Authenticity and The Tourist Gaze: Latin American Perspectives
Authenticity and the „tourist gaze“
Latin American Perspectives
„Those who travel are searching for authentic encounters with exotic others. The natives become the spectacle.“
„The commoditization of people and their cultural traits and customs may alter cultural meanings and destroy their authenticity. Instead of the “real” thing, the commoditization of cultures leads to a fake or a “staged authenticity”(MacCannell, 1973; see also Cohen, 1988: 372; van den Berghe, 1994). The authenticity that the tourist seeks, however, is not fixed but negotiable, a cultural construct. In the negotiations about what an authentic experience is (Cohen, 1988), all three parties (tourists, middlemen, natives) have their moments of power.“
„The pursuit of the authentic other, then, involves a power struggle among tourists, local communities, entrepreneurs, middlemen, and cultural brokers with definitions of “authentic” at its core.“
The Tourist Gaze and beyond
An interview with John Urry
MacCannell’s The Tourist.
„In The Tourist Gaze you argue that tourism is constantly changing both in terms of the tourism objects necessary to create a sense of difference and in terms of the changing social and cultural composition of tourists.“
Culture, economy and tourism commodities Social relations of production and consumption
„In the contemporary global economy, processes of commodification have become characterized by the intense and sophisticated symbolic aestheticization of material objects“
Gazing or Performing?
Reflections on Urry’s Tourist Gaze in the Context of Contemporary Experience in the Antipodes
„Going further, Selwyn (1990: 24) suggested that:
. . . sites are no longer signifiers which, linked together, form coherent struc- tures within which individual tourists find historical and biographical meaning, but instead they are centres of physical and emotional sensation from which temporal and spatial continuities have been abolished.“
„It is in this context
Latin American Perspectives
„Those who travel are searching for authentic encounters with exotic others. The natives become the spectacle.“
„The commoditization of people and their cultural traits and customs may alter cultural meanings and destroy their authenticity. Instead of the “real” thing, the commoditization of cultures leads to a fake or a “staged authenticity”(MacCannell, 1973; see also Cohen, 1988: 372; van den Berghe, 1994). The authenticity that the tourist seeks, however, is not fixed but negotiable, a cultural construct. In the negotiations about what an authentic experience is (Cohen, 1988), all three parties (tourists, middlemen, natives) have their moments of power.“
„The pursuit of the authentic other, then, involves a power struggle among tourists, local communities, entrepreneurs, middlemen, and cultural brokers with definitions of “authentic” at its core.“
The Tourist Gaze and beyond
An interview with John Urry
MacCannell’s The Tourist.
„In The Tourist Gaze you argue that tourism is constantly changing both in terms of the tourism objects necessary to create a sense of difference and in terms of the changing social and cultural composition of tourists.“
Culture, economy and tourism commodities Social relations of production and consumption
„In the contemporary global economy, processes of commodification have become characterized by the intense and sophisticated symbolic aestheticization of material objects“
Gazing or Performing?
Reflections on Urry’s Tourist Gaze in the Context of Contemporary Experience in the Antipodes
„Going further, Selwyn (1990: 24) suggested that:
. . . sites are no longer signifiers which, linked together, form coherent struc- tures within which individual tourists find historical and biographical meaning, but instead they are centres of physical and emotional sensation from which temporal and spatial continuities have been abolished.“
„It is in this context