The Politics of Cultural Legitimacy in Walking Tours
Date Issued
2016
Date
2016
Author(s)
Kao, Yu-Ting
Abstract
This article regards walking tour as a mechanism or recognition framework with legitimizing effect. It is increasingly appropriated by actors with diversified purposes and hence manifests itself as an arena of cultural politics. Based on official documents, journalism, online information as well as participant observation and in-depth interview, five types of walking tours are classified and their historical context examined. These include 1) parade-like historic tours, 2) local cultural tours, 3) tours featuring natural environment, 4) tours of stylish consumption and 5) tours aiming to promote social issues as well as empowerment. Following de Certeau’s notion of walking tactic, this article further refers to Bourdieu’s ideas of cultural hierarchy and symbolic power to suggest that the framework of a guiding tour, which involves the impartation of knowledge and therefore a sense of legitimacy, could alter the image of marginalized communities and landscapes, enabling them to win recognition and even resources from the mainstream society. Walking tours in the city are therefore not only capable of guiding recognition, but also an intervention into the society as well as a possible mechanism of the re-production of cultural values. Nevertheless, this legitimizing effect induced by the practices of walking tours is always embedded within particular times and the dominant value and taste exist therein, and therefore is always limited. The walking tours at the early period in Taiwan for example were always led by the authorized speakers who were deemed as professionals, and the landscapes presented during the tour were always materially evident and heritagized objects with beautiful forms. The voices of the marginalized were nowhere to be seen. Yet, with democratization and the thriving of cultural governance in the cities, the recent practicing framework of walking tours have increasingly turned to personalized and stylish ways of narratives. This turn of walking tours seems beneficial for the representation of multiple voices, but it meanwhile fits perfectly well into the post-industrial cultural economy. While the recognition framework of walking tours begin freeing itself from the authorized way of seeing, it however risks being framed by the consuming taste and appeals for aesthetics at this new era. The same period also sees the emergence of social movements and the popping up of various organizations aiming at social transformation. They are prompted by the violent re-structuring of society, and they adopt the mechanism of walking tour as instrument for political aims. Nevertheless, the actors and issues of this last type of walking tour are often too peripheral to carry out legitimizing effect as potent as the stylish one. When combined, the political purpose of the former might easily be eliminated or incorporated by the latter. Within one walking tour, heterogeneous appeals of legitimization are anticipated by different actors, and different actors will appropriate this recognition framework according to their own values, on the same landscape, thus propagating variegated versions of cultural legitimacy to the same group of audience. This is how walking tours come to be the arena where multiple values compete. While the marginalized groups’ adopting this strategy is confined in effect, subversion of cultural hierarchy might still occur if this framework is repetitively conducted and connected with other strategies. Some unknown others might be touched eventually, and become the break through which the values in the dark could find their way to the brightness.
Subjects
Walking tour
Walking tactic
Cultural hierarchy
Framework of cultural legitimization
Tours with political aims
Type
thesis
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