Paper short abstract:

This paper explores the way the tourism industry has led to cultural realignment throughout the world, giving examples of specific locations from village to city. Cultural realignment is the intentional, proactive practice of manipulating a culture or its aspects with a specific objective in mind, through for example interpretation, image-making, commodification and branding.

Paper long abstract:

This paper explores the way the tourism industry has led to cultural realignment throughout the world, giving examples of specific locations from village to city. Cultural realignment is the intentional, proactive practice of manipulating a culture or its aspects with a specific objective in mind, through for example interpretation, image-making, commodification and branding.

The sheer scale of the global tourism industry, with around 1 billion international travellers in 2011, and many more domestic tourists, means it has a massive economic importance and impacts on host communities in ways including social, cultural, economic and environmental. This scenario leads to intense competition between locations, and is increasingly being led by marketing and the drive for a unique selling point and higher profile. This paper argues that tourism is a unique and powerful aspect of globalisation and that the concept of cultural realignment helps us to perceive and analyse one of its burgeoning facets.

Communities are continually evolving, and tourism's stimulation of cultural realignment is worthy of special attention, as it impacts on numerous aspects of identity (place, culture, heritage, personal and professional), and encourages the commodification of culture (heritage products, festivals, events). Specific examples examined include villages in the Canary Islands and the Dominican Republic, and the city of Glasgow, giving an idea of the variety and scale of impact, a process which can be expected to increase dramatically.