Tourism and nostalgia for the pastoral on the island of Fyn,Denmark

Constructions of home are powerful from both heritage and tourism perspectives, as ‘home’ suggests a certain type of heritage precedence while also providing a competitive tourism advantage over rival locations. Sport tourism sites also disseminate notions of home as part of their narrative, both to create and solidify particular heritage claims as well as to enhance the tourism potential of a location. Home narratives are used, in particular, during stadium tours, where tourists go ‘behind the scenes’ at a famous sports venue. Tour narratives at Twickenham Stadium were examined in this study. At Twickenham, it was found that the stadium was represented as ‘home’ during tours in three different ways: as the literal home of the English National Rugby team; as the spiritual home of the sport of rugby; and as the home of particular notions of English identity. These representations were created as a means of claiming cultural propriety, particularly with regard to the sport and its heritage, as well as in recognition of the venue's role as an international tourism destination. However, the employment of home narratives, which espouse notions of stability and continuity, also mask wider heritage and tourism anxieties, in particular competition from rival sites.     

A nostalgic Peranakan journey in Melaka: Duo-ethnographic conversations between a Nyonya and Baba

A UNESCO World Heritage Listed historic city, Melaka embodies a vibrant multi-ethnic Asian heritage, straits-colonial legacy and cultural landscape that has been attracting tourists from within Asia and the wider world. In particular, Melaka is renowned for its rich Peranakan (Straits Chinese) cultural heritage and history. This work presents the divergent narratives of two Peranakan Chinese on a nostalgic, ancestral tourism journey in Melaka. Specifically, it explores the dimensions of nostalgia, authenticity and diaspora in cultural heritage tourism, framed within the affecting gaze of cultural, diasporic and reminiscent lenses through which we consume tourism experiences. Through our tourism lived experience and duo-ethnographic conversations, we explore our shared Southeast Asian ancestry, reflect on past traditions and question representations of our Peranakan Chinese heritage within four main themes: (1) reflective nostalgia, (2) the imagined past, (3) objective authenticity, and (4) existential authenticity.     

‘My dark heaven’: Hidden voices in orphanage tourism

Literature on orphanage tourism considers the motives of Western volunteers and the problematic nature of their compulsion to ‘help’ vulnerable children in the Global South. Orphanage tourism is also increasingly adopted into ‘rescue ideologies’ (Howard, 2016) and anti-trafficking/‘modern slavery’ campaigns. The perspectives of children involved, however, are missing from these discourses. This article draws on original empirical data to explore the narratives of young Nepali adults who lived in Kathmandu orphanages as children. Through these narratives, the article explores the diverse complexities of the residents' experiences of volunteer tourism and NGO ‘rescue’, and the shortcomings of recent ‘neoabolitionist’ frameworks. The article argues that such framings are routinely oversimplified and that a more nuanced and contextualised empirical exploration is urgently needed.     

Negotiating authenticity: Cathar heritage tourism

This paper explores the negotiation of authenticity with the case of Cathar heritage tourism in southern France. Also known as the Albigensians, the Cathars were a medieval sect practicing in the Languedoc Region of southern France from the tenth to the fourteenth century. Cathar heritage tourism is based upon various museums, heritage centers, castles, and seasonal trading fairs or markets supplemented by the activities of Cathar re-enactment or ‘living history’ societies. This interest in Cathar heritage has led to a highly saturated calendar of events. In 2010, for example, the total number of all varieties of these events in France was 36, with over 4000 people actively participating and the events attracting upwards of about 3 million visitors annually.

Based on a case-study approach, the geographical breadth of Cathar heritage tourism in France is outlined, giving brief case studies of each of the main types of tourist experiences. This is followed with a discussion on how notions of authenticity and commodification are constructed by key participants through the staging of particular types of Cathar heritage tourism.     

A structural model of host authenticity

Authenticity is significant for all modern peoples, including hosts. Hosts have the right to make their own interpretation of authenticity. The model that we constructed explains the process of hosts’ authentication through structural analysis of the antecedents and consequences of hosts’ authentic experiences. The effects of personal economic benefits are indirect and hidden, with personal emotional benefits being the key factor that mediates the conflict between economic benefits and authenticity. The model explains the complex but delicate mechanism of how hosts balance their dual demands, ‘benefits from tourism’ and ‘authentic culture’. When hosts use support for tourism as power to obtain hegemony over authenticity, they focus only on objective authenticity, which also implies ethnic tourism has become superficial in China.     

Tourism,mood and affect: Narratives of loss and hope

Beyond looking to emotion and affect for the purpose of understanding better the tourist experience in itself, this article considers what affect produced through tourism might do vis-à-vis our relationship with the world around us. With a particular focus on the production of ‘hopeful mood’, the article discusses the links between affect and tourism narratives of loss and of hope performed in two New Zealand tourism destinations. That both loss and hope narratives are produced in both destinations illustrates not only how tourism narratives are ‘affective’, but also that the affect produced is potentially selective. The implications of these narratives for tourism’s hopeful ‘worldmaking’ capacities are considered, along with suggested further avenues for research on tourism narratives, mood and affect.     

Dreaming of drams: authenticity in Scottish whisky tourism as an expression of unresolved Habermasian rationalities

In this paper, the production of whisky tourism at both independently owned and corporately owned distilleries in Scotland is explored by focusing on four examples (Arran, Glengoyne, Glenturret and Bruichladdich). In particular, claims of authenticity and Scottishness of Scottish whiskies through commercial materials, case studies, website‐forum discussions and ‘independent’ writing about such whisky are analysed. It is argued that the globalisation and commodification of whisky and whisky tourism, and the communicative backlash to these trends typified by the search for authenticity, is representative of a Habermasian struggle between two irreconcilable rationalities. This paper will demonstrate that the meaning and purpose of leisure can be understood through such explorations of the tension between the instrumentality of commodification and the freedom of individuals to locate their own leisure lives in the lifeworld that remains.     

Heritage Buildings and Tourism: An Experiential View

There has been a lack of attention in previous heritage tourism studies to the experiential relationship between heritage buildings and tourism. The aim of this paper is to explore the experiences gained by international tourists from heritage buildings in a particular region of New Zealand: Hawke's Bay. Specifically, the paper seeks insight into the specific attributes of heritage buildings that influenced the experiences of international tourists in the region. An increased understanding of the experiential relationship between heritage buildings and tourism is essential in strengthening support for preservation, for product development and promotion. Fifty semi-structured, and 66 photograph-supported, interviews conducted with international tourists visiting Hawke's Bay elicited three key experiential themes that emerged from respondents' narratives. These are ‘visual appeal’, ‘personal reflections’ and ‘engaging experiences’. Specifically, it was found that a tourism townscape is not a passive space. Heritage buildings render the townscape an experiential space filled with emotion, mindfulness, engagement and personal meaning. The paper concludes that this finding has important implications for destination promotion and product development and stresses the need for future research into the relationship between heritage buildings and tourism.     

Why Heidegger did not travel: Existential angst,authenticity, and tourist experiences

“Authenticity” continues to be debated within tourism studies, as seen in the extensive number of articles published in ATR since 1999 on this subject. Advocates of existential authenticity have used the work of the German philosopher Martin Heidegger to argue that tourists seek experiences that counter the emptiness of everyday life in modern societies and provide them an opportunity to be more authentic. This is, however, based on a partial reading of Heidegger. His work implicitly questions the efficacy of travel as a means of experiencing a greater awareness of one’s own place in the world and explicitly rejects cosmopolitanism as a worldview. Rather than a new intervention, ‘existential authenticity’ is a return to a familiar travel/tourist dichotomy.     

What makes Airbnb likeable? Exploring the nexus between service attractiveness,country image,perceived authenticity and experience from a social exchange theory perspective within an emerging economy context

As a result of the growth of the notions of collaborative consumption and sharing economy in the tourism industry, this paper applies social exchange theory to investigate how the Airbnb platform influences the Airbnb experience and authenticity, which might lead consumers to like Airbnb and influence their behavioural patterns. By recruiting 466 tourists who had stayed in Airbnb accommodation in Istanbul, Turkey via travel-related Telegram, Twitter, travel blogs, and Facebook groups, this study revealed the importance of the platform and its features in enhancing service attractiveness, perceived authenticity and experience. Furthermore, the results revealed that visitors’ experiences have an influence on Airbnb likability, where Airbnb likability influences their intention to re-visit and to recommend. Significant implications for tourism planning, management and researchers are highlighted.     

The modernities of heritage and tourism: interpretations of an Asian future

Recent years have seen the emergence of a number of regional-based charters and declarations; all of which attempt to address the Eurocentric biases of the global heritage movement. For example, the Nara Declaration, China Principles, Hoi An Protocols and Seoul Declaration all reflect a desire to develop heritage frameworks that are sensitive to, and in tune with, the complexities and socio-cultural specificities of the Asian region. With the primary concern of these initiatives being the development of more appropriate ‘conservation philosophies’ or notions of ‘authenticity’, they have given less attention to the interface between heritage sites and their consumers, or tourists, and the rapidly changing nature of tourism in Asia. Indeed, the vast majority of reports and studies produced by UNESCO, ICOMOS, IUCN and others continue to talk of ‘the tourist’ as a singular, homogenous construct. The rapid growth of travel for leisure and recreation within Asia today, however, demands a re-appraisal of how such terms are used and deployed within the heritage industry. Accordingly, this article examines why Asian tourism is presenting new and unfamiliar challenges for policy makers regarding the management and presentation of heritage sites in Asia. More specifically, it considers the industry familiar discourse of ‘site interpretation’ against a backdrop of Asian modernities in order to ask questions about aesthetics and the politics of heritage narration.     

‘The smell of death and the smell of life’: authenticity,anxiety and perceptions of death at Varanasi’s cremation grounds

ABSTRACT

This paper contributes to an understanding of existential authenticity and existential anxiety in tourism studies through an investigation of tourists’ perceptions of death, the Self, and ‘others’ at the Hindu cremation grounds in Varanasi, India. Encounters with death at dark tourism sites serve as reminders of one’s own mortality affecting one’s attitude towards death, perception of self, and even challenging one’s personal values. Existentialists assert that anxiety is a condition of existential authenticity, and therefore moments of the existentially authentic experience are not always pleasurable. This paper argues that confrontation with death, as exemplified by the Aghori rituals and the cremation grounds in Varanasi, offers tourists an opportunity to examine the inevitability that life will end and to engage with this existential predicament and anxiety in an embodied sense, thereby pushing some of them towards life changes in the pursuit of existential authenticity.     

Culinary tourism as living history: staging,tourist performance and perceptions of authenticity in a Thai cooking school

This study examined how a cooking school in Thailand acted as a site of living history in its staging and touristic experience of authenticity. The cooking school was one of the oldest, most visited and most comprehensively “staged” cooking schools in Bangkok. Research focused on understanding: (a) the nature of spatial and temporal staging of authenticity in the school, (b) tourists’ perceptions of authenticity and (c) parallels between the cooking school and living heritage sites. Findings showed that the cooking school was carefully designed to transport tourists from the heterogeneous tourist spaces of present-day Bangkok to the idealized, enclavic space of an imagined Thai culinary past. Tourists took on multiple roles, had rich sensory experiences, felt a sense of play and space–time transcendence, and revelled in close social relations with hosts and other tourists. These factors allowed them to experience multiple forms of both modernist and post-modernist authenticity. In its scenography, interpretative performance, narrative and rituals, the cooking school did indeed resemble a living history site. However, the school made no particular claim to expertise in Thai history, place or culinary culture, and tended more towards touristic entertainment, and less towards accurate historical and cultural visitor education.     

Ecological restoration in Aotearoa New Zealand: Contrasting tourist conservation narratives

Aotearoa/New Zealand is a hotspot of threatened biodiversity. In recent years, a system of local/regional eco-sanctuaries has been developed, which now play a critical role in the intensive management of endangered endemic species as part of the wider restoration of New Zealand's indigenous biodiversity. Many of these projects have harnessed tourism as an important revenue stream to fund ecological restoration. Theoretically informed by the field of environmental philosophy and drawing upon the concept of ‘conservation narratives’, this paper aims to explore international visitors' perceptions of ecological restoration and experiences in New Zealand eco-sanctuaries using flash interviews informed by photo-elicitation. The findings reveal disparate interpretations of biodiversity and contrasting conservation narratives that underpin diverse visitor experiences at New Zealand eco-sanctuaries.     

Host–guest authentication of intangible cultural heritage: a literature review and conceptual model

ABSTRACT

Cultural tourism and intangible cultural heritage (ICH) play a key role in tourism worldwide, and are especially important for communities in developing countries, due to the demand for authentic experiences. This article provides a review of existing literature on the authenticity and authentication of ICH. The review reveals scholarly inquiry has evolved from external-expert ‘cool’ authentication to direct host–guest on-site or ‘hot’ authentication whereby tourists participate in the process of determining authenticity. Further, existing models for authentication of ICH have focused only on either a guest’s or host’s perspectives with little attention to the inevitable mutual interaction of the host and guest in the authentication of ICH. Mutual authentication can enhance the tourist experience and improve community empowerment. This paper develops a conceptual model of the mutual (host–guest) authentication of ICH, incorporating both hosts’ and tourists’ perspectives. The model has application in ICH based tourism and emphasizes power relationships between the host and guest, and community empowerment across political, social, psychological and economic domains. Future research is needed to test and validate this conceptual model.     

All in good fun: governing camp experiences through discourses of ‘good’ and ‘fun’

Summer camps have been conventionally associated with the positive development of individual character through the promotion of recreational ‘fun.’ However, popular narratives obscure more critical questions concerning the power-knowledge relations that have shaped the provision of summer camp fun as a significant site of child development in Canadian culture. In this article we examine how camp counsellors mobilise particular discourses about the benefits, or ‘good’, and ‘fun’ of camp to govern themselves and the campers that are in their care. We draw on Foucauldian notions of governmentality to problematise that which is often assumed as the ‘truth’ of camp experiences. We discuss how the ‘good’ of camp often draws on psy-discourses and those of entrepreneurial selves to improve or add value to campers’ lives. Additionally, ‘fun’ discourses and practices can work to produce manageable and docile campers. We conclude the article by identifying the implications of the research for developing a critical approach to the management of young staff who work to provide a broad range of recreational experiences where benefits and fun are promised.     

EXPERIENCING FILM TOURISM: Authenticity & Fellowship

Authenticity, existential authenticity, sincerity, hyperreality and simulacra are overlapping concepts often used in accounting for the tourist experience. This study discusses these concepts in the context of a case study of Lord of the Rings film-induced tourism to New Zealand. Findings support an elaborated and extended version of authenticity that incorporates aspects of object and existential authenticity, sincerity of relationships and embodied experiences of place. These factors underpin tourists’ judgments and experiences of authenticity. Links are drawn between this analysis and the theoplacity framework for religious pilgrimage. It is concluded that value emanates not only from objects or sights but also from the moments of embodied interaction with place and others, which actively constitute those objects and sights.     

回望“真实性”(authenticity)(上)——一个旅游研究的热点

麦坎内尔(MacCannell)掀起的"真实性"研究热已逾30年,其间,研究视角逐渐从"客观"转向"主观"。这既反映出真实性内涵的延展与变迁,亦凸显旅游主体—游客体验的重要性。然而,就研究者日渐褊狭的视域来看,旅游客体真实性对旅游体验真实性的影响从松散到几近断裂,旅游主体甚至以"悦纳万物"的信仰姿态视一切"存在"为真,从而收获真实的体验。客观真实与主观真实,究竟是谁决定或影响了谁?对此问题的探寻导致学界对旅游客体之"虚假"的重新界定和对旅游体验之"真实"的再度好奇,并因此形成旅游真实性研究的纷争局面。有鉴于此,对国内外真实性研究做一番缘起、视角、界定等方面的梳理和反思,或将对国内相关研究与应用有所裨益。     

Commercial hospitality in destination experiences: McDonald's and tourists' consumption of space

This paper examines the multiple roles that globalised, branded spaces of hospitality can play in tourists' experiences in destinations. It is argued that previous studies have not considered adequately how such commercial hospitality services and spaces interact with and influence tourists' experiences of places. Drawing on a netnographic analysis of online discussions of McDonald's, this study explores how tourists perceive these hospitality venues, and how they use them to engage with foreign destinations and negotiate the ‘work of tourism’. The data show how tourists (re)construct their identities through reflections on consuming McDonald's. The data also demonstrate that tourists critically evaluate discourses of authenticity and the (in)authenticity of consuming McDonald's. The paper concludes by discussing the implications for the marketing and management of McDonald's and similar branded commercial hospitality venues, the marketing and management of destinations, and it outlines avenues for further research.     

Following the story: narrative mapping as a mobile method for tracking and interrogating spatial narratives

Museums and heritage tourism sites are highly curated places of memory work whose function is the assembling and ordering of space and narrative to contour visitors’ experiences of the past. Variations in such experiences within and between sites, however, necessitates a method that: (1) captures how guides, visitors, and exhibits interact within spaces when representing and performing history and (2) allows researchers to document those variations. We developed narrative mapping, a mobile and geographically sensitive form of participant observation, to enable museum scholars and professionals to systematically capture, visualize, and interpret tendencies and variations in the content, affective qualities, and spatial arrangements of museum narratives over multiple sites and across multiple tours at the same site. Two antebellum plantation museum case studies, Laura Plantation in Louisiana and Virginia’s Berkeley Plantation, demonstrate the method’s utility in documenting how stories are spatially configured and materially enlivened in order to analyze the ways enslaved persons are placed within these narratives.