAST

icant for the development of the tourism

industry. Culture is what gives locations
that want to join the tourist offer local colorfulness, a touch of what should distinguish them from all other possible destinations, which is why exactly cultural
heritage should be a distinctive feature of
each individual place included in the world
network of the tourist offer.
The process of an intensive tourism exploitation of heritage began with what is
called the Bilbao Effect9 today, although,
approximately at the same time, all big
metropolises with significant historical
edifices and/or museums, protected city
wholes, as well as the most diverse ethno-spaces became flooded with multitudes of tourists. The economic effects of
heritage treated in this manner have positioned it high in the neoliberal concept of
the world, too: its preservation and maintenance may be expensive, but in return,
it generates money (preferably more than
has been invested), so pursuantly it is useful and meaningful.
During this process, all those spaces/places went through the process of touristification,10 by which they lost all that had
defined them as the space/place that necessarily had to be preserved, turning them
into classical Augs non-places namely the spaces impossible to define neither

The opening of the Guggenheim Museum in 1997

turned Bilbao from a provincial Basque small city
into a big cultural/tourist center, with the income
that, as early as in the course of the first year after
its opening, returned to the city authorities the
invested 100 million US$ (ola 2002: 58).

10 Taleb says that touristification is his term for the aspect

of modern life that treats people as washing-machines,
with simple mechanical responses and a detailed
instruction for use. That is a systematic elimination
of uncertainty and randomness, in striving for making
everything highly predictable to an extent of even
the smallest details. All that for the sake of comfort,
conventions and efficiency. () [T]ouristification
castrates systems and organisms for which uncertainty
is a normal thing, by exhausting coincidence to the
last drop of it while simultaneously convincing
them of an illusion of a benefit (Taleb 2012: 90).

on the identity basis, nor relationally, nor

historically (Aug 2005: 75). Although a
travel to a place where there are different
(most frequently general/globally known)
monuments, or to destinations recognized
for their being authentic, where tourists should become familiar with places/
cultures that importantly differ from the
place/culture they come from, offer them
new experiences and make them be citizens of the world, the process of touristification has enabled them to gain only familiar/safe experiences in all of those
locations. Recognizing tourist destinations (including those with the most valued cultural heritage, those from the UNESCO World Heritage List) as non-places
is what tourists themselves do, in that, to
them, setting out on a journey is insufficient in its own right: it is necessary that
such a journey should be eternalized with
as many photographs as possible, which
should have a tourists temporary identity
permanently written in in a personal identity. As there is no possibility of establishing a relation between people and spaces/
heritage, nor between people themselves
in view of spaces/heritage, tourists most
frequently do not look around themselves
at all, but rather take photographs: of the
surroundings, but for the most part of
themselves in those surroundings, since
ach photograph should legitimate the incorporation of oneself into the generally
known pictures of a destination, each one
of them being a picture in another picture.
They behave fully complying with Augs
description of peoples behaviors at a contemporary moment and in a non-place:
in order for a man/woman to be what he/
she is, he/she must be doing the same as
others (Augs 2005: 101).
Touristification implies that each tourist/
user, too, reads his/her perceptions/meanings into the observed heritage, which re-

19

LJILJANA GAVRILOVI

sults in our being given an endlessly open

narrative, between which narrative and a
cultural element itself, seemingly protected, there is very little essential connection.
Namely, although heritage implies permanent negotiations on the meanings and
values, touristified heritage is deprived of
any local identity component whatsoever,
so, to be honest, there is no possibility of
establishing a true relation between tourists and spaces.
Global exotica adapted to
tourists needs

20

In a conflict between the idea of the preservation of heritage for the reason of the
most various identity needs and global
hunger for exotica (either located back into
the great past of European antique times
or the Middle Ages, the geographical remoteness of small Mediterranean towns/
African villages or some other sort of foreign and unknown culture) used in the
maximal popularization of cultural tourism, local identities increasingly clearly
lose the battle with a profit.
That can most clearly be seen in the process of the development of the tradition
industry, founded on the grounds of really-still-preserved or even reconstructed
heritage. Tradition produced in that manner is not a consequence of a societys internal needs, but rather one of externally
constructed needs, and it is almost exclusively created for economic reasons, which
is in contradiction to the narrative conceptualizing heritage. The bearers of heritage
themselves are left in a space void of the
meaning/value that their culture attached
to that particular tradition, without adopted values of another (if only a global one)
culture they could experience as of their
own, so with a serious identity problem.
The two descriptions of the representation
of intangible cultural heritage, for the sake

of tourism, from two remote ends of the

world and from the two completely different cultures speak about the same problem:
Local villagers somewhere in the south
of Croatia dance and wheel dance in kolos every Sunday, at the same time, whereas traditionally they would be doing that
five times a year. An additional reason has
somehow occurred, whose value should be
doubted. It is impossible, namely, to sacrifice the dignity of a tradition because
tourists need an instant cultural event
and an insight into living cultural practice.
Of course, tourists are willing to pay for
that. Only a day after, instead of continuing their own ways of living, there are some
other villagers, dancing for them a thousand kilometers more southward, belonging to some other vanishing culture. (ola
2002: 85).
The other example is a description of the
contemporary behavior of the members
of hunter-collectors groups of Thailand,
which due to the devastation of their
forest homelands had to join the contemporary division of works:
There they have the choice of working
for local planters or merchants at punitive
rates, or joining a human zoo for tourists
to gawp at. Uprooted, much of their culture
now but a memory, they perform characteristic taskstree-climbing, corrupted
versions of their rituals, pig-killingfor the
visitors to video. Some also sell their crafts.
Some simply beg. (MacClancy 2002: 418).
Both examples (and there is an endless
number of such ones possible to mention)
speak not only about a tradition emptied
of all the meanings and values it once had,
while it was still alive, but also about the
emptiness in the lives of bearers/guardians of that tradition.

NON-PLACES OF THE PRESERVED PAST

... where everything becomes the same

At the same time, the really-existing and
frequently really-preserved/living traditions adapt themselves to tourists needs,
or their wishes. So, on the Adriatic and the
Greek coasts, it has become almost impossible for one to find classical olive oil (with
the scent of olives, squeezed from olives
that have started to ferment) what is only offered is extra-virgin oils, mainly with
added scents of laurel, rosemary and similar seasonings). To be fair, industrial classical olive oil can be bought in Greece, in any
local shop, since the Greeks still use it as
the basic fat in cooking, and domestic olive oil can be found in local marketplaces;
however, neither the former nor the latter
is offered to tourists because they are not
in compliance with the Western/globally-promoted popular recommendations for
healthy diet, for the reason of which tourists are not prone to buying them, either.11
Traditional cuisines also adapt themselves
to the taste of Western tourists. A Greek
hors-doeuvre/side dish called
(in its original version, the dish is made
from onion, olive oil and potatoes or
bread), which is on the menus of the majority of Greek restaurants in tourist places, stands for a striking example. Although
all the ingredients have been preserved,
as well as the process of making the meal,
change in the proportion of the ingredients (by drastically reducing the amount
of onion) leads to a complete change in
the taste of it as a result. It is considered
as necessary since Western tourists do not

11

Olive oil is also an element of a Mediterranean diet,

which is in the UNESCO Representative List of Intangible
Cultural Heritage. To be fair, the List does not precisely
specify the sort of olive oil, or the manner which it is
produced in, but since the olive production technology
was more-or-less uniform in the whole of the Mediterranean region, whereas there had been no variety in
sorts of oil until as recent as the last decades, either, it
is logical to assume that it refers to olive oil now called
classical, i.e. olive oil squeezed in a traditional manner.

like food with a large amount of onion, so

they are served a dish with the taste they
are satisfied with, still bearing the exotic
name of the domestic cuisine. Yet, in places not primarily tourist destinations and
in restaurants intended for the domestic
public, still has the taste typical of the Greek traditional cuisine.
So, in both cases, although seemingly preserved and offered as exotica, the cultural
heritage has been transformed to the extent of unrecognizability because the true
tradition cannot be sold to tourists, since
although declaratively even expecting/
wanting it they actually seek what they
are used to. The wanted exotica are only expected from what one can see, rather than experience, too. There, process of
touristification is in its full swing: although
tourists are seemingly offered something
that should be a novelty for them, something new, interesting and exotic, that is
completely adapted to the known and,
therefore, the safe. On the other hand, local communities still hold on to their habits, so tradition is being preserved, carefully separated from the tourist offer. That
is exactly what is being done at all major
tourist destinations.
***
So, the overall touristified heritage, as
well as the traditions that are unprotected (but could be protected) cease to differ between each other in anything except for their forms and names, because of
which, the overall meaning of the protection of heritage is definitely lost. If we look
back at the quotation at the beginning
of the paper, we can see that all practices of the use of (protected and unprotected) heritage in the meaning of an intensive
tourism exploitation (namely: the one that
is recognized by the neoliberal perception
of the world as useful, namely usable and

21

LJILJANA GAVRILOVI

financially lucrative) also abolish an engagement and true communication inside

it and with it, depriving it of every other
meaning but the economic one. By insisting on its touristification, protected/preserved heritage transforms itself into its
exact opposite: a space (physical, and cultural as well), which is completely deprived
of any meaning, emotions, and therefore
sense.
Exactly that view of the world and heritage
is the view we should beware of, in the
name of the true protection of what has
been preserved from the past and what
should be left for the future. It would need

22

to find a measure: to show/offer tourists a

true tradition, being fully aware of the possibility of their not accepting/not buying it.
That may also be elitism, but not the elitism of power and money, but rather the
one of knowledges, emotions and curiosities, in which the minority the one of a
sufficiently open-minded spirit to take a
risk of putting to the test a dialogue with
the unknown would be in a position to
establish true communication with heritage. In the contrary, only an empty shell of
foregone times, only a dead pig in a jar of
alcohol, as is defined by the tourist guide
of the not-so-far projected future of Ted
Williams.

NON-PLACES OF THE PRESERVED PAST

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