Theming Asia Culture Nature and Heritage in A Transforming Environment

Tourism Geographies
An International Journal of Tourism Space, Place and Environment
ISSN: 1461-6688 (Print) 1470-1340 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rtxg20
Theming Asia: culture, nature and heritage in a

transforming environment
Maribeth Erb & Chin-Ee Ong
To cite this article: Maribeth Erb & Chin-Ee Ong (2017) Theming Asia: culture, nature
and heritage in a transforming environment, Tourism Geographies, 19:2, 143-167, DOI:
10.1080/14616688.2016.1238501
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Download by: [179.95.49.228] Date: 16 October 2017, At: 06:09

TOURISM GEOGRAPHIES, 2017
VOL. 19, NO. 2, 143–167
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/14616688.2016.1238501
Theming Asia: culture, nature and heritage in a transforming

environment
Maribeth Erba and Chin-Ee Ongb,c
a
Department of Sociology, National University of Singapore, Singapore; bCultural Geography Department,
Wageningen University, Wageningen, The Netherlands; cDepartment of Geography, National University of
Singapore, Singapore
ABSTRACT ARTICLE HISTORY

This paper introduces a special issue on Theme Parks in Asia with Received 25 May 2015
Downloaded by [179.95.49.228] at 06:09 16 October 2017
reflections on how the various theoretical ideas on theming and Accepted 27 August 2016
theme parks that are found in the social science literature can help KEYWORDS
us to understand the proliferation of theming and theme parks in Authenticity; cultural village;
contemporary Asia. How does theming create a specific spatial and Disneyization; heritage;
social form that has meaning in a transforming Asia? We trace here theme park; Asia
the rising importance of theming in places of consumption,
education, entertainment and everyday life and argue that further 关键词
attention is needed to understand the transformation of ideas of 原真性; 文化村; 迪斯尼化;
遗产; 主题公园; 亚洲
culture, nature and heritage within the context of theme park
development in Asia. We look at arguments that suggest that
theming is part of human cognitive processes, that it creates a
frame that gives the content a particular order and meaning; we
also consider theming within the context of theories of
Disneyization and the ‘experience economy’ in leisure and tourism
to explore how ‘new’ experience-based consumerism, and the
designing of coherent ‘imagineered’ spaces, plays a role in ordering
our social worlds. We also examine how debates over the
authenticity or superficiality of theme parks, and more generally in
cultural display and preservation, can take on new twists in Asia. We
do this by drawing on a review of postmodernist perspectives on
themed parks to show how theme parks in Asia can be better
understood through nuanced inquiries into the ways cultural,
natural and heritage images and icons are cited, referenced and
projected, departing from a simple ‘copy’ versus ‘original’
dichotomy. Finally, we position and introduce the papers included
in this special issue and suggest further possible research into such
a fertile research field.
摘要
本文为|亚洲主题公园}特刊的导论性文章, 反思了社会科学文献
中有关主题化和主题公园的各种理论思想是如何有助于我们理解
现代亚洲蓬勃发展的主题化和主题公园现象。主题化是如何创造
了一种在亚洲转型中有特定意义的社会空间形态? 我们在本文追
溯了主题化在消费、教育、娱乐以及日常生活场所中日益突出的
意义, 认为未来需要进一步关注文化、自然和遗产思想在亚洲主
题公园发展背景下的转化。我们审视了一些观点认为, 主题化是
CONTACT Maribeth Erb socmerb@nus.edu.sg
© 2016 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group

144 M. ERB AND C.-E. ONG
人类认知过程的一部分, 它创造了一种框架, 让人类认知过程具有

特定的秩序与意义。我们也在迪斯尼化理论和休闲旅游体验经济
理论脉络中思考了主题化, 探讨了新的体验型消费主义和连贯的
想象地方的设计是如何在社会世界秩序化中发挥作用的。我们也
审视了主题公园以及更广意义的文化展示与保护的原真性与肤浅
性争论在亚洲如何以新的形式交织在一起的。我们通过一个后现
代主义视角的主题公园的综述表明, 从简单的 ‘拷贝-原创’二元论
分析到细微地拷问自然、文化遗产图像符号引用、参照与投射的
方法, 是如何可以更好地理解亚洲的主题公园。最后, 我们在这一
理论脉络下定位并且介绍了本特刊的文章, 同时提出了这一富饶
的研究领域进一步开展的研究方向。
Introduction
Part of what is involved in tourism is the purchase of a particular themed experience… . (Urry,
2002, p. 138).
… theme parks represent extraordinary spatial and social forms, they offer some of the most
basic needs, reflect deep and powerful emotions and cognitive modes, and present some of
the most telling and controversial representations of the world (Lukas, 2008, pp. 7–8).
This special issue considers the transformation of ideas of culture, nature and heritage
due to the proliferation of the ‘extraordinary spatial and social form’ of the theme park in
contemporary Asia. For tourism researchers, theming is a vital topic; indeed, Urry pointed
out, part of what tourism is about is ‘the purchase of a … themed experience’ (Urry, 2002,
p. 138). The increasing importance of theming in places of consumption, entertainment
and everyday life experiences has been commented on by many observers (Bryman,
2004; Gottdiener, 2001; Lukas, 2007c, 2008; Schlehe, Uike-Bormann, Oesterle, &
Hochbruck, 2010; Urry, 2002), who often point out how the popularity of themed spaces
grew after Walt Disney made the theme park a phenomenal success in the world of
amusement parks in mid-century, post-war America. Understanding the popularity of
themed spaces, and especially the theme park, and analyzing them as a window on a
transforming society, has occupied many scholars, particularly in regard to their role in
American society and culture (Gottdiener, 2001; Jackson & West, 2011). The editors of this
special issue felt that a focus on the rapid proliferation of theming, particularly the growth
of theme parks in twenty-first-century Asia, would likewise provide an interesting lens by
which to contemplate some of the transformations taking place in contemporary Asia.
Theme parks are claimed by some observers to be the ‘star players’ in the tourism
industry, ‘play[ing] a special and important role in generating tourism demand’ (Raluca &
Strutzen, 2008, p. 641). So, with the average annual growth of international tourism in
Asia being the world’s highest over the 2005–2014 period, according to the World Tourism
Organization1 (2015), and with the phenomenal increase in the numbers of international
and domestic tourists originating from Asia (Winters, Teo, & Chang, 2009), it seems timely
to give consideration to how tourism developments in Asia have been effected by the
growth of theme parks. Some scholars examining tourism developments in Asia and other
developing world regions have argued that tourism theories and concepts have been for
too long dominated by a Eurocentric view (Alneng, 2002; Cohen & Cohen, 2015; Winters,
2009; Winters et al., 2009). Similarly, although there has been some attention given to
theme park growth and development in Asia (Ap, 2003; Choi, 2012; Hendry, 2000;
TOURISM GEOGRAPHIES 145
Hitchcock, 1998; Matusitz, 2011; Raz, 2000; Ren, 2007; Yeoh & Teo, 1996), concepts sur-
rounding the theme park industry and the meaning of theming and theme parks might
similarly be argued to originate from the perceived Euro-American origin of theme parks.
Thus, giving some consideration to this geographic bias in the conceptual tool kit of tour-
ism studies as it influences our understandings of the phenomenon of theming and the
theme park industry in Asia is also an issue worth pursuing.
The popularity of the theme park model in Asia, particularly for several decades in
Japan, after the introduction of Disneyland there in the 1980s, has been extensively docu-
mented by observers, such as Hendry (2000, 2010). In more recent years, there has been a
trend of integrating theme parks, casinos, retail spaces and museums into single develop-
ments. Along with the opening of several new global theme parks in Asia, such as Hong
Kong Disneyland in 2005, Universal Studios Singapore in 2011, and the massive Shanghai
Disneyland in 2016, Asia is on the brink of overtaking North America’s theme park atten-
dance. Such new theme park developments, however, have happened alongside an exist-
ing array of ethnic parks and cultural villages, popular-culture-based amusement parks
and other forms of thematic cultural and leisure spaces. Examining these spaces, and
what they might mean in contemporary Asia, particularly in relationship to culture and
history, was our intention when we organized a panel on heritage transformation and
theme parks, at the first Asian Studies in Asia conference in Singapore in 2014. These
articles all originate from that panel, and although they are limited in their geographic
coverage of the Asian region, we hope that these articles, and our introductory paper
here, can help to expand our original scope beyond just thinking about the relationship
between ‘heritage’ and ‘theming’, to considering the popular spread of theming, and
especially theme parks more generally in the Asian region and beyond.
Considering Theming: Power, Order and Leisure Spaces
Theming is a motivated form of geographical representation in which meaningful connec-

tions are made among unifying ideas, symbols or discourses (Lukas, 2007a, p. 2).
It has been suggested by scholars such as Lukas that ‘theming’ is basically a symbolic
narrative process, extremely satisfying and intrinsic to human cognitive processes and
entertainment pursuits (see also Gottdiener, 2001). As a process of ordering and symboli-
cally marking environments, theming is intrinsic to the way that human beings make
sense of, and create sense of, the world around them; as a ‘motivated form of geographi-
cal representation’, theming is integral to religious spaces, and it might be argued that a
certain sacred quality adheres to a space that has been ordered in a thematic way. Due to
the ubiquity of themed spaces in the contemporary world, Lukas suggests that it is hard
for us to see the significance and consequences of theming in our lives (2007a, p. 2).
Theming in contemporary consumer spaces, he argues, uses this ordering, symbolism,
and ‘sacred quality’, to tap into and create desire. In fact, it appears that often in order to
be ‘successful’ in today’s competitive consumer-driven economy, businesses of various
kinds are almost forced to theme, since it has become ‘the recognizable form of architec-
ture and associated (performative) service that people have in their minds’ (Lukas, 2007a,
p. 3). Theming may even be recognized and suspected as a strategy for unifying a particu-
lar space and creating it as a ‘destination’, where it was not intended (see Wong, this
issue).
Theming creates desire both through immersion and the use of ‘imaginaries’ (Salazar,
2012; Salazar & Graburn, 2014). It is perhaps the juxtaposition of these two processes that
ironically associate theming with the ‘authentic’ as well as the ‘inauthentic’. Immersion
takes place through what Lukas calls the ‘corporeal realities of representation’ (Lukas,
2007c, p. 6), where a ‘multi-sensory ambience’ (Lukas, 2007b, p. 80) is created through the
use of sights, smells, sounds and tastes in a themed space; this is what shapes an ‘authen-
tic’ experience for a visitor. This immersion becomes what Bella Dicks calls an intensifica-
tion of ‘reality’ or the creation of an ‘essence’. This essence is formed by a process of
condensation which eliminates the ‘dead space’ found in normal environments; this is
done by a ‘technological effect which aims to make environments thematically coherent’
(2003, pp. 93–94). Authenticity in these environments, she suggests, is created through
this technological effect and the great attention to detail.
On the other hand, Lukas argues, theming an environment can be a ‘risky’ endeavour,
since it might be considered ‘gimmicky’ (Lukas, 2007a, pp. 3–4). While he suggests this is
particularly true for restaurants, which might be more concerned with showcasing the
quality of their food, it might also be considered to be more widely true. This is because
the artefacts and symbolic resources that might be mustered to build a theme, ‘are often
drawn from contrasting, contradictory and unreliable sources’ (Lukas, 2007a, p. 2). It might
be argued this is because theming, particularly in contemporary consumer spaces, draws
on a range of circulating ‘imaginaries’, that Salazar has argued feed into creating touristic
desire and tourist destinations (2012). These ‘imaginaries’ are the various ideas and fanta-
sies about peoples and places that originate from myths and stories which circulate and
help to build ‘unspoken schemas of interpretation’ (Salazar, 2012, p. 864) upon which our
understandings of the world rest. Since these imaginaries often consist of ‘stereotypes’
upon which fantasies are assembled, they tend to be seen as indicative of ‘inauthenticity’.
Expectations and constructions of ‘authenticity’ in themed environments, therefore, are
often very ambiguous; these are arguably negotiated by visitors in their own ways, at par-
ticular locations, according to their own cultural logics about temporality and spatiality,
which will be discussed further below.
The ambiguous nature of themed landscapes, as well spaces where ‘contradictory
myths are often intertwined’ (Young, 2002, p. 5), is interestingly pointed out in the volume,
Theme Park Landscapes: Antecedents and Variations, edited by Young and Riley (2002), as
well as the paper by Tuan and Hoelscher comparing historical European and Chinese plea-
sure gardens with the contemporary place of Disneyland in ‘world culture’ (1997). Themed
landscapes bring together people with often contradictory desires, for example, a desire
for ‘progress’, versus ‘nostalgia’ for a return to the past (Young, 2002, p. 5). They also have
a contradictory structure, in that these sites of ‘paradise’, ‘utopia’ or the ‘cosmic city’, offer
access to ‘contentment’, or ‘happiness’, in a ‘perfect’, morally ‘good’ place, which is theo-
retically open to all, and at the same time they are set away from most of humanity (Tuan
& Hoelscher, 1997, p. 198). Thus, these themed spaces, such as both the Chinese cosmic
city and Disneyland, are built upon the ‘myth’ that these ‘planned cosmic theme parks’
can be sites set away from disorder. These themed environments, some well pre-dating
Disneyland, were attempts to ‘construct a total alternate universe’ (King & O’Boyle, 2011,
p. 8), autonomous and separate from a surrounding world beset with turmoil and unrest.
Papers in the Young and Riley volume focus on the conditions under which these land-
scapes have emerged, and specifically look at diverse types of theme park landscapes
that have appeared globally. While early gardens of the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries
in Europe were themed landscapes of ‘power and taste’ that needed certain learning and
cultural capital to interpret, the authors suggest that today’s themed environments are
more ‘cash cows’ than places of culture and fashion (Young, 2002, p. 4). However, at the
same time, Young suggests that today’s themed environments are massive pilgrimage
sites, where modern pilgrims go to assuage their concerns about rapid change and disor-
der; the themed environment becomes a ‘haven away from the crisis’ (2002, p. 4). In fact,
Young argues that themed environments of various types proliferated in the context of a
rapidly secularizing world in the twentieth century, and implies that they have become
the new ‘sacred monuments’ of our era (see also Sears, 1989). For authors in the Young
and Riley volume, these themed landscapes include not just the parks which we associate
with amusement park entertainment, but also national parks, which Young suggests are
also ‘nationalist theme parks’ of ‘scenic, recreational and ecological landscapes’ (Young,
2002, p. 6), as well as agricultural fairs and ethnic, cultural and historic themed parks. In
this way, theming, which has helped to create order in a transforming world, has lent a
sacred quality to various landscapes which showcase important activities and ideologies.
Theme park as form and social force

Gottdiener (2001) suggests that there was a period of time in Western architecture where
‘the symbolic was consciously and purposely squelched’ (p. 20) in order that ‘form would
follow function’ (p. 26), especially the ‘functional need of accumulating wealth’ (p. 23); this
was to neutralize the symbolism associated with power and wealth utilized in older forms
of architecture. Apart from a few places where fantasy and desire could still reign supreme
in the newly created leisure spaces of the late nineteenth century and early twentieth cen-
tury, such as department stores, movie theatres, amusement parks and world fairs, archi-
tecture was meant to push forward the modernist idea of technology and progress
(Gottdiener, 2001, pp. 29–38). However, these more functional spaces started to lose their
appeal by mid-twentieth century, and the newly constructed Disney theme park became
a popular model for the architecture of the 1970s. Despite the critical views launched at
the Disney Land theme park from its very inception (Marling, 1994) – that it was over-com-
mercialized, an inauthentic ‘pseudo-event’, a contrived cultural space (Boorstin, 1964), as
well as a ‘highly regulated, completely synthetic vision’ that was the antithesis of democ-
racy (Sorokin, 1992, p. 208) – some urban architects praised what the Disney design
concepts actually did for everyday living spaces. One architect suggested that they pro-
duced, ‘nearer to what people want (in a city and living space) than anything architects
have ever given them’ (Robert Venturi, quoted in King, 1981, p. 125).
Theming and the theme park style of organizing and shaping environments, as this
took shape over the twentieth century, has become more and more ubiquitous. Gottdi-
ener argues this is because there is ‘an almost universal applicability of theme park engi-
neering to a variety of cultural contexts’ (2001, p. 127). Dicks argues that theming is a
strategy, that makes environments more ‘legible’ and consequently more ‘visitable’, and
while many places are themed, she argues that theme parks are the epitome of a totaliz-
ing ‘wrap around little world’, that presents a ‘total theatre’, a ‘fictional dream world’
(2003, p. 94). According to Anton Clave whose major work on theme parks has given
many insights into this phenomena (2007), a theme park is a symbolic microcosm with a
distinctive identity, that attempts to create a complete emotional experience in an ‘alter-

native world’ (p. 21). The ‘theme’ is several things at once; it is a ‘marketing strategy’, an
‘argument’, and an ‘organizational foundation’ (2007, pp. 33–35). As a marketing strategy,
theming creates a distinct identity. As an argument, the theme uses story, spectacle and
technology to create specific emotional responses; in this sense, he argues that theming
is a highly effective instrument to transfer emotions and feelings to commercial space,
hence disguising its commercial nature (2007, p. xv). As an organizational principle, them-
ing becomes a ‘complete, closed, self-sufficient universe’ (2007, p. 33) that regulates
rhythm, movement and consumption. Lukas suggests that this ‘total environment’ as a
‘complete entity’ was first created at World’s Expositions, where it was ‘proved that
through careful attention to architecture, performance and symbolism an enclosed space
could be completely distinguished from other spaces’ (2008, pp. 28–29).
Lukas points out that the ubiquity of theme park elements is often assiduously denied
by people in various places like Las Vegas casinos, or interactive museums, where design-
ers or managers of these places want to distance themselves from what a theme park
appears to stand for (2008, p. 19), such as the values of contrivance and superficiality. He
suggests, however, that the theme park has permeated these places, not necessarily in
terms of their concrete being, but as an ‘inconspicuous surface-level expression’. In this
sense, he argues the ‘gaseous’ presence of the theme park is felt everywhere (2008, p. 19).
Hence, Lukas suggests ‘the legacy of the theme park, like that of consumerism and popu-
lar amusements in general, is profoundly and widely felt’ (2008, p. 20). Schlehe et al.
(2010) suggest a similar thing when they note the increasingly hybrid nature of various
educational, cultural and heritage sites that ‘stage’ the past in performative ways, and
hence come to resemble theme parks. In fact, they remark on the tendency of theme
parks, ‘to integrate museum-like elements, thereby blurring the boundaries between
themed entertainment spaces and serious educational institutions’ (2010, p. 11). This is a
point made more generally by Lukas (2008, p. 165), where he suggests that ‘the theme
park competes with the museum for relevance’. In essence, this has forced museums, and
other places of history and heritage, to take on the conceptual organization and technolo-
gies of theme parks in order to relate to visitors increasingly expecting this kind of enter-
tainment and hybridity in spaces of leisure, education and recreation.
Lukas suggests that theme parks have come to be increasingly powerful shapers of ide-
ology and identity, ‘The newest theme parks act as powerful lifespaces – as physical places
that project educational, political, and lifestyle messages amidst all the consumerism’
(2008, p. 244). Lukas suggests that theme parks are a powerful model for the world in a
number of ways. They give us new senses of space and perspective, teaching us to see a
coherence, a unity and wholeness ‘affirm[ing] that all things can be in one place’ (p. 240).
Additionally, he argues that the evolution of the theme park has seen the rise of new
forms of sociality, a more tolerant mixing of different peoples in one place, and the radical
reforming of social units, with the emphasis on family togetherness in a single form of lei-
sure. The theme park creates one great drama; not only the workers, but also the visitors,
are swept up in the performances of the park, convincing individuals that they are ‘a part
of the great show’ (p. 241). Theme parks create, he suggests, new ways of knowing, by
connecting all kinds of cultures and histories in one place; the theme becomes ‘a new
vision of the world.. [it] creates a unique canvas that connects multiple places, people,
events and ideas in one confined space, and thus it condenses and interconnects cultures
in ways previously unimaginable’ (Lucas, 2008). At the same time, it does this, not simply
in a two- or three-dimensional form, but by total immersion, and the use of all the senses.
This immersion projects a powerful (though limited) version of the world, that gives the
experience a sense of wholeness, instead of fragmentation associated with life outside (p.
242). Similarly, King and O’Boyle suggest that although theming bombards our senses,
this ‘barrage of input is confirmatory rather than confusing’ (2011, p. 15), since anything
dissonant with the theme has been ‘edited out’ (King & O’Boyle, 2011). In this sense, one
might call the theme park a form of ‘ordering’, as Franklin (2004) says more generally
about tourism. It might be possible to say that the theme park is ‘as an active ordering of
modernity and not merely an epiphenomenon or outcome with little or no social life
beyond it, as merely experience or consumption’ (Franklin, 2004, p. 278). Themed parks of
various kinds, and themed spaces more generally, have introduced a new way of seeing,
acting and ordering the material objects and human subjects of the world that has pene-
trated deeply into the ways that people interact and imagine the world around them. In
this way, as Franklin suggested elsewhere about tourism, theming might be said to be an
‘active social force, alongside other socio-technical structuring processes, such as national-
ism, [and] consumerism…’ (2008, p. 30). Our suggestion is that theming is one of the
underlying logics that makes these structuring processes of nationalism and consumerism
possible. Through themed landscapes – such as national parks and ethnic/cultural parks –
nationalism, which might be said to be a ‘theming’ of a population, becomes visible and
material. At the same time, consumerism is given a concrete focus and the impetus to
desire, as Lukas, referred to above, suggests, by the immersion created by unitary theming
of various retail and entertainment spaces. In this way, theming becomes a ‘social force’.
The theme park as a form of ‘ordering’ is also clearly a ‘frame’; in this regard, it is inter-
esting to contemplate how some things are considered to be appropriate to be presented
within this frame, while others are not. When Gottdiener first wrote about the ‘theming’ of
America, he commented on how there were only a limited number of ‘themes’ that were
repeatedly recycled in themed spaces, such as ‘The Wild West’, ‘Tropical Paradise’, ‘Ancient
Civilizations’ and the like (2001, pp. 169–186). However, this seems to be no longer the
case, and as Lukas relates (2007c), there has been more recently an extreme variety of
themes attempted, sometimes leading to shock or outrage at the controversial content
presented in themed spaces. These reactions appear to indicate that there are strong feel-
ings about what should be put within the theme park frame, or what can more generally
be used as a theme. The theme park frame appears to be indicating a ‘play frame’
(Bateson, 1976; Handelman, 1977) – what is found within that frame is not to be taken
seriously. This leads to, as Lukas points out in various places in his work, two interesting,
sometimes contradictory entailments. On the one hand, it encourages people to use this
format liberally, thinking that all that matters is the theming process itself, and not what
the theme is (2008, p. 214). Lukas gives several examples of offensive themes. One was
‘Hitler’s Cross’ restaurant in Delhi which opened in 2006, and was subject to a huge global
outcry that forced the owner to eventually remove the ‘Hitler’ theme (2007c, p. 271). The
owner had read the ‘frame’ itself as more important than the content, ‘We wanted to be
different… . . We are not promoting Hitler…we want to tell people that we are different in
the way he was different’ (Lucas, 2007c). On the other hand, precisely because the themed
format appears to belittle the messages and content within, many people find this
themed frame highly offensive if it is presenting something that should be taken
extremely seriously. This was the case with the proposed theme park ‘Disney’s America’,
due to be opened near Williamsburg, Virginia, in the mid-1990s, which promised to give
visitors the true Civil War experience, ‘with all its racial conflict,… .what it was like to be a
slave or…escape through the underground railroad’ (2007c, p. 276). Some of those who
protested this Disney park saw it as a mockery of the suffering of slaves and a ‘cheap
romantiz[ing of] suffering’ (Lucas, 2007c). Other such controversial and eventually failed
theme proposals were a National Rifle Association Sports Blast themed restaurant and
entertainment complex in New York, and Crash Cafe in Baltimore, a restaurant themed on
car and plane crashes. These proposed leisure themes were considered too violent and
destructive, and like Disney’s America, appeared to be belittling human suffering in an
inappropriate themed format. Lukas muses that public outcry rarely appears when the
same topics are portrayed in films (2007c, p. 278) suggesting that the themed frame itself
is extremely significant and is experienced and interpreted by visitors in a particular way.
Disneyization, the ‘experience’ economy and hyper-reality
… .Disneyland not only produces illusion but in confusing it—stimulates the desire for it… .
(Eco, 1986, p. 44).
The increasing expectation to be entertained in broader areas of life and interaction

has led a number of scholars to suggest this as a focus for a ‘new economy’. The ‘enter-
tainment economy’ (Wolf, 1999), or the ‘experience economy’ (Pine & Gilmore, 1998), give
specific names to the changing organization of how and why people purchase things in
the contemporary world. Wolf tells us that not only is entertainment the fastest growing
sector of the modern consumer economy, but it seeps into every other part of it. ‘Experi-
ences’, which have always been part of the entertainment business Pine and Gilmore tell
us (1998, p. 99), become the staging of a ‘product’, so as to make it not merely functional,
but ‘memorable’. This focus on ‘entertainment’, through staging ‘experiences’ as a way of
attracting consumers, is influenced by the popularity and spread of the leisured space of
the theme park. In fact, the format of the theme park has come to influence economic
and social processes more generally. Alan Bryman sums this up in his expression, ‘Disney-
ization’. He defines Disneyization as the ‘process by which the principles of the Disney
theme parks are coming to dominate more and more sectors of American society as well
as the rest of the world’ (2004, p. 1, emphasis in original). He is clear that this is a different
concept than that of ‘Disneyification’, often spoken of by scholars to refer to ‘sanitized’ or
‘cutified’ imitation of the Disney style in the presentation of stories, places, or histories.
Instead, ‘Disneyization’, Bryman argues, is a concept that captures the specificities of post-
modern economies which are focused on consumption, spectacle and display. Consisting
of four core principles, theming, de-differentiation (or hybridization) of consumption, mer-
chandising and emotional (or performative) labour, Disneyization captures the heart of
the post-modern consumer economy and incarnates these principles in the core of the
contemporary amusementscape, the Disney Theme Park. Although not the first ‘theme
park’ in the world, Walt Disney raised the principle of theming to be the key factor of his
new style amusement park. It is frequently commented on by writers on the Disney phe-
nomenon, how Walt Disney eschewed the disorganization and seedy style of the early
twentieth century amusement parks, and wanted to create something attractive and
interesting for both children and adults. Creating ‘theme lands’ was one way that he did
this (Bryman, 2004, pp. 20–21). Theming, however, was also a way of tying together con-
sumption, merchandising and labour into new permutations, by forcing all attention to be
focused on one central thread, which encouraged consumption, drove merchandize and
forced labour to play roles to immerse themselves in a part and create an atmosphere
and fantasy world for visitors. The power of this ‘Disneyization’ configuration tied together
by ‘theming’ has been proven by its spread not only into all amusement parks, but also
into other contemporary entertainment spaces. As argued above, theming has shaped
contemporary entertainment and consumer spaces, and has become the way that cultural
and historical spaces have been reconfigured also as amusement spaces. Bryman sees this
all as a way of promoting more consumption; theming turns a place into a ‘destination’
(p. 34), and with ‘hybrid consumption’ – that is, the more kinds of services and entertain-
ments available – the longer people will stay in a space, and the more money they will
spend (2004, p. 59).
The important role that theming has in motivating consumption cannot be denied;
however, the power of ‘Disneyization’, or the imitation of the format and ideals of the Dis-
ney style theme park, is arguably more than just about merchandising and consumption.
Disney included ‘themes’ to create an immersive environment, including nostalgic presen-
tations of American history and heritage, as a way of emotionally appealing to visitors,
including and perhaps especially for adults. Hence, we would argue that one of the ‘Dis-
neyization’ principles has always included the attempt to ‘culturize’ and historicize enter-
tainment, at the same time attempting to ‘entertainize’ culture, history and heritage, not
only to push more merchandizing, but also to control the creation and construction of
identity.
What we have said so far indicates that we feel that themed spaces in general, and
theme parks more specifically, are highly significant spaces, and deserve serious attention.
There has been a tendency, however, for a range of scholars to see theme parks as ‘super-
ficial’ and the epitome of ‘inauthenticity’, and in this sense the opposite of what might be
considered ‘heritage’. Heritage is what is old, and comes from the past; it is ‘traditional’,
and full of important cultural values. On the other hand, theme parks are new, fun, only
for amusement, and the epitome of superficial values. Although it is clear that these bina-
ries have been increasingly questioned in recent years, there still does seem to be a ten-
dency to denigrate the themed space as a space of superficiality. This denigration of
theme parks, particularly the Disney parks, as the expression of inauthenticity and of
superficiality in American culture, and indicative of the loss of genuine art, culture, and lei-
sure experience, arguably began with Daniel Boorstin (1964). Boorstin saw Disneyland as
the prime example of a contrived ‘pseudo-event’, constructed solely for the purpose of
attracting tourists to the ‘most attenuated form of a nation’s culture’, with ‘little signifi-
cance for the inward life of a people’ (1992 [1961], p. 103); similarly, Sorokin (1992) was
very critical of what he thought the Disney vision – and the themed regulatory environ-
ments that it inspired – was doing to the American city. Disney was leading, he said to an
‘end of public space’, ‘a city of simulations, television city, the city as theme park’ (1992,
p. xiv). Disneyland he characterized as a ‘highly regulated, completely synthetic vision
[that] provides a simplified, sanitized experience that stands in for the more undisciplined
complexities of the city’ (p. 208). To him, this was most visible in the way that history was
used in architecture, ‘buildings that rely for their authority on images drawn from history,
from a spuriously appropriated past that substitutes for a more exigent and examined
present’ (Sorokin, 1992). These critical looks at the ‘contrived’ and ‘synthetic’ world of the
theme park were added to by more sophisticated attempts to understand how the Disney
phenomenon could give insights into the nature of the contemporary world. Eco saw Dis-
ney as the epitome of the ‘hyper-real’ (1986 [1975], p. 43). In his ‘Travels in Hyperreality’
across America, Eco sought out places that to him most characterized America, that is the
obsession with realism, to the point of making and revelling in perfect copies. The theme
park, in this regard, is not an anomaly in American culture, but instead an intricate part of
it. A sentiment that seems to sum this up is, ‘We are giving you the reproduction, so you
will no longer feel any need for the original’ (p. 19), and this Eco argues is because, ‘com-
pulsive imitation prevail[s] where wealth has no history’ (p. 26), an allusion to the fact that
places Eco visited appeared to be obsessively imitating European art and culture. Baudril-
lard similarly looks at Disneyland as the ‘perfect model of all the entangled orders of simu-
lation’ (2001, p. 174). Disneyland is not only an imaginary world, but it is ‘there to conceal
the fact that it is the “real” country’ (p. 175), and everything outside of it, is not real, but
instead ‘hyperreal’ and ‘simulation’. This simulation Baudrillard saw also in the way that
cultural groups became ‘frozen’ and ‘museumized’. Cultural groups, like the infamous
Tasaday, who were ‘discovered’, ‘untouched’ in the Philippines, became a metaphor to
him of the state of culture in the contemporary world. ‘We are all the Tasaday… who have
once more become “what they used to be”’ (p. 170). It is in conversation with these critical
views of culture and its relationship to themed spaces, that we hope the papers in this
special issue will open up some new ways to think about theme parks.
Theming in Asia
Studies on themed environments in Asia have been some of the more important and
innovative works on the subject, dealing with questions of power, inequality, control and
nation-building within themed spaces, as well as querying the meaning of the themed
environment in terms of temporality and spatiality. Some of these works have also inter-
estingly questioned the Euro-centric understandings of ‘authenticity’, and we suggest that
work on themed spaces in Asia can also open this question up further by querying the
meaning of ‘hyper-reality’.
One of the more famous and earliest ethnic theme parks in Asia (to be discussed more
below) was the Taman Mini in Jakarta, Indonesia, which opened in the 1970s and spawned a
number of ‘Mini’ parks in other places in the country (see Robinson, 1997) in subsequent dec-
ades. In Japan, theme parks became very popular in the 1980s and 1990s after the opening
of Tokyo Disneyland in 1981 (Hendry, 2000; Raz, 2000). Theme park development in China
and Southeast Asia took off in the 1990s in a big way. Ethnic and heritage style theme parks
proliferated in Singapore and Malaysia in the 1990s (Hoffstaedter, 2008; Teo & Yeoh, 1997). In
China, Ap (2003) tells us that theme parks were believed to be a sure ‘money spinner’ after
the success of Splendid China in 1989 and the China Folk Culture Villages in 1991; so much
so that these parks were imitated all over the country, often in a very shoddy manner. The
belief that a theme park automatically would guarantee high returns on investment, that
they were easy to operate, and that imitating an already successful park would be a sure win
was quickly proved wrong, however (Ap, 2003, pp. 198–199), and by the end of the 1990s,
many of the hundreds of imitation parks built in China had closed and guidelines were being
drawn there up for understanding what would lead to a successful theme park for the
twenty-first century (Ap, 2003, pp. 210–213).
Some interesting work on the ‘flow of culture’ has looked at the global–local connec-
tions through theme parks in Asia. Van Mannen (1992) analyzed cultural flow, via Disney
parks, specifically focusing on Tokyo Disneyland – its adaptation, resistance, and adoption;
the popularity of heritage-style theme parks, or ‘folk villages’, was also analyzed by some
as being a borrowing from Western models (Hitchcock, 1998; Hitchcock & Stanley, 2010;
Stanley, 1998). Although the predominant tendency has been to see the theme park form
in general as borrowed from the west, some other scholars do suggest some indigenous
models, as do Hendry (2000, pp. 191–196) and Ren (2007, p. 100), who suggest that gar-
dens, in Japan and China, were spaces that long have presented ‘make-believe’, fantastic,
magical places, where people could cross into a different world thought to represent
some other place (see also King & O’Boyle, 2011; Tuan & Hoelscher, 1997). Indeed, an older
generation of theming and themed spaces existed in eighteenth-century China and has
been argued to have inspired others in East Asia (including Japan and Korea) and possibly
Europe. Hai Ren (2007, p. 100), in his examination of the neo-liberal governmentality that
shapes contemporary Chinese theme park consumption, argues that China’s Old Summer
Palace (the imperial gardens of Yuanming Yuan) built in the 1700s may be seen as ‘a pro-
totype of the modern theme park’. This prototypical theme park entertained China’s Qing
Emperors during New Year celebrations and featured both Chinese and European archi-
tectures, artefacts from all over the world and a make-believe marketplace staffed by
eunuchs. For nine days every year, in a make-believe town complete with squares and
town halls, eunuchs emulated aggressive salesmen and simulated quarrels and fights and
entertained the emperors and their entourage with a typical Chinese street scene (Ren,
2007, p. 100) – similar tropes Disney might have picked to entertain modern-day ‘con-
sumer-emperors’ within an idealized American streetscape. Whatever be the source of
these theme park and folk village constructions across Asia, there is a clear interpenetra-
tion of ideas of ‘leisure’, ‘fantasy’ and ‘heritage’ (Hendry, 2000), that are received and
understood by visitors in very complex ways.
As was alluded to above, from the beginning, the reception of the first American-style
theme park in Asia – Tokyo Disneyland in Japan – was extremely positive. As commented
on by people like Mary Yoko Brannen (1992) and Aviad Raz (2000), Tokyo Disneyland is
experienced by Japanese as a ‘foreign vacation’ and the intention of the organizers was
that it would always be a perfect copy of Disneyland in America. The subtle cultural adap-
tations in Tokyo Disneyland are not recognized or acknowledged by Japanese visitors, or
the management. If Disneyland is imagined as ‘the happiest place on earth’, and the epit-
ome of excellent service, the Japanese are determined to excel in this and do it even bet-
ter than in America. The situation in Hong Kong Disney, however, has been very different.
Kimberley Choi (2012) and John Matusitz (2011) show how the type of service culture
expected in a Disneyland park was not well understood or well received in Hong Kong;
various barriers made the ‘cultural flows’ not as smooth as in Japan. Chinese visitors
wanted something more akin to their own cultural expectations: food more appropriate
for their tastes, languages and jokes, d
ecor and dress that were tailored to the local situa-
tion, which Disney eventually complied with. The Disney expectation of ‘smiling service’
was also not acceptable to local workers and so labour practices were also changed
(Matusitz, 2011, pp. 673–676). The atmosphere of the park consequently, according to
Choi, was very much less than magical, since not only did the workers lack the desire to
create the ‘Disney magic’, but the visitors also tended to cut queues, paw the merchandise
and brawl with one another (2012, pp. 390–392). In this regard, it might be interesting to
reflect on how the modern-day theme park form encapsulates a particular moral expecta-
tion of behaviour, and failure to abide by these moral expectations becomes a means of
socializing and disciplining certain standards of leisure behaviour in a global ‘middle class’.
These questions of ‘globalization’ and ‘localization’ of particular tastes, practices and val-
ues within a theme park are dealt with by several papers in this special issue, most notably
those by Chang and Pang in their look at Universal Studios in Singapore, and Ong, in his
examination of the Chimelong Ocean Park in Zhuhai, China.
Much of the early work analyzing ethnic theme parks originated from Asia. One of the
sites that garnered a lot of attention in this regard was the ‘Beautiful Indonesia Miniature
Park’ or ‘Taman Mini’, in Jakarta, referred to above, a park that was built in 1975 by the
then President of Indonesia’s wife, Mrs Suharto. Mrs Suharto had been inspired by a visit
to Disneyland to build something ‘more complete and more perfect… both materially
and spiritually’ (Pemberton, 1994, p. 241). The park which consists of traditional-style
houses from the different provinces of Indonesia, as well as other buildings that serve as
various kinds of museums documenting the work of the nation, is meant to be a ‘ideal-
ized’ and ‘miniaturized’ Indonesia (Pemberton, 1994, pp. 243). Works in the 1990s examin-
ing Taman Mini looked at it as a representation of the nation ‘giving visible form to the
Indonesian nation-state’s self-imaging’ (Errington, 1998, p. 196), and generally used in the
service of ‘nation-building’ for a diverse post-colonial nation (Adams, 1998; Errington,
1998; Hitchcock, 1998; Kipp, 1993; Pemberton, 1994; Picard, 1993). At the same time,
observers saw this representation of ethnic diversity as a very stereotypical one, that was
a ‘folkloristic display’, reducing culture to merely ‘houses, traditional clothing and handi-
crafts’ that could be readily marketed for tourists (Kipp, 1993, p. 111). Pemberton, in fact,
sees Taman Mini as a place that flattens time and space, creating an ahistorical and a-geo-
graphic space, that denies temporality and spatiality. In a reversal of the way that authen-
ticity is usually attributed, as something accruing over time (and perhaps in response to
ideas about Disneyland’s inauthenticity which might rub off on her Mini), Mrs Suharto
claimed the Taman Mini’s halls and houses were already ‘authentic’ and would not lose
this authenticity with the passing of time (Pemberton, 1994, p. 250). These reproduced
houses and monuments, indeed, were claimed to be more authentic and more complete
than the ‘originals’ in their provincial locations, because the whole monument or cultural
artefact, which was miniaturized, could be appreciated and understood; in a similar way,
the whole of Indonesia, located in one place, could be thus understood. Taman Mini was
less confusing and more ordered than the real Indonesia and hence is a ‘simulacrum’
(Pemberton, 1994).
Bruner’s more recent analysis of Taman Mini, however, sees it not simply as an icon of
the nation, a symbol of the power of the state to control culture and ethnicity or a depth-
less and timeless simulacrum. In fact, his observations of the more ‘everyday’ uses of the
park by people who come from different places in Indonesia suggest that they engage
and interact with these sites as ‘real’ sites of their indigenous culture, not as ‘superficial’,
‘stereotypical’ reproductions of their traditions. Instead, what was displayed there was ‘cul-
turally specific, symbolically charged, and emotionally significant’ (Bruner, 2005, p. 220), to
viewers who were familiar with the culture on display. One might say that they do not
relate to the culture in the Taman Mini spaces devoted to their ethnic group as ‘reproduc-
tions’ of their culture, but instead people who visit are in the process of ‘producing’ this
culture anew, as vibrant, living spaces, not museumized, frozen monuments to ethnic
diversity. Bruner’s revealing example is a fashion show of a famous Batak designer, whose
gowns, worn by Javanese models, were modern creations based on traditional styles
that were enthusiastically received by Batak and other audience attendees2 (2005,
pp. 222–224).
Other important works on ethnic theme parks in Asia have showcased how these
spaces as sites of ‘governance’ may also be sites of struggle. In particular, the work of Tim-
othy Oakes (1998, 2012) shows how while the state and private companies try to create
ethnic or heritage theme parks to ‘civilize’, ‘govern’ and ‘improve’ the poor communities
in marginalized places in China, people themselves had their own agendas. For example,
in his recent paper on the construction of a heritage display of an ancient community of
military Han Chinese who had been posted in peripheral parts of the empire hundreds of
years ago, he showed how ‘experts’ attempted to ‘recover’ and present this heritage as a
‘living fossil’ of ancient China (2012, p. 382). Local communities, however, resisted these
attempts of experts to standardize them in the heritage park into one cultural group and
one presentation; instead of seeing the park as a way of ‘freezing’ their culture, they
embraced the idea of ‘improvement’ and saw ‘heritage’ as a project of development. The
way ‘contradictory myths’ are intertwined in themed landscapes, discussed above, is well
illustrated here. Also, the paradoxes and contradictions more widely true of tourism devel-
opments (Bruner, 1995), and how they attempt to preserve the pristine (from the outside),
but at the same time lead to ‘development’ (from the inside), are also demonstrated in
this case.
One important issue that emerges in the presentation of ethnic culture in culturally
themed spaces is that there is often a different understanding of the meaning of these
cultures to different visitors. This point is discussed by Bruner in his look at the ways that
the Maasai pastoral group in Kenya are displayed in different types of tourist sites for dif-
ferent audiences. For foreign tourists, the Maasai tended to be presented as exotic, ‘primi-
tive’ and ‘timeless’ (Bruner, 2001; Bruner & Kirschenblatt-Gimblett, 1994), while in the
urban ethnic theme park, geared towards primarily domestic visitors, the Maasai were pre-
sented as one of the many different ethnic groups existing in Kenya, and their culture was
displayed as one of the changing, disappearing folk traditions of rural Africa. What is nec-
essary to take away from Bruner’s examples are that theme parks of various types tend to
be geared to particular audiences, and if the audiences expect something different, or get
offended by a particular display of culture (Bruner, 2001, p. 885), then the display and the
site inevitably fail. In this sense, theme parks are sites not only of identity construction,
but also of identity contestation.
Bruner notes, in fact, in his comparison of a number of ethnic theme parks in Asia and
Africa (2005, pp. 211–218), that they tend to be places that are visited more frequently by
domestic visitors, who tend to regard these sites more as sites of recreation and leisure,
than places to seek out ‘authentic culture’. The whole question of ‘authentic culture’ may
be a misguided one, in regard to the question of ethnic theme parks, as with Bruner’s
example of the Batak in the Taman Mini example discussed above. For the Batak, in their
Taman Mini house, culture becomes something that gets lived, produced and participated
in, not evaluated. Bruner’s point about the different ways different audiences assess and
participate in cultural display, and the question of valuations of ‘authenticity’, is a discus-

sion we turn to next.
Continuity and authenticity: evaluating presentations of ‘culture’ and ‘heritage’ in

themed spaces
What is ‘authentic’ culture of a particular place, and what is the relationship of the theme
park to ‘authentic culture’? One anecdote opens up our discussion for thinking about how
people outside of European traditions may think differently about these issues, some-
thing, in fact, discussed by several authors in regard to Asia which we will discuss below.
One of our students, who did research on the newly opened Universal Studios Singapore
when it opened in 2011, was keen to find out how young Singaporean visitors to the park
evaluated it. Was it considered by them to be a ‘contrived’, superficial place? She was sur-
prised to find that young Singaporeans in fact saw Universal Studios as representing their
own culture; as one respondent told her, ‘We were brought up on the movies represented
in this park. To me this is authentic Singapore culture’. A response like this, it seems to us,
again seems to point to how the issue of ‘authentic culture’ is misconceived when looked
at from the perspective of visitors to many of the theme parks in Asia. An obsession with
connecting the theme park world with a different order of ‘reality’ gives us interesting
insights, we suggest, into a Western philosophical tradition that constructs ideas of
‘authenticity’, ‘reality’ and ‘heritage’ in a particular way.
A huge literature, which can only be briefly cited, discusses visitor evaluations of
themed sites, and how they negotiate and evaluate the ‘authenticity’ of these sites
(Bruner, 1994, 2001; Cohen, 1988, 2002; Cole, 2007; Connell, 2007; Conran, 2006; Edelheim,
2005; Xie, 2003; Yang, 2011). Western visitors do appear, in the work of many scholars, to
be extremely concerned with authenticity of culture as they encounter it in tourism vil-
lages, or heritage/ethnic parks that are constructed to present tradition or the past. Oakes
tells us in the opening of his book on minority village tourism in southern China, how at
the beginning of his fieldwork he was immediately confronted with the outrage of Ameri-
can tourists, expecting an ‘authentic village’, but instead found him greeting them,
dressed in a traditional minority group’s women’s costumes (1998, p. 1). In response to
Western tourist tastes, people in various locations have come to police and manage
spaces in order to present what they hope will be acceptable as ‘authentic’ to Western vis-
itors. In Northeast Thailand, guides alternate visits to different villages, so that villagers will
not become too used to, and too demanding towards, visitors (Conran, 2006, p. 277).
Guides understand that tourists do not want to see ‘developed’ villages, but many tourists
themselves have come to recognize that simply the material aspects of villages, whether
they seem traditional or not, is not the essential aspect that makes their visit ‘authentic’. It
is instead what Conran calls the ‘intimacy of the encounter’ (2006), that makes a difference
for them. In Vanuatu, similarly, tourists become sceptical about their visit to a village which
is too perfectly presented as ‘untouched’ by modern life; despite claims of being
‘untouched’, the roads there are well worn, the people sell handicrafts, and expect to be
paid for performances and photographs (Connell, 2007). Traditional heritage seems to be
so perfectly staged that it has become a simulacrum, and in doing so has ‘lost vitality’
(Connell, 2007, p. 85).
One of the more interesting looks at authenticity, as it gets negotiated and constructed
in a national park, is DeLyser’s look at the Bodie State Historic Park Ghost Town in
California (1999). DeLyser (1999) specifically acknowledges the ‘myth’ or ‘imaginary’ that
circulates about the Old West, and how ghost towns have become sites through which
Americans seek to realize an understanding of this myth. What is most attractive about
the Bodie ghost town, which so many of the visitors claim as the most authentic ghost
town they have been to, is the way the landscape is arranged to evoke a past that helps
visitors ‘imagine’. The material objects that have been abandoned in the town, and the
state’s policy of ‘arrested decay’, allowing dust to accumulate, and repairing things only so
that they will not crumble, help to physically make the image of the past come alive for
the visitors. It is precisely this relationship with the physical landscape, and the objects in
it, that appears to be what creates the feelings of an ‘authentic place’ for many visitors,
especially in historic sites, where living populations do not reside. In a similar way, as men-
tioned above, themed entertainment sites, according to Dicks, can create authenticity by
loving attention to detail, even if they are entirely contrived sites, with no pretension to
being connected to a traditional reality.

These questions of the relationship to material objects and landscapes, and ways of
evaluating the past, its ‘authenticity’, and different cultures relationship to it, were opened
up already in a 1972 lecture by urban historian F.W. Mote. Mote gave expression to the
idea that Chinese ideas about the past and about ‘authenticity’ are different than those
found in the west. Looking at the city of Suzhou (Soochow), Mote drew attention to the
fact that the city layout, represented in a map of 1229, and compared with an aerial pho-
tograph of 1945, had not changed for all those centuries. The layout had remained the
same, but nothing materially present in the city, however, had remained. Looking at Suz-
hou’s Great Pagoda, founded in the third century, Mote relates how it was rebuilt, over
and over again over the centuries, but to the inhabitants was recognized as the same
building (1973, pp. 50–51). Continuity, for the residents of China, has been recognized, he
argues, in a different way; not through material objects, but through the written word,
expressed in various literary forms to articulate emotions about a particular place. A
famous bridge in Suzhou was known to everyone in China, not through its material pres-
ence, or visual depictions, but through the various poems that had been written about it
over the centuries. Botz-Bernstein (2012) uses this example from Mote and other similar
historical examples, to muse on the way that Chinese live in a state of ‘hyper-reality’.
Botz-Bornstein suggests that in the Western philosophical tradition, ideas of history,
culture and civilization may be very different than those found in Asia, particularly, in his
examples, for China and Japan. While ‘western civilization’ has always emphasized mate-
rial, monumental remains of history and heritage as the ‘real’ and ‘authentic’ signs of the
existence of the past, Chinese ideas of culture, heritage and civilization are embedded
instead in writing, calligraphy and painting (2012, p. 8). Drawing on Mote (1973) as related
above, Botz-Bornstein (2012) argues that both Chinese and Japanese civilizations did not
value the preservation of buildings of the past; instead, the ‘real’, or the ‘authentic’, was
preserved in the written word, which encapsulated the experiences of earlier generations
of the particular monuments and landscapes that existed in the past. Old buildings them-
selves are not needed to represent a ‘real past’; buildings were purposely made of perish-
able materials, as a form of ‘in-built obsolescence’, so that they could be repeatedly
rebuilt and renewed (2012, p. 10). In fact, reconstructing these places repeatedly has been
a normal part of the process of conserving them over the centuries. Botz-Bernstein gives
the example of a famous Japanese Shinto shrine, that has been rebuilt ritually every
20 years since the seventh century; Hendry, in reference to this shrine, suggests it is not
the buildings itself, but the skills and knowledge to build it, that have been seen as the
important thing to be conserved over the centuries (2000, pp. 164–167). Botz Bernstein
comments that the fact that this shrine has been continually rebuilt had nullified the claim
to World Heritage Status, which based its ideas of heritage more on ideas of material con-
tinuity.3 From the examples of China and Japan, it is clear that the question of the ‘authen-
ticity’ of the buildings is based on ‘another conception of the past’ (Botz-Bernstein, 2012,
p. 11, or what Holtorf (2010) would call ‘pastness’) and a different concept of the relation-
ship that people have with their pasts.
Another interesting argument in this regard is Joy Hendry’s look at the proliferation of
‘themed parks’ in Japan, particularly during the time of the economic boom in Japan back
in the 1980s. Many parks were built that represented attempts to perfectly copy other
countries, so that the Japanese, who were nervous about travelling abroad, could visit
these foreign country theme parks and feel like they were going on a ‘foreign vacation’
(see also Brannen (1992) on Tokyo Disney). Hendry explores the idea that Japanese were
turning a reverse ‘Orientalist’ gaze on the west, and hence ‘objectifying’ western culture
and exoticizing it in much the same way as the west had done to Asia and the colonized
world during world exhibitions in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. However,
through a thoughtful, in-depth look at cultural principles of learning and imitation, Hendry
argues that this is not the best reading of what Japanese are doing in their foreign country
themed parks. A similar type of ‘theming’, consisting of replication and imitation, takes
place also in regard to Japanese history and heritage, as they are presented in gardens
that are spaces of reflection and leisure. Hendry considers Masao Yamaguchi’s idea that
Japanese tend to ‘cite’ and ‘reference’ as ways of leaning and showing respect, and hence
these imitations of other places in cultural theme parks, and even in Tokyo Disney, exhibit
a general cultural principle of copying and imitating that has a very different meaning
from what it does in the west (1991, pp. 57–67). Against these different cultural ideas of
‘heritage’ and ‘history’, what a theme park is in Asia, therefore, needs to be more carefully
examined, not from the point of view of western notions of ‘authenticity’, ‘fakeness’,
‘superficiality’ or ‘contrivance’, but instead against a very different cultural understanding
about ‘imitation’, ‘copying’, and ‘renewal’.
These different ideas about ‘authenticity’ and the ‘original’ open up again the question
of the ‘hyper-real’. Botz-Bernstein suggests that Chinese ideas of ‘copying’, which he calls
the ‘hyper-real monuments of the mind’ – a different way of relating to materiality – is a
Chinese kind of ‘Disneyfication’ (2012, p. 12). Campanella, looking at themed develop-
ments which have opened up in Chinese suburbs (2009) (also studied by Boskar, 2013),
calls the attempt to imitate far flung famous geographical locales, ‘mimetic utopias’. These
spaces, which replicate Southern California, or Tuscany or Cambridge, offer a fantasy
space to live in and ‘an opportunity to shape one’s imagined place in the world’ (Campa-
nella, 2009, p. 81). Campanella suggests the ‘authentic is churned into an ersatz commod-
ity’ (2009, p. 85) in these mimetic spaces. We are not here suggesting that understanding
these spaces as ‘simulacrum’, as ‘hyper-real’, does not offer interesting ways of thinking
about people’s relationship with themed spaces. However, there is a possibility that the
Chinese relationship with the past, as so thoughtfully argued by Mote, is not ‘hyper-real’
in the sense that Eco argued for America and Disney. The lack of material reference to a
Chinese idea of the past, as discussed by Mote (1973), means that there can be no ‘copy’,
in the way that Eco talks of the ‘reproduction’ of the Oval Office in Lyndon Johnson’s
home (Eco, 1986, p. 7). The Chinese rebuilding of the Great Pagoda in Suzhou was not
seen as a ‘reproduction’, but instead as a constant ‘production’. Similarly, as Bruner has
suggested above for the Batak in Taman Mini, they do not see the cultural display pre-
sented there as a ‘reproduction’, but instead as part of their ongoing production of their
culture. In this way, we suggest that themed spaces, of heritage and culture, of nature and
entertainment might more usefully be analyzed not from the perspective of ‘originals’, or
‘copies’, of ‘authenticity’, or ‘contrivance’, but instead as sites of constant ongoing
production.
As has been shown above, recent scholarship has been overturning these dichotomies
between ‘fake’ and ‘real’, ‘contrived’ and ‘genuine’, as they are associated with the theme
park and sites of heritage (like museums, ancient monuments); in this special issue, we
too add to this research, with a particular look at transforming Asia. Our claim is that this
is one of the important ways to understand the ‘transformation’ of Asia, in regard to cul-
tural and social values, by looking at what is going on in the arena of leisure, and recrea-
tion, and how this has come to be a ‘serious’ matter that overlaps with issues of cultural
heritage. Indeed, we argue, themed spaces have become a form of cultural heritage, as
they increasingly become a way of ‘ordering’ and framing; what is known, what is moral,
and new forms of sociality and self. As new spaces, they also, quite possibly, represent in
an Asian context, the idea of ‘renewal’ and continuity in a different way. As sites of ‘pro-
duction’, these theme parks are not necessarily understood in this regard as ‘contrived’, or
‘fake’, but instead as sites that create a new sense of heritage. At the same time, the
spread of theming and various kinds of theme parks through China, Malaysia, Singapore,
Indonesia, and other parts of Asia means the spread of a different way of learning, inter-
acting and immersing oneself in experiences.
Contemplating the Asian theme park: tourism geographies and theme parks
Currently, tourism studies have seen a proliferation of different niche, and sometimes nar-
rowly defined forms of tourism (Hall, 2010a), such as art tourism, beer tourism or culinary
tourism. Despite the rise in the number of tourism-related studies, we have not seen the
deepening of theories concerning key areas of the tourism phenomenon, such as the
development of tourism, visitors’ motivations and experiences, or the connections
between tourism and everyday life (Hall, 2010b). Our special issue attempts to engage
with Hall’s challenge to focus on these key areas. We argue that seemingly diverse themed
attractions – such as a marine animal park, discussed in Chin-EeOng’s paper on Chimelong
Ocean Kingdom in Zhuhai, a religious site, which ‘accidentally’ became a theme park, dis-
cussed in Cora Wong’s paper on the Big Buddha Park in Hong Kong, an historical paint-
ing-based park, analyzed in Chin-EeOng and Jin Ge’s paper on Qingming Shanghe Park in
Kaifeng, a movie-franchise park, the focus of Tou-Chuang Chang and Juvy Pang’s paper
on Universal Studios Singapore, and an ethnic and culture park, the subject of HamzahMu-
zaini’s paper on Sarawak Cultural Village in Malaysia – are all united in some key concerns.
The theoretical issues raised, such as power and stakeholder contestation (state, big local,
regional and global businesses, DMOs, ethnic communities), and agreements/
disagreements over the portrayals of the past, over identity or over different species do
not lend to creating more disconnected and disparate forms of ‘niche’ tourism, but
instead help us to see the relevance and integration of these themed spaces to other
spheres in our lives. In doing so, this special issue attempts to push forward theorization
in tourism studies.
The recent rise of tourism experiences enabled by user-centred cyberspace technolo-
gies such as Airbnb, couch surfing and Uber and tourism academic discussions on the ‘co-
creation’ of tourism experiences (Richards & Wilson, 2006) have led to the argument that
tourism experiences are now created in more ‘bottom-up’ ways. However, we suggest
that the lingering existence of old-fashioned cultural and animal-based theme parks
and the spread of movie-franchise, casino-backed parks, or the rise of religious themed
parks that are identified and examined in this special issue, is evidence of the persistence
of a planned for and constructed tourism experience. At the same time, our authors
attempt to understand the ‘bottom-up’ ways that people negotiate these planned sites and
create various different kinds of meanings for themselves. In this regard, several of the
papers in our special issue give consideration to different audiences in the sites they are
examining and how the same site is understood differently. Cora Wong, in her examination
of the Big Buddha of Lantau Island in Hong Kong, offers an interesting analysis of the differ-
ent understandings of the site by Asian versus Western tourists. In some ways, this parallels
Bruner’s analysis of domestic versus foreign tourists (2001), since the Asian visitors tend to
see Buddhism as something that they are very familiar with, whereas the foreign tourists
see it as exotic, and thus expect different things from the presentation of the site.
Additionally, we want to muse on what theme parks may mean for people in contem-
porary Asia, and how are meanings constructed and negotiated in a transforming social–
cultural context in these sites. It is clear in a number of our papers that theme parks repre-
sent a way of consuming a modern sophisticated life-style. This is particularly evident in
Ong’s look at the Chimelong Ocean Kingdom, and one can assume that this is true for visi-
tors to Universal Studios in Singapore in Chang and Pang’s study. But we argue that it can
also be true for visitors to heritage or ethnic theme parks, such as those in Sarawak pre-
sented by Muzaini, or the painting-inspired theme park in Kaifeng China, presented by
Ong and Ge. Representing cultural heritage in a theme park form is following a model
that suggests that, as Bruner argues, the folk traditions of the past are something worthy
of nostalgia and display. But this representation is a life that no longer exists, and it does
not display who and what people are in the present. The frame freezes the cultural dis-
play, and announces that this is a different time period, a different ‘us’ from who we are
now. For this reason, the theme park is sometimes problematically consumed by some vis-
itors, as Muzaini shows for ethnic identity in Malaysia, who come in expectations of find-
ing something different. In other cases, the theme park and its idealized cultural or
historic past can also be playfully consumed as illustrated in Ong and Ge’s case. The theme
park frame, as we have been suggesting, indicates a stance towards what is presented
within. In this sense, it is very interesting to contemplate Cora Wong’s example of the Big
Buddha statue, the Buddhist monastery and a shopping village as an ‘accidental theme
park’. The Big Buddha statue, erected on Lantau Island in 1993 as a symbol of a Hong
Kong that would be looking back to China, was not intended to be part of a theme park.
The monks in the Buddhist monastery which had been on Lantau Island for over a century,
were not at all pleased by the opening of a ‘village’ in 2002 – a site of commercial activities
intended to merchandise the site – which completely changed the character of the place.
In 2006, the addition of a cable car went even further in redefining the site as a ‘theme
park’, despite no clear intentions of ever creating it as such. Her example suggests that
more and more of what we consume as leisure sites in the contemporary world will not
only be presented as themed spaces, but be organized into theme parks, whether or not
they are intended to be so, because of certain growing expectations of leisure, display,
heritage and sociality that make up our contemporary life-styles and expectations.
We have thus far argued for taking themed spaces and theme parks seriously in
research. Our arguments for additional attention to theme parks goes beyond the more
obvious empirical rise of themed spaces and theme parks in Asia and is founded on the
philosophical and social underpinnings behind such sites and the profound consequences
they bring to tourism, the tourists and the toured. We feel that a number of other issues
are furthered in the papers in this special issue, including the aforementioned blurring of
serious educational and interactive entertainment in sites of culture, nature and heritage
through theming, and the ways in which theme parks in Asia cite, reference and repro-
duce culture and important icons through flows and connections in and beyond Asia. We
also feel that these issues warrant further research. The temporal dimension is crucial for
understanding such flows and connections. The paper by Ong and Ge regarding the repli-
cations of past cultures happening in a theme park inspired by an iconic Chinese painting
also attends to the ways in which what they termed a ‘double simulation’ takes place and
how that can be understood using a postmodernist lens and building upon the concep-
tual architectures of Eco and Baudrillard.
Development studies has been a key topic of interest for tourism geographers for many
years (e.g. Scheyvens, 2002; Telfer, 2002) and many of the seminal studies can be dated to
the late 1960s and early 1970s (Hall, 2009). In this special issue, our contributors have
sought to uncover the developmental processes of five theme parks of very diverse and
differing contexts: a movie-franchise modern theme park, an accidental Buddhist theme
park, a painting-inspired historical ‘city’ theme park, an animal-based ‘ocean kingdom’
and an ethnic-based cultural village. These developments and their associated and
assorted (dis)contents – resistance towards the commercialization of a religious land-
scape, the glossing over of environmental and animal well-being in an amusement space
and the identity struggles in and over a cultural village formed the basis of much geo-
graphic inquiry into tourism and are investigated in varying degrees in our contributions
in this special issue. Although themed spaces and theme parks are a rising phenomenon
in Asia, tourism geographies on Asian attractions, destinations and places continue to
focus more on marketing and management. While not all contributors profess to be geog-
raphers or tourism geographers by training and vocation, in this special issue, we had
sought to engage with broader issues in studies that are distinctively geographical in the
ways in which they examine how tourism and its array of social, economic and cultural
process take root or play out in a clearly defined themed space.
This special issue also helps add to the strengthening of bonds between tourism geog-
raphies and geographies of consumption in particular and to the sub-field of economic
geography more broadly. While geographers have persisted in studies of consumption in
the years after Goss’ iconic study of North American shopping malls, more has been done
on topics concerning shopping, commodity chains and retail networks, and less on look-
ing at how consumption actually happens within other significant themed spaces (see
Pow, 2009, for a notable exception) such as the theme park. We also argue that the focus
on identity work and the ways different theme parks and themed spaces relate to differ-
ent groups in society and the ways in which rampant consumerism is shaping such rela-
tionships and spaces, which we have highlighted in this issue, are also crucial topics for
future research. As demonstrated by some of the papers in this special issue, the burgeon-
ing reach of spaces of consumerism and entertainment foments some interesting scenar-
ios and makes for another important and intriguing research direction. For instance, the
extended reach of consumerist spaces into Hong Kong’s Big Buddha, a site of Buddhist
faith and pilgrimage, as Cora Wong has shown, has presented fertile ground for examining
the ways in which religious spaces can be re-interpreted and consumed by different tour-
ing groups and how some ‘tourism’ places can indeed be ‘accidental’ ones.
In recent years, human geographers in general (Lin, 2016; Ong, Minca, & Felder, 2014;
Ormond, 2013) and tourism geographers (Bell & Ward, 2000; Coles, Duval, & Hall, 2005;
Ong & du Cros, 2012) more specifically have turned to the mobilities paradigm in their
inquiries (Hall, 2009, 2013). This special issue contributes to understandings of spaces that
are bounded and delineated and the ways in which they are (still) permeable to local,
national, regional and/or global flows and mobilities. Tou-Chuang Chang and Juvy Pang’s
analysis of a global tourism corporation, Universal Studios’, franchise in Singapore illus-
trates how global and local flows interact in shaping a delineated and bounded tourism
enclave in the island state. Local elements, Chang and Pang show, were painstakingly
integrated into the global brand and product appeal of Universal Studios. These enclavic
spaces are also found to confer status, taste and specific forms of class ‘citizenship’ as
found in Chin-EeOng’s study of Chimelong Ocean Kingdom. The new massive theme park
in China’s southern city of Zhuhai facilitates a civilizing function and operation through a
promotion of desirable attributes and an exclusion of undesirable elements for the grow-
ing middle-class Chinese society. This approach to delineated but permeable enclavic
spaces builds on tourism and human geography’s extensive use and adaptation of the
mobilities paradigm. It also connects to other existing concerns and conceptualizations in
geography regarding enclavic spaces – including Britton’s (1991) seminal piece on the
political economy of enclave tourism, Minca’s analysis of the tourist island (2009) and the
refugee camp (2005) and Sparke and Anguelov’s (2012) privileged medical enclaves of
access to H1N1 treatment.
This special issue may be limited as to how much it can capture such a rapidly chang-
ing and fast-developing phenomenon such as the theme park, and there is certainly a
pressing need for future and sustained efforts into researching theme parks in Asia. The
postmodernist works of Eco and Baudrillard also remind us and draw attention to the
need to see theme parks and themed spaces beyond notions of ‘superficiality’ and ‘inau-
thenticity’. We wish to extend such an insight into tourism research by calling for a focus
on the cultural and societal flows and connections in and beyond Asia regarding theme
parks and themed spaces in the region. In particular, we would like to steer away from the
trappings of real–fake or copy–original dichotomies which may potentially limit our work
and would encourage future research to engage with the ways in which cultures are
always in construction and that the citations, references and reproductions one finds in
theme parks and themed spaces may be the ‘clues’ to understanding how societies make
sense of iconic and/or nostalgic images and projections – whether these take the form of
a celebrated mouse, a historical street or a typical ancestral house.
Notes
1. The growth of international arrivals in Asia was 6.1% in the 2005–2014 period, in comparison to
Europe, at 2.8%, the Americas at 3.5%, Africa at 5.4% and the Middle East at 4.7%. Asia had the
second largest market share at 23.1% after Europe at 51.1% (see UNWTO Tourism Highlights,
2015, p. 4).
2. One of us, who has long been conducting research on Flores Island in eastern Indonesia, has
also been aware of numerous events organized in Taman Mini on the part of people from
Flores, with innovative cultural displays (plays and performances), that showcase a changing
Florenese culture. In fact, on her latest visit there in May 2015, she noticed that almost all of the
traditional items of culture had disappeared, and the province of eastern Indonesia pavilion
had been turned into a hotel, to better accommodate the visitors who would attend the special
events that frequently took place there.
3. However, this has been changed, and UNESCO has modified its criteria for world heritage sta-
tus, apparently because China had played a central role on the world heritage committee. We
thank one of the reviewers for pointing out this fact.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.
Notes on contributors
Maribeth Erb is an Associate Professor in the Department of Sociology at the National University of
Singapore. She has been conducting anthropological research in eastern Indonesia, particularly on
Flores Island, since the early 1980s. Her research has been on kinship, ritual, tourism, politics, the
environment and most recently mining, and she has published many articles and co-edited several
books on these topics. In recent years her research and teaching on tourism have led her to a focus
on theme parks and themed displays of culture and nature.
Chin-Ee Ong is a cultural geographer who works on the burgeoning and dynamic interface between
tourism and urban governance. His work has focused largely on the rapidly growing Chinese and
Asian tourist segments and their associated home and destination cities and societies. He was also
part of a team that developed and delivered a series of specialist guide programme for World Heri-
tage sites for UNESCO Asia-Pacific between 2006 and 2011.
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Theming Asia Culture Nature and Heritage in A Transforming Environment

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Tourism Geographies

An International Journal of Tourism Space, Place and Environment

ISSN: 1461-6688 (Print) 1470-1340 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rtxg20

Theming Asia: culture, nature and heritage in a

Maribeth Erb & Chin-Ee Ong

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/14616688.2016.1238501

Published online: 21 Oct 2016.

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Theming Asia: culture, nature and heritage in a transforming

ABSTRACT ARTICLE HISTORY

CONTACT Maribeth Erb socmerb@nus.edu.sg

© 2016 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group

人类认知过程的一部分, 它创造了一种框架, 让人类认知过程具有

Theming is a motivated form of geographical representation in which meaningful connec-

Theme park as form and social force

distinctive identity, that attempts to create a complete emotional experience in an ‘alter-

Disneyization, the ‘experience’ economy and hyper-reality

The increasing expectation to be entertained in broader areas of life and interaction

participate in cultural display, and the question of valuations of ‘authenticity’, is a discus-

Continuity and authenticity: evaluating presentations of ‘culture’ and ‘heritage’ in

being connected to a traditional reality.

Oakes, T. (1998). Tourism and modernity in China. London: Routledge.

290). Washington, DC: Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection.

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