How Is Tourism A Quest For The Authentic Self

As the rising number of tourists continues to fuel the booming holidaymaker economy, quests for the ‘authentic self’ rise in response. Fundamentally, the theoretic of ‘object authenticity’ and ‘existential authenticity’ would hold the heaviest denial against the relative positions and definitions taken by those claiming tourism as a quest for the authentic self. However, not all consumers of the tourist market can be classified as a single body of individuals seeking to understand an authentic identity, and not all tourists on a quest for the authentic self understand authenticity and other related concepts in agreement to the same sense. Complications in the field of observed ethnography, such as the authenticity of ‘phantasmic’ tourism and

The idea of a backstage area where host populations continue meaningful traditions away from the front stage performances set up for the typical tourist audience has gained impressive rapport amongst the contemporary anthropologist society within the recent decades, and yet it still cannot provide a strong argument for tourism as a quest for the authentic self (Reisinger and Steiner 2006a:68). For this particular type of tourists, many of whom would not refer to themselves as part of what they call “mainstream tourists”, the quest for the authentic self through backstage tourism “leads to surface sociality and materiality to be deemed inauthentic” (Theodossopoulos 2013b:344). In believing themselves to be above falling into the commonly constructed tourist ploys after realizing the artificial presentation of the front stage tourism, those tourists rely on the archaic backstage display to connect with a romanticized authentic self. The approach to supposedly discovering the authentic self is almost synonymous to primitivist tourism, where “tourists seek out encounters with humans felt to incarnate a condition of extreme archaicness understood as the opposite of global modernity” (Stasch 2014:192). The typical primitivist or backstage visitor can without fail feel strong inclinations to, when encountering what social media has deemed pure and materially disconnected communities such as the Korowai people of West Papua, Indonesia, “describe themselves by their differences of approach relative to other travelers…and [understand the authenticity self as] an idea of a human other who is true to his individual spiritual constitution, and thus, is above all, not staging false appearances for what is in reality an underlying desire for material gain” (Stasch 2014:206-208). Such method for