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124 cultural conservation
artefacts, their ideas, and their values; to others the
culture of a population is the peculiar or unique
way of life of that population in terms of its mores,
its customs, and its explicit and implied design for
living �1963: 181).
While the culture of some small-scale, tribal or
isolated populations may be relatively homogenous,
the culture �or rather cultures) of complex
societies are never invariable, and they always
change over time. Hence it is important to monitor
the rates of diffusion, acculturation, evolution
and development that are relatively transformative
and enduring. Tourism managers/researchers
working with a given population may recognise
that what is significant �that is, viewable or
protectable) about lands or heritage may change
occasionally.
While preservation invokes the effort to save,
restore and continue customs �particularly of built
representations of culture), conservation is the
effort which ensures the stability of present
inheritances by maintaining them against interference
of some kind in the future. Thus under
conservation, unlike preservation, the inherited
elements or the symbolic features of a given culture
may be altered in use or sanction while they are
marked, cared for and sustained for the generations
to come. Where cultural conservation involves the
identification/protection of a cultural area, it is
important to identify associative and cultural
landscapes, where the former have powerful
religious, artistic or cultural associations with or
without material cultural evidence. It is always
critical to resolve what is being protected, for
whom and for what purpose. Sometimes there may
be nothing that is readily viewable by tourists;
sometimes conservation purposes may clash with
that site's other use values; sometimes a local
population may want the whole of an identified
territory rendered `sacred' �or `conserved'), not just
a single site.
The recent history of tourism and conservation
are closely connected. The conservation movement
around the world is fired by the moral crusade to
maintain living diversity by conserving not only the
biological wilderness of places supposedly uncontaminated
by the physical vestiges of humanity,
but it seeks to maintain the maximum diversity of
cultural heritage by helping retain the supposed
authenticity of the traditions and customs of
people, and by obviating harmful or unwanted
cultural impacts. It is then those pristine places,
and those untouched peoples, that constitute a very
strong appeal in tourism, as increasing volumes of
travellers seek to explore their vision of the other.
In tourism research, Marie-Franhoise Lanfant
�1995) considers that there is currently quite a poor
understanding of the complex relationships that
surround cultural conservation and of the related
processes involving the displacement of the local,
the disruption of systems of reference and the
endowment of heritage with new interpretations.
To Lanfant, the local cannot be meaningfully
understood independent of the global, and a new
truly international sociology of tourism is needed to
probe the processes of mirroring, reflexivity and
transitivity that arise in matters of culture survival,
conservation and identity. Too frequently, to
Lanfant, efforts to measure or monitor cultural
change and cultural conservation have been
dominated by the study of social and/or cultural
impacts, which have positioned tourism only as an
exogenous force. To Lanfant, tourism has been
repeatedly and inadequately envisaged as a force of
social change which arrives unidirectionally to
destroy local societal integrity and identity within
given cultural areas: to her, while tourism has itself
been assumed to be the acting vehicle of change or
of conservation, the rightful status of local actors in
deliberately inviting tourism or exploiting it for
their own ends has been grossly under assessed.
There is now a fascinating medley of nonindigenous
bodies like Tourism Concern �based in
London) and Cultural Survival �based in Cambridge,
Massachusetts) which project strong support
for indigenous peoples in their efforts to
conserve their life-ways and stand up to the
claimed encroachments of tourism and related
industries. Not all of such organisations have been
welcomed by removed populations in isolated/
undeveloped parts of the world, however, for the
ideological stances they adopt are quite varied.
Hollinshead �1996) has attempted to clarify this
ideological nightmare in and around cultural
conservation by adapting Bodley's applied anthropological
continuum of certain political orientations
of such caring/activist organisations towards
tourism. There are three principal perspectives on