SECULAR PILGRIMS ON THE QUEST FOR AUTHENTICITY?

Abstract

In this paper I will explore the relation between the tourist and the place visited drawing on my own fieldwork among Finnish tourists in many Mediterranean tourist destinations, like Athens and Rhodes in Greece and Bodrum in Turkey, as well as Gran Canaria in Spain and Aqaba in Jordan. I will show that the tourists’ relations to the place visited varies very much. In some types of recreational mass tourism to beach resorts the local heritage or the spirit of place is of marginal importance. In other types of tourism, like cultural tourism to Athens, the importance of the place is central to the tourist experience and, thus, the journey can be described as a secular pilgrimage. In the paper I will from an emic perspective analyse the tourists’ experiences and compare cultural tourism to beach tourism in order to cast light on the tourists’ own experiences in both types. This analysis casts doubts on what could be called the “authenticity paradigm” in the anthropology and sociology of tourism. The aim of the paper is to enhance our understanding of different types of tourism, and especially to explore the tourists’ experiences in both site-oriented (heritage, cultural) tourism and image-oriented (beach, recreation) tourism. Tourism to the Mediterranean region and the Canary Islands has become an integral part of modern Finnish culture, which is indicated by the adoption of special terms into the spoken language. Finns very often refer to their holiday destinations with the concept “etela” (=south) without clarifying more exactly what geographical place they are talking about. Common phrases are “kavimme etelassa lomalla” (we went to the south on our holiday), “lahden etelanmatkalle” (I will go to the south), etc. The concept “etela” is widely used also in tourism marketing, especially in newspaper advertisements, sometimes without any clear indications of where this “south” is. (SELANNIEMI 1994b; 1996). The difference between the destinations I studied as well as the tourists travelling to these destinations comes forth very clearly in the motives for choosing a certain destination. When I asked tourists in my field work destinations why they had chosen this one, only the tourists in Athens (67%) and Aqaba (46%) answered that