Heritage performance – reinforcement

So what’s being reinforced? Look at the dominant one. So here’s just some examples of what people are reinforced when they visit heritage sites. So for this person, “It reinforces, it makes me appreciate and feel proud of my country”. “It reinforces, it makes me appreciate and feel proud of my country”. So proud in country was an important sense of being reinforced. Here from England, even “For a short time feeling part of history, even recent history. It just brings things home - It reinforces how you feel about the past”. “Each time we come to a place like this (It is an Australian site), it just reinforces what I’ve seen and just makes me feel good to be in Australia.

I don’t really take anything new away from coming into this site, but it’s my knowledge and views that have been reinforced. That’s why I come. ” Now what was reinforced can be as the show of nationalistic feelings, but it could also be reinforcement of family identity, reinforcement of particular identities as a member of an ethnic group, or member of social class, or it could be reinforcement of a political views and values. As I said, at the performances of sites of sub-national importance, the performances were often focused on inter-generational communication. And this could be quite critical and emotionally engaged performances.

At national sites, when I was measuring the register of engagement, this is across the relatives within the four and a half thousand people I interviewed. The register of engagement could be shallow characterized as comfortable or compass. What emerges from the Data is that visitors from dominant ethnic affiliations visiting sites in their own country, and in particular those sites of national narratives and storytelling tend to be emotionally investing, but relatively uncritical and reinforcing in those national narratives?

Overseas tourists who are less invested in the national narratives of the countries that they were visiting will tend to be a little bit more critically engaged, a little bit more thinking about possibilities and attempting to make more active links to people and the stories being told. Those from non-dominant ethnic backgrounds and those from dominant ethnic backgrounds but with low educational attainment will be far more actively emotionally invested in the sites that they are visiting. There will be far more aware of the emotions that they’re having and using those emotions to help them work through the meaning of the site for them. That says something really rob bad about the educational processes in three countries that I looked at.

The more educated you were, the less engaged or less willing you were to talk about your emotions in association with heritage and the past. But what I was finding is that those who were emotionally invested and were emotionally aware are those who had a certain level of what we might call emotional intelligence. Definition of which is being aware that you’re having an emotional sponsor, and using those emotions to help you think through the meanings that have been offered to you or that you are constructing about the site. Those visitors with that high EQ or emotional intelligence were far more willing to cognitively engaged, intellectually engaged with the material that they were looking at.

Now, visitors when asked why do you visit, often said they came for educational reasons, If we were to ask using normal touristy techniques, why do you visit? Most would say, oh yes, I come because of the education. But if we look, if we drill passed that, if we dig deeper, many of them will then admit as this woman does. “I should say something like, you know, I’m here for education learning, I should say that. But to be honest, the experience that I’m having is just enjoying the beauty of the place and enjoying the gardens, and having a lovely lunch; having a nice day out.

” Now, as I said to you before, education is often an assumption that is what tourists go in anglophone contexts. Now, in response to the question, is there anything that you have seen already here today that has changed her views about each of the past or present? 20% of visitors said “yes” across the four and a half thousand that I interviewed, with this frequency dropping as low to 10% on sites of national identity making. I know those said “yes”, the views changed in effect 9% of them is within the 20%. We’re really offering that they had gained a little bit of more information， their views actually hadn’t changed.

So you’re looking at about 11% of people who had their views changed about the past and the meaning of that past. For the present, again, reinforcing the idea that people come for reinforcement.