leading tourists to accept contrived attractions as "authentic," creates a "false touristic consciousness." A fully developed mass tourist system surrounds the tourist with a staged tourist space, from which there is "no exit." The modern tourist-pilgrim is thus damned to inauthenticity: "Tourists make brave sorties out from their hotels hopftig, perhaps, for an authentic experience, but their paths can be traced in advance over small increments of what is for them increasingly apparent authenticity proffered by [staged] tourist settings. Adventurous tourists progress from stage to stage, always in the public eye, and greeted everywhere by their obliging hosts" (MacCannell 1973 :602)..
It follows from these assumptions that commoditization, engendered by tourism, allegedly destroys not only the meaning of cultural prod-
ucts for the locals but, paradoxically, also for the tourists. It thus emerges that, the more tourism flourishes, the more it allegedly be-
comes a colossal deception. These assumptions are highly persuasive and appealing to both sociologists and critics of modern society. But the conclusion seems far-fetched and hard to accept; unless, of course, one adopts a view of modern society as completely absurd and dominated by sinister powers, so that its members are surreptitiously misled to believe that they have genuinely authentic experiences, while in fact being systematically debarred from having them. However, before one goes to that extreme, it would be prudent to examine critically the above assumptions, in order to reach perhaps some more realistic con-
clusions.
AUTHENTICITY
"Authenticity" is an eminently modern value (cf. Appadurai 1986:45; Berger, 1973; Trilling 1972), whose emergence is closely related to the impact of modernity upon the unity of social existence. As institutions become, in .Nietzsche's words, "weightless" and lose their reality (Berger 1973:86; Trilling 1972:138), the individual is said to turn into himself. "If nothing on 'the outside' can be relied upon to give weight to the individual's sense of reality, he is left no option but to burrow into himself in search of the real. Whatever this ens realissimum may then turn out to be, it must necessarily be in opposition to any external [modern] social formation. The opposition between self and society has now reached its maximum. The concept of authenticity is one way of articulating this experience" (Berger 1973:88).
Modern man is thus seen, from the perspective of a contemporary existential philosophical anthropology, as a being in quest of authentici-
ty. Since modern society is inauthentic, those modern seekers who desire to overcome the opposition between their authenticity-seeking self and society have to look elsewhere for authentic life. The quest for authenticity thus becomes a prominent motif of modern tourism, as MacCannell (1973, 1976) so incisively showed. However, here is also found the source of the confusion which the unexplicated use of this term introduced into tourism studies. In MacCannell's writings, as indeed in those of the researchers who followed his line of analysis (e.g., Redfoot 1984), the "quest for authenticity" is a "primitive" concept, which is at best illustrated, but left undefined. However, one appears to