Development of intangible cultural heritage as a sustainable tourism resource: the intangible cultural heritage practitioners’ perspectives

ABSTRACT

Authentic intangible cultural heritage (ICH) provides a community with a unique selling point in the globally competitive tourism industry. The process of commodification of ICH, however, has threatened its authenticity and thus sustainable tourism approaches are required to achieve successful transmission and promotion of ICH as a sustainable tourism resource. This paper explores the priorities of ICH practitioners in relation to the development of ICH as a sustainable tourism resource, by utilising South Korea as a case study. The results revealed that from the ICH practitioners’ perspectives, authenticity is a holistic notion integrating the transmitted customs, inherited meanings and the practitioners’ identities. ICH practitioners agree with the potential positive symbiotic relationship between transmission of authentic ICH and promotion of ICH as a tourism resource. To achieve the positive symbiotic relationship, locals’ awareness of ICH, ICH practitioner empowerment and parallel development between tourism development and transmission of ICH are necessary. To date, the practitioner approach to the authenticity of ICH and ICH as a sustainable tourism resource is little explored in the literature, thus this paper makes a valuable addition to the area of sustainable heritage tourism.

KEYWORDS:

• Intangible cultural heritage
• authenticity
• intangible cultural heritage practitioners
• sustainable tourism
• heritage tourism

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes on contributors

Soojung Kim is a Ph.D. candidate at Griffith University, Australia. Her research interests include intangible cultural heritage, sustainable development and cultural heritage promotion and safeguarding.

Associate Professor Michelle Whitford is an Associate Professor and the Acting Dean Learning and Teaching of Griffith Business School. She manages and coordinates a range of academic and consultancy research projects in the areas of Indigenous tourism and events with a focus on supply and demand, capacity development, entrepreneurship, authenticity and commodification. She has also co-coordinated research projects for various organisations including the Sustainable Tourism Cooperative Research Centre, the Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Island Studies, Indigenous Business Australia and the Department of Resources, Energy and Tourism. Michelle’s most recent awards include the Emerald Literati Network Awards for Excellence Outstanding Paper in 2014 and the 2016 Donald Getz Biennial Award for Outstanding Research in Planned Events.

Professor Charles Arcodia is the Deputy Head of the Department of Tourism, Sport and Hotel Management. He joined Griffith University in 2012 and has held previous full-time positions at other universities in Australia. Charles Arcodia is an experienced tertiary educator having taught and researched in the tertiary sector for over 20 years. He has held leadership positions in a variety of educational and business service contexts. Directly before he joined the higher education sector he was involved in the industry in a variety of organisational and management roles. His primary areas of teaching and research interest are in event management, tourism and hospitality education, and various tourism and related cultural issues. He has published widely in quality international journals and presents regularly at academic conferences. He frequently reviews scholarly papers for various high quality journals and has supervised to completion a number of Ph.D. scholars.

ORCID

Charles Arcodia http://orcid.org/0000-0002-9196-9591