From Cultural Display to Cultural Reproduction: A Cultural Learning Cycle Framework for Tourism Events

Abstract

Cultural tourism events are increasingly expected to perform functions that extend beyond heritage display, including cultural revitalization, community participation, identity negotiation, and intergenerational transmission. Yet existing scholarship tends to examine these processes separately, leaving insufficient explanation of how participation in tourism events may develop into cultural learning and, ultimately, sustained cultural reproduction. This article addresses this theoretical fragmentation by developing a Cultural Learning Cycle as an integrative process framework for understanding event-mediated cultural reconstruction. The study adopts an integrative conceptual review drawing on a Scopus-derived corpus of recent scholarship on cultural tourism, heritage, festivals, community participation, cultural learning, authenticity, and cultural revitalization, complemented by foundational theoretical works. Through comparative conceptual synthesis, the review identifies five interrelated processes: cultural recognition, reflexive reactualization, participatory enactment, value negotiation and internalization, and cultural reproduction. Reflection operates across the cycle as a recursive mechanism through which communities reassess cultural meanings and modify subsequent practices. The framework further recognizes that progression across these processes is neither automatic nor uniformly beneficial. Community agency, interpretive authority, inclusive governance, and intergenerational engagement can enable cultural continuity, whereas commodification, unequal participation, market-driven simplification, and contested authenticity may interrupt or redirect the cycle. The article contributes to cultural tourism and event studies by theorizing the mechanisms through which cultural events can shift from spaces of representation to arenas of negotiated learning and cultural reproduction. Rather than presenting cultural reconstruction as an empirically validated outcome, the Cultural Learning Cycle is advanced as a theoretically grounded framework for subsequent comparative and empirical testing.