week four_article five_blog eleven

Diller and Scofidio_Home Bodies on Vacation

Early in their text, Diller and Scofidio quote the writings of Jonathan Culler: “one of the characteristics of modernity is the belief that authenticity has somehow been lost and that it can be recuperated in other cultures and in the past.” The authors expand on this idea, pointing out that while tourism (via its production of sights) constructs authenticity, what is “at stake in the issue of authenticity, is the question, whose authenticity?” But is authenticity truly ‘constructed’ or is it only the possibility for authenticity which is created within the tourist mechanism? Is authenticity something which the individual must identify for him of herself through the activation of various possible tourist experiences, or is a given tourist experience inherently authentic? Does tourism serve as a mechanism for the individual tourist, the voyeur, to personally create authenticity, value, and meaning? Furthermore, does tourism serve different purposes cross-culturally? And if so, what are these differences and why do they exist? The authors traveling installation suitCase Studies focuses upon America’s national tourist landscape in which travel to the past is the means by which one is to find authenticity. It only very briefly touches upon such a search within different cultures. Is the purpose of travel different for North American’s than it is for, say, Eastern Europeans, Asians, East-Indians, etc.? Is tourism more of a North American phenomenon than it is a global phenomenon? When we travel inter-culturally as North American’s, does our search for authenticity also include a search for history; perhaps for long-established traditions our culture does not possess? Is inter-cultural travel a way for us to acquire a personal history because our shared cultural history is so ‘shallow’. Is it a way for us to come to understand ourselves, to construct ourselves, our own authentic existence via what we experience in new cultures? A way to come to some understanding of the world that surrounds; a search for a real emotional connection to it? Can something such as an individual persons’ search for their family roots via travel not become a way to deepen ones’ personal history? Is there a difference between ‘travel’ and ‘tourism’?