| Using MacCannell's (1976) framework of the ‘back’ and the ‘front,’ this study focuses on the interface between the producers and the consumers of the Fishermen's Memorial and Tribute in Lunenburg, Nova Scotia, and explores four processes: representation, interpretation, influence, and transformation. Over the past twenty years, increased tourism has restructured Lunenburg's Old Town into a kind of amusement park for visitors, forcing the fishing industry away from the town's waterfront through rezoning, and further pushing fishing as the local cultural identity into the past. In 1996, the fishing community unveiled a monument meant to mourn the dead and celebrate a way of life. Since then, the structure has been transformed into an icon of cultural heritage for tourists through the media, tourism propaganda material, and displays in the museum located across the parking lot. With its black polished granite pillars decorated with names of over six hundred men this fishing community has lost at sea, the Fishermen's Memorial and Tribute rests on the Lunenburg's waterfront like a tombstone. (Abstract shortened by UMI.)... |
