Lithuanian genocide heritage as discursive formation

• Presents a discourse analysis of Lithuanian genocide heritage-tourism.
• Deploys a synthesis of Foucault’s Archaeology of Knowledge as a methodology.
• Conceptualises heritage as post-structuralist ‘text’.
• Suggests knowledge in museums is maintained as a rarefied field of knowledge.

This paper presents a synthesis of Foucault’s Archaeology of Knowledge and the concept of discursive formation to critique museums and sites of memory as spaces in which competing discourses of cultural identity emerge. The research context is the troublesome place of genocide and victimhood in discourses of occupation in Lithuanian museums and sites of memory. Analysis suggests that these exhibitions produce a rarefied field of knowledge around the ideas and concepts that they reveal, and, as discursive tourism texts, they play a role in maintaining the cultural identity of Lithuania. The contribution offers a novel, post-structuralist framework for understanding exhibitions as sites of discourse production, since it is the first study to deploy the ideas from Archaeology of Knowledge into an analysis of specific heritage sites.