Authentic outsiders? Welcome to the age of the 'post-tourist' (original) (raw)
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Authenticity and Simulation in Post-tourism
Post-tourism has undergone a few mutations in recent decades. The ironically-disposed post-tourist has come to accept and eventually seek destinations where space and time, and sometimes people themselves, have been commodified for touristic purposes. Various degrees of authenticity of a few popular tourist destinations are analyzed in the light of Baudrillard’s theory of simulation and simulacra. The conclusion briefly lays out the modern tourists’ dual attitude towards commodification and (in)authenticity.
Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Anthropology, 2020
Tourism affects the lives of an increasing number of people across the world and has been growing and diversifying immensely since the turn of the 21st century. Anthropological approaches to tourism have also expanded from the early contributions of the 1970s, which tended to focus on the nature of tourism and its “impact” on peripheral host communities. These first interventions see anthropologists theorizing tourism as a “secular ritual,” studying its workings as a process of “acculturation,” and countering macroeconomic views of tourism’s potential for the economic development of peripheral societies by underscoring instead its neocolonial and imperialist features. Tourism is linked to the exacerbation of center-periphery dependencies, seen as an agent of cultural commoditization and responsible for the promotion and dissemination of stereotypical images of people and places. Moving beyond the impact paradigm, which has the disadvantage of portraying tourism as an external, disembedded, and imposed force on a passive population, constructivist approaches highlight its creative appropriations and integral role in the reinvention of culture and traditions. Anthropologists pay attention to the varied range of actors and agencies involved in tourism, accounting for the multi-scalar dimensions of this phenomenon and the uneven circulation of images, discourses, and resources it engenders. Tourism exerts a powerful global influence on how alterity and difference are framed and understood in the contemporary world and contributes to the valorization and dissemination of particular views of culture, identity, and heritage. Tourism is increasingly intertwined with processes of heritage-making, whose study helps advance anthropological reflections on cultural property, material culture, and the memorialization of the past. A key source of livelihood for a growing number of people worldwide, tourism is also becoming more and more associated with development projects in which applied anthropologists are also enrolled as experts and consultants. The study of the tourism-development nexus continues to be a key area of theoretical innovation and has helped advance anthropological debates on North–South relations, dominant responses to poverty and inequality, and their entanglements with neoliberal forms of governance. Given its diffuse and distributed character, tourism and touristification have been approached as forms of ordering that affect and restructure an ever-growing range of entities, and whose effects are increasingly difficult to tease out from concomitant societal processes. The ubiquitous implementations of tourism policies and projects, the influx of tourists, and the debates, reactions, and resistances these generate underscore, however, the importance of uncovering the ways tourism and its effects are being concretely identified, invoked, acted upon, and confronted by its various protagonists. Research on tourism has the potential to contribute to disciplinary debates on many key areas and notions of concern for anthropology. Culture, ethnicity, identity, alterity, heritage, mobility, labor, commerce, hospitality, intimacy, development, and the environment are among the notions and domains increasingly affected and transformed by tourism. The study of tourism helps understand how such transformations occur, uncovering their features and orientations, while also shedding light on the societal struggles that are at stake in them. The analysis of past and current research shows the scope of the theoretical and methodological debates and of the realms of intervention to which anthropological scholarship on tourism can contribute.
Introduction- Authentic and Inauthentic Places in Tourism
Authentic and Inauthentic Places in Tourism: From Heritage Sites to Theme Parks, 2017
A section from the introductory chapter of the book. This book explores the geography of authenticity, investigating a wide variety of places used by tourists, ranging from heritage sites, wilderness and seaside environments to theme parks, ruins and gentrified cityscapes, locating the fantastical heritage site, the poignant replica, the authenticated theme park, the unmasked event, the detail within the photograph and the mighty-real castle. This book identifies how, as globalisation, gentrification, digitisation and virtual realities continue to evolve, authenticity is increasingly germane to placemaking and acts of authentication, both tangible and intangible, occur on granular and meta scales in a variety of locations. As Lovell (2013) discovered when researching staged authenticity, it is an international concept, recognised by tourists from 18 different countries, spanning all continents. The strength of this text is its breadth; using a wide-angled lens to explore place authenticity reveals linkages and possibilities across different disciplines which make the work significant. Revisiting the topic of authenticity has never been so relevant. The term post-authenticity (Labadi, 2010, p.78) has been used to describe the inseparable mix of fake and real styles in the built heritage environment and postmodern theories suggest that we are beyond separating the real from the copy. With the rise of post-truth, ‘authentic’ politicians, fake news and the concept that we live in a ‘fake world’ of hypernormalisation and spectacle, there has been what amounts to a popular ‘authenticity turn’ or, more accurately, an ‘inauthenticity turn’. In the climate of post-postmodernism, where virtual combinations of fiction and fact seem unfilterable, the levelling effect of digitisation ensures that verification is obscured and memes are mass-reproduced, we are increasingly unsure about our reality. However, truth is not simply unvarnished or “post” and as the book demonstrates, there are many variations in between. The study of authenticity involves navigating negotiability and encountering portmanteau words such as Tudorbethan and contradictory ideas, combinatory forms, oxymorons such as ‘genuine fakery’ (Brown, 1996) and metaphors which are as thoroughly mixed as the multiple realities. The delight of researching authenticity is that it seems to stretch, turn, fold in on itself, unfold, emerge and retreat, all verbs used within this text. It seems to the authors on writing this book that perceptions of authenticity form bubbles of liquid reality. Benjamin, (1936, p.7) describes how authenticity ‘wobbles’ and bubbles spin, replicate, stretch, join, divide, pop and create shapes when pushed together; they are also permeable to some substances, they form structures under the surface and are always moving; in, of and around places. The model in Figure 1.3 is designed to suggest some of the many realities of places which shape tourists’ impressions. The structure of the book As indicated at the outset, this book aims to examine the authenticity of a range of places or environments that are important for tourism. The book is loosely divided into three sections: heritage, from the conservation of cities to gentrification; places which have been created to a greater or lesser extent by natural environmental processes, from seaside resorts to wilderness; and performing places, from event spaces and film locations to theme parks. Each chapter examines a place or environment and considers the variety of ways in which authenticity is perceived, refracted, or developed and the chapters are linked through theories of placemaking, including staging, theming and reproduction.
Authenticity: tourism and the implications of a constructivist approach
The concept of authenticity and its connection to the original, genuine or real has long been debated within a range of fields. One of the largest fields of debate has emerged within tourism literature, due to commentators arguing that tourists are continually on a quest for authenticity. In recent times, this notion has been challenged due to the rising popularity of tourists visiting attractions that may be deemed ‘inauthentic’ by researchers such as Disney World. These notions have also extended to cultural and heritage fields, through the use of ‘inauthentic’ objects such as replicas, reproductions and copies displayed alongside originals objects in destinations such as museums and heritage sites. In discussing the emergence of three different approaches to authenticity within tourism literature, this paper is separated into multiple sections, in order to provide a summary of the debates that continue to plague the sector. This paper is separated into four distinct sessions. The first section provides an overview of the concept of authenticity within tourism and traces its origins to MacCannell, who introduced the subject in the early 1970s. The second section attempts to distinguish the differences between objects that may be deemed inauthentic, such as replicas, copies, forgeries and fakes, and argues that it is the intention of duplicated items that characterizes them as either inherently negative or positive. The third section covers the three main approaches to authenticity, objectivism, postmodern and constructivist, and argues that the third approach allows for copied or replicated items to be deemed as authentic. While the fourth and final section, attempts to illustrate how the popularity of the constructivist approach to authenticity is navigated by museum audiences through recent research undertaken by the Deutsches Museum.
A Critique of the Touristic Phenomenon
This is a paper I wrote for a course work and hence it is not very elaborate but I have tried for arguing and developing an insight on a post-modernist phenomenon called "Tourism". Though I develop a critique of the touristic experience but my aim is to locate culturally a common individual in the neo-liberal society. The conclusion of this paper is short due to limitations but there is a lot that could be said once the crux of the arguments is understood. I leave it to the readers to understand where they belong in this discourse.
The Relationship between Types of Tourist and Destination Authenticity
2011
Since the 1960s and 1970s, the issues of both types of tourist and authenticity in tourism have been popular topics among tourism academics. However, their socio-cultural approaches and contributions have been limited to the theoretical stage. These arguments need to move to the next level of debate for tourism literature. The purpose of this study is to determine the relationships between the types of tourist and authenticity in tourism based on a summary of three decades of tourism literature. The findings of the study are expected to reveal a new approach to tourism destination segmentation supported by strong theoretical foundations.
Memorable Tourist Experiences in Authentic Vicos, Peru
The desire for new experiences which are truly authentic and meaningful has become an important mainstream in the tourism industry and is in line with the increasing search for authentic experiences in the present-day experience economy. The discussion about what authenticity exactly is and what it means for the tourism industry continues however. This research focussed on which concept of authenticity in tourism literature is most connected with Gilmore and Pine's (2007) theory on the search for authenticity in the current experience economy. Especially with a view to the upcoming target market generation Y, this case study zoomed in on the memorable tourist experiences of several generation Y tourists from the Netherlands who visited the " authentic " Andean Quechua community in Vicos in Peru. The memorable tourist experiences were measured and the physical aspects of the concept of authenticity were discussed during in-depth interviews. This case study consequently measured the memorable tourist experiences of generation Y tourists in Vicos in order to determine which concept of authenticity in tourism literature is most connected with Gilmore and Pine's (2007) theory on the search for authenticity in the current experience economy, according to the perception of generation Y tourists.
Tourist Cultures: Identity, Place and the Traveller, 2010
This paper identifies four noteworthy conceptual developments in the study of the tourist experience: a turn from differentiation to de-differentiation of everyday life and touristic experiences; a shift from generalizing to pluralizing conceptualizations; a transformed focus from the toured objects to the tourist subjective negotiation of meanings; and a movement from contradictory and decisive statements to relative and complementary interpretations. Thus, it is suggested that contemporary conceptualizations of this subject correspond to the so-called ''postmodernist'' theorizing in the social sciences. This turn in the literature is evaluated while addressing past and future research.