Heritage tourism has taken deep roots over the last decade with several destination management areas effectively carving a niche for themselves as places that offer products that help people to relive history. For Ghana, with its various forts and castles spread along its coastline; inhabitants of such communities have taken it for granted that tourists visit.Emerging research has shown that when an area is able to package its heritage artifacts and monuments in an integrated manner with its culture, no matter what it is; then it can be more successful in marketing its tourism products for sustainable development.The culture of a place however, cannot be looked at in isolation. The immediate and remote influences all around it must be explored. Butre as a tourist community, has had its culture over the last couple of years been open to influences not only from tourists but also from the larger globalization platform; brought on by travel, access to satellite TV, mobile phone and Internet access etc. Over the course of the few weeks I spent in Butre, talking to and following the lives of 8 community members; I realized that the rich history of the fort which goes to reinforce our colonial history which is of course, significant to the outside world is left largely untold. My motivation for embarking on this study stemmed from a fascination in knowing why tourists would choose to visit one particular site within the same geographical area. Does the lives and culture of the people there matter at all? The results as this study showed, buttressed the point made in the opening paragraph that yes indeed, we as a people living in these areas do take for granted the artifact, its history and the giant number of tourists that come to see the peculiarities that our area offers. To revert this however, we must begin to think of employing the tried and tested community-participation methodologies that foster sustainable development through the integration of the very important and interrelated strands of culture, heritage and people.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:UPSALLA1/oai:DiVA.org:mau-21129 |
| Date | January 2011 |
| Creators | Deffor, Sally |
| Publisher | Malmö högskola, Fakulteten för kultur och samhälle (KS), Malmö högskola/Kultur och samhälle |
| Source Sets | DiVA Archive at Upsalla University |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Student thesis, info:eu-repo/semantics/bachelorThesis, text |
| Format | application/pdf |
| Rights | info:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess |
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