Staged Authenticity

super frenchReading Macannell’s “Staged Authenticty,” I was struck by his delineation of the authentic experience, and his classification of the front and back regions. The desire to have an authentic experience, which the author compares to a religious pilgrimage, is really interesting to me. It expresses, at once, a recognition of the artificiality present in other cultures, and an almost willful ignorance of the artificiality typically inherent to the “authentic” experience. It is motivated by the tourist’s wish to penetrate a foreign culture, and, by understanding it fully in its rawest state, to gain a measure of power over it. The tourist experience, it seems to me, amounts to an act of appropriation or colonization.
This might be a measure of what I feel, in my travels abroad. True, an individual’s reasons for traveling are complex and highly personal, often having as much to do with one’s country of origin as with one’s destination. But I can’t deny that, each time I penetrate a little deeper into French culture, I feel a spark of elation that feels a lot like triumph. Part of this triumph stems, I think, from an awareness of the barriers that French people erect to keep people like me out, and the pleasure I take in overcoming them.
Macannell breaks the regions of the tourist experience down into six stages, ranging from those that are baldly touristic, to those that are truly authentic and are untouched by any self-awareness or attempts to appeal to foreigners. The degrees between those front spaces that are staged to appear as back regions, and those back regions that have been altered to attract tourists, are subtle. Often, it is difficult to tell where, on this scale, your experience falls.
Walking around Paris, I frequently am struck by a sense of dislocation and confusion, the results of a critical distance that forces me to ask—who is all of this for? When shopping in markets, or eating in cafes, I often find myself in the company solely of French people, all of whom are going about their daily transactions casually, with little sense of theater or artifice. Possibly, they do not even know that I am not French. It is odd, then, to experience a market scene as a tourist, in the midst of people who are not, and to wonder exactly what part of the experience is “authentic.” The situation is even more complicated when in the company of other French people…in this case, you become a collectively a group, only a fraction of which can be classified as touristic. Is your experience then more authentic? Or, because the areas that these activities are taking place are shaped by their appeal to foreigners, is the experience equally inauthentic among the tourists and the Parisians whose company they are in?