Autoethnography of Cultural Heritage Tourism Documentary Production: A Story of Tourism Storytelling

Introduction

Stories have stories to tell. This chapter tells the story of how tourism stories have been produced as a video documentary for public television in the United States, using a particular tourism documentary as a case study. I, as the documentary producer, drafted the chapter while also producing the tourism documentary. This simultaneity allows for a real-time reporting of challenges and successes associated with how ethical dilemmas were addressed as the production team worked through them.

A myriad of challenges exist when creating a video story designed to advance understanding of under-told stories in a way that entertains and encourages people to visit places featured in the documentary. Challenges described in this chapter that arose during production include protecting people and property, telling stories that could be seen as controversial, covering historically neglected topics, and advancing stereotypes in the stories presented in the documentary. Each of these ethical dilemmas are detailed following a brief description of the purpose and setting of the documentary.

This chapter is autoethnographic, as I recount some of the challenges in telling cultural heritage stories in a way to entice interest in tourism visitation to a region. The chapter also includes an account of how I became involved with documentary television production as a professor of tourism. A key to autoethnography is the author’s use of self-reflection while exploring personal experiences and connecting with larger social phenomena and understanding (Ellis, 2004). Through autoethnography, the chapter presents a connection between tourism and art, in this case documentary television production.

Autoethnography has been used in research that analyzes the impacts on travel and tourism derived from other artforms such as literature, poetry, and television dramas (Best, 2017; Brown, 2016; & Noy, 2007). Noy (2007), through innovative analysis of poetry, used autoethnography to capture tourist experiences in more realistic ways that may be more vibrant and more uncomfortable than traditional research methods. Underscoring the importance of cultural preservation, Brown (2016) created an autoethnographic account showing the linkages between travelers’ desire to admire a place of literary importance while in the place where books were written. Best (2017) presented a personal account of a visit to a cultural heritage museum spurred by a lifetime of fascination with American cars. He realized the museum experience, having been sanitized like tourism marketing tends to be, lacked authenticity that was presented better by the television script writers and novelists that originally spurred his interest in the subject. Similar to the authors of these works, I am also an autoethnographic traveler using art to frame this research.