MacCannell Chapter 5 - "Staged Authenticity"

In this chapter of The Tourist, MacCannell expands upon Erving Goffman’s theory and tweaks aspects of Daniel Boorstin’s to introduce a theory of the study of tourist settings that creates a spectrum of authenticity (both perceived and realistic). MacCannell begins the chapter by building upon Erving Goffman’s theory of the front and back regions of society and how people interact with either, both, or none. We’ve discussed how the gaze is nonspecific – how the tourist, the broker, or the local can possess it. Goffman’s idea that the performers have access to both the front and the back regions reflects Foucauld’s idea that the locals are the agents in many situations while the tourists (who can normally only access the front regions) are the targets. I believe that this creates a lack of a gaze – the tourists believe that they are gazing upon a cultural spectacle, but they are lacking much of the authenticity of the culture because what they see is only the front region of view. MacCannell then discusses how sightseers are motivated by a search for authenticity, but they rarely find it. He seems to be making a distinction between ethnographers and tourists looking for truth, but he doesn’t explain in very much detail how exactly ethnographers are able to “penetrate the true inner workings of other individuals or societies” (MacCannell 95). Finally, MacCannell begins his discussion on staged authenticity and the structure of tourist settings. MacCannell is asking where the line of authenticity is drawn. He mentions that in between stages 3 and 4 of the 6-stage theory of the tourist setting continuum, it becomes very difficult to decipher whether you’re seeing the front or the back region. My question is: who cares? It doesn’t seem to me that stages 4 or 5 are completely authentic either because the people running these organizations are still putting in some effort to put on a façade for the tourists. In the last part of this chapter, MacCannell introduces Boorstin’s “pseudo-event” that explains that the tourist setting is not a substantial representation of what it is trying to depict. The hurdles that one must leap over to find authentic experiences seem to me to be the same ones that ethnographers, who have made a career out of studying others, leap over. This brings us back to the question of whether there is a difference between ethnographers and tourists who are searching for truth. MacCannell expresses his belief that tourists are on an endless search for authenticity, but their level of commitment to this cause is what differentiates them from ethnographers. What about those tourists who have a real hunger for finding the authenticity of a culture? Are their experiences deemed inauthentic and superficial simply because they are tourists? The quest for authenticity and the question of where to draw the line between the inauthentic and the authentic will persist as long as the Modern Man quests to find the truth of the other.