The truth about Texas : a naturalistic study of the construction of heritage

Abstract

This investigation is set during what some regard an unheroic age -- an era of historical amnesia in the West, where compatriots are increasingly manufactured through the presentation of preferred narratives about the past. It attempts to establish a research agenda in iconology -- on state administrators of heritage-tourism as agents of normalcy, totalizing the histories they externalize. Exploring the preinterpretations (i.e., the unformulated thematics) within the discourse and praxis of these conceivable 'administrator-judges', it scrutinizes how tourism matters -- probing meanings of heritage-tourism at supra-individual and macro-cosmic levels. Given the theoretically invertebrate nature of tourism studies upon iconological issues of domination / subjugation involved in the past's 'pasteurization', it becomes a transdisciplinary inquiry of universe maintenance, robbing sociology, philosophy, anthropology, political science, marketing, communications and history for insight into social truth as collective coercive act. Thus, the investigation absorbs a Foucauldian / Nietzschean conceptualization of truthmaking - - where truth is fused with power: the validity of any particular truth is deemed relative to a specific regime-of-power. This fusion is found substantive for both the study problem (in exploring the Foucauldian 'gaze' of heritage-tourism administrators) and the research problem (exploring social science approaches able to capture the contemporary pluriverse of truths). Hence, concepts of postmodernity are frequently used to distill the temporal and inventive nature of the truths that unfold within 'editorialized heritage'. Plumbing the possible multivocality of 'the talk' of 'agents of normalcy', the investigation is constructivist, here deploying a naturalistic inquiry methodology as a catalyst study of pastmaking in Texas -- viz., as an adjuvant inquiry for the longhaul / blanket research agenda. Timing and access difficulties during summer 1992, however, diminished the interactive, in-dwelling and iterative force of that adjuvant contextualization. Instead, the available discourse was, restrictively, a one-time batch of 'public-professional' literature, published by the target Texan state agency...