Re-Investing Authenticity: Tourism, Place and Emotions

Britta Timm Knudsen · Anne Marit Waade

Jan 2010 · Tourism and Cultural Change Book 20 · Channel View Publications

About this ebook

From the highly influential concept of ‘staged authenticity’ discussed by Dean MacCannell, to the general claim of longing for authenticity on behalf of all Western consumers, made by Joseph Pine and James Gilmore, it is obvious that the concept of authenticity is still worth considering. This ground-breaking book re-thinks and re-invests in the notion of authenticity as a surplus of experiential meaning and feeling that derives from what we do at / in places. In Re-investing Authenticity - Tourism, Place and Emotions international scholars representing a wide range of disciplines, examine contemporary performances of authenticity in travel and tourism practices: From cultural place branding to individual pilgrim performances; from intensified experiences of imaginary crime scenes to the rhetorical features of the encounter with the traumatic and; from photography performing memories of place to experiences of wilderness producing excitement, this book demonstrates how the feeling of authenticity within places is produced.

About the author

Britta Timm Knudsen is Associate Professor at the Scandinavian Department, Aarhus University, Denmark. Her research is within culture and media studies, event culture and experience economy, cultural heritage tourism and memory culture. She has recently published books and articles on realism, witnessing on TV, nostalgia, and thanatourism (http://begivenhedskultur.dk).

Anne Marit Waade is Associate Professor at the Institute of Information and Media Studies, Aarhus University, Denmark. Her research is within media aesthetics, visual culture, mediated tourism and market communications, and she has recently published articles on crime fiction tourism (www.krimiforsk.aau.dk) and travel series (www.tvunderholdning.au.dk) and a book in Danish on media and tourism (Jensen & Waade, 2009).