Task

5 Staged Authenticity

THE modernization of work relations, history and nature detaches these from their traditional roots and transforms them into cultural productions and experiences. The same process is operating on "everyday life" in modern society, making a "production" and a fetish of urban public street life, rural village life and traditional domestic relations. Modernity is quite literally turning industrial structure inside out as these workaday, "real life, " "authentic" details are woven into the fabric of our modern solidarity alongside the other attrac- tions. Industrial Man could retreat into his own niche at his work place, into his own neighborhood bar or into his own domestic relations. Modern Man is losing his attachments to the work bench, the neighborhood, the town, the family, which he once called "his own" but, at the same time, he is developing an interest in the "real life" of others.

The modern disruption of real life and the simultaneous emergence of a fascination for the "real life" of others are the outward signs of an important social redefinition of the categories "truth" and "reality" now taking place. In premodern types of society, truth and nontruth are socially encoded distinctions protected by norms. The maintenance of this distinction is essential to the functioning of a society that is based on interpersonal relationships. The stability of interpersonal relations requires a separation of truth from lies, and the stability of social structure requires stable interpersonal relations. This pattern is most pronounced in the primitive case where family structure is social structure. In modern settings, society is established

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Given a particular performance as the point of reference, we have distinguished three crucial roles on the basis of function: those who perform; those performed to; and outsiders who neither perform in the show nor observe it. . . . (T)he three crucial roles mentioned could be described on the basis of the regions to which the role-player has access: performers appear in the front and back regions; the audience appears only in the front region; and the outsiders are excluded from both regions.'

human behavior. Rather, it depends on structural arrangements like this division between front and back. A back region, closed to audi- ences and outsiders, allows concealment of props and activities that might discredit the performance out front. In other words, sustaining a firm sense of social reality requires some mystification.

The problem here is clearly one of the emergent aspects of life i.n modern society. Primitives who live their lives totally exposed to theIr "relevant others" do not suffer from anxiety about the authenticity of their lives, unless, perhaps, a frightening aspect of life suddenly becomes too real for them. The opposite problem, a weakened sense of reality, appears with the differentiation of society into front and back. Once this division is established, there can be no return to a state of nature. Authenticity itself moves to inhabit mystification.

A recent example of a mystification designed to generate a sense of reality is the disclosure that chemical nitrates are injected into hams for cosmetic purposes to make them more pink, appetizing and desir- able, that is, more hamlike.2 Similarly, go-go girls in San Francisco's North Beach have their breasts injected with silicones in order to conform their size, shape and firmness to the characteristics of an ~deal breast. Novels about novelists and television shows about fictional television stars exemplify this on a cultural plane. In each of these cases, a kind of strained truthfulness is similar in most of its particu- lars to a little lie. In other cases, social structure itself is involved in the construction of the type of mystification that supports social reality.

In fact, social structural arrangements can generate mystifications without the conscious manipulation on the part of individuals that occurred in the ham and breast examples. The possibility that a stranger might penetrate a back region is one major source of social concern in everyday life, as much a concern to the strangers who might do the violating as to the violated. Everyone is waiting for this kind of intrusion not to happen, which is a paradox in that the absence of social relationships between strangers makes back region secrets unimportant to outsiders or casual and accidental intruders. Just having a back region generates the belief that there is something more than meets the eye; even where no secrets are actually kept, back regions are still the places where it is popularly believe? the .secrets are. Folklorists discover tales of the horror concealed m attics and cellars, attesting to this belief.

through cultural representations of reality at a level above that of interpersonal relations. Real life relations are being liberated from their traditional constraints as the integrity of society is no longer dependent on such constraints. No one has described the impact of this social structural change so well or so closely as Erving Goffman. He has found that it is no longer sufficient simply to be a man in order to be perceived as one. Now it is often necessary to act out reality and truth.

I began my analysis of the problem of authenticity by starting across the bridge between structure and consciousness built by Goff- man. I found it necessary to extend his conception a little to make it to the other side.

Paralleling a common sense division, Goffman analyzed a struc- tural division of social establishments into what he terms front and back regions. The front is the meeting place of hosts and guests or customers and service persons, and the back is the place where members of the home team retire between performances to relax and to prepare. Examples of back regions are kitchens, boiler rooms, executive wash- rooms, and examples of front regions are reception offices and parlors. Although architectural arrangements are mobilized to sup- port this division, it is primarily asocial one, based on the type of social performance that is staged in a place, and on the social roles found there. In Goffman's own words:

The apparent, taken-for-granted reality of a social performance, accordmg to GoHman's theory, is not an unproblematical part of

An earlier, one-sided version of this connection between truth, intimacy and sharing the life behind the scenes is found in descrip- tions of the ethnographic method of data collection. Margaret Mead has written:

The anthropologist not only records the consumption of sago in the native diet, but eats at least enough to know how heavily it lies upon the stomach; not only records verbally and by photographs the tight clasp of the baby's hands around the neck, but also carries the baby and experiences the constriction of the windpipe; hurries or lags on the way to a ceremony; kneels half-blinded by incense while the spirits of the ancestors speak, or the gods refuse to appear. The anthropologist enters the setting and he observes. . . .

These writers base their comments on an implicit distinction between false fronts and intimate reality, a distinction which is not, for them, problematical: once a person, or an observer, moves off- stage, or into the "setting," the real truth begins to reveal itself more or less automatically.

Closer examination of these matters suggests that it might not be so easy to penetrate the true inner workings of other individuals ~r societies. What is taken to be real might, in fact, be a show that IS

based on the structure of reality. For example, Goffman warns that under certain conditions it is difficult to separate front from back, and that these are sometimes transformed one into the other:

As yet unexplored is the function of back regions-their mere existence intimating their possible violation-in sustaining the common-sense polarity of social life: the putative "intimate and real" as against "show." This division into front and back supports the popular beliefs regarding the relationship of truth to intimacy. In our society, intimacy and closeness are accorded much importance: they are seen as the core of social solidarity and they are also thought by some to be morally superior to rationality and distance in social relationships, and more "real." Being "one of them," or at one with "them," means, in part, being permitted to share back regions with "them." This is a sharing which allows one to see behind the others' mere performances, to perceive and accept the others for what they really are.

Touristic experience is circumscribed by the structural tendencies described here. Sightseers are motivated by a desire to see life as it is really lived, even to get in with the natives, and at the same time, they are deprecated for always failing to achieve these goals. The term "tourist" is increasingly used as a derisive label for someone who seems content with his obviously inauthentic experiences.

The variety of understanding held out before tourists as an ideal is an authentic and demystifted experience of an aspect of some society or other person. An anonymous writer in an underground periodical breathlessly describes her feelings at a women's liberation, all-female dance where she was able, she thought, to drop the front she usually maintains in the presence of men:

Finally the men moved beyond the doorway. And We Danced-All of us with all of us. In circles and lines and holding hands and arm in arm, clapping and jumping-a group of whole people. I remember so many other dances, couples, men and women, sitting watching, not even talking. How could I have consented to that hateful, possessive, jealous pairing? So much energy and life, and sensuality, we women have so rarely and ineffectively expressed. But we did, on Saturday. The women in the band were above performing and beyond competition, playing and singing together and with we [sic] who were dancing. And We Danced--expressing for and with each other. 3

(W)e can observe the up-grading of domestic establishments, wherein the kitchen, which once possessed its own back regions, is now coming to be the least presentable region of the house while at the same time becoming more and more presentable. We can also trace that peculiar social movement which led some factories, ships, restaurants, and households to clean up their backstages to such an extent that, like monks, Communists, or German aldermen, their guards are always up and there is no place where their front is down, while at the same time members of the audience become sufficiently entranced with the society's id to explore the places that had been cleaned up for them. Paid attendance at symphony orchestra rehearsals is only one of the latest examples.5

Under the conditions Goffman documents here, the back-front division no longer allows one to make facile distinctions between mere

I] acts and authentic expressions of true characteristics. In places where tourists gather, the issues are even more complex. "to get off the beaten path" and "in with the natives." An advertise-

ment for an airline reads:

Take "De tour." Swissair's free-wheeling fifteen day Take-a-break Holiday that lets you detour to the off-beat, over-looked and unex- pected corners of Switzerland for as little as $315 .... Including car. Take de tour. But watch out for de sheep, de goats and de chickens. 8Not all travelers are concerned about seeing behind the scenes in

the places they visit. On occasion, and for some visitors, back regions are obtrusive. Arthur Young, when he visited France in 1887 to make observations for his comparative study of agriculture, also observed the following:

Finally, Frigliana has no single, spectacular attraction, such as Granada's Alhambra or the cave at Nerja. Frigliana's appeal lies in its a~mosphere. It is quaint without being cloying or artificial. It is a living Village and not a "restoration of an authentic Spanish town." Here one can better see and understand the Andalusian style of life. 7

Some tourists do in fact make incursions into the life of the society they visit, or are at least allowed actually to peek into one of its back regions. In 1963, the manager of the Student Center at the University of California at Berkeley would occasionally invite visitors to the building to join him on his periodic inspection tours. For the visitor, this was a chance to see its kitchens, the place behind the pin-setting machines in the bowling alley, the giant fans on the roof, and so forth, but he was probably not a typical building manager. This kind of hospitality is the rule rather than the exception in the areas of the world that have been civilized the longest, a factor in the popularity of these areas with Anglo-Americans. A respondent of mine told me she was invited by a cloth merchant in the Damascus bazaar to visit his silk factory. She answered "yes," whereupon he threw open a door behind his counter exposing a little dark room where two men in their underwear sat on the floor on either side of a hand loom passing a shuttle back and forth between them. "It takes a year to weave a bolt of silk like that," the owner explained as he closed the door. This kind of happening, an experience in the everyday sense of that term, often occurs by accident. A lady who is a relative of mine, and another lady friend of hers, walked too far into the Cana- dian Rockies near Banff and found themselves with too much travel- ing back to town to do in the daytime that was left to do it in. They were rescued by the crew of a freight train and what they remember most from their experience was being allowed to ride with the en- gineer in the cab of his locomotive. A young American couple told me of being unable to find a hotel room in Zagreb, Yugoslavia. While they were discussing their plight on the sidewalk, an old woman approached them and led them by a circuitous route to a small apartment where they rented a blackmarket room, displacing the family of workers who slept on a couch behind a blanket hung as a curtain in the living room.

Mops, brooms, and scrubbing brushes are not in the catalogue of the necessaries of a French inn. Bells there are none; thefiile must always be bawled for; and when she appears, is neither neat, well dressed, nor handsome. The kitchen is black with smoke; the master commonly the cook, and the less you see of the cooking the more likely you are to have a stomach to your dinner. The mistress rarely classes civility or atten- tion to her guests among the requisites of her trade. We are so unaccus- tomed in England to live in our bedchambers that it is at first awkward in France to find that people live nowhere else. Here I find that everybody, let his rank be what it may, lives in his bed-chamber.6

Among some, especially some American, tourists and sightseers of today, Young's attitude would be considered insensitive and cynical even if there was agreement that his treatment of the facts was ac~urate, as apparently. it was. One finds in the place of Young's attttude much Interest In exactly the details Young wanted not to notice.

A touristic desire to share in the real life of the places visited, or at least to see that life as it is really lived, is reflected in the conclusion of a tourist's report from a little Spanish town;

Certain individuals are prone to the kind of accident that leads to these experiences because they seek out situations in which this type of thing is most likely to occur. A report from the Caribbean suggests that a taste for action of this type can be cultivated:

"But tourists never take the mail boats," said the hotel manager. That clinched the matter. The next afternoon, I jumped from the dock at Potter's Cay in downtown Nassau to the rusted deck of the Deborah K., swinging idly at her spring lines. . . . [The writer describes island hopping on the mail boat and ends his account with this observation.] Th~ next day, while aloft in a Bahamas Airways plane, I spotted the Deborah K. chugging along in the sound toward Green Turtle Cay. She is no craft for the queasy of stomach and has a minimum of the amenities that most people find indispensable, but she and her sister mail boats offer a wonderfully inexpensive way to see life in the Bahamas-life as the natives live it, not the tourists. D

Given the felt value of these experiences, it is not surprising to find social structural arrangements that produce them.

selves touring the facility last month during the unforgettable mission of Apollo 13.... In a garden-like courtyard outside the News Bureau in Building 1, a group of tourists visiting the Manned Space- craft Center here stared at the working correspondents through the huge plate-glass windows. The visitors, too, could hear the voice of Mission Control. A tall young man, his arm around his mini-skirted blonde girl friend, summed up the feelings of the sightseers when he said, half aloud, "Being here's like being part of it." "Dear God," his girl whispered earnestly, "please let them come home safe."lo

The young man in this account is expressing his belief that he is having an almost authentic experience. This type of experience is produced through the use of a new kind of social space that is opening up everywhere in our society. It is a space for outsiders who are permitted to view details of the inner operation of a commercial, domestic, industrial or public institution. Apparently, entry into this space allows adults to recapture virginal sensations of discovery, or childlike feelings of being half-in and half-out of society, their faces pressed up against the glass. Some political radicals and conservatives consider "swinging," "massage therapy" and "wide-screen cunnilin- gus" to be indices of a general relaxation of society's moral standards. These are, however, only special cases of reality displays, public orgasm worked up in the interest of social solidarity.

Other basic (that is, biological process) examples of staged inti- macy are provided by the tendency to make restaurants into some- thing more than places to eat:

The newest eating place in Copenhagen is La Cuisine, strategically located on the Stroeget, the main strolling street of the city. Everyone is flat-nosing it against the windows these days watching the four cooks. In order to get to the cozy, wood-paneled restaurant in the back of the house, the guest must pass the kitchen. If he is in a hurry he may eat in the kitchen, hamburger joint-style.

"The kitchen" bit is a come-hither, actually, admits Canadian- born, Swiss-educated Patrick McCurdy, table captain and associate manager. "A casual passer-by is fascinated by cooks at work, preparing a steak or a chicken or a salad."ll

Tourists commonly take guided tours of social establishments because they provide easy access to areas of the establishment ordinar- ily closed to outsiders. School children's tours of firehouses, banks, newspapers and dairies are called "educational" because the inner operations of these important places are shown and explained in the course of the tour. This kind of tour, and the experiences generated by it, provide an interesting set of analytical problems. The tour is characterized by social organization designed to reveal inner workings of the place; on tour, outsiders are allowed further in than regular patrons; children are permitted to enter bank vaults to see a million dollars, allowed to touch cows' udders, etc. At the same time, there is a staged quality to the proceedings that lends to them an aura of superficiality, albeit a superficiality not always perceived as such by the tourist, who is usually forgiving about these matters.

An account from Cape Kennedy provides illustration:

No sightseers at the Manned Spacecraft Center ever had a more drama- tic visit than those who, by design or accident of time, found them-

What is being shown to tourists is not the institutional back stage, as Goffman defined this term. Rather, it isa staged back region, a kind of living museum for which we have no analytical terms.

THE STRUCTURE OF TOURIST SETTINGS

A student of mine has told me that a new apartment building in N~w York City exhibits its heating and air conditioning equipment, bnghtly pai~ted in basic colors, behind a brass rail in its lobby. From the standpoInt of the social institutions that are exposed in this way, the structure of their reception rooms reflects a new concern for truth and ",-orality at the institutional level. Industry, for example, is dis- coverIng that the commercial advantages of appearing to be honest ~nd aboveboard can outweigh the disadvantages of having to organize lIttle shows of honesty . There is an interesting parallel here with some o~ th~ !oung people of the industrial West who have pressed for sl~phclty and naturalness in their attire and have found it necessary a~slduou~ly to select clothing, jewelry and hair styles that are espe- cIally desIgned to look natural. In exposing their steel hearts for all to s~e and in stagi~g their true inner life, important commercial estab- IIshme~lts?f the Industrial West "went hippie" adecade before hippies ~ent hIPPIe: Approached from this standpoint, the hippie movement ISnot techmcally a movement but a basic expression of the present stage of the evolution of our society.

The current structural development of society is marked by the appearance everywhere of touristic space. This space can be called a stage set, a tourist setting, or simply, a set depending on how purposefully worked up for tourists the display is. The New York ~tock ~xcha?ge viewed from the balcony set up for sightseers is a tOU~IStsettIng, smce t~e~e.is no evidence that the show below isfor th~ slghtsee~s. The exhibitIOns of the back regions of the world at DIsneyland In An;iheim, California are constructed only for sight- seers, however, and can be called "stage sets." Characteristics of sets are: the. onl~ reason that need be given for visiting them is to see them.-m thIS r~gard they are unique among social places; they are ph!slcall! proxImal to serious social activity, or serious activity is ImItated In them; they contain objects, tools and machines that have ~peciali~ed us~ in specific, often esoteric, social, occupational and I~~us~nal routInes; they are open, at least during specified times, to VISItationfrom outsiders.

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Touristic consciousness is motivated by its desire for authentic experiences, and the tourist may believe that he is m?ving in th~s direction, but often it is very difficult to know for sure ~fthe experI- ence is in fact authentic. It is always possible that what IStaken to be entry into a back region is really en~~ in~o.afr~nt region t~at has ~een totally set up in advance for tOUrIsticvIsitation. In tOUrI.stsettIngs, especially in industrial society, it may be necessary to d~scount the importance, and even the existence, of front and back regIOnsexcept as ideal poles of touristic experience. . .

Returning to Goffman's original front-back dIchotomy, tOUrIst settings can be arranged in a con~inuum starting fro~ the front and ending at the back, reproducl?g ~he ?atural. traJ.ec~ory of .a? individual's initial entry into a SOCIalsItuation. WhIle dIstInct emplf1- cal indicators of each stage may be somewhat difficult to discover, it is theoretically possible to distinguish six stages of this continuum. ~ere, the exercise of a little theoretical license might prove worthwhIle.

Stage one: Goffman's front region; the kind of social space tourists attempt to overcome or to get behind.

Stage two: a touristic front region that has been decorated to appear, in some of its particulars, like a back region: a s~afood restaur- ant with a fishnet hanging on the wall; a meat counter In a supermar- ket with three-dimensional plastic replicas of cheeses and bolognas hanging against the wall. Functionally, t~is. stage (t~o) is entirely a front region, and it always has been, but It IScosmetIcally decorate~ with reminders of back region activities: mementos, not taken serI- ously, called "atmosphere." "

Stage three: a front region that is totally or~a?lzed to.look like a b~ck region; simulations of moonwalks for televISIon audIences; the lIve shows above sex shops in Berlin where the customer can pay to watch interracial couples copulating according to his own specific instructions. This is a problematical stage: the better the simulation, the more difficult to distinguish from stage four.

Stagefour: a back region that isopen to outside~s;magazi~e exposes of the private doings of famous personages; offiCIalrevelations o~t~e details of secret diplomatic negotiations. It is the open characterIstIc that distinguishes these especially touristic settings ~st~gesthree .and four) from other back regions; access to most nontOUrIsticback regIOns is somewhat restricted.

Stage five: a back region that may be cleaned up or altered a bit because tourists are permitted an occasional glimpse in: Erving Goffman's kitchen; factory, ship, and orchestra rehearsal cases; news leaks.

Stage six: Goffman's back region; the kind of social space that motivates touristic consciousness.

.That is theory enough. The empirical action in tourist settings is mamly confined to movement between areas decorated to look like ba~k re~ions, and back regions into which tourists are allowed to peek. Irmght, I~ the everyday, and in some ethnological senses of the term, is what is obtained from one of these peeks into a back region.

The~e is.no serious or functional role in the production awaiting the tOUrIstsm the places they visit. Tourists are not made personally responsible for anything that happens in the establishments they visit, an.d.t?e quality of the insight gained by touristic experience has been CrItiCIZedas less than profound. David Riesman's "other-directed" and Herbert Marcuse's "one-dimensional" men are products of a traditional intel~ectual concern for the superficiality of knowledge in our mo~ern socIety, but the tourist setting per se is just beginning to promp~ mtellectual commentary. Settings are often not merely copies o~ rep~lcas of real-life. situations but copies that are presented as dlsclosmg more about the real thing than the real thing itself discloses. Of course, this cannot be the case, at least not from technical stand- points, as in ethnography, for example. The Greyline guided tours of the Haight Ashbury when the hippies Jived there cannot be substi- tutedfor the studies based on participant observation undertaken at the same time. The intellectual attitude is firm in this belief. The touristic experience that comes out of the tourist setting is based on inauthenticity and as such it is superficial when compared with careful study. It is morally inferior to mere experience. A mere expe~ience may be mystified, but a touristic experience is always mystified. The lie contained in the touristic experience, moreover, presents itself as a truthful revelation, as the vehicle that carries the onlooker behind false fronts into reality. The idea here is that a false back is more insidious and dangerous than a false front, or an inau-

thentic demystification of social life is not merely a lie but a superlie, the kind that drips with sincerity.

Along these lines, Daniel Boorstin's12 comments on sightseeing and tourism suggest that critical writing on the subject of modern mass mentality is gaining analytical precision and is moving from the individual-centered concepts of the 1950's to a structural orientation . His concept of "pseudo-event" is a recent addition to a line of specific criticism of tourists that can be traced back to Veblen's "conspicuous leisure"13or back still further to Mark Twain's ironic commentary in The Innocents Abroad. 14In his use of the term "pseudo-event", Boor- stin wants his reader to understand that there is something about the tourist setting itself that is not intellectually satisfying. In his own words:

These [tourist]"attractions" offer an elaborately contrived indirect ex- perience, an artificial product to be consumed in the very places where the real thing is as free as air. They are ways for the traveler to remain out of contact with foreign peoples in the very act of "sight-seeing" them. They keep the natives in quarantine while the tourist in air- conditioned comfort views them through a picture window. They are the cultural mirages now found at tourist oases everywhere.i5

This kind of commentary reminds us that tourist settings, like other areas of institutional life, are often insufficiently policed by liberal concerns for truth and beauty. They are tacky. We might also suggest that some touristic places overexpress their underlying struc- ture and thereby upset certain of their sensitive visitors: restaurants are decorated like ranch kitchens; bellboys assume and use false, foreign first names; hotel rooms are made to appear like peasant cottages; primitive religious ceremonies are staged as public pageants. This kind of naked tourist setting is probably not as important in the overall picture of mass tourism as Boorstin makes it out to be in his polemic, but it is an ideal type of sorts, and many examples of it exist.

Boorstin is insightful as to the nature of touristic arrangements but he undercuts what might have developed into a structural analysis of sightseeing and touristic consciousness by falling back onto indivi- dual-level interpretations before analyzing fully his "pseudo-event" conception. He claims that touists themselves cause "pseudo-events." Commenting on the restaurants along superhighways, Boorstin writes:

_J There people can eat without having to look out on an individualized, localized landscape. The disposable paper mat on which they are served shows no local scenes, but a map of numbered super highways with the location of other "oases." They feel most at bome above the highway itself, soothed by the auto stream to which they helong.16

None of the accounts in my collection support Boorstin's conten- tion that tourists want superficial, contrived experiences. Rather, tourists demand authenticity just as Boorstin does. Nevertheless, Boorstin persists in positing an absolute separation of touristic and intellectual attitudes. On the distinction between work ("traveling") and sightseeing, he writes:

The traveler, then, was working at something; the tourist was a pleasure-seeker. The traveler was active; he went strenuously in search of people, of adventure, of experience. The tourist is passive; he expects interesting things to happen to him. He goes "sight-seeing". . . . He expects everything to be done to him and for him. I 7

As I have already suggested, the attitude Boorstin expresses is a commonplace among tourists and travel writers. It is so prevalent, in fact, that it is a part of the problem of mass tourism, not an analytical reflection on it.

In other words, we still lack adequate technical perspectives for the study of "pseudo-events." The construction of such perspectives necessarily begins with the tourists themselves and a close examina- tion of the facts of sightseeing. The writers of the accounts cited earlier in this chapter express Boorstin's disappointment that their experiences are sometimes fleeting and insulated. They desire to get in with the natives, but, more important here, they are willing to ~cc~pt disappoin~ent when they feel they are stopped from penetrat- mg mto the real life of the place they are visiting. In fact, some tourists are able ~o laugh off~oorstin's disappointment. The account of a trip to Tangier from which the following is excerpted was given by a writer who clearly expected the false backwardness she found there and is relaxed about relating it.

~ ~oung Arab pulled a chair up to our table. He had rugs to sell, but we mSlsted we were not interested. He unrolled his entire collection and spread them out on the ground. He wouldn't leave. I could see beneath his robes that he was wearing well-tailored navy blue slacks and a baby blue cashmere sweater. 16

Similarly, the VISItor to La Vegas who wrote the following has seen through the structure of tourist settings and is laughing about it:

Along with winter vacationists by the thousands, I will return to lively Las Vegas, if only to learn whether Howard Hughes, like the Mint Casino, has begun issuing free coupons entitling the visitor to a back- stage tour of his moneymaking establishment. 19

For these tourists, exposure of a back region is casual part of their touristic experience. What they see in the back is only another show. It does not trick, shock or anger them, and they do not express any feelings of having been made less pure by their discoveries.

Daniel Boorstin calls places like American superhighways and the Istanbul Hilton "pseudo," a hopeful appellation that suggests that they are insubstantial or transitory, which they are not. It also sug- gests that somewhere in tourist settings there are real events accessible to intellectual elites, and perhaps there are. I have argued that a more helpful way of approaching the same facts is in terms of a modification of Erving Goffman's model of everyday life activities. Specifically, I have suggested that for the study of tourist settings front and back be treated as ideal poles of a continuum, poles linked by a series of front regions decorated to appear as back regions, and back regions set up to accommodate outsiders. I have suggested the term stage setting for these intermediary types of social space, but there is no need to be rigid about the matter of the name of this place, so long as its structural features and their influences on ideas are understood.

I have claimed that the structure of this social space is intimately linked to touristic attitudes and I want to pursue this. The touristic way of getting in with the natives is to enter into a quest for authentic experiences, perceptions and insights. The quest for authenticity is marked off in stages in the passage from front to back. Movement from stage to stage corresponds to growing touristic understanding. This continuum is sufficiently developed in some areas of the world that it appears as an infinite regression of stage sets. Once in this manifold, the tourist is trapped. His road does not end abruptly in some conversion process that transforms him into Boorstin's

"traveler," "working at something" as he breaks the bou?ds of all t~at is pseudo and penetrates, finally, into a real b~ck regIOn. Tourists make brave sorties out from their hotels, hoplllg, perhaps, for an authentic experience, but their paths can be traced in advance ov~r small increments of what is for them increasingly apparent authenti- city proffered by tourist settings. Adventuresome tourists progress from stage to stage, always in the public eye, and greeted everywhere by their obliging hosts. .

In highly developed tourist .se~tings s?ch as San FrancIsco and Switzerland, every detail of tOUriStICexperience can take on.a showy, back-region aspect, at least for fl~eting ~oments. Tou:lsts enter tourist areas precisely because theIr experiences there ~~11not, for them, be routine. The local people in the places they VISit, by co~- trast, have long discounted the presence of tourists and go about theIr business as usual, even their tourist business, as best. they can, treat- ing tourists as a part of the regional scenery. Tourists often do .s~e routine aspects of life as it is reall~ lived I~ th~ places th~y VISIt, although few tourists express much Illterest III thIS. I~ the gtve-an~- take of urban street life in tourist areas, the question of who IS watching whom and who is responding to whom can be as c?mplex as it is in the give-and-take between ethnographers and theIr .respon- dents. It is only when a person makes an effort t? penetrate Illt~ the real life of the areas he visits that he ends up III places espeCIally designed to generate feelings of intimacy an~,exJX:ri.ence~, ~hat ~an be talked about as "participation." No one can partIcIpate III hIs o~n life; he can only participate in the lives of others. And once tOUrists have entered touristic space, there is no way out for them .so lon~ as they press their search for authenticity. Near ~~ch tOUrist settlllg there are others like the last. Each one may be VISIted, and each one promises real and convincing shows oflocal life and culture. Even the infamously clean Istanbul Hilton has not excluded all aspec~s ?f Turkish culture (the cocktail waitresses wear harem pa~ts, or d~d III 1968). For some Europeans I know, an American superhIghway I~a~ attraction of the first rank, the more barren the better because It IS thereby more American. .

Daniel Boorstin was the first to study these matters. HIS approach elevates to the level of analysis a nostalgia for an earlier time with more clear-cut divisions between the classes and simpler social values based

on a programmatic, back vs. front view of the true and the false. This classic position is morally superior to the one presented here but it cannot lead to the scientific study of society. Specifically, Boorstin's and other intellectual approaches do not help us to analyze the expan- sion of the tourist class under modernization, or the development on an international scale of activities and social structural arrangements made for tourists, social changes Boorstin himself documents. Rather than confront the issues he raises, Boorstin only expresses a long- standing touristic attitude, a pronounced dislike, bordering on hatred, for other tourists, an attitude that turns man against man in a they are the tourists, I am not equation.20

The touristic attitude and the structure that produces it contribute to the destruction of the interpersonal solidarity that is such a notable feature of the life of the educated masses in modern society. This attitude has nowhere been so eloquently expressed as it was by Claude Levi-Strauss:

Travel and travellers are two things I loathe-and yet here I am, all set to tell the story of my expeditions. But at least I've taken a long while to make up my mind to it; fifteen years have passed since I left Brazil for the last time and often, during those years, I've planned to write this book, but I've always been held back by a sort of shame and disgust. So much would have to be said that has no possible interest: insipid details, incidents of no significance. . . . That the object of our studies should be attainable only by continual struggle and vain expenditures does not mean that we should set any store by what we should rather consider as the negative aspect of our profession. The truths that we travel so far to seek are of value only when we have scraped them clean of all this fungus. It may well be that we shall have spent six months of travel, privation, and sickening physical weariness merely in order to record-in a few days, it may be, or even a few hours-an unpublished myth, a new marriage-rule, or a complete list of names of clans. But that does not justify my taking up my pen in order to rake over memory's trash-cans: "At 5:30 a.m. we dropped anchor off Recife while the seagulls skirIed around us and a flotilla of small boats put out from the shore with exotic fruits for sale. . . ."

And yet that sort of book enjoys a great and, to me, inexplicable popularity. 21