Touristic Authenticity, Touristic Angst,
arid Modern Reality
Donald L. Redfoot
Duke University
ABSTRACT: The tourist has become the symbol of a peculiarly modern type of
inauthenticity. This paper explores the criticisms that have been directed at the
"reality experiences" of the tourist. In so doing, the following inexhaustive typology of
"touristic realities" is developed: 1t the first-order or "true tourist," 2} the second-order
or "Angst-ridden tourist," 3} the third-order or "anthropological tourist," and 4 / t h e
fourth-order or "spiritual tourist." Each of these types represents a progressively more
intense search for "reality" through travel. Each is, however, criticized for participating in its own form of inauthenticity.
After exploring the "reality experiences" and criticisms of each of these travelters~
the paper turns the tables on the "cultured despisers" of tourism to argue that perhaps
the lowly first-order tourist is not so inauthentic after all. True, this traveller may not
be having a "real" heroic adventure, but such is not the goal. Rather, the reality experienced by the first-order tourist is a pleasurable liberation from the normal concerns
of everyday life which simultaneously reaffirms commitment to that reality. Quite
frequently the first-order tourist is less concerned about having a "real" experience in
the visited place than in experiencing family and friendship relationships-relationships completely ignored by the "anti-touristic tourists" in their search for
authenticity in someone else's "reality."
Historically, there have been many reasons to travel--to seek fortune in faraway lands, to seek religious experience in a pilgrimage, to
seek the personal and national aggrandizement of colonial conquest, or
to seek escape, in exile, from persecution. Stories of those who sought
escape from the everyday reality of home are the stuff of great legends.
By stepping out of the reality of the familiar and the everyday, these
travellers have provided rich symbols of heroic confrontation with the
unknown and the mysterious. While the actual experiences of these
earlier travellers may have been less than heroic, they have been
viewed metaphorically in heroic terms--good, evil, or tragic.
To these earlier types of travellers must be added a relative
newcomer--the tourist. In contrast to the rich metaphorical potency of
The author would like to thank Peter L. Berger, Harry C. Bredemeier, Warren L
Susman, and M. Kathy Kenyon for their comments and suggestions on earlier versions
of this paper. This research was supported in part by N I M H grant no. 5 T32 NH14660.
Address correspondence to: Center for the Study of Aging and Human Development,
Duke University, Durham, NC 27710.
Qualitative Sociology, 7(4), Winter 1984
291
© 1984 by Human Sciences Press
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SOCIOLOGY
these earlier wanderers, the tourist is likely to represent a ridiculous
kind of impotence. The fortune-seeker of old is a producer of exotic
goods; the tourist is merely a consumer of well-known sights. The
pilgrim is a spiritual wanderer in quest of the ultimately real; the
tourist looks for what Walker Percy {1975:53} has called "a Platonic
ideal of the Quaint and the Picturesque." The colonial adventurer
conquers foreign lands; the tourist "captures" only snapshots. The
"exiled soul" expresses the deepest spiritual yearning for a home; the
tourist seeks only a good time, "getting away from it all." In contrast
to the images of these other travellers, no one ascribes heroic characteristics to the tourist. Heroic metaphors give way to images of a middle-aged man or woman wearing bermuda shorts and a ridiculous hat
asking directions to the American Express office while being irritated
that the natives do not speak English. In short, the "tourist" is a
metaphor for shallowness and inauthenticity--"a derisive label for
someone who seems content with his obviously inauthentic experiences" {MacCannell, 1976:94}.
Criticisms of tourism sound remarkably similar whether they come
from the right or the left end of the political spectrum. Both sides
relegate touristic experience to a lower ontological s t a t u s - - a "pseudo"
experience {Boorstin, 1962). Both sides lay the blame on capitalism's
ability to convert experience into a cheap " c o m m o d i t y " to be sold to a
mass market. Both sides, therefore, view touristic inauthenticity as
symptomatic of the general authenticity of modern life. The difference
between them depends on whether this inauthenticity is attributed to
bourgeois false consciousness {Sontag, 1977; Turner and Ash, 1976) or
to bourgeois philistinism {Boorstin, 1961; Fussell, 1980). Touristic
inauthenticity reflects either an alienated consciousness not yet
liberated or a fall from grace.
An alternative image of the tourist has been presented in the work of
Dean MacCannell (1973, 1976). Far from being content with inauthentic existence, MacCannell's tourists are on a modern day " q u e s t " in
search of authenticity. These tourists constantly a t t e m p t to go behind
the " s t a g e d authenticity" of the surface in order to reach the "reality"
that presumably lies there. He comes to the Durkheimian conclusion
that
•.. sightseeing is a form of ritual respect for society and that tourism
absorbs some of the functions of religion in the modern world. The
dimension of social life analyzed in this paper is its authenticity or, more
exactly, the search for authenticity of experience that is everywhere
manifest in our society. The concern of moderns for the shallowness of
their lives and inauthenticity of their experiences parallels concerns for
the sacred in primitive society {1973:589-901.
Touristic Authenticity and Modern Reality
293
We are faced with two competing images of the tourist's exp e r i e n c e - t h e wide-spread notion that tourism is a "trivial, superficial,
frivolous pursuit of vicarious, contrived experiences, a 'pseudoevent' " and MacCannell's notion that it "is an earnest quest for the
authentic, the pilgrimage of modern man" (Cohen, 1979:179). To explore the dimension of authenticity in touristic travel, this essay
suggests four orders of touristic experience {some of them not normally classified as touristic). 1The focus is on the nature of the anxiety
over reality that is experienced by each type of tourist and the accusations of inauthenticity that have been hurled at each. The goal is
not to be a complete sociological analysis of the structure of modern
tourism, but a more limited understanding of the reality experiences of
modern travellers and the anxiety about that reality frequently expressed by critics of touristic inauthenticity.
The First-Order T o u r i s t 2
The first-order tourist, that most unheroic of travellers, has borne
the brunt of the accusations of inauthenticity. Travelling with family
or a tour group (almost never alone), bearing numerous cameras,
visiting famous sites, while comfortably avoiding "real" contact with
the surrounding environment, the first-order tourist seems to
caricature earlier travellers. Percy {1975:52) argues that, in contrast to
those travellers, the tourist a t t e m p t s to avoid an "immediate encounter with being." The ontological problems with the experience of
the first-order tourist become immediately obvious when we contrast
such experiences with those of "the adventurer," as described by
Georg Simmel. In the first place, the first-order tourist violates the
temporal order of the adventurer for whom the "immediate encounter"
is all that matters. The true adventure is temporally bracketted, set
apart in a kind of "exclave" without a p a s t or a future that connects it
with life as a whole. As Simmel (1971:190) puts it,
For this reason the adventurer is also the extreme example of the
ahistorical individual, of the man who lives in the present. On the one
hand, he is not determined by the p a s t . . . ; nor, on the other hand, does
the future exist for him.
Unlike the adventurer, the first-order tourist comes with a past and
leaves to a future. Molded b y travel brochures, television, and picture
postcards, expectations are well formed in advance as to j u s t what one
is " s u p p o s e d " to experience. Travel agents, tourist bureaus, and
hotels all exist to assure that the experiences approximate the ex-
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pectations. The experiences of the first-order tourist are, therefore,
predictable--landmarks suitably " a u t h e n t i c a t e d " as " r e a l , "
"genuine," " a u t h e n t i c , " or "original" will be visited {MacCannell,
1976:Ch. 6); scenic spots known for their "picturesqueness" will be
sought out. In the process, the immediate experience is lost in the
meeting of past expectations. Percy {1975:47) compares the experience
of a tourist arriving at the Grand Canyon on a tour bus to t h a t of the
Spanish explorer:
The thing is no longer the thing as it confronted the Spaniard; it is
rather that which has already been formulated--by picture postcard,
geography book, tourist folders, and the words Grand Canyon. As a
result of this preformulation, the source of the sightseer's pleasure undergoes a shift. Where the wonder and delight of the Spaniard arose
from his penetration of the thing itself, from a progressive discovery of
depths, patterns, colors, shadows, etc., now the sightseer measures his
satisfaction by the degree to which the canyon conforms to the preformed complex. If it does so, if it looks just like the postcard, he is
pleased; he might even say, "Why it is every bit as beautiful as a picture
postcard!" . . . The highest point, the term of the sightseer's satisfaction, is not the sovereign discovery of the thing before him; it is rather
the measuring up of the thing to the criterion of the preformed complex.
The first-order tourist not only surrenders the "immediate encounter with being" to the "preformed complex" of past expectations
but also to a complex of future expectations. This future orientation is
symbolized by the ubiquitous camera, the hallmark of this type of
traveller (Chalfen, 1979). In taking pictures, experiences are stored up
for future reference. The "immediate encounter" is, therefore, judged
not only by how it measures up the "preformed complex" but also for
how it will look when the pictures are shown "back home." Once
removed from authentic experience by the prefabricated expectations
of the tourist role, the touristic photographer is twice removed by the
temporal distancing of the photographic moment. Typically, family or
friends pose in the foreground, literally and symbolically turning their
backs to the setting t h a t they are supposed to be experiencing.
Milgram {1976:9) argues that, in the process, photography intrudes as
a "contamination of the pleasurable present"3:
The man who sees a beautiful scene, and has a camera, stops to take a
picture; but the photographic act may interfere with his fully savoring
the experience. There is not only the minor inconveniences of carrying a
few pounds of camera equipment, but the interruption of a fully spontaneous set of activities by the need to stop to take pictures and divide
his attention between enjoyment of the scene and the mental set needed
to photograph it. The photographic act devalues the moment, as he
trades the full value of the present instant for a future record of it.
Touristic Authenticity and Modern Reality
295
Lacking value as an immediate experience, argues Sontag {1977:9),
"Travel becomes a strategy for accumulating photographs." In my
own exploratory research on family photographs, 4 I encountered a
rather extreme example of this temporal displacement of the firstorder tourist. One participant described a trip in the following terms:
" W e took a trip one time where we made some four-thousand-odd
miles in ten days and took over a thousand slides. Like I said, I like to
come home and enjoy the trip." In contrast to Simmel's description of
the adventurer as "the ahistorical individual" who "is not determined
b y an)- p a s t . . , n o r . . , does any future exist for him," this man was
nearly a perfect example of Percy's (1975:47-48) description of the
tourist's experience:
For him there is no present; there is only the past of what has been formulated and seen and the future of what has been formulated and not
seen. The present is surrendered to the past and the future.
Related to the temporal displacements which mediate the "encounter with being" experienced by the first-order tourist, are commitments to the everyday world "back home." The real adventurer,
says Simmel (1971:190), is committed to the present experience as the
paramountly real. Citing the "erotic-adventurous life" of Casanova as
an example, he argues that this present orientation prohibits the true
adventurer from making and keeping commitments to the everyday
life of interpersonal relations. In contrast, the tour is seen b y the firstorder tourist as but a brief interlude in the commitments to family,
work, and the routines of everyday life. It is to this world of everyday
life that primary allegiance is owed and it is to that world that the
tourist will return with a few souvenirs of his "escape" from "reality"
(Cohen and Taylor, 1976:113-21).
In short, the first-order tourist violates the "reality" of the adventure in at least three ways: by surrendering the "immediate encounter with being" both to p a s t expectations molded by official
authenticators and to future expectations of "how it will look when !
get back home," and b y surrendering "sovereignty" over the present
to the commitments of everyday life back home. Unlike the pilgrim
who leaves home in quest of the ultimately real, the experiences of this
tourist are constantly in relation to the reality back home--the trip is
simply a temporary escape.
The Second-Order Tourist 5
The second-order tourist, unlike the first-order tourist, is keenly
aware of the inauthenticities of the touristic role and experiences a con-
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siderable amount of anxiety a n d " shame" in being labelled a " t o u r i s t . "
This type of tourist is likely to disparage other "mere tourists" and to
seek ways to distinguish "real" experiences from their inauthenticity.
This touristic " a n g s t " {Fussell, 1980:49} or " s h a m e " is nicely described by MacCannell {1976:10}:
. . . touristic shame is not based on being a tourist but on not being
tourist enough, on a failure to see everything the way it "ought" to be
seen. The touristic critique of tourism is based on a desire to go beyond
the other "mere" tourists to a more profound appreciation of society
and culture...
Given the ubiquity of tourism, this quest for authenticity requires
the development of conscious strategies in order to see the things one
went to see while avoiding other " m e r e " tourists. Travelling alone or
at least apart from organized tour groups is a must. Travelling offseason is preferable. This traveller will likely learn at least a few words
of the local language and will stay and eat in places t h a t "only the
locals know about."
Because of its close association with touristic inauthenticity,
photography presents special problems for the second-order tourist.
One way to deal with this photographic inauthenticity is simply to
refuse to take pictures. In so doing, one eliminates both the identifying
label of the camera and the " c o n t a m i n a t i o n " of the present experience
which it represents. Since picture-taking is such an integral part of
touristic experience, such a refusal borders on an act of deviance.
Nonetheless Milgram {1976:10} reports t h a t " t h i s contamination of
the pleasurable present by the photographic urge is prompting
growing numbers of vacationers to leave their cameras at home." One
participant in my small sample mentioned some discomfort with the
camera, saying
It's quite a problem to have to take pictures. It takes you from a
precious time when you want to be seeing something and here one of the
two is taking a picture. That may be why we don't take so many. But
it's a wonderful record of your trip!
Another way to deal with touristic angst as a second-order tourist
and still come home with some pictures involves making subtle distinctions in the role played as photographer. This requires the purchase of
an expensive 35-millimeter camera with a Japanese or German name,
known only to those who "really" know photography, in order to
distinguish oneself from the users of the K o d a k " I n s t a m a t i c , " which is
more characteristic of the first-order type. Second-order touristic
photographers thereby announce their intentions as being more
Touristic Authenticity and Modern Reality
297
"serious" than those of their first-order counterparts. Photography is
seen as a means of personal expression, an art form, or even as an occupation6--but not as a symbol of tourism.
An avoidance of touristic angst also requires that one take pictures
which are distinctly different in intent and content from those taken
b y the first-order type. There m u s t be no photographs displaying the
family in front of some officially authenticated monument or "picture
postcard" shots for this type. Instead, the second-order tourist will
take pictures from different angles, with different lenses, perhaps
using black-and-white film to capture a unique perspective of some
"authentic" scene not sanctioned in the travel brochures. More importantly, these shots should be directed toward capturing something
authentic about the lives of the people observed. This is accomplished
b y a t t e m p t s to get candid shots of the natives doing native things--all
unmediated, of course, by the family's presence in the foreground. A
well-travelled participant in m y s t u d y expressed such a preference in
the following terms:
We like to take pictures of scenery and take pictures of people in different parts of the world... People just doing their everyday things--a
group of bicycles waiting to cross a railroad track, people working in little gardens--that sort of thing.
Whether the second-order tourist takes thousands of pictures or
avoids cameras like the plague, the goal is much the s a m e - - t o have a
more "immediate experiencing" of the reality being visited. The
second-order tourist m u s t often do a great deal of strategic planning
and suffer considerable hardship to achieve this authentic experiencing but, having done so, the experience is often very rewarding.
Again Percy (1975:52) invents an example:
[A] couple decide to drive from Guanajuanto to Mexico City. On the way
they get lost. After hours on a rocky mountain road, they find themselves in a tiny village not even marked on the map. There they discover
an Indian village. Some sort of religious festival is going on. It is apparently a corn dance in supplication of the rain god. The couple know at
once that this is "it."
The ontological status of this " i t " experience is very complex and
" a m b i g u o u s . " " I t " m u s t be a spontaneous expression of the natives
themselves, "unspoiled" b y the intrusive presence of other "mere"
tourists. B u t beyond the external conditions of the " i t " experience, is
an important internal aspect; "it" must be an "ecstatic" exp e r i e n c e - b o t h in the sense of an emotional high and in the
etymologically correct sense described b y Peter Berger (1963:136} as
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QUALITATIVE SOCIOLOGY
"the act of standing or stepping outside (literally, ekstasis) the takenfor-granted routines of society." Touristic ecstasy is that emotional
high achieved b y the experience of authenticity in the lives of people in
exotic places.
Suppose that the external criteria are met in Percy's example--the
Indians are performing their rain dance in "genuine" supplication of
the gods and no other tourists litter the landscape. Suppose, moreover,
that this couple achieves touristic ecstasy. M a y we then say that the
second-order tourist has achieved authenticity? Percy {1975:52) answers that:
Possibly this may occur. Yet it is more likely that what happens is a far
cry from an immediate encounter with being, that the experience, while
masquerading as such, is in truth a rather desperate impersonation•
This desperation is rooted in the paradoxical nature of the "it" experience of the second-order tourist. In the first place, these touristic
observer take the keenest interest in details of the lives of the
"natives" that they themselves would not find interesting in their own
society because of their taken-for-grantedness. Pictures of bicycles at a
train crossing o r o f people tending their gardens or even of the corn
dance in Percy's example would be rather uninteresting to those for
whom these are everyday activities. Despite the a t t e m p t to achieve an
"authentic" experience, the interest in these activities shown by the
second-order tourist is distinctly that of the outsider. The goal of this
second-order touristic quest is not a detailed knowledge of the folkways of any particular g r o u p - - a n y "unspoiled" exotic group will do.
Much less is the goal to adopt those folkways as one's own permanent
lifestyle--they would soon become "routinized" drudgery. The ecstasy
of the second-order tourist hangs in the tension between participation
in an authentic event in the lives of some exotic group and remaining
decidedly an outsider. In contrast to MacCannell, Cohen (1979:188)
argues that such a tourist
•.. experiences only vicariously the authenticity of the life of others,
but does not appropriate it for himself. Hence, though his quest may be
essentially religious, the actual experience is primarily aethetic, owing
to its vicarious nature. The aethesis provoked by direct contact with the
authenticity of others may reassure and uplift the tourist, but does not
provide new meaning and guidance to his life.
The touristic ecstasy of the second-order tourist is, moreover, an
anxious ecstasy. Anxious, in the first place, over the suspect nature of
the tourist role, this tourist is doubly anxious, suggests Percy, because
of the possibility that " i t " might not be real after all. Suppose, Percy
Touristic Authenticity and Modern Reality
299
suggests, that the chief of the Indian village comes out of his hut with
a Sears-Roebuck catalogue. The criteria for the "it" experience will
have been shattered by this intrusion of modernity. Even while having
the "it" experience, Percy notes that the second-order tourist is
anxious to return home with a good story and a few "genuine" relics of
the experience lest "it" prove to be "too good to be true."
Percy adds a final criticism that such a tourist participates in a more
subtle loss of authenticity as a "sovereign knower." The shattering of
the "it" experience reveals a "preformed complex" of its own about
what is properly exotic. This "preformed complex" may not be shaped
as much by travel brochures and the other official authenticators of
the first-order type, but there are expectations nonetheless from
higher-brow authenticators of "it" experiences, such as novelists and
anthropologists. Percy introduces into his scenario an anthropologist
friend to whom the second-order tourists rush in order to be certified
as having had a proper "it" experience. In their search for the ecstasy
of novelty and their anxiety about whether their experience is certifiably real, the second-order tourists have forgone the possibility of a
real "encounter with being."
The Third-Order Tourist 7
Just as Percy's couple deferred to an anthropologist friend as an expert of the exotic, should the anthropologist be classified as a thirdorder tourist who has a real "encounter with being" in other cultures?
Anthropologists would no doubt shudder at my suggestion that they
are third-order tourists. Being called a tourist seems to diminish the
reality of their work. Despite the fact that cultural anthropologists
spend a great deal of time travelling and taking pictures, the apparent
incongruity of calling them tourists indicates that theirs is a quite different reality experience. After all, anthropologists would not settle
for simple experiences of officially authenticated landmarks, as firstorder tourists often do. Moreover, they take great pains to avoid the
inauthenticities of the second-order tourist's anxious ecstasy by
remaining long enough to more fully understand the everyday reality
of the people they study. While anthropologists undoubtedly occasionally experience emotional highs, these are regarded as obstacles
to real understanding. Touristic ecstasy is to be rigorously guarded
against through the application of scientific methods. Strategies are
developed to maintain a subjective detachment, to avoid "going
native."
So what is the nature of this reality which the anthropologist takes
such great pains to experience and convey in an impersonal manner?
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L6vi-Strauss notes that we m u s t took at the relationship of anthropologists to their own cultural home as well as at their relationships to the cultures they are studying. Far from one's own home, says
L6vi-Strauss (1974:383), one is likely to experience not only a distancing of miles but also a subjective distancing from the artifices of
modernity which it represents--a "disdain for, and occasionally
hostility towards, the customs prevailing in his native setting." The
anthropologist reaches out to another culture in a peculiar kind of
nostalgia--not a yearning for one's own home as the term originally
meant (Davis, 1979), b u t a yearning for the homes of others. Sontag
(1966:75) perceptively argues that there is a spiritual dimension to the
anthropologist's quest (as represented b y L6vi-Strauss), in which he
"is engaged in saving his own soul."
But L6vi-Strauss was quite aware that anthropologists also find
themselves in a paradoxical situation. They m a y reject the artifices in
their own culture and seek an alternative reality in a "quest." B u t once
there they refrain from "going native." Moreover, they expend great
energy, anxiously recording and protecting a w a y of life which they
would be loath to adopt if forced to do so. The source of their anxiety is
not the same as the touristic angst of the second-order tourist, who is
anxious lest " i t " be too good to be true; it is the broader "historical
anxiety" (Sontag, 1966:73) that the artifices of modernity are rapidly
destroying the few remnants of primitive reality that still exist. There
is a desperation about the a t t e m p t to film, photograph and record all
primitives before they disappear entirely. That quintessential thirdorder tourist, Margaret Mead (1975:4), laments that
All over the world, on every continent and island, in hidden recesses of
modern cities as well as in the hidden valleys that can be reached only
by helicopter, precious, totally irreplaceable, and forever irreproducible
behaviors are disappearing.
Mead (1975:8) urges the photographing and recording of these
primitives in order to build an archive not only for anthropologists,
b u t also for "their descendents, who (after the recurrent spasms of
modernization, technological change, and a t t e m p t s at new forms of
economic organization) m a y wish to claim once more the rhythms and
handicrafts of their own people." Like Noah's ark or a zoo attempting
to save a remnant of an endangered species with which to replenish the
earth, so the anthropologist saves remnants of disappearing cultures
in an archive in the hope that the "primitive" experience will not be
irretrievably lost.S
After all this effort and spiritual anguish, however, L6vi-Strauss expresses the anxiety that this experience is not "real" after all. He
Touristic Authenticity and Modern Reality
301
frequently alludes to the spiritual nature of his quest, but he concludes
t h a t it is a " m u t i l a t i o n " comparable to the "little glass of r u m " offered
to convicts j u s t prior to their executions (1974:389). If "salvation" is
the goal, then anthropologists have to admit their own fall from grace;
they can be only " s p e c t a t o r s " of the vanishing realities t h a t history is
mercilessly obliterating. Wistfully, L~vi-Strauss {1974:43) longs for
a "vanished reality":
I wished that I had lived in the days of real journeys, when it was still
possible to see the full splendor of a spectacle that had not yet been
blighted, polluted, and spoilt; I wished that t had not trodden ~hat
ground as myself, but as Bernier, Tavernier, or Manucci did . . . . For
every five years I move back in time, I am able to save a custom, gain a
ceremony or share in another belief. But I know the texts too well not to
realize that, by going back a century I am at the same time foregoing
data and lines of inquiry which would offer intellectual enrichment... I
have only two possibilities: either I can be like some traveller of the
olden days, who was faced with a stupendous spectacle, all, or almost
all, of which eluded him, or worse still, filled him with scorn and disgust;
or I can be a modern traveller, chasing after the vestiges of a vanished
reality. I lose on both c o u n t s . . .
Unlike Mead, L~vi-Strauss finds no solace in recording these remnants of primitive behavior. Bitterly he denounces the practice of
bringing back anthropological photographs in order to appease the
public's appetite for a record of primitive reality. To him the
photographs of the third-order tourist represent both the artifices of
modernity and the empty "cannibalism of history":
Perhaps the public imagines that the charms of the savages can be appropriated through the medium of these photographs. Not content with
having elhminated savage life, and unaware of even having done so, it
feels the need feverishly to appease the nostalgic cannibalism of history
with the shadows of those that history has already destroyed. (1974:4 I)
The Fourth-Order Tourist 9
The anthropologist, as third-order tourist, digs deeper in a quest for
authenticity, but this quest is doomed to failure because of the subjective distancing from the "primitive" built into the anthropologist's
role. The fourth-order tourist seeks to overcome this distancing by
going native. These tourists are literally "engaged in saving their own
souls" through an explicit rejection of modern culture. This type, who
would be most appalled at being called tourists, includes the modernday pilgrims who seek ultimate spiritual reality not in their own
cultural tradition but in experiences of ether traditions. This fourth-
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QUALITATIVE SOCIOLOGY
order tourist is generally typified b y the upper-middle-class drop-out
who is part of the spiritual movement "turning E a s t " {Cox, 1977}.
Surely this person can finally shed the label " t o u r i s t " by virtue of
having achieved an authentic spiritual experience. This person buys a
one-way ticket, at least spiritually speaking, in a pilgrimage to the
primitive. This tourist is not interested in officially authenticated
sites, shallow touristic ecstasy, or cultural remnants. While each of the
former types of tourists is likely to convey photographically in different ways something of their experience, this " t o u r i s t " is very
unlikely to take pictures at all because of their denial of the "eternal
present" and their participation in "illusion." This spiritual tourist is
committed to getting behind the "veil of illusion" to absolute reality.
But, alas, this ardent seeker of reality has also received a great deal
of criticism for participating in an illusory quest for reality. Gita
Mehta (1979) has satirically described the process b y which this deeper
"reality" has become a commodity for skillful entrepreneurs
"marketing the Mystic E a s t . " As if to prove the mystics r i g h t - - t h a t
all is illusion--the modern-day pilgrim seems to be the dupe of a complex con game playing on a desperate search for authenticity. Even as
sympathetic a participant-observer as H a r v e y Cox {1977:71-72} has to
conclude that the current vogue of "turning E a s t " has more to do with
Western illusions than it does with any "reality" that the E a s t has to
offer:
Any contemporary traveller to the Orient is so programmed by hundreds of years of image-making that his capacity to see what is actually
there is much diminished.
Enterprising Orientals have learned, of course, how to show us what
we want to see. Perceptive entrepreneurs, East and West, can now supply the pilgrim or tourist (the distinction between the two is seldom
clear} with precisely the Orient he or she sets out to see . . . Reality
imitates art, and institutions are often shaped around images of what
they are believed and hoped to be.
Cohen {1979:196} notes that these spiritual tourists, when confronted with the inevitably flawed nature of the spiritual "centre" of
their quest, are forced into one of three options. They can become
"realistic idealists" who recognize these flaws--thus risking a large
measure of disillusionment. Alternatively, they can remain "starryeyed idealists" who are simply duped b y the show and engage in "selfdelusion." Finally, they can become "critical idealists," "who oscillate
between a craving for the centre from afar, and a disenchantment
when they visit it." Such a person who feels exiled when at home
(1979:190-91), is paradoxically at home only with such an experience of
exile from the "centre." In any of these cases, authenticity is a very
Touristic Authenticity and Modern Reality
303
precarious balancing of the subjective experiences of home and one's
spiritual " c e n t r e " - - a balance surrounded on all sides b y the threat of
illusion.
On Tourism: " A Lecture to Its Cultured Despisers"
At this point I would like to turn the spotlight of this discussion
from the increasingly desperate a t t e m p t s at authenticity by the
touristic types to the critical commentators who have been sitting on
the sidelines watching. On the one hand are the "cultured despisers"
of tourism who see tourism as a metaphor for the general inauthenticity of modern life. On the other hand, MacCannell defends the
touristic quests for authenticity as a modern pilgrimage seeking to get
behind the artifices of modernity to the realm of authentic existence.
Both sides are in agreement that the tourist represents a metaphor for
deeper aspects of the modern experience of reality. But what are the
ontological criteria used by these commentators in making their
critical assessments?
The "cultured despisers" of tourism argue that the reality experienced b y the tourist represents either a diminution of a previous
reality or a prelude to a liberated reality to come. That tourism reflects
a fall from the grace of a previous reality is a favorite line of conservative critics. Fussell {1980) presents this position as a decline
"from exploration to travel to tourism." Boorstin (1962:91-92) succinctly concludes: "The traveller used to go about the world to encounter the natives. A function of travel agencies now is to prevent
this encounter." These characterizations represent a remarkable
ability to forget the inconvenient facts of history. Did Cortez {a
representative of Fussell's "exploration" era) have a more authentic
experience of Aztec culture than a modern tourist would have? Did
Lord Byron {a representative of the era of bourgeois "travel") have a
more genuine experience of Italian culture than do contemporary
visitors to the museums of Florence? Certainly one would have to concede that Cortez' regicidal conquest and Byron's erotic conquests were
more adventuresome and, in a way, more heroic than the experiences
of the contemporary tourist. B u t these historicM travellers also came
with expectations that separated them at least as far from any genuine
experience of the natives as is any unheroic traveller of today. If the
experiences of the modern tourist represent a diminution in reality,
then the natives are likely to be grateful for the loss.
Tourism's "cultured despisers" on the left do not share this romanticization of the past; instead, they romanticize the future. Their
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assumption is that the ontological problems with tourism are those of
late capitalism, presumed to pass when it does. To m y knowledge none
of these critics have offered a convincing model of what a nonalienating, non-exploiting form of touristic experience would look like
after the revolution. Utopian attempts, however, to abolish capitalism
have not generally resulted in a more immediate "encounter with
being"--except, perhaps, in the rather limited sense that they have often reduced existence to a very real struggle for survival.
If the "cultured despisers" denigrate the reality experiences of the
tourist, then MacCannell's work elevates it to the level of a modern
religious experience of authenticity. B u t to do so he sets up a curious
mixture of a Durkheimian theory of religion as an integrating set of
values with an existentialist's angst over the meaninglessness of
existence. B u t Durkheim's primitives, who worshipped the sacred,
were profoundly at home in the world. The sacred provided an allembracing explanation of the universe. Life might be tough b u t it was
certainly not meaningless. The quest for authenticity, on the other
hand, is rooted in the peculiarly modern anxiety over the "reality" of
life's meaning, an anxiety which Arnold Gehlen (1980:66) has perceptively called "a kind of ontological vote of no confidence." Lionel
Trilling (1972:93) has noted the close link between the quest for
authenticity and this ontological anxiety:
That the word [authenticityl has become part of the moral slang of our
day points to the peculiar nature of our fallen condition, our anxiety
over the credibility of existence and of individual existences.
The touristic quest for authenticity leads one deeper and deeper into
the reality experiences of other people only at the cost of increasing the
distance {objectively and subjectively) from the reality of one's own
home. In contrast to Durkheim's notion of the sacred, touristic authenticity is possible only through a profound alienation from one's home
reality. It would appear that the more ardently one searches for
authenticity, the more it recedes into the u n a t t a i n a b l e - - " . . , there is
no w a y out for them as long as they press their search for authenticity" {MacCannell, 1973:601). What starts as a quest for the real
becomes yet another manifestation of the ultimate absurdity of all
realities:
This claim attains with MacCannell almost the status of a "touristic
condition" reflecting a generally absurd human condition captured in
the works of existentialist philosophers. If for Sartre, there is "No
Exit" from the human existence and no way to penetrate the subjectivity of others, for MacCannell there is no way for the tourist to
penetrate the others' authenticity. Taken to its extreme, the quest of
MacCannell's tourist, like that of Camus's or Sartre's heroes, is absurd.
(Cohen, 1979:195)
Touristic Authenticity and Modern Reality
305
In short, the tourist is damned if he does and damned if he doesn't;
condemned to inauthenticity if he remains content with the surface
reality, he is condemned to the absurdity of "chasing after the vestiges
of a vanished reality" if he seeks a more authentic existence. This
would seem to lead us inevitably to Fusselrs (1980:49) conclusion t h a t
" . . . the anti-tourist deludes only himself. We are all tourists, now,
and there is no escape."
This would indeed be the conclusion if we were to assume that, since
the tourist does not have a true adventure or a true pilgrimage,
nothing real is experienced at all. Let us return for a moment to the experience of the lowly first-order tourist. Lugging along the baggage of
past preconceptions, future expectations, and commitments to the
world "back home," this tourist certainly does not have an unmediated "direct encounter with b e i n g " - - a t least as far as the place
visited is concerned. But, experiencing the trip through the viewfinder
of the camera, this tourist is likely to see what the "cultured
despisers" of tourism and the Angst-ridden, "anti-touristic tourists"
of the second, third, and fourth orders have failed to see. The viewfinder frames a scene away from the cares of everyday life, all the while
announcing commitment to t h a t world where these pictures will bring
back pleasant memories. It is a fun scene unembarrassed and unconcerned by its irreality. A b o v e all, standing front and center as the
featured aspect of the experience are likely to be family members and
friends. When I asked people about the kinds of pictures they liked to
take on trips, participants in m y own research {Redfoot, 1981} indicated over and again such things as:
"Things that display the activities of the family on the trip." "When we
travel, the people we know. We like to photograph them--family or
friends." "Scenes of where we've been; but more important than that,
pictures of people we're with in the scenes." "You want to have members of the family or people to remember or something that you wanted
to remember."
Despite the sociological evidence (Schudson, 1979} t h a t a very substantial portion of travel is either with family or friends or in order to
see family or friends, one looks in vain for references to the shared
nature of these experiences amongst the critics of tourism (and scarce
reference among social scientific researchers}. Even Cohen's {1979}
otherwise excellent essay misses this point when he talks about what
he calls the "recreational tourist." While he does a phenomenological
analysis of the reality experienced by his other types, with the
recreational tourist he relies on the old functionalist line t h a t such
tourism provides an escape from the everyday t h a t prepares the per-
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QUALITATIVE SOCIOLOGY
son for the "serious living" back home. This may be true as far as it
goes. But it should also be pointed out this tourist is rarely acting simply in order to be functional to the system. In the experiences of the individuals involved, travel is an experience that is torn off from the
workaday world not so that they can be better cogs in the economic
machine but so that personal relationships can assert themselves as
paramount, as most intensely "real." The "authenticity" of the place
visited is, therefore, often quite unimportant--it serves only as backdrop whose exotic quality highlights the familiar relationships that are
clearly most important. This tourist takes a snapshot so that the experience can take its place among the weddings, births, graduations,
and other family-centered events that are collected in the family
album--events that some of the same "cultured despisers" of tourism
have also disparaged (see, among others, Sontag's, 1977, broadside on
family photographs). These collected mementos are not just frivolous
times off from life; they represent the shared memories of the private
sphere that serve as an important ontological anchor for the modern
individual. 10
The anxiety over authenticity may point, as Trilling argued, "to the
peculiar nature of our fallen condition" as modern individuals. But, as
Peter Berger (1973) noted in reviewing Trilling's work, this anxiety
over authenticity is not evenly distributed throughout the population.
It seems to be a particular occupational hazard among modern inteUectuals. Most people, most of the time, seem to muddle through
using available resources as ontological sandbags to shore up the
realities of identity and meaningful relationships. Typically, this involves a heavy reliance on the private sphere as an ontological anchor
amidst the uncertainties of modern life. For such people, tourism is
likely to be experienced as a liberation of the private sphere, a time
over which they have control to do what they wish, where they wish.
Most importantly, it is time that can be devoted entirely to family and
friendships as the core of what is most importantly real.
For the more adventuresome, this solution may be rather dull. For
the angst-ridden spiritual individualists, such commitments to the
everyday m a y be illusory and inauthentic. They will continue to seek
authenticity through flights from the everyday into the exotic. This
essay is not intended to disparage such efforts, which are, after all, the
source of great poetic imagery. For critics who establish the adventure
(Fussell) or the spiritual pilgrimage (MacCannell) as the standard of
authenticity, the tourist will represent an irredeemably fallen state.
But for those who have an appreciation for the "reality" of the
everyday, the tourist may be due for a metaphorical rehabilitation as
the symbol of the impressive, if unheroic, triumph of personal meaning
in an increasingly impersonal world.
Touristic Authenticity and Modern Reality
307
Reference Notes
1. There has been no shortage of typotogies of touristic experience. My typology is
indebted to MacCannell's {1973, 1976} use of Goffman's frontstage/backstage
metaphor to discuss touristic reality and Cohen's {1979) phenomenvlogical
analysis. See also discussions by Schmidt {1979) and Duncan {1978} on the construction of touristic unreality and Pearce's 11982} discussion of the "social role of
the tourist."
2. Compare the following discussion to Cohen's {1979} discussion of the "recreational
tourist" and to Pearce's research {1982:28-37} on images of "pleasure first" travel.
Among Pearce's sample of Australian students, the tourist was someone who {in
order of importance) "takes photos, buys souvenirs, goes to famous places, stays
briefly in one place, does not understand the local people tp. 32)."
3. Goffman contrasts the snapshot and the portrait on this point. Posing for a snapshot is criticized as "inauthentic" for storing up images for the future because it
denies the immediate experience. Goffman (1979:17) notes, however, that the person having a portrait made is not branded as inauthentic since the meaning of
"posing" has little to do with the immediate experience; the person poses nat for
the experience of posing but solely in order to make a record for the future.
4. The size of the sample in this explanatory work does not justify many inferences
(in a rigorous statistical sense). The study was done with nine married couples and
two individuals who had previously been married (one widowed and one divorced},
The data will therefore be used for examples rather than as a test of hypotheses
(Redfoot, 1981).
5. Compare the following section to the descriptions in Cohen (1979) of the "experiential tourist" and in Pearce's (1982:28-37) study of "high contact" travellers.
Note especially the latter's description of the "traveller" as one who "stays briefly
in one place, experiments with local food, goes to famous places, takes photos, explores places privately." See also the description of the "overseas student" as one
who "experiments with local food, does not exploit local people, takes photos,
keenly observes the visited society, takes physical risks."
6. Pearce (1982:28-37) groups the "overseas journalist" with these "high contact"
travellers. The roles are seen as similar, as the journalist "takes photos, keenly observes the visited society, goes to famous places, takes physical risks, explores
places privately."
7. Pearce's (1982:32) sample saw the anthropologist (as environmental traveller) in
the following roles: "keenly observes the visited society, explores places privately,
interested in the environment, does not buy souvenirs, takes photos." See also
MacCannell's (1976:176ff.) comparison of the anthropologist to the tourist,
8. See Sorenson (1975:464-66) for a similar discussion and criticism of this "cultural
zoo philosophy." For a phenomenological analysis of the problems involved in one
attempt to recover the artifacts of a cultural identity, see Handler's discussion
(1984) of Quebec.
9. Compare this section to Pearce's {1982:32} sample, which viewed the "religious
pilgrim" as "spiritual" traveller in the following roles: "searches for the meaning
of life, does not live a life of luxury, does not exploit the local people, does not buy
souvenirs." See also Cohen's {1979) discussion of the "existential tourist."
10. For discussions of the "multiple realities" of modern life and the consequent
reliance on the "private sphere" for identity see Luckmann t1978), Berger, Berger,
and Kellner (1973), and Weigart and Hastings {1977).
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QUALITATIVE SOCIOLOGY
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