ABSTRACT
It was noted above that the ‘cult of the primitive’ (Mumford 1934, cited in Wang 2000) is the Romantic reaction to modernity, creating an aesthetic valuing of a simple or natural life associated with pre-modern times. This yearning lies behind the ‘ethnic’ or cultural forms of tourism that encompass a tourist search for people who appear to be living pre-modern lives. A similar idea was put forward by MacCannell (1976), who argued that tourists are alienated by the conditions of contemporary life and thus, in an attempt to recreate the structures that life in the modern world appears to have demolished, search for authenticity in other times and other places. The representations of Cappadocia quoted above clearly follow this Romantic search for a simple and pre-modern world. This search is met in images of a ‘thriving community working the fields’ and making ‘village bread’, and it is met most conclusively in the notion of a people still living in caves.
