Popular Culture Review Vol. 10, No. 2, August 1999 | Page 21

The Trouble with Tourists

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worse-careful staging and production design. Tour promoters and sight market
ers, among others, have long recognized the drawing power of authenticity, and
they have touted it accordingly-“see live alligators!” (in a cage); “buy pieces of
Christ’s cross” (in Rome, in Naples, in Jerusalem, etc.); “watch a real Hawaiian
luau” (in the hotel lobby). Authenticity is a commodity, and its presentation is a
cultural production, always.
Consider, for a moment, a re-enactment of the April 18, 1775, battle be
tween colonial minutemen and British regulars, a popular tourist production in
Concord, Massachusetts. If this “play” is real enough, then the onlookers (tour
ists) have gained a typical tourist experience, and the cultural production is com
plete. Of course, different tourists may have different standards of authenticity,
and their reactions could easily range from “I could feel the tension of the battle”
to “I really doubt the minutemen wore watches.” In either case, the show must go
on, and so must the tourists. The next “battle” will be in a few hours, and the next
sight is just down the road at a pond called Walden. The Concord battle re-enact
ment may also gamer another reaction from the tourist: “It is just as I had imag
ined the battle to be.” The expectations with which we visit a sight cannot help but
influence our reaction to it. But it is difficult to separate our imagination from our
concept of the real, especially when it comes to historical re-enactments. And
until someone figures out time-travel, we simply cannot touch the original experi
ence of the battle in Concord, and we can never hear the “shots heard around the
world.” We can only try to gather as much information as we care to, then imag
ine. This battle re-enactment, what Boorstin would call a “pseudo-event,” is cen
tral to tourism, and although it is a staged product ion, a “play,” it nevertheless
becomes associated with the authentic, not because of its accuracy so much as
because people see it. The authenticity of any sight, then, increases with each
tourist moving through the turnstiles. Sights gain weight and authority by being
seen, and the masses over time thus help authenticate them. Sticking with the
battle example, we can see that tourists do not simply travel to Concord to see the
re-enactment and experience April 18, 1775. More significantly, they go because
of all that has followed that original event-the starting of the Revolutionary War,
the founding of a nation, and the founding of a tourist sight, the building of a
touristic apparatus of which the re-enactment is but a part.
Any touristic production, in addition to asking for imaginative leaps from
the audience, also asks for “a willing suspension of disbelief’ (I am stealing from
Coleridge now and his comments on poetic faith). Touristic faith implies that
tourists ignore that they are watching a production, to pretend to believe, at least
for the moment, that they are gaining an authentic experience. Erik Cohen notes
that tourists’ enjoyment level “is contingent on their willingness to accept the make
believe or half-seriously to delude themselves. In a sense, they are accomplices of