ABSTRACT
Writing of the search for “authenticity” in an age increasingly skeptical of any “real” to be found, Dean MacCannell applies sociologist Erving Goffman’s notion of front/back distinctions to tourism, seen in the epochal sense as both the dominant mode of “knowing”/experiencing foreign cultures and an embodiment of the material relations that structure varieties of encounter. MacCannell’s tourist “quests” after an authentic experience of difference: “touristic consciousness is motivated” by a belief that behind staged “fronts” there are concealed “back” regions (MacCannell 1976: 101). If what tourists recognize (when perception approaches preconception) as “front” appears to be clichéd or a reality substitute, they nonetheless believe it retains some connection to a hidden reality (as stereotypes are thought to be distorted echoes of actual behaviors). Tourists thus approach engagement with foreign peoples by being guided “behind” touristic
fronts, with an implied hierarchy arranged around the difficulty of escape from the “packaged.” Tour guides talk of showing what is missing from (behind) the tourist poster. The problem for the tourist (or secondary tourist/reader) who considers such matters is that “it is very difficult to know for sure if the experience is in fact authentic. It is always possible that what is taken to be entry into a back region is really entry into a front region that has been totally set up in advance for tourist visitation” (ibid.).
