What have been the circumstances that made the notion of authenticity so popular in the most modern analysis about tourism? Primarily used in academic studies, the concept of authencity ended up in journalistic articles and even in novels, such as Platform, by Michel Houllebecq. My hypothesis is that the notion of authenticity appears revested of a huge explanatory value; at first instance, it seems possible to articulate it with a large number of topics and touristic practices. First, they tell us why do turists travel: to see other “authentically different” people, that have a “different culture”, hence new and attractive. Second, it states a particular relation between the tourist, who has the money but lacks of an “authentic culture”, and the native, poor but “rich” un culture.

Politically, these visions of authenticity are molded into an idea presented as positive: that relations of alterity, far from becoming vehicles of bloody ethnic confrontations, may become vehicles of economic progress for the communities that receive visitors.

As stated in a previous post, these positive ideas have many difficulties. First, the ideal of non conflictive alterity is nothig but an illusion. The rescue of authentic cultures in tourism ends up many times in a simple estereotype associated to a few images. There is a hiearchisation of certain local elements that can become touristic merchandise. Those attributes that cannot be represented as images have few possibilites to be reknown.

Second, it’s clear that the difference is not a given thing, but the result of the relation between natives and tourists, in which the firsts are “authentic” when they are like the tourists imagine they should be. As can be easily observed in many places around Latin America, natives dress in a specific way to welcome tourists; as soon as the tourists leave, natives go back to their usual t-shirt, jeans and sneakers outfits. The notion of authenticity cannot tell us much on this point, except to work it as an effect of the speech, in relation to economic, social and political determinations.

Despite these criticis, I’m still surprised by how marketing reuses the idea of authenticity to promote new touristic destinations. At Platform, Michel Houllebecq cinically tears this ideal apart: to know “authentic natives” is indeed an unequal relation between bored europeans that can afford to pay and poor natives who want to receive that money. In this statement, everything counts, amongst them, the industrialisation of sexual tourism at places such as the south of Asia, Cuba and Brazil. Particularly for those of us who study the social dimensions of tourism as an object of study, tt’s attractive to formalise and describe the images with which the industry represents the “authenticity” of natives.

By the way, I’m not thinking the idea of “authenticity” in relation to the possibilities of knowing the other in touristic contexts. There’s plenty bibliography that analyses the issues of tourists and travelers when describing other places and nations -lack of time, scarce interaction with locals, tendency to get stuck in gettos touristified as hotels and bars. This subject definitely deserves a separate entry.