Cultural Tourism and Knowledge Management: The Importance of Epistemological Awareness in Cultural Tourism Destination Management

Abstract

Tourism is an industrial sector that is proliferating and promises benefits to large groups of people. This growth encourages the formation of tourist destinations consisting of infrastructure, supporting communities, and tourist attractions in many places. Some tourist destinations highlight the culture of the people as part of a tourist attraction. Using local culture as a tourist attraction will inevitably lead to a shift in the values and meanings of the culture. Culture consists of three dimensions; artifacts, behaviors, and ideas. Dimensions of ideas from culture include, among others, beliefs and knowledge that are owned and passed down from generation to generation through formal and non-formal education processes. In the context of culture as a tourist attraction, the dimensions of local cultural ideas will adapt to the tourism paradigm. Local beliefs will become a part of an economic system that emphasizes uniqueness in its interactions with other beliefs. Local knowledge, which includes factual, conceptual, procedural, and metacognitive knowledge, initially a process of adaptation of local communities to their environment, is now part of the tourism paradigm. Because of its global nature, the tourism paradigm is a paradigm that has universal standards. Therefore, epistemological awareness is needed to meet the dimensions of local cultural ideas and the global tourism paradigm. This epistemological awareness can be stimulated through knowledge management of the supporting community in the tourist destination by utilizing existing educational institutions and local organizations.