In Search of Authenticity off and on the Beaten Track

Abstract

Recent years has seen increasing academic concern with constructions of authenticity, much of it focused upon the travel industry and the emergence of the ‘real holidays’ market in particular. Of appeal to independent travellers moving off the beaten track, such holidays have been located within a sociology of tourism that draws strict distinctions between the desires and activities of an independent traveller, drawn from the new cultural class, and working-class package tourists. Here it is suggested that accounts tracing the emergence of this market have tended to conflate two often related, but analytically distinct, discourses of authenticity which, when held apart, undermine the usual tourist typologies and considerably extend our understandings of the search for authenticity. Drawing upon qualitative interviews undertaken both with ‘travellers’ and with ‘tourists’ it is suggested that our understandings of this search be extended, to consider the ways in which a concern for authenticity is negotiated by a range of tourists enjoying a variety of holidays. Offering a critical intervention in debates around authenticity I champion a method capable of mapping the ambiguities of individual experience, rather than forcing that experience through the restrictive categories of various ideal types.