Social Tourism and Museum Mobilities in Destinations of Experience

In this paper, I try to understand what kinds of mobilities of transformation occur in the museum, both as a concept and as a spatial and sensorial experience, from my own ethnographic work on the Bread for Social Change Museum in Gabrovo, Bulgaria, reviewed in dialogue with studies on other types of museums as representatives of important transformations and innovations in the creative industries. The other types of museums explored below include: Community-founded and partially state-sponsored museum in Brazil (Museum of the Imaginary Object in Salvador de Bahia); Statefounded and financed but community-run cultural center in British Columbia (Clifford); Community-founded and privately-funded museums in Peru and Mexico (Cuauhtemoc Camarena and Teresa Morales; Buntinx); Individually-founded community museums at private homes in Morocco (Kapchan) and the Museum of Bread for Social Change in Bulgaria (Savova-Grigorova).The questions I ask include: What do these differently funded and functioning physical spaces have in common as an idea and as a strategy for development that explore the museum logics as symptoms of larger social processes imbued with affect and emotion? And in the movement towards tangible and intangible heritage safeguarding, are people afraid to forget, or excited about remembering, or vice versa? The research finally analyzes the social, cultural, and economic roles of the museums and cultural centers as points along the Bread for Social Change Cultural Route and thus the wider vision and potential benefits to sustainable development of the new emerging sphere of "social tourism".The Bread Route includes three different geographic and thematic routes, all envisioned to be ultimately united into one: Bread Route in Bulgaria (currently operating), European Bread Route and a Global Bread Route across continents (to be developed).The Bread Routes and in particular the Bread (for Change) Museum in Gabrovo, Bulgaria, bear the mo!o "Travel with a mission" and present a case of creative tourism we explore in this research as social tourism, while the points on the Route are perceived not as tourist a!ractions but as "destinations of experiences".Methodologically, this research is both an action research and an auto-ethnography, since the idea for the Route is a personal vision and initiative of the researcher, dr. Nadezhda Savova-Grigorova, cultural anthropologist awarded as "Traveler with a Mission of the Year 2012" by the global National Geographic for having traveled 76 countries exploring their bread traditions and helping communities unite through community baking creative methods, also recognized as a new form of art therapy called "Bread Therapy".The Bread Cultural Route integrates the categories of cultural, gastronomic, and green alternative tourism, but also (participatory) social tourism as it offers tourists and underprivileged locals interactive, deeply touching and transformative baking activities that leave the travelers with lasting emotional memories from their "travel with a mission". The activities planned along the European and Global Routes are developed and offered by various local organizations and institutions, from Bread Houses part of the Bread Houses Network to Bread Museums, bakeries, community and cultural centers, and various NGOs, which offer experiences that include all the multifaceted therapeutic/healing, social, anthropological, training, and performative sides of the breadmaking processes and local bread traditions.The Bread Route in Bulgaria passes through the socio-cultural centers Bread Houses, part of the Bread Houses Network Bulgaria (www.bread.bg) in six locations with rich tangible and intangible cultural heritage (Gabrovo, Veliko Tarnovo/Zlataritsa, Chiprovtsi, Plovdiv, Stara Zagora, Sofia). In each "destination of experience", the tourists can master different local recipes for the preparation of traditional bread and pastry products, while they also participate in the innovative method for community baking called "Theater of crumbs", which enables them to learn about and recreate impressions from each location by drawing in flour and then creating sculptures/symbols out of dough. The baking events can engage the tourists with local disadvantaged groups that regularly visit the Bread House for free as part of its "Bread Therapy" program. The daily mission of the Bread Houses as socio-cultural centers is to both revive and enrich forgo!en traditions related to food, arts and cra\#s, and at the same time to create conditions to gather people from different social backgrounds, people with disabilities and various other isolated and vulnerable groups to regularly meet, knead bread and share it along with spontaneous contacts and friendships between very different people.Part of the social tourism concept as interpreted by the Bulgarian Bread Route is that if a group decides to go through all or some of the points/Bread Houses on it, they engage in a playful game element: the group takes one of the ingredients of bread from each subsequent Bread House (local flour, water, salt, honey, yeast, local spices) and in the last Bread House before departing, everyone kneads a collective bread incorporating the collected bread ingredients and experiences - a truly delicious and unforge!able memory.The foundational stone of the Bread Route in Bulgaria and internationally is the historic Bread House in the town of Gabrovo, which has evolved over time since 2009 as the first in Bulgaria, and possibly the world, Bread Museum dedicated to breadmaking as a tool for social transformation and powerful symbol of political and social struggle. The Bread for Social Change Museum was inaugurated in 2016 during a visit of the President of the global Agenda 21 for Culture, Catherine Cullen, in Gabrovo, which was selected as one of the Global Cities implementing the Agenda 21 for Culture in Development. Agenda 21 recognized the Bread House as one of the best practices in the field of synergies between the creative industry and tourism industry in the city of Gabrovo, which was also later awarded as a UNESCO Creative City, and the Bread Museum s model and recipe for traditional local sourdough-bread were included in a global publication linking the culinary (and particularly bread) heritage of Creative Cities around the globe(1).The Gabrovo house itself is the old family home of the great-grandmother of Nadezhda Savova-Grigorova, which she donated to be used as a community center and which slowly evolved as an alternative museum space run by the joint volunteer activism of enthusiasts. The process of creating the community center-museum by engaging local people with both their painful memories and passionate hopes for change, their complaints and dreams, has been a deeply charged dynamic of memory production, re-production, and representation. How can museums become ever more socially inclusive and interactive cultural institutions, hubs for community revival?Museum Mobilities: Cultural Democracy in the Transition from Object to ThingOne evening during the first year of the creation of the Bread House, which subsequently evolved as the Bread (for Social Change) Museum, a middle-aged man with big black moustache and a large belly entered the house with a suspicious look on his face. At first, he was reluctant to join the community[GRAPHICS]Walking up the steep steps from the Tangier port and entering the narrow streets of the medina, I found the house quickly. It was indistinguishable from the others. It wasn t until I entered that I found the sign designating the location. Dar Gnawa, it said, Commemorating the Memory of God s Mercy (dar gnawa tuhiyyu dhikra at-tarahhum). And indeed, both commemoration and memory were created and displayed here.Before putting this passage into context later in the paper, I raise the critical question of what it means for a house, or any place for that ma!er, to commemorate memory. How and why is a building enmeshed with sensations and practices? The figure of the museum is the epitome of these dilemmas and of a global change of principles of representation and civil society.For over a century, museums mainly exhibited "lifeless museum objects"(2). As Franz Boas laid the foundations of "salvage anthropology," the practice of collecting objects from indigenous societies confronted the challenge of contextualizing materiality in the absence of its ecosystem, which has raised questions on the museum s colonial exoticization of the "Other"?(3), their disciplining social projects(4), and their role in the repatriation of objects(5). Bourdieu s concept of "cultural capital"(6) is o\#en evoked in works on museums as the elite s symbolic power in its embodied and objectified states. In addition to representation, "collective memory" is a key issue in the field of Museum Studies, ever since it became a focus of study with Maurice Halbwachs(7), and nowadays, most scholars would perhaps agree with John Urry that: "there is no past out there or back there [...] only the present, in the context of which the past is being continually re-created"(8).When the nineteenth-century semi-private museums became publicly funded centers for instruction of citizenship, the Western "exhibitionary complex" (Bennet 1995) was transformed in the Eastern European and Soviet reality, as Boris Groy argues in " The Display of Art in Totalitarian Space," from the vita contemplativa s aestheticism to the vita activa embodied in the new populist museum of the Proletariat9. But did museums take a middle path through the ruins of the Berlin Wall?Already in the 1960s, a "new museology"(10) with a "museum in transition"(11) emphasized "community bridge-building" for the democratic purposes of equality of access(12). As Edward Alexander argues in his Museums in Motion(13), museums are built but not static, since movement circulates among the variety of museums and within their new community outreach activities(14). The growing discourse on inclusive practices, however, needs to be more critical of what is assumed by "the general public," since quite often this "average" approximation incorporates preconceived notions that exclude, even inadvertently, people of lower socio-economic classes and literacy levels or physical impairment. When in the late 1980s and into the twenty-first century UNESCO pushed for heritage to be understood as much more than objects - see for instance intangible heritage - museums faced the even greater challenge of interacting with cultural practices and civic values, if they, together with, or being simultaneously cultural centers, aspire to be recognized by governments as primary agencies for the UNESCO s 2003 Intangible Heritage Convention 2003(15).The 1980s marked an internal movement towards change of the "museums in motion", which later evolved in the late 1990s into a phenomenon that anthropologist Ivan Karp called global "tactical museologies," where "the most fundamental global process that makes the concept of the museum available as a tactical resource is that the museums themselves travel"(16) as a concept adapted by sub-cultures, peripheral urban neighborhoods, and rural communities who a!empt to redefine the universalistic view in the "Declaration on the Importance and Value of Universal Museums" signed by eighteen of the world s most powerful museums. The symbolic travel of museums as physical constructs spread across diverse geographic and cultural areas turns them into "contact zones," in James Clifford s concept (1997), that link "routes" of older processes of globalization such as colonialism and imperialism, and conflict and creativity.Another aspect of the traveling idea of the museum is Karp s observation of a "non-nation-based world polity [funding organizations] that uses the categories of Western experience, such as the museum or development itself, to organize the distribution of resources both through and outside the state"(17). In Europe, neoliberal devolution dictated that cultural institutions be increasingly managed through the so-called "arms-length," independent bodies with non-for-profit character (trusts, foundations, NGOs, international organizations like UNESCO, and civic associations)(18). But is this the "right" or "left" arm, to adopt Bourdieu (1998)(19) on the policy hands of the State? Bourdieu s hand metaphor raises questions about the museum s new identity and outreach programs. How and towards whom is the museum hand "reaching out"? Is it simply giving something and waiting for nothing interactive in return but mute legitimation? Is the museum ready to shake hands, ready to work with the community and get its hands dirty, tired, calloused? Is it ready to cover them with paint and clay? In sum, has the museum s community outreach been able to escape the common development failure: the failure of reciprocation? " What is wrong with the so-called free gift is the donor s intention to be exempt from return gifts coming from the recipient," concludes Mary Douglas. "A gift that does nothing to enhance solidarity is a contradiction"(20).[GRAPHICS]See the World Down-side UpI was making watermelon juice with Jorge and Veronica in the kitchen of the Museu do Objeto Imaginario (Museum of the Imaginary Object), nestled in the bosom of the historic center of Salvador de Bahia, Brazil, on a late night in February 2008. Slow reggae tunes were seeping from the tiny bar below, where people rested cha!ing aFTer a night of dancing through the crossroads of Pelourinho in a caminhada, an ambulant musical manifestation, which the owner of the bar organizes in honor of the candomble god Exu every year on the last day of Carnival. Ten years ago, he found it important to emphasize that Exu should not be confused with the Christian Devil, but is a traditional Afro-Brazilian divine messenger who moves in-between the different worlds and energies with dance, music, and play.