Postmodern Tourism: Staging Authenticity

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Postmodern Tourism Staging Authenticity

• Catering to the postmodern tourist who
• Seeks rapidly changing art/enter-/edutainment
• Seeks extraordinary and individualistic
  experiences
• Who expects experiences to be produced but
  presented as real
• Has not always time to cross the globe to visit.
• Who has been socialized into consuming by gazing
  - the tourist gaze is demanding

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The development of the tourist gaze

• Tourist landscapes are consumed by the tourist
  who gazes upon them
• The idea is of
• seeing as discovering
• interpreting the seen as aesthetically
  significant
• and determine its difference to the mundane.

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The tourist gaze

• The gaze is defined in terms of difference
• Perceived strangeness (but only to tourist)
• Exotic, pleasurable
• Distinguished by semiotics - symbolic icons
  e.g., Eiffel Tower, the Pyramids, Taj Mahal
• rational work and seeks efficiency

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Authenticity

• The gaze is a construct
• Tourism as pilgrimage a quest for the authentic
  
• Authenticity versus staged authenticity
• Staged authenticity protects hosts from
  intrusion, yet allows commercial benefits of
  tourism
• Can any form of tourism be totally inauthentic?

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Caves at Lascaux
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Caves at Lascaux
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Caves at Lascaux
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Romeo and Juliet in Verona
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Still there

• Capello and Montecchi, the families that
  Shakespeare turned into the Capulets and
  Montagues

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Evidence is overwhelming

• Shakespeares characters are fictitious.
• Most scholars believe that Shakespeare simply
  reworked an old drama by an Italian playwright.
• Lack of factual basis offset by imagination to
  fill in the gaps left by documentation.
• Entire package tours of tourists insist to see
  the site of the most romantic episodes in all of
  literature the immortal balcony scene.

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Casa di Guilietta, situated at No. 27 Via Cappello
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Authenticity?
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Authenticity?
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Staged Authenticity?
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Hawaii
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1920
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Today
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Also Today Hula Contest
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Staged Authenticity and Pseudo-EventsTourism as
the Production and Consumption of Simulation
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Producing the Lake District

• Nothing natural about it says beautiful tourist
  site
• So how come it is?
• Answer symbolic construction of difference
  though signs and images and cultural production
  in general.

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The place myth in three stages

• Discovery
• Interpretation (capacity of being in, seeing, and
  experiencing the site)
• Management of the discourse
• What activities are allowed or appropriate
• Physical and perceptual capacity
• Aesthetic dimensions
• Cultural hegemony (of taste, of language,
  mobility)
• Create attractions

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Established place myths

• Stonehenge
• Lake District

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Place myth under construction
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Summary

• History of tourism as the formation of the
  tourist gaze
• The patterns of tourism consumption TODAY are
  indebted to the forces socializing the tourist
  gaze.
• The production of place requires symbolic and
  cultural work!
• Authenticity is a historical and cultural
  construct.
• Authenticity as attraction superseded by staged
  authenticity as the attraction.
• Authenticity is a floating (ie., non-essential)
  concept