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Ethnohistory 50.3 (2003) 575-585



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Staged Encounters:
Postmodern Tourism and Aboriginal People

Michael Harkin
University of Wyoming


The scholarly study of tourism as a cultural phenomenon, in the modern anthropological sense, arguably began in 1976 with the publication of Dean MacCannell's seminal book The Tourist: A New Theory of the Leisure Class. As the title implied, MacCannell's interests were with the tourists and their motivations, with the possibilities of class formation that this practice entailed. As with Thorstein Veblen's study of conspicuous consumption, which provides MacCannell's subtitle, the foibles of the modern bourgoisie are the subjects of amused and bemused scrutiny.

The most significant contribution of MacCannell's work is not, however, the rather conventional sociological analysis of class and the solidarity that is allegedly engendered by tourism. Rather, it is the key insight that tourists seek experiences of authenticity amid the anomie of late capitalism (see MacCannell 1973). This was prescient, coming at a time when all tourism was thought to be superficial by definition. Indeed, if we examine tourist practice today, we see that a significant portion of it is explicitly involved in the seeking of authentic experience, especially of that which Larry Nesper (this volume) terms the "Paleolithic." Destinations on the fringe of the developed world, such as Mexico, Morocco, Turkey, and lately eastern Europe, have long been favored by wealthier, better-educated tourists. More exotic destinations have become increasingly popular, as markers of taste and wealth. Note, for example, the New York Times's use of the phrase the "sophisticated traveler" or "The Savvy Traveler" carried on many public radio stations. Such sensibilities are combined with a pseudo-ethnographic praxis. When I taught at Emory University in the early 1990s, I took great pleasure in listening to the reports of my students returning [End Page 575] from spring break. Most memorable was one who took a motor boat up the Orinoco River past the last mestizo settlements to an Indian village. Apparently, a session with the local shaman was included in the package! This is reminiscent of Cannibal Tours, the excellent film by Dennis O'Rourke that documents the tourist trade among rich Europeans (Germans, mostly) along the Sepik River.

For the more mass market, self-guided tours to the premodern world are available a few mouse clicks away. The Lonely Planet (surely one of the more ironic titles in the history of publishing) series of books and television programs sends backpackers tramping to precisely the same sites at Ankor Wat, Bali, or Timbuktu. In North America, the destination of choice for such seekers is Indian country, especially those areas formerly far from the beaten path. On the Wind River Indian Reservation in Wyoming, which has probably done less than any other large reservation in the country to attract tourists, despite its location on the road to Yellowstone Park, I encountered a group of Germans, some dressed in hobbyist attire, earnestly asking questions of their guide about some of the finer points of the Sun Dance. For the Germans, this was clearly the fulfillment of a lifetime's desire to experience a Plains Indian way of life directly and immediately. And yet, we know that such encounters and the authenticity that they produce are highly mediated, "staged," as MacCannell says, and thus surely are not exactly what they may seem to be. This paradox produces confusion in the tourist as well as the scholar, who attempts to tease out the various experiential and semiotic strands of the phenomenon. My 1995 article drew on this paradox, attempting to describe how tourists constructed their experiences semiotically, seeking authenticity through the framing and reproduction of signs (Harkin 1995).

I would stand by this analysis but admit to its limitations. The problem with such a model, as I came to understand, lay in its restricted application. It works, I think, for a certain type of authenticity-seeking (i.e., better educated and often wealthier) tourist, but not for others. Moreover, it largely ignored the other side of the equation: those who maintained the tourist sites, either as formal...

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