The text outlines the issue of authenticity with regard to the experiences connected with tourism. The author presents how the way tourists perceive tourism and the way tourist industry perceives tourists themselves have changed over the years. With aesthetic categories in the background: post modernization, aesthetization and carnivalization, it presents changes taking place in everyday life of the western European civilization. Afterwards, on the basis of changes in perceiving the carnival, the author presents how these categories influence tourist needs.
The cultural studies analyses basing on a socio‑regulating conception of culture understand culture and cultural heritage in a very similar way. The difference could consist in perceiving culture more „procedurally” and cultural heritage more „subjectively”. The former would refer to the thought reality, the latter to its content. However, in both cases, they take on the form of cultural regulations that is why the division suggested is fairly arbitrary in nature. The main subject of considerations is the problem of complex relations between the means of a conscious development of the cultural heritage and its dependence of objective conditions. In the light of theory‑cultural assumptions, worldview valorizations influence the ultimate form of cultural heritage less significantly than the demand of social practice. Despite it, the components of socio‑subjective regulators are mental in character, and depend directly on their previous historical forms. Thus, one cannot totally abandon or overcome cultural heritage. Even though particular regulating beliefs or their whole units deactualize in culture, they can exist in social awareness after the meaningful recontextualization under the label of precious „cultural traces” or relics deprived of symbolic values.
The article presents different forms and activities of the legally-protected intangible cultural heritage with the special focus on the carnival. On the UNESO Intangible Cultural Heritage List there are currently 160 various activities, and only three carnivals among them. What is curious is that they are not the best-known or best-flourishing ones in the tourist attractions market. In the article, we will try to answer the following questions – why are so few carnival protected? and why, despite protection, the carnivals in Binche, Oruro and Barranquilla are not chosen by tourists as often as the carnivals in Venice or Rio de Janeiro? The article finishes with considerations of what form of cultural tourism is the carnival – is it event tourism? or is it the tourism of the legally-protected cultural heritage?
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