Allerton, Catherine 
ORCID: 0000-0002-1463-4157
(2003)
Authentic housing, authentic culture?: transforming a village into a 'tourist site' in Manggarai, eastern Indonesia.
Indonesia and the Malay World, 31 (89).
pp. 119-128.
ISSN 1363-9811
Abstract
Since the publication of MacCannell’s The tourist (1976), the issue of ‘authenticity’ has been at the centre of tourism studies. Whilst early analysts broadly agreed with MacCannell’s thesis that tourism, by turning culture into a commodity, replaced real with ‘staged’ authenticity (ibid, 91-107), more recent work has shown ‘an increased awareness of the social construction and invention of both tradition and authenticity’ (Wood, 1992: 57). That is, authenticity is increasingly seen as a socially constructed concept, with criteria for judgement of ‘the authentic’ varying greatly between different actors. In addition, analysts are moving away from rather naive considerations of the ‘impact’ of tourism on pristine, pre-tourist culture, to an appreciation that not only does tourism create a ‘space for discussion’ of tradition (see both Adams and Picard, this issue), but that its ‘impact’ is always bound up with local cultural politics (Wood, 1992: 67-8). In this paper, I describe an Indonesian tourism project – the ‘discovery’ of an apparently ‘untouched’ village and its remodelling into a ‘tourist site’ – in which issues of ‘authenticity’ played a central part. As I shall show, both concepts of authenticity and perceptions of what objects, practices or other aspects of culture should be the focus of talk about authenticity varied between state officials, ambitious young men, ritual elders and other villagers. Not only does the project I describe have implications for pan-Indonesian discourses on ‘culture’ and ‘ethnicity’, it also raises issues concerning the ways in which local people distinguish between different kinds of visitors, and how ‘tourism’ can have a profound impact on local perceptions of place and identity, even in the absence of large numbers of visitors.
| Item Type: |
Article
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| Official URL: |
http://www.tandf.co.uk/journals/titles/13639811.as... |
| Additional Information: |
(c) 2003 Taylor and Francis Publications. LSE has developed LSE Research Online so that users may access research output of the School. Copyright and Moral Rights for the papers on this site are retained by the individual authors and/or other copyright owners. Users may download and/or print one copy of any article(s) in LSE Research Online to facilitate their private study or for non-commercial research. You may not engage in further distribution of the material or use it for any profit-making activities or any commercial gain. You may freely distribute the URL (<http://eprints.lse.ac.uk>) of the LSE Research Online website. |
| Divisions: |
Anthropology |
| Subjects: |
G Geography. Anthropology. Recreation > GF Human ecology. Anthropogeography |
| Date Deposited: |
20 Mar 2007 |
| Last Modified: |
11 Dec 2024 22:42 |
| URI: |
http://eprints.lse.ac.uk/id/eprint/967 |
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