Abstract
This paper challenges the overuse of existential authenticity as a categorical umbrella encapsulating touristic experience and contributes new insights to the way postmodern authenticity is defined in tourism research. To date, studies associated with postmodern authenticity have focused on the inauthentic and themed, with scholars contending that it speaks more to the consumptive, the superficial, and the trivial than to the substantive and meaningful. By working through a case study focused on nature tourists in pursuit of authentic wilderness experiences, this paper illustrates the ways postmodern authenticity encompasses much more than cynical authenticity, for while the American wilderness may be a hyperreal, and even hypernatural, simulacrum, nature tourists nevertheless report deep, meaningful, and “authentic” engagements with wilderness.
Highlights
The Adirondack Park Representing one-fifth of New York’s land area, the Adirondack Park is a nearly six million-acre piece of land and is today the largest publicly protected area in the contiguous United States (APA, 2017)
We seek to investigate, through extending postmodern authenticity to include psychoanalytical authenticity, an experiential phenomenon of tourism: on tour one gets the feeling of authenticity despite an absence of its absolute existence
We explore the case of nature tourists in the Adirondack Park in Upstate New York who report authentic experiences in its wilderness while describing the lack of wilderness’ existence
Summary
“To me, I think wilderness is in large part a state of mind...you can find wilderness in surprising places”(Jeremy, 27 year-old nature tourist). While most discussions of postmodern authenticity focus on highly constructive and controlled environments that offer surreal, hyperreal, and/or fantastical settings, such as theme parks, virtual and augmented realities, film tourism, and festivals, we wish to push beyond these more obvious correlations of (in)authenticity and simulacra to consider the role of fantasy, desire, and alienation in the quieter, less crowded, and more introverting spaces of nature-based tourism In focusing on such a setting, we argue that notions of self, being, and experiential qualities so prominent in interpretations of existential authenticity of tourism, as well as the desire for and seductive power of authentic places that continually inspire touristic pursuits, can be explained through Lacan’s theories. We speak to a shortcoming Wang (1999: 358) identified amongst postmodernists, that there is the possibility for alternative experiences of, and deeper inspirations for, authenticity than a focus on originality alone can offer
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