Hello discoverers!

Get off the beaten track, find the little town the guidebook missed, eat where the locals eat, steer clear of other tourists. That’s the unspoken creed of many travellers and that was me, too. I’d sniff at anyone who hung out at the obviously touristy spots, thinking that my own experiences were somehow more legitimate, more ‘authentic’.

This essay by David Sze opened my eyes to the fact that the very notion of authenticity rests on a fantasy that cultures are pure, fixed things that tourism then comes along and spoils.

Sze points out that no culture has ever sat sealed off and unchanging. The Silk Road, empires, trade, migration, missionaries, K-pop, Bollywood films played on a TV in a Senegalese mud hut – everything has always been bleeding into everything else:

“Through these processes, the world is increasingly intermeshed – with no country and no man an island. Each country, state, and city, down to the smallest village, is constantly changing with unceasing interaction with regional and global influences. How then to draw a boundary around a culture? We cannot, as each meld into and influence another.”

If a culture is always shifting, then the commodified, tourist-facing version of a place isn’t a fake version bolted onto something real. It’s just the most recent layer.

“If culture is inherently dynamic, we can argue that commodification does not produce a simulacrum of the ‘local’, but is instead just the latest step of a never-ending evolution.”

Sze argues that what travellers are actually chasing is a flattering story about themselves:

“It is a shiny label that the traveler pins on her experiences – a marker of Bourdieuian distinction, to prove that she is more knowledgeable, more adventurous, and more off-the-beaten track.”

So the search for the ‘untouched’ is really a search for something that was never there. Worse, it does a disservice to the people we claim to admire:

“‘Authenticity’ is the denial of a people’s privilege to their changing culture amidst changing times… [It] is a box into which the traveler crams what he wants to see, while ignoring the complexity of reality. It is both distorting, and lazy.”

That’s not to say that tourism doesn’t negatively impact local cultures. Sze’s essay is now nearly a decade old and the full Instagrammification of travel was just beginning to take hold. Since then, social media has flattened travel into a checklist of shareable images. We don’t go looking for the ‘authentic’ as much as we try to recreate a photo we’ve already seen. Nicely summarised in this Domus piece:

“We no longer seek the unknown – or even what’s familiar – we chase images that are already well-known and highly shareable, affirming our place in a global community. We travel pursuing stories shaped by others, where the experience is influenced more by digital narratives than personal exploration. In essence, we create images to confirm an existing fantasy.”

That is its own kind of inauthentic, of course – arguably far more so than ordering that overpriced pad thai.

All of that said, wanting to look past the souvenir stalls to find corners that aren’t yet rearranged for tour groups is still worth doing. I guess we just shouldn’t expect some ‘pure’ version of a place that never existed. Like a panellist suggested back in DD271: serious travellers should do some homework first. Books, documentaries, podcasts by and with locals help us see an ever-changing culture through the eyes of the people who actually live it.

And now to this week’s discoveries. – Kai