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Abstract

Museums are often regarded as a cultural destination, however they stand distinct from other purveyors of culture in that they consciously attempt at a less pronounced social and cognitive dissonance among the audience it covets. In their strife for continuity as an overarching goal, museums by necessity have moved away from being torchbearers of heritage and interpretive centers thereof, to being experiential centers and thus facing challenges associated with a duality of roles. Conscious democratization and integration efforts to draw in the masses require commensurate marketing strategies, while at the same time museums strive to offer an experience that is in effect personal. It is our contention that museums offer a unique and valuable opportunity for theoretical and empirical work in tourism consumer behavior research. To such end, this research reviews the constructs identity seeking (selfidentity), identity projection (social identity) as determinants of motivation in cultural experiential tourism. Motivation is considered along the dimensions of reflective and recreational motivation. A theoretical framework of relationship between identity and motivation to explain pre and post visitation attitude formation and behavioral intention in cultural experiential tourism is proposed, along with methodological notes on pursuant empirical research to validate the framework.Keywords: self identity, social identity, motivation, behavioral intention, cultural tourism, experiential tourism https: //doi.org/10.26493/2335-4194.10.115-128 Introduction Museums have often been regarded as a cultural destination: by definition, a bearer of legacies and heritage. New museologists have regarded museums as social institutions with their share of social, political, and economic influences and biases, and have advocated larger integration with the multi-cultural society (Stam, 1993), arguing they should not be above the concerns of the non-elite (Prentice, 2001). Pearce (1998) states it is not museums' role to be either static or enduring, thus opening itself to the only constant of the outside: change.Ironically, charges of the museums (and to a greater extent, the arts) being above the concerns of the nonelite may not be their own making, but rather imposed upon them. As Šola (1992) observes, the arts is where the social and cognitive dissonance is most pronounced, and elevating it and showcasing it as to be above the 'common man' and proclaiming art to be for the sake of the arts blunts the edges of the dissoAcademica Turistica, Year 10, No. 2, December 2017 | 115 Atanu Nath and Parmita Saha A Theoretical Positioning of Self nances. Šola (1992) holds society, art historians, and sometimes artists themselves guilty of a collusion in what he views as a self-serving and less discordant, less disconcerting positioning of the arts. If we follow this argument, then the museums can serve their inherent purpose better if they align themselves with the so-called non-elite, or rather more preferably not be segmented along such ...