With the deregulation of air travel and advent of low-cost airlines, traveling has become one of the most popular leisure activities of the 21st century. It is now heralded as a crucial learning experience and a remedy against stress, depression, and burnout. People immerse themselves in foreign cultures for weeks or months at a time in order to gain genuinely “authentic” experiences. However, it is questionable whether authenticity is operationally achievable. Global travel, as it existed before the COVID-19 pandemic, cannot be authentic because the very concept is paradoxical.
Firstly, people often travel to foreign countries in order to attain some sense of spiritual enlightenment. Similar to the heroine of the movie “Eat Pray Love”, Westerners visit developing countries in the hopes that exposure to economic hardship will make them appreciate their privileged circumstances more. For example, “slums tours” in Rio de Janeiro or Johannesburg are an exercise of exploitative voyeurism that lets them “see the real world.” This orientalist gaze objectifies local cultures by interpreting them as the exotic “other”, understood as the opposite of the West rather than on its own terms (Mackie, 2000). Secondly, the quest for authenticity has resulted in the “Disneyfication” of local cultures, thereby making the concept of an “authentic tourism experience” a paradox. A place becomes a contrived and exaggerated version of itself in order to attract more consumers. Tourism constructs a static idea of what “authentic” culture represents, ignoring its heterogeneity, dynamism, or the influence of other cultures. Tourism does not acknowledge that culture constantly changes because the people that shape it are always changing. Therefore, the global travel industry cannot be authentic because it objectifies and commodifies culture.
Reference
Mackie, V. (2000). The metropolitan gaze: Travellers, bodies, and spaces. Intersections: Gender, History and Culture in the Asian Context, 4. Web.