The consumption of cultural experiences in city tourism

Introduction

Cultural heritage is often thought to be an important ingredient of city tourism ‘products’ consumed by tourists in search of the ‘authentic’ other (Tunbridge and Ashworth, 1996; Wickens, 2000; Smith, 2007). Much has been written on the economic logic which places a destination’s culture on the market, on the ‘gentrification’ of inner city areas, and the consumption of ‘symbolic’ experiences produced by the tourism and heritage industries (Alvarez Sainz, 2012; Dann, 1996; Evans, 2003; Hewison, 1987; Hooper-Greenhill, 1992; Maitland and Newman, 2004). Studies show that cultural tourism contributes to the regeneration of local economies and the whole life of city communities, for instance the regeneration of Baltimore city is often used as an example to illustrate this argumentation (Richards, 2011). However, there are also several studies that claim to show that this consumption ‘de-authenticates’ the culture of the visited city, resulting in the loss of place distinctiveness and the subsequent loss of ‘authenticity’ (AlSayyad, 2013; Graburn, 2013; Watson and Kopachevsky, 1994; Ivanovic, 2014). By implication the commoditisation of cultural tourism destroys the ‘authenticity’ of the traveller’s experience. This logic raises questions about the hermeneutic problem entailed in any conceptualisation of ‘authenticity’ (Cohen, 1988; Dant, 1990; Featherstone, 1991; Rojek and Urry, 1997; Sheller and Urry, 2004; Bruner, 1994).

This article presents a synoptic clarification of the term ‘authenticity’ and in so doing it assesses the key theoretical contributions to our understanding of this pivotal concept. It scrutinises important treatments of ‘authenticity’ that inform contemporary studies of cultural tourism and then proceeds to offer a fresh perspective for understanding the consumption of cultural experiences in city tourism.

The concept of authenticity

A literature review reveals that many scholars operate with an under developed definition of the term authenticity in their analysis of cultural experiences in city tourism. The need for such a definition typically goes unrecognised. Although the word authenticity is very much in vogue, it still remains rather elusive to definition (Appadurai, 1986; Cohen, 1988; Fitchett, 1997; Girard, 2008; Reisinger and Steiner, 2006; Wickens, 1994). This task is made more difficult by the fact that ‘authenticity’ is not merely an academic term but also one which has become an epithet used to describe almost anything the user of the term happens to fancy, from drinks (e.g. Coke is the Real Thing) to places (e.g. Real London). Such incidences of usage of the term ‘authentic’ raise questions about its meaning, which needs to be more clearly defined.

According to the Shorter Oxford English Dictionary (1993) authenticity is the ‘quality of being authentic’. The same source explains that the word is derived from the Greek term ‘afthentikos’, meaning ‘principal, genuine’. Authentic is said to mean: (1) of authority, authoritative; entitled to obedience or respect; (2) legally valid, legally qualified; (3) entitled to belief as stating or according with fact, reliable, trustworthy; (4) real, actual, genuine, original, first hand; really proceeding from its stated source. It is definition (4) which most accords with the general use of this term in many cultural studies (Girard, 2008). One of the few uncontroversial statements that can be made about this concept is that it has been applied to so many different things that it abounds in ambiguity (Ivanovic, 2014; Lazaridis and Wickens, 1999; Taylor, 2001; Wickens, 2006). Its ambiguity has generated a discourse which is centred on the issue concerning the consumption of cultural experiences in destinations including city tourism. In what follows, the various arguments found in the collection of writings which are most pertinent to our understanding of this issue are considered. Mostly for reasons of space, however, this article has been prevented from engaging in discussions concerning the authenticity in ‘freedom directed tourists’ (e.g. people who go on city breaks for the purpose of having fun and pleasure; Bakir and Baxter, 2011; Wickens, 2002).

Theoretical discourses on cultural experiences in city tourism

Notwithstanding the definitional problem associated with the term authenticity, the cultural tourist’s experience is often conceptualised as a commodity. Furthermore, there is a tendency among researchers to adopt one of two opposed theoretical orientations in their analysis of the cultural tourist’s experience. One perceives the cultural tourist as the prisoner in touristic ‘ghettos’ directed to ‘special city enclaves’ and consequently, the experience is characterised as ‘superficial’, and as an extension of an ‘alienated’ world (Boorstin, 1964; Crick, 1996; Featherstone, 1991; Xue et al., 2014). The other point of view conceptualises the cultural tourist as ‘a pilgrim’ and urban tourism as a search for ‘authenticity’, an escape from an ‘alienated’ world (Graburn, 2002; MacCannell, 1989, 1992). It should be noted that these two conceptual orientations are best seen as the ends of a spectrum of opinion with a range of views lying somewhere between them (Cohen, 1979; Ryan, 1997; Wickens, 2002, 2006).

The treatment of cultural tourists as ‘passive spectators’, or as ‘contemporary urban flaneurs’ (strollers) who enjoy ‘contrived attractions’ and ‘pseudo events’ celebrating the ‘artificiality’ and ‘superficiality’ in themed touristic spaces is found in several studies (Milman, 2006; Rojek and Urry, 1997; Urry, 1995). ‘Pseudo events’, including staged performances of traditional dances or ceremonies, are said to be designed to show cultural tourists a traditional way of city life which has disappeared as a result of mass consumption. A related assertion is that cultural tourists’ experiences are homogenised, superficial and hence inauthentic. Isolated from the local community, these tourists are gullible sightseers as they remain in and around the touristic spaces or ‘honeypots’ often located in the centre of the visited city. The honeypot is conceptualised as an all-encompassing, hermetically sealed, micro-world. This micro-world comprises hotels, a range of facilities such as restaurants, souvenir shops, bars and pubs and contrived cultural attractions trading on nostalgia, idealising the past and turning it into tourist kitsch. What is also striking about this representation of cultural experiences in city tourism is that visitors are known by how many nights they spend at the hotel, the number of museum trips undertaken and what quantity of alcohol and food they consume. Perhaps the vagueness of the term ‘authentic’ experiences of the visited host city is symptomatic of an inability to take seriously the phenomenological study of the tourist. A feature of existing literature is that studies concentrate on the city producers of the ‘tourist gaze’ and cultural tourists are treated merely as silent figures in the analytical landscape (Urry, 1995; Wickens, 2006). Further shortcomings of this representation of cultural tourists’ experiences in city tourism become clear when the works in which they are found are put in context. Cultural tourists are not the subject of investigation (Girard, 2008; Wickens, 2002). Analysts are mainly concerned with the socio-cultural impacts of urban tourism, the creation of ‘placeless environments’ in inauthentic cities.

Authenticity as a modern value

It has been argued by MacCannell and like-minded analysts that cultural tourists look for authenticity in the ‘other’ because everything about modern living is ‘inauthentic’. MacCannell (1989: 3) claims that ‘for moderns, reality and authenticity are thought to be elsewhere in other historical periods and other cultures, in purer, simpler lifestyles’. His conclusion, that, tourists seek authenticity in other times and places, is based on ethnographic evidence from his study of guided tours in Paris. In his work, interest in the authentic ‘other’ is interpreted as a modern value, whose emergence is linked to the presumed effects of modernity upon human existence (Appadurai, 1986; Berger, 1973; Trilling, 1972). However, the view that modern society is inauthentic and, as a consequence, generates cognitive ‘alienation’, or what Berger calls ‘mental homelessness’ was a sociological concern of the 1970s. His thesis is of limited explanatory use in the world we now inhabit. It is this notion of authenticity that informs MacCannell’s thesis. He and other like-minded thinkers view the modern western world as inauthentic and alienating, and pre-modern and traditional societies as ‘authentic’. What is asserted in their work is that cultural tourists are concerned with the authenticity of the ‘other’, that is visited host destination because it is absent in the occidental tourist’s own society.

Staged authenticity and culture

Influenced by Goffman’s work (1959), MacCannell coined the term ‘staged authenticity’, to refer to the presentation of contrived cultural attractions as if they were ‘authentic’. By employing Goffman’s ‘front-stage/back-stage’ dichotomy, he developed a classification of touristic settings, which reflects the differing degrees of authenticity. Some settings are ‘purely front’ (e.g. Disneyworld holiday resorts), set specifically for mass consumption. Others are ‘purely back’ that is authentic places (e.g. places off the beaten track found in cities such as Kathmandu). In between these two poles there are front regions which are organised to look like ‘backs’, (e.g. the guided tours in the Jewish quarters, in Krakow), or back regions to which visitors are occasionally permitted entry (e.g. the open orchestra rehearsal). Although his analysis parallels Boorstin’s (1964) concept of pseudo event, in MacCannell’s narrative, cultural tourists are inhibited by the tourist industry from ‘peeking into the back regions’. This view contrasts with Boorstin’s view that the cultural tourists want to consume ‘pseudo events’. For MacCannell tourists rarely participate in the culture of the visited place. The inauthenticity of the tourist experience is ‘the structural consequence of the development of tourism’, rather than the result of tourists’ demand for pseudo events (MacCannell, 1989: 94). However, it should be noted that even in this view, everything about the tourists’ experience is inauthentic and mass produced.

There are several studies which document the staging of local cultural events, and rituals which are supposed to serve and satisfy the cultural needs of tourists (Fees, 1996; Selwyn, 1996; Sheller and Urry, 2004; Smith, 2007; Watson and Kopachevsky, 1996). These thinkers suggest that the ‘real’ meaning of cultural events such as folk dances, festivals, and religious ceremonies have been lost, because they are mass produced and performed for a touristic audience. Although they may appear to cultural tourists as ‘authentic’, in reality, it is claimed that they are ‘pseudo events’. A common theme in several writings is that commoditisation destroys the authenticity of the local culture (Girard, 2008; Urry, 1995; Wickens and Harrison, 1996).

A number of objections may be made to this analysis. First, there is some evidence that cultural tourism is ‘the guardian’ of tradition. Tourists’ demand for cultural authenticity, by reawakening an interest in the host community’s own culture, encourages the maintenance of traditions and customs (Andronicou, 1984). Examples in support of this view can be found in cities such as Dublin. Situated in the heart of this city, the church of St. Mary’s has been preserved by its new owners who creatively have converted it into a bar/restaurant, offering ‘traditional’ food, drink and Irish music. It is interesting to see that the new ‘Church’ has still got many of its original features such as the organ and stained glass windows. Another example from the same city is the change of use of a bank into a bar/restaurant while retaining its original Victorian features. ‘Everything is exactly as it was when the Belfast Bank opened its doors to the Dublin public in April 1895. Nothing has changed here: nothing will change in the future in what will remain as a treasured preservation of our cultural heritage’ (The Bank on College Green, 2007).

Preserving and conserving the past is now a widespread activity. The proliferation of heritage centres and museums (e.g. latest museum in England is that of Baked Beans means Heritage) suggests that cultural heritage is certainly big business and explains the recent growth of interest in city cultures. Feelings of nostalgia for the past are everywhere. Indeed, increasing numbers of people travel to particular places for the expressed purpose of understanding and experiencing a culture that is somehow different from their own (Ryan, 1997; Wickens, 2002; Wickens, 2011). Some estimates suggest that cultural tourism accounts for more than 70 percent of all city trips (Richards, 2011).

At this point it will be useful to define this other ambiguous concept, namely that of ‘culture’. According to Williams (1977), culture means more than just historical buildings, monuments, arts and handicrafts. Culture is also about people and their patterns of everyday life. It includes the hosts’ life styles, customs, traditions, festivals, religious ceremonies and local entertainment. A number of studies suggest that the desire for authentic experiences in foreign places is one of the reasons motivating people to travel (Kesgin et al., 2012). Traditions, handicrafts, language, the history of the region, architecture, religion, local traditional food and leisure activities are some aspects of local culture, which can lead people to travel to a particular city (Hose and Wickens, 2004; Kasim, 2011; Kesgin et al., 2012).

Consuming signs of authenticity

The authenticity argument can usefully be explored by reference to Baudrillard’s (1997: 28) concept of ‘simulations’. There is an affinity between ‘staged events’ and Baudrillard’s study of Disneyland in America in which the contemporary tourist is involved in simulations of experience. For him places such as theme parks and museums offer the tourist spectacles which are simulations. Staged performances of traditional dances or ceremonies and heritage museums designed to show tourists, a traditional way of life, are for him examples of ‘simulations’. ‘But these are accepted in a spirit of spectacle … This world of sign and spectacle is one in which there is no real originality … Everything is a copy, or a text, where what is fake seems more real than the real’ (Baudrillard, 1997). In addition, commercial interests promote and manipulate false images of places selling authentic paradises which do not exist (Baudrillard, 1988; Featherstone, 1991; Umberto, 1986). Tourism is a way of providing a ‘simulacrum of the world’. This postmodernist approach rejects the notion of ‘authenticity’ and more importantly the search for the authentic ‘other’ since everything in now inauthentic. It places an emphasis on the superficial, the ephemeral, the trivial and the artificial. The interpretation, that, tourists are in search for ‘signs of authenticity’ and are consumers of ‘signs and representations’ is also echoed in Urry’s (1991) work. He suggests that ‘there is the seeing of particular signs, such as the typical English village, the typical American skyscraper, the typical German beer-garden, the typical French chateau, and so on. This mode of gazing shows how tourists are in a way semioticians, reading the landscape for signifiers of certain pre-established notions or signs derived from various discourses of travel and tourism’ (Urry, 1991). From this point of view, it is the seeing of particular signs during the trip which are important to cultural tourists (Urry, 1991; Lash and Urry, 1993). Urry goes on to argue that people travel to these places in order to take photographs. The ‘tourist gaze’ is made material via photography. ‘People feel that they must not miss seeing particular scenes since otherwise the photo-opportunities will be missed … Indeed, much tourism becomes in effect a search for the photogenic travel’ and is a strategy for ‘the accumulation of photographs’ (Urry, 1991: 139).

It is widely recognised that media, travel brochures and more recently the web inform tourists about a place, and its ‘signs of authenticity’. A commonly held view is that cultural tourism is not only ‘sign-driven’ but also ‘media-driven’ (e.g. Watson and Kopachevsky, 1996: 282). Here, cultural tourists are characterised as ‘semioticians’, reading the landscape for signs derived from various travel discourses (Wang, 1999) In this interpretation of the touristic experience, it is the seeing of particular signs during the trip which are important to cultural tourists. From this perspective, for example when one visits Dublin one must see Temple Bar, Trinity College, Guinness’ Museum and all the attractions listed in the travellers’ guide book.

A common theme in many postmodernist studies is that the tourist industry plays an important role in shaping tourists’ wants and expectations. In particular, brochures and travel guides are seen to be influential in determining tourists’ perceptions of a city. Surely, the assumption that cultural tourists are ‘mere suckers for the surfaces of the tourist brochures’ and is ‘too simplistic’ (Selwyn, 1996: 29). Reading of travel literature is a ‘creative act’ which differs from person to person (Fiske, 1989). Any travel brochure image, may be considered as a ‘text’ – something that is creatively read, interpreted and assigned meanings by each tourist who receives it. Meanings reflect an individual’s socio-cultural background and experiences (Hose and Wickens, 2004). The postmodernist argument that cultural tourists search for and consume signs of authenticity is flawed, in that it is based on the researcher’s reading of travel brochures which reflects the researcher’s cultural background and often his/her ‘hostility’ towards tourism (Hose and Wickens, 2004). In ‘Tourists, motivations and experiences: A theoretical and methodological critique’ Wickens (2006) suggests an alternative perspective which treats people as active agents interacting with real structures. Like their modernist predecessors, postmodernist thinkers do not consider the meanings of a cultural trip from the tourist’s point of view.

Evolving cultures

Some commentators claim that cultural events and festivals that have become tourist attractions still retain their importance and authenticity within the host society (Boissevain, 1996; Crick, 1996). For instance, Boissevain suggests that ‘while Malta is indeed now selling its colourful rituals to tourists, this commoditisation is not destroying them. On the contrary, it has imbued them with new meanings’ (Boissevain, 1996: 116). Others have suggested that a cultural event which is inauthentic now, may become authentic later (Crick, 1996). Cultures are dynamic, changing over time. To pretend otherwise is akin to Sartre’s ‘bad faith’ in that the authentic/traditional label treats a society as if it is an object (a being-in-itself). The truly authentic society fully accepts itself (Manser, 1966) as an amalgam of the old and the new (Wickens, 2009). The issue of the authenticity of cultural attractions and events is still very much contested amongst social thinkers (Clifford, 1986; Fees, 1996; Greenwood, 1989; Kasim, 2011). It is worth noting here, that in many of these studies, the major concern is with socio-cultural changes in destinations, rather than with the experiences of tourists. However, it might be argued that the judgement that cultural tourism destroys the authenticity of the other, that is its traditions and culture is often influenced by Western romanticism of primitive, a ‘version of ethnocentrism’ (Robins, 1991). It is assumed that there was a ‘true’ culture and that the introduction of tourism has destroyed it. However, theorising the authenticity of the ‘other’ is certainly problematic. It requires a historical knowledge of the culture of the host community. History, however, is open ended since it is socially constructed (AlSayyad, 2013; Briedenhann and Wickens, 2007; Crick, 1996). Anthropological work has shown that all cultures have been changing throughout history and most city cultures had at least one major foreign encounter before any tourist came their way. Cultures are neither static nor monolithic, but evolve and are constantly changing.

Long before tourism, those cultures were changing, including in directions that reflected their own understandings of the nature of Western societies … all cultures are in the process of making themselves up all the time. In a general sense all cultures are staged authenticity. That being so, if change is a permanent state, why should the changes be seen in such a negative light’ (Crick, 1996: 40).

Several thinkers have suggested that the perception of a disappearing authenticity of the ‘other’ involves an imaginative reconstruction (Giddens, 1992). Cultures are invented and remade and hence cultural tourism is based on the reinvention of traditions, that is based on myths (AlSayyad, 2013; Selwyn, 1996; Rojek, 1995; Rojek and Urry, 1997; Wickens, 2002). Because the traditional culture of a city is invented and reinvented, it follows that the authenticity of the ‘other’ is socially constructed and reconstructed through narratives. Giddens (1991: 37) makes a similar point regarding the reinvention of ‘tradition’ in societies.

Tradition is not wholly static, because it has to be reinvented by each new generation as it takes over its cultural inheritance from those preceding it … to understand tradition, as distinct from other modes of organising action and experience, demands cutting into time-space in ways which are only possible with the invention of writing. Writing expands the level of time-space distanciation and creates a perspective of past, present, and future, in which the reflexive appropriation of knowledge can be set off from designated tradition.

Since cultures are constantly evolving, they ‘do not hold still for their portraits … to make them do so always involve simplification and exclusion, selection of a temporal focus,… and the imposition or negotiation of a power relationship’ (Clifford and Marcus, 1986: 10). As these writers point out, there are limits to the representation of the other. Crick and like-minded scholars have questioned the social scientists’ authority for the authentication of cultural attractions and events and for speaking for others who are perceived as unable to differentiate between the authentic and inauthentic. As Wickens (2002) points out, the tourist voice is never heard, because in many studies, tourists are not the subject of investigation. She suggests that the authenticity of the tourist experience should be judged through the tourist’s own eyes.

Cultural hybridisation

There are several studies that make the important point that places are not static or frozen but constantly changing (AlSayyad, 2013). Social change is complex and the changes that are attributed to places may also take in response to other forces of modernisation, including globalisation. As Robbins (1991) points out, there is ‘something very suspect and problematical about the Western idealisation of primitiveness and purity, this romance of the Other… it does pose important questions about the nature of western cultural identity and its relation to Otherness’ (Robbins, 1991: 32). He explains that as a result of globalisation, boundaries ‘are crossed, cultures are mingled, identities become blurred’ and hence cultures become hybridised (Robbins, 1991: 43). The ‘cultural hybridity’ of a host community is one of the consequences of the ‘logic of globalisation’. However, Robins (Robbins, 1991: 35) also points out that:

Whilst globalisation may be the prevailing force of our times, this does not mean that localism is without significance … The particularity of place and culture can never be done away with, can never be absolutely transcended … It is important to see the local as a relational, and relative, concept.

Thus while, he recognises that cultural hybridisation takes place, he also points out that there are still major cultural differences, for instance between European host communities and tourist destinations such as those in East Asia. This is an important perspective on what could be called the ‘other-directed’ authenticity of a visited host city. This refers to the contemporary character of a host community that is rooted in both the past and the present.

This conceptualisation recognises that the authenticity of the ‘other’, that is a place and its culture is not fixed in time but rather bound up in an ongoing process of cultural invention (AlSayyad, 2013; Giddens, 1992). This facet of other-directed authenticity describes the host community’s own contemporary ‘persona’, that is its collective self, its contemporary character, its uniqueness, in short ‘the spirit of a place’. For instance, let us take two European cities Dublin and Krakow. Each has a traditional culture which is rooted in the past, but the essential character of each is now squarely rooted in the present and indeed the future (c.f. the existential notion of ‘being in becoming’). This is of importance to our understanding of cultural tourists’ experiences in creative cities. There is also evidence from my work in Greece, and Nepal that the search for this type of authenticity is a motivational factor of the Cultural Heritage tourists (Wickens, 2005, 2009).

Studies today have tended to emphasise the loss of the distinctiveness of urban places pointing to their cultural similarities whereas existing cultural differences have been ignored. The concept of cultural hybridity recognises that there are similarities but also differences in the ‘other’ (Figure 1). OPEN IN VIEWER

It is the second level of meaning of the word which has been used in the analysis of the cultural tourists’ experience in Greece and voluntourists in Nepal. Evidence shows that tourists’ perceptions of what constitutes authentic cultural experiences, varies in relation to the nature of the tourists’ expectations (Wickens, 2002, 2005, 2007, 2009). My recent study of international volunteer tourists’ experiences in Kathmandu provides further support for the thesis that cultural tourists can achieve an ‘authentic experience and insights into the lives of others’ through their relationships with the locals (Pearce and Moscardo, 1986: 470).

Conclusion

This conceptual article has primarily drawn upon key contributions to our understanding of authenticity in cultural experiences in city tourism. From the foregoing analysis, it can be seen that authenticity is a conceptual representation of something we perceive as authentic. There is no single notion of authenticity, but social constructions of authenticity are created and recreated again and again, made and remade, in their various forms. Thus, judging the tourist experience as authentic or inauthentic involves a selection of certain criteria. These criteria are not fixed or absolute, but as the above discussion shows, they are negotiated and selected according to the analyst’s cultural values and perceptions of the ‘real other’. Every interpretation of the authenticity of a city’s culture is selective and incomplete, and this is certainly true when interpreting the cultural experience of tourists.

It is also equally clear, that cultures and places are complex and therefore, any conceptual representation of the authenticity of the tourist experience of the ‘other’ is problematic. In our studies, we can no longer know the ‘whole truth’; any account of the tourist experience of the other can only be partial. I have also suggested that other-directed authenticity is a useful heuristic device for describing the emergent culture of a place. Furthermore, I have argued that to understand the meaning of the tourist’s experience, it is important to recognise that people assign their own meanings and value to their holidays. To-date, the vast majority of studies have been concerned with the social change of cosmopolitan cities or metropolies rather than with the tourists’ experiences. More importantly questions such as what makes a tourist experience authentic in the tourist’s own eyes are only just beginning to be asked.