Yuanxin Zhang et al.: Amish in Rural Tourism

In conference proceedings titled Amish in Rural Tourism: Representation of Subcultures in Tourism Marketing, authors Yuanxin Zhang (Journalism and Communication, Tsinghua University), Jonathon Day (Hospitality & Tourism Management, Purdue University), Zhenhao (Mark) Meng (Hospitality & Tourism, Indiana University), and Chengyu Xiong (Journalism and Communication, Tsinghua University) question how marketing discrete cultural heritages in tourism materials can contribute to commodification of that heritage.

In particular, the authors examine 13 counties in Indiana where Amish make up a significant propportion of the population and analyze how these counties present Amish culture in their tourism marketing materials. In total, the authors analyzed the use of Amish icons and other website information with a date set of 50 websites and 458 images.

The paper includes an intersting history of Amish tourism in the United States, which developed in the 20th century and was originally done through bus tours and brochures. However, Amish tourism has now evolved into package tours, tourism products, and hotel expansions. The focal point of Amish tourism is the Amish heritage, which includes handcrafted techniques, food, instruments, objects, artifacts, expressions, representations, as well as the value system of the community and their cultural spaces. Overall, Amish rural tourism provides authenticity and an insight into the uniqueness of the rural life and “nostalgic” imaginations. Amish tourism treats all forms of cultural heritage as marketable assets, thus forming the cultural heritage into a heritage industry. As a result, there is a transformation of heritage values into economic values in an effort to heighten heritage management and industrialization.

Amish in Rural Tourism provides a statistical evaluation and comparison of the difference between Amish representation in different types of marketing materials—finding, for example, that so-called “destination marketing” websites tended to “present a typical sterotyped image” of Amish in order to promote a toursit experience.

Ultimately, the authors suggest that their early work suggests future research directions, arguing that the potential tension between heritage and economy in rural tourism “requires people to pay more attention to the cultural perspective of the heritage communication of subculture groups.” They call for more work on practical strageis for better integrating heritage communication into tourism markets going forward.