Negotiating entertainment and education: a zoo in Japan
International Journal of Culture, Tourism and Hospitality Research
ISSN: 1750-6182
Article publication date: 22 March 2013
Abstract
Purpose
Controversy occurs among professionals, such as veterinarians and zookeepers in Japan, as to whether a zoo should be educational or recreational. The purpose of this paper is to examine how a zoo's culturally crafted entertainment value conflicts with educational value. Using a front/back framework of the zoo, both entertainment and educational values are negotiated.
Design/methodology/approach
This paper conceptualizes differences between a zoo's front and back regions to examine operations and visitor behavior. Observing and interpreting visitor and zoo employee interactions provide rich data about the educational versus recreational dynamic. The author observes visitor behavior in both zoo regions and interprets their cognitive schema.
Findings
Animal representation in mass media reinforces the zoo animal's amusement value to visitors, leading to the construction of tourist texts. Tourist text images affect the viewer's perception of reality, sometimes conflicting with the animal's reality. The zoo's back region helps alleviate this paradox. In this process, tour guides play a mediatory role between entertainment and educational values.
Originality/value
The author argues about zoos and zoo animals from the Cartesian dualism view of “culture/nature”. A zoo represents culture's triumph over nature. This paper develops this idea and discusses how entertainment and educational values conflict, and are reconciled, from the perspective of symbolic and pragmatic dimensions.
Keywords
Citation
Yasuda, H. (2013), "Negotiating entertainment and education: a zoo in Japan", International Journal of Culture, Tourism and Hospitality Research, Vol. 7 No. 1, pp. 105-112. https://doi.org/10.1108/17506181311301408
Publisher
:Emerald Group Publishing Limited
Copyright © 2013, Emerald Group Publishing Limited