This analysis of the relevance of Thailand’s heritage to tourism has
adopted two perspectives: that of visitor trends, which have been
scrutinized in terms of site attendance and of response to official
promotion; and that of heritage as a tourist construct, whose meaning
and authenticity in the tourism context can be alternatively given by
an international organization (ICOMOS), a government office (TAT),
a dissenting archaeologist (Srisakra), or the tourists themselves.
Following Cohen (1988), this analysis entails a notion of heritage’s
authenticity as “negotiable” on the basis of the tourist’s own experience.
In fact, there is no heritage as such. Heritage is the result of
the process of selection and authentication of the material past
operated by scholarly discourses. But the more globalization, of which
tourism is a main agent, homogenizes habits and landscapes all
around the world, the more whatever is available of the past tends to
be iconicized as a symbol for national identification and, in touristic
terms, as a unique sight. This “end-of-modernity” search for historical
likelihood (Vattimo 1988) is resulting in the unfolding, recovery
and creation of a variety of pasts, including those that have been
excluded or marginalized by national historical narratives, such as
colonial and regional ones, insofar as they can be cornmodified by the
tourism industry. Once the material evidence of these recovered pasts
is given emphasis, they may result to be at variance with the tenets
of the official historical narrative and thus promote alternative
readings of it. Thailand, which is proudly purported by the nationalist
historiography as the only country to have avoided colonization in
Southeast Asia, should also be able to sell a “colonial past”, such as
the Oriental Hotel or the Eastern and Oriental Express.