From Cultural Tourism to Festival Construction: A Critical Approach for All Festivals Held in Taiwan

• Main Authors: Kang Pan, 潘罡
• Other Authors: 朱宗慶
• Format: Others
• Language: zh-TW
• Published: 2008
• Online Access: http://ndltd.ncl.edu.tw/handle/gchx6k

碩士 === 國立臺北藝術大學 === 藝術行政與管理研究所碩士班 === 96 === In 1996, Council of Cultural Affairs has announced a policy to support local governments to organize their own festivals in cities and towns. Suddenly, a lot of festivals have proliferated all over the country. At the beginning, they have been boosted as one of the creative industries and have been constructed to attract tourists, to generate cultural and creative power. However, many festivals have been suspended or even terminated in recent years. What the worst is many festivals have been condemned by mass media as chaos, full of bewildering things and even scandals. But mass media cannot justify themselves because there are many faults in their reports. However, their comments on festivals have stimulated me to seek solution for all festivals in Taiwan. How can a local government construct one successful festivalNULL How can they sustain the festival and still get applause for many yearsNULL My research shows that some concepts and theories from cultural tourism will offer the solution. Since the latter half of 1970s, many anthropologists and social scientists have studied and published substantial works on tourism. Both symbolic cultural issues and socioeconomic issues in tourism have been deeply explored to provide insights into this leisure industry. One of the celebrated writer, Dean MacCannell, saw the tourists in pursuit of authenticity after finding themselves lost in this modern world. He also presented a model of modern society, i.e. structure genuine and spurious, to examine the social structure of modernity. His theories and model can be fully applied to the construction of festivals, which is regarded as one kind of cultural tourism nowadays. Genuine structure is composed of the values and material culture manifest in the true sights. The spurious side of the social structure of modernity is composed out of information, memories, images and other representations which become detached from genuine cultural elements. If one festival is built on the genuine structure of society, it is very likely to be a successful one.