Cultural Capital in Place-Making

Abstract

Innovative fieldwork research in cultural tourism is presented which is based around a detective novel set in a seaside town in France. The participants completed autoethnographic writing to provide insight into the active processes of value creation, experience creation, place-making and identity formation. The original research proposes a theory for the way that the literary language in the cultural artefact, in this case the realist novel, activates the tourist's cultural capital and thus affects behaviours. A new theoretical term is proposed, the toureme. The theory has applicability in other towns where novels are set and hence is useful for place-making. Further, the research aims to provide re-usable tools for cultural development particularly in the emerging field of archaeological topophonics currently being piloted by the author.