Travel Reference
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Fig. 15.1.
Fort Sagan inspiration. Copyright Maria Cardeira da Silva, CEAS/CRIA, FCT.
a four-wheel drive. They come inspired, among
other things, by the illusion of a bare desert
landscape, unaware of the warning signs that
bound it.
However, to some of them, the desert itself
no longer provides an inexhaustible motivation,
or the exclusive inspiration for their journey, as
it might have been for romantic travellers. (And
I shall not mention here those for whom Africa
has become a gym of sorts, the challenging con-
tinent where you test your physical endurance
and push your own limits.)
Presently, sightseeing increasingly involves
the search for cultural meaning. And since cul-
ture is not antithetical to sightseeing and other
touristic activities, heritage has become a shared
agenda in Ouadane as elsewhere.
As Kieshenblatt-Gimblett (1998) puts it, sites
of display aim to reduce the amount of down
time and dead space between high points. Local
'spontaneous' museums in Ouadane, as in the
surrounding desert, have overcome the danger
of cultural insignifi cance, where cultural evidence
is hard to locate and to consume (Fig. 15.2).
The proliferation of local museums, their
exhibitionary options, the selection of artefacts
for display and the performance of chosen
objects allows us to visualize the way local cul-
ture is being produced and reproduced through
its materialized exhibition, and ordered through
imported categories and market demand. Local
patrimonialization and local 'museum' proce-
dures respond mainly to the impulse of salva-
tion that motivates tourists and, because of that,
exhibits culture as a total, pristine, fragile and
anachronous, therefore external, product. But,
ironically, although local owners strive to clas-
sify and display culture in a thematic and chron-
ological way - as it is represented in a
conventional museum - their lack of museo-
graphic means and skills makes them, unadvis-
edly, replicate some postmodernist approaches
adopted in exhibition displays, juxtaposing dif-
ferent items together with fragments and other
cultural detritus, to be reinterpreted.
In reducing the amount of down time and
dead cultural space between high points, spon-
taneous museums trace the new routes of tour-
ist caravans. They thus help to include new
spots in these routes. On the other hand, in
places like Ouadane, these museums can make
tourists spend more time in the town and, even-
tually, encourage them to spend the night in
one of its guesthouses.
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