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Heritage Tourism, Conflict, and the Public Interest: An Introduction

This special issue explores how and why conflicts arise in the development and practice of heritage tourism. From New York City’s Ground Zero and the archaeological site of Chichen Itza in Yucatan, Mexico, to an Underground Railroad site in Pennsylvania and a post-industrial Massachusetts town, the authors of these four articles are concerned with identifying the often overlapping interests of stakeholders in their attempts to gain access to and guide the development of heritage resources. This issue grows out of a 2003 symposium entitled ‘Resolving Conflicts in Heritage Tourism: A Public Interest Anthropology Approach’, at the 102nd annual meeting of the American Anthropological Association in Chicago, Illinois, organised by Dr Peggy Reeves Sanday, Noel Salazar, and Benjamin Porter of the University of Pennsylvania. The symposium encouraged scholars to consider heritage apart from official and ‘top-down’ definitions as well as how an emerging methodological approach, public interest anthropology (PIA hereafter),1 could be applied to the analysis of heritage conflicts. This introduction places the issue’s key themes of heritage, tourism, conflict, and the public interest in focus and illustrates their intersection in a brief case study from modern Jordan. Following this, the four ensuing articles are discussed with an emphasis on their contributions to the issue’s themes. Heritage and heritage tourism are longfamiliar terms to this journal’s readership and our goal here is not to recapitulate what others have described so well elsewhere.2 In particular, we analyse a process of revaluation that objects, sites, and practices undergo before they are placed within the domain of heritage. Additionally, we explain why tourism is an ideal realm in which to investigate heritage and why the conflicts that erupt around heritage tourism are particularly volatile.