sh. macdonald - mediating heritage; tour guides at the former nazi party rally grounds, nurmeberg.pdf - Nauki społeczne - MKTK

Tourist Studies

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Mediating heritage: Tour guides at the former Nazi Party Rally Grounds,

Nuremberg

Sharon Macdonald

Tourist Studies

2006; 6; 119

DOI: 10.1177/1468797606071473

http://tou.sagepub.com/cgi/content/abstract/6/2/119

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article

Mediating heritage

Tour guides at the former Nazi Party

tourist studies

SAGE PUBLICATIONS

London,

Thousand Oaks and

New Delhi

VOL 6(2) 119–138

DOI: 10.1177/

1468797606071473

www.sagepublications.com

Rally Grounds, Nuremberg

Sharon Macdonald

University of Manchester, UK

abstract This article draws on media theory in order to theorize the role of tour

guides as a form of cultural mediation. It does so by analysing the work of tour

guides at a site of ‘difﬁcult heritage’, the former Nazi Party Rally Grounds in

Nuremberg, Germany. The work of tour guides is here conceptualized primarily as a

process in which guides, and the organization for which they work, are engaged in

trying to encode preferred readings. The empirical study shows how this ‘encoding

attempt’ is a complex, negotiated and sometimes conﬂictual process in which guides

try to deal with the materiality of the site and the social dynamics of the tour group.

This has implications for understanding the nature of mediation and of different forms

of tourism.

keywords difﬁcult heritage; Germany; mediation; Nazi tourism; tour guides

Introduction

This article explores the work of tour guides as a form of cultural mediation.

The signiﬁcance of the role that tour guides play in the tourist experience is

recognized in a now signiﬁcant body of research that draws on a range of dis-

ciplinary perspectives (see Dahles, 2002 for an overview). According to Heidi

Dahles, what these different approaches ‘have in common [is] . . . a strong

emphasis on the mediation activities of guides’ (p. 784). Dahles criticizes this

emphasis for ‘portraying [the guide] as someone who builds bridges among

different groups of people’ (p. 784) and for operating ‘according to a harmony

model of “mediation”, of keeping all parties involved satisﬁed’ (p. 784).This, she

argues, is problematic, not least because it ‘fails to capture the political com-

ponent of guiding’ (p. 785). While Dahles is surely right to be critical of a

‘harmony model’ which screens out the political, my argument here is that

rather than doing away with the notion of ‘mediation’ we need a more

thoroughgoing understanding of what it might involve. Here I draw on media

theory, in which concepts of mediation have been best developed, in order to

119

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120

tourist studies 6:2

suggest an alternative approach to mediation in relation to tourism, and more

speciﬁcally in relation to the work of tour guides.

In doing so, I draw upon empirical material about tour guides at the former

Nazi Party Rally Grounds in Nuremberg, Germany. This is part of a broader

study in which I have been exploring the post-war treatment of the Nazi past

in Nuremberg (see Macdonald, 2006a, 2006b). While the form of tourism

involved in this case might be viewed as ‘atypical’, in that it is less concerned

with pleasure seeking than many other forms of tourism, this makes it no less

valuable for an exploration of processes of mediation. Indeed, the particular

struggles involved in trying to represent a site that was built in order to enlist

visitors to fascist sympathies helps to highlight some of the difﬁcult – and ‘non-

harmonious’ – dimensions that may be involved in mediation. Moreover, as

contemporary representation of the Nazi past is highly political, and implicated

in ongoing identity projects, this case also illustrates well how ‘mediation’ is not

necessarily – and perhaps is only rarely, if ever – apolitical.

Here, I ﬁrst brieﬂy discuss some of the existing literature on tour guiding,

before introducing ideas about mediation drawn from media theory. I then

develop these further through a discussion of tour guiding at the former Nazi

Party Rally Grounds.

Tour guides and guiding

As Dahles (2002) points out, ‘guides are of crucial importance in cultural

tourism, as theirs is the task of selecting, glossing, and interpreting sights’

(p. 784). Del Casino and Hanna (2000: 29) even argue that tourism workers are

so much part of the performance of a site that they in a sense ‘become’ it.

Guides’ mediatory signiﬁcance has often been recognized through reference to

them as ‘culture brokers’. For example, in the now classic work on the anthro-

pology of tourism, Hosts and Guests (1977/1989),Valene L. Smith uses this term

to refer to the local guides who emerged to present ‘Eskimo culture’ to tourists,

and Dennison Nash (1977/1989), while not speciﬁcally mentioning tour

guides, writes of the ‘cultural brokers’ or ‘mediators’ who tend to emerge to

manage relations between ‘hosts’ and ‘guests’. In both of these examples, as

reﬂected in the book’s title and many of the cases with which it deals, the situ-

ation depicted is one of discrete bounded cultures, that of the locals and that of

the outsiders, the members of which frequently misunderstand each other.

Indeed, in Nash’s theorizing, one result of an expansion of tourism tends to be

an increasing polarization between the two groups. In such contexts and

accounts, cultural brokers become the means through which contact between

the separate groups is managed. The term ‘cultural broker’ is also used in this

way by others, such as Christopher Holloway (1981), who, in a study of guides

on coach tours, describes guides as ‘initiat[ing] the tourist into the culture of the

host country’ (p. 387) – a task which may entail negotiating between providing

information and actually performing and even personifying the ‘host culture’.

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Macdonald Mediating heritage 121

One criticism of the notion of ‘culture broker’ is that it implies a model of

discrete ‘cultures’ and a clear-cut gulf between ‘hosts’ and ‘guests’. Such a model

has been increasingly questioned within anthropology and tourism research

(e.g. Abram et al., 1997; Gupta and Ferguson, 1997; Sherlock, 2001). Neverthe-

less, while it may be inappropriate to think of ‘brokers’ necessarily working

between pre-existing ‘cultures’ of longstanding, most touristic situations involve

organizations, groups and individuals who are consciously engaged in the task

of creating representations of ‘the place’ or ‘the culture’.These are the ‘directors

and stage-managers’ who ‘choreograph tourists’ movements’ (Edensor, 2001:

69), and often involve ‘professional experts’ who ‘help to construct and develop

our gaze as tourists’ (Urry, 1990: 1). Such ‘culture workers’ are engaged in

processes of ‘mediation’, even if the representations involved do not mediate

between two distinct ‘cultures’ in the sense set out by Nash and others, and even

if they may be being consumed by those who might think of themselves as part

of ‘the culture’ being represented.

Rather than seeing ‘culture broking’ as the essence of tour guide activity,

Erik Cohen (1985) – in an important article on tour guides – regards it as one

possible dimension within a range of forms of ‘mediation’ performed by guides.

More speciﬁcally, ‘culture broking’ is classiﬁed by Cohen as a form of ‘com-

municative mediatory’ work, a ‘sphere’ which also includes ‘selection’ (indicat-

ing that which is worthy of touristic attention), providing ‘information’ and,

sometimes, ‘fabrication’ (inventing accounts or deceiving tourists).

Communicative mediation is distinguished from ‘interactional’, which consists

of ‘representation’ (which considers how the guide negotiates between tourists

and hosts) and ‘organization’, which is concerned with practical arrangements.

Despite the scope of activity covered by ‘mediation’ here, and the large number

of sub-categories identiﬁed, Cohen’s complex attempt to set out the roles and

activities involved in tour guiding posits ‘mediation’ as just one of two main

types of tour guide activity, and indeed as characteristic of a type of guide that

he refers to as ‘the mentor’. ‘Pathﬁnders’, by contrast, engage in ‘leadership’

rather than ‘mediation’; and ‘leadership’, like ‘mediation’, is broken down into a

range of ‘components’ and sub-components.

While Cohen’s attempt at a taxonomy is useful both in distinguishing

between different kinds of guides and the range of activities that they under-

take, 1 it is often difﬁcult to see why certain activities are classiﬁed as they are or

to know how to categorize empirical material. Although he attempts to relate

his taxonomy to notions of centre and periphery – understood (though with

further qualiﬁcations) as the extent to which a site is established as worthy of

tourism or not – there is less sense of an overall governing model than in his

influential typology of tourist types (Cohen, 1979). Apart from the

centre/periphery division, it is unclear how to bring in consideration of

the kind of site involved. Moreover, like other taxonomies of guides and guid-

ing that have followed in its wake, it is not well attuned to the kinds of trans-

formations and indeterminacy that may be involved in the guiding process –

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tourist studies 6:2

something that has been especially well illustrated by ethnographic research

(such as Fine and Speer, 1985; Dahles, 1996; Handler and Gable, 1997; Eade,

2002; Bruner, 2005). And although Cohen refers to the ‘dynamics’ of the role,

and provides some interesting observations on what is entailed in the profes-

sionalization of tour guiding, the scheme here does not give much handle on

how to analyse the process – or cultural work – of guiding.

Nevertheless, Cohen et al. (2002) alert us to many aspects of tour guide activ-

ity that may need to be considered in its analysis. This includes not only such

matters as the ‘sight sacralization’ (see also Fine and Speer, 1985) that guides may

perform, but also their more mundane work of managing the group (something

also emphasized, though not really linked to the analysis, by Holloway, 1981).

Later, I shall turn to media theory for an alternative framework for looking at

the work of guides. In doing so, I will suggest that the term ‘mediation’ be used

to consider the broad scope of the work that they do, rather than to refer more

speciﬁcally to, say, ‘interpretation’ or to ‘making harmonious’. Moreover, rather

than taxonomically dissecting tour guide work into discrete elements, I suggest

a model in which the interrelationship of different elements is key.

Mediation, encoding and tour guides

According to Kelly Askew (2002), ‘[t]he term “mediation” – which together

with “media” derives from the Latin medius meaning “middle” – assumes two or

more poles of engagement’ (p. 2).Thus, in looking at tour guiding as a form of

mediation, we are prompted to consider the different engagements involved,

and the particular positioning of those involved in the engagements. As Roger

Silverstone (1999) writes in relation to media studies, ‘mediation involves the

movement of meaning’ (p. 13). As such, this

requires us to think of mediation as extending beyond the point of contact between

media texts and their readers or viewers. It requires us to reconsider it as involving

producers and consumers of media in a more or less continuous activity of engage-

ment and disengagement with meanings which have their source or their focus in

those mediated texts, but which extend through, and are measured against, experience

in a multitude of different ways. (p. 13)

A thoroughgoing account of mediation would thus require a tracing through of

the making of a media text/tourist site and the various engagements of audi-

ences/visitors with – and beyond – it. But even if particular studies do not cover

the full range of what might be included, they can usefully consider particular

aspects of the wider mediation process. As Mieke Bal (1996) notes of museum

curators, they are ‘only a tiny connection in a long chain of events’ (p. 16). So

too with tour guides: they are not the expository agents or the only mediators.

Nevertheless, as noted earlier, they play an important role partially mediating

between the site and its visitors. Interestingly, this does not have a self-evident

parallel in many other media studies cases, where audiences generally confront

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sh. macdonald - mediating heritage; tour guides at the former nazi party rally grounds, nurmeberg.pdf

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