INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF TOURISM RESEARCH
Int. J. Tourism Res. 6, 57–73 (2004)
Published online in Wiley InterScience (www.interscience.wiley.com). DOI: 10.1002/jtr.470
Literature, Cultural Identity and
the Limits of Authenticity:
A Composite Approach
Kobi Cohen-Hattab1,* and Jenny Kerber2
1
Department of Geography, Bar Ilan University, Ramat-Gan, Israel 52900
2
Faculty of Environmental Studies, York University, 4700 Keele St., Toronto, ON M3J 1P3, Canada
ABSTRACT
Although tourism scholarship has paid
much attention to the concept of
authenticity in relation to the
homogenisation of tourism representation,
this term has limits that curb its usefulness
for analysing subtle interrelations of place,
representation and identity. Some recent
work has attempted to recuperate
authenticity by associating it with
experience and activity, however we suggest
that the concept of cultural identity allows
for greater attention to the fluid movements
of social power relations that inform the
tourist site. By undertaking a comparative
analysis of three global tourist sites located
in the Middle East (Jerusalem), North
America (Moose Jaw, Saskatchewan) and
Europe (Isle of Wight), this article discusses
the politics of representation vis à vis
identity as manifested in a spectrum of
tourism-related literature ranging from
pamphlets, maps and guidebooks, to more
creative approaches in contemporary novels
and poetry. This comparative survey of
literature explores questions of identity on
several fronts: first, it prompts questions
about how religious, historical and national
identities are formulated in and through the
tourist site; second, it leads to an assessment
of a site’s claim to status as a work of art
that prompts aesthetic identification; and
*Correspondence to: K Cohen-Hattab, Department of
Geography, Bar Ilan University, Ramat-Gan, Israel 52900.
E-mail: cohenko@mail.biu.ac.il
finally, it allows one to consider how other
works of art — in this case, novelistic or
poetic representations — both affirm and
question identities presented by standard
tourist literature. These alternative textual
representations demonstrate not only how
cultural identity as represented in the
tourist site is an active site of struggle, but
also present alternative politics of place and
identity that enable a greater diversity of
interpretations of the tourist site. Copyright
© 2004 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
Received 2 October 2002; Revised 1 November 2003; Accepted
17 November 2003
Keywords: identity; authenticity; models;
Jerusalem; Moose Jaw; Isle of Wight.
INTRODUCTION
O
ne of the defining features of mass
tourism in the late twentieth and early
twenty-first centuries is the prolifera-
tion of destinations that are abstracted from
specific histories, places and events in order
to appeal to the greatest possible range of
tourists. In an effort to attract massive numbers
of travellers, many sites have homogenised
their wares to the lowest common denomina-
tor, offering up a standardised tourist experi-
ence that frequently supplants idiosyncratic
cultural identities. Although many thinkers
have tried to critique this homogenisation of
tourist sites by attempting to construct objec-
tive criterion for what qualifies tourist attrac-
tions as either authentic or inauthentic, the
Copyright © 2004 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
58
increasing fluidity of tourist travel, cultural
identity and post-modern theorising about
representation means that authenticity itself
has become an exceedingly slippery concept.
Hence, even as academic theory belabours
the distinction between the ‘authentic’ and the
‘inauthentic’, the global tourism industry
moves swiftly along, encouraging cultures to
commoditise themselves and copy one another
so that tourists feel at home everywhere they
go. What are often neglected between these
two poles of concern are subtler aspects of
cooperation and conflict between particular
cultural identities, and the larger economic,
social and political contexts that inform their
construction, alteration and perpetuation
(Ritzer, 2000; Wahab and Cooper, 2001).
If, through an informed examination of
the debate surrounding authenticity, we can
conclude that it is a highly unstable, even
ephemeral term that is continually redefined
according to both the tourist’s and the critic’s
whim, then what are the implications of this
fluidity for understanding identity? How
should we approach sites that claim to convey
a particular set of cultural identities? More
specifically, what forms of identity are tourists
encouraged to experience when visiting sites
and viewing objects, and how are these identi-
ties socially and politically inflected? The fol-
lowing discussion attempts to respond to these
questions by undertaking a comparative inves-
tigation of the literature surrounding three
global tourist sites — the Model of Jerusalem
(Jerusalem, Israel), The Model Village at
Godshill (Isle of Wight, England) and the
Sukanen Ship Museum (Moose Jaw, Canada)
— which each function as cultural representa-
tions of particular histories, events and identi-
ties. These three sites are significant for the
experience of cultural identification they
attempt to cultivate in the tourist, even as the
unified cultural identity they promote tends to
mask a network of contesting histories and
power relationships. Narrowing the focus of
this discussion to the literature surrounding
tourist sites helpfully allows us to shift the
concern about identity away from the trou-
bling concept of authenticity — with its evoca-
tions of originals and copies, and its frequent
presumption of essence — to questions about
representation. Literature, in this case, is
Copyright © 2004 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
K. Cohen-Hattab and J. Kerber
divided into two broad categories: the first
includes written material ranging from ‘offi-
cial’ publications such as guidebooks and
maps, to print-based promotional materials;
the second involves so-called ‘fictional’ depic-
tions in novels, poetry and creative non-fiction.
Certain assumptions about cultural identity
are implicit within the division between the
documentation expected of the sites them-
selves and the depictions of these same sites
offered in fictional or poetic accounts. Cer-
tainly, the promotional and informational texts
in which sites are featured are significant
means by which claims to a particular identity
are measured; as such, these texts often attain
a higher level of legitimacy with the tourist. On
the other hand, creative literary representa-
tions can counter or diversify the simplified
views of place and identity often perpetuated
by the mass tourism industry, thus giving
the tourist a more complex way of interpret-
ing not only the character of the place, but
also the cultural identities it affirms and
neglects.
The following discussion is comprised of
two major parts: first, we intend to illustrate
that the current authenticity debate in the the-
oretical literature surrounding tourism ought
to be reframed to address issues of identity,
representation, and the function of ideology in
tourism sites more adequately. In the second
section of the paper we will scrutinise the
expression of cultural identity in these sites
through attention to the following compo-
nents: the claim to particular religious, histor-
ical and national identities via an appeal to
‘glory days’, the claim to unique aesthetic
accomplishment, thereby accommodating an
identification with the site as a work of art, and
finally the complication of these identities/
identifications by using literary depictions of
the sites to read against the grain of standard
tourist texts. Examining the complex issue of
cultural identity in tourism through these com-
ponents also enables us to better understand
why people frequently choose to visit sites that
are aestheticised recreations of certain histori-
cal, religious, cultural and political phenom-
ena, rather than visiting the actual sites
themselves. Models, for example, are particu-
larly adept at crystallising a host of unseen
connections and associations in ways that are
Int. J. Tourism Res. 6, 57–73 (2004)
The Limits of Authenticity
attractive to the contemporary tourist who
finds him/herself under increasing temporal
and financial constraints. The appeal of models
as tourist attractions is evinced by the
continuing popularity of sites around the globe
such as the Madurodam in the Netherlands,
the France Miniature in France, Miniature
World in Victoria, BC, Canada, and more
recently, the Mini-Israel in Israel (http://www.
i-a-m-p.org). Ultimately, these models can be
seen as contemporary compromises in the
pressured relationship between geographical
space, cultural experience and the might of
mass tourism.
For the tourist seeking identification with a
particular religious, historical or nationalist
representation, concerns about authenticity
and inauthenticity are often superseded by the
ability of a site to condense the complexities of
region and history into a cohesive, captivating
narrative. Although Butler (1990) and others
have offered descriptive studies of how litera-
ture has contributed to the development of
tourism in different global regions, tourism
studies also would benefit from further atten-
tion to situations in which textual repre-
sentations self-consciously complicate and
challenge — rather than simply legitimise —
standard tourist perceptions of place. Cer-
tainly, overtly fictional literary depictions of
geographical places have often turned these
places into bustling tourist sites in which visi-
tors come to view the site almost exclusively
through the lenses ground for them by pre-
vious writers, artists and even critics (Ousby,
1990; Shields, 1991, p. 167). Further research
has also convincingly demonstrated how trav-
elogues and other literary depictions can lead
to the formation of a ‘textual attitude’ in which
literary texts attain primary authority over
how sites and cultures are viewed. The
primacy of literary depictions over actual
experience then underscores the tendency to
view sites in ways that legitimate certain ideo-
logical (and often imperial) notions about
culture and place (Said, 1978; Kabbani, 1986).
However, we will demonstrate how in some
cases creative literary depictions have also
sharply challenged received tourist notions of
these sites derived from other textual media,
undercutting simplistic accounts of the geo-
graphical and cultural identity of the site to
Copyright © 2004 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
59
reveal new layers of complexity that help to
turn the ‘site’ back into a ‘place’.
AUTHENTICITY AND ITS LIMITS
The rise of mass tourism, increasing tech-
nological sophistication in site construction,
restoration and promotion, and anxiety asso-
ciated with post-modern challenges to onto-
logical certainty all have contributed to a
voluminous scholarship concerned with
authenticity in tourism studies. An examina-
tion of the theoretical literature dealing with
the tensions between tourism and authenticity
reveals stances that range from those deeply
concerned with the legitimacy of claims to
authenticity made by tourist sites, to those that
celebrate the fluidity and constructedness
of representations. Randy Widdis’s work on
tourism development in Moose Jaw, for
example, demonstrates the former position by
adopting a highly critical stance regarding a
‘heritage’ tourism project — namely, the con-
struction of underground tunnels linked to a
story of liquor smuggling during Prohibition
— with claims to historical legitimacy that are
questionable (Widdis, 2000, p. 251). Widdis’s
criticism of a blatantly commercial venture
laying claim to authenticity as a means
of marketing itself seems to be underwritten
by an assumption that the authentic can
in fact be clearly defined and determined, in
this case primarily through archival research
(Widdis, 2000, p. 242). The tourist therefore
must be vigilant in his/her quest for the
authentic, for many sites attempt to mask their
inauthenticity in order to capitalise on the
tourist’s desire for ‘the real thing’. Widdis’s
work, then, still relies on an essentialised
notion of the authentic, a stance that becomes
increasingly untenable when considered
in light of post-modernism’s insistence
upon the fluidity of cultural identity and
representation.
Authenticity begins to recede ever further
from the tourist’s grasp when one considers
MacCannell’s well-known concept of ‘staged
authenticity’ (MacCannell, 1976, p. 98). Even
when the tourist assumes that he or she has
penetrated behind a constructed state to attain
authentic experience, he or she may in fact
have only encountered another staged experi-
Int. J. Tourism Res. 6, 57–73 (2004)
60
ence that convincingly poses as authentic.
MacCannell (1976, p. 101) argues that
[t]ouristic consciousness is motivated by
its desire for authentic experiences, and
the tourist may believe that he is moving
in this direction, but often it is very diffi-
cult to know for sure if the experience is
in fact authentic. It is always possible that
what is taken to be entry into a back
region is really entry into a front region
that has been totally set up in advance for
tourist visitation.
On the other side of the debate are those who
are little disturbed by the haziness of the line
dividing the authentic from the inauthentic. In
some cases where the inauthentic is particu-
larly effective in masking its own constructed-
ness in the telling of a good story, the tourist
may even celebrate and find delight in the con-
vincing quality of the artifice. Such an attitude
characterises John Urry’s ‘post-tourist’ who
self-consciously revels in the constructedness
of the tourist experience, viewing tourism
itself as a kind of game (Urry, 1990, p. 11).
Similar to the game-playing motif examined
by Urry is Brian Osborne’s description of
tourist experience in performative terms. Like
Widdis (2000), Osborne also chooses to
examine tourism through the case study of
Moose Jaw, Saskatchewan, however, his stance
on authenticity is considerably more elastic
than Widdis. For Osborne, authenticity
becomes less important than the creation of a
‘good story’ in the service of economic initia-
tive (Osborne, 2002, pp. 25–26). However, it is
perhaps too easily assumed that reconceptual-
ising tourism as either a game or as theatre is
adequate exemption from the need to consider
wider political, social and historical processes
and relations of power. Neither theatre nor
games are ideologically neutral; hence, it is
prudent to consider Tom Selwyn’s (1996) more
cautious approach towards the issue of
authenticity in tourism. Selwyn emphasises
the need to distinguish between the myths or
fantasies of tourism and ‘real’ political–eco-
nomic and socio-cultural processes if we are to
avoid an ‘eventual wholesale Disneyfication’
of historical, social and cultural incidents that
have had tangible impacts on local peoples’
Copyright © 2004 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
K. Cohen-Hattab and J. Kerber
lives (Selwyn, 1996, p. 30). At the same time,
however, Selwyn neglects to examine more
extensively just how myths and fantasies — not
only of tourism, but also often of so-called
‘real’ political and social processes — are built.
Remaining mindful of these cautionary
points, some critics have argued that it is pos-
sible to rethink authenticity in ways that reco-
gnise the term’s fluidity while avoiding the
conversion of the world’s tourist sites into one
constructed, economically driven theme park.
David Lowenthal comments that what we
think of as ‘authentic’, particularly in regard to
historical sites, is often heavily informed by a
‘presentist bias’ that leads us to portray,
reform, or purify the past in ways that suit our
present values (Lowenthal, 1985, p. 362). An
obsession with the simple preservation of
history, which is always located ‘out there’
somewhere — which we can periodically
access in order to draw upon its authenticity
— is arguably of less value than a respectful
approach to heritage, which we continually
assimilate into ourselves and re-present within
a dynamic context. Such a position recognises
that to some extent heritage tourist sites are
modern creations, without surrendering to
the temptation to see these representations
simply as incidences of ‘free play’ that have
no broader ideological, economic, or cultural
implications. Our work that follows will
examine how these implications affect three
global sites, each of which attempts to gener-
ate tourist interest by integrating components
that appeal to (and reinforce) a series of dis-
tinct cultural identities.
Like Lowenthal (1985), Erik Cohen views
authenticity in dynamic terms, proposing that
rather than existing as a fixed point, authen-
ticity exists on a negotiable continuum (Cohen,
1988, p. 374). Cohen’s conception of authentic-
ity is also appealing because it is mindful of the
temptation to overestimate the knowledge and
motivations of the tourist (as Urry’s (1990)
‘post-tourist’ concept tends to do), or to under-
estimate the self-consciousness of the tourist
by seeing him or her simply as a dupe who
thinks that he or she is consuming an ‘authen-
tic’ experience when in fact the tourist expe-
rience has been staged. As a challenge to
this dichotomy, Cohen (1998) maintains that
tourists may actually entertain ideas about
Int. J. Tourism Res. 6, 57–73 (2004)
The Limits of Authenticity
authenticity that are much more flexible than
most academics allow (Cohen, 1988, p. 383). As
our survey of literary representations will
demonstrate, this flexibility is put to the test
when the tourist encounters texts surrounding
the site that reinforce its identity claims in
some cases while undermining them in others.
Instead of simply choosing whether to believe
or disbelieve the ‘truth’ of a site, the tourist
is called to pick his or her way through a
much murkier field of ideologically infused
possibilities.
Further, although authenticity may be asso-
ciated directly with objects, some critics have
pointed out that this need not necessarily be
the case. Wang’s (1999, p. 359) concept of
existential authenticity, for example, seeks to
account for the tourist’s preoccupation with an
‘existential state of Being’ activated by partici-
pation in specific tourist activities, rather than
an association with material objects. However,
although Wang argues in favour of viewing
authenticity as an activity-based concept in
which one can be ‘true to oneself’, there
remains a lack of attention to questions about
how power and ideology influence whose
activities are regarded as ‘authentic’ and
whose are not. George Hughes (1995) attends
more thoroughly to issues of ideology and rep-
resentation, concluding that it may now be
necessary to re-examine many of our former
assumptions about authenticity in relation
to tourism. Indeed, much of post-modern
thought has challenged the very idea that there
can be any stable referent upon which authen-
ticity is based. As Hughes (1995, p. 790) con-
tends, ‘Authenticity must be rethought when
there are no longer stable reference points for
comparison. Ideological content is measured
in the disparity between social constructions
rather than comparing any single social con-
struction with some stable autonomous
reality’. Similarly, Edward Bruner (1994, p.
408) has argued: ‘No longer is authenticity a
property inherent in an object, forever fixed in
time; it is seen as a struggle, a social process,
in which competing interests argue for their
own interpretation of history. Culture is seen
as contested, emergent, and constructed, and
agency and desire become part of the dis-
course’. In examining the three sites that
follow, our analysis is informed by theoretical
Copyright © 2004 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
61
work that is less concerned with authenticity
as a definable reference point in space and
time, than it is with the way in which tourist
sites function as contemporary sites of struggle
and negotiation between stories attempting
to construct and appeal to particular cultural
identities. In devising a new typology for
exploring identity through the analysis of
tourist sites around the globe, we hope to
extend the existing theoretical debate by seeing
how the contestatory, multivalent interpreta-
tions of this term are manifested in the prac-
tices of the global tourist industry.
JERUSALEM, MOOSE JAW AND THE ISLE
OF WIGHT: A GENERAL BACKGROUND
For many generations the Holy Land has
attracted pilgrims and other visitors from
around the world. Primarily, visitors have been
drawn to Jerusalem, the cradle of the Jewish
and Christian faiths, as well as being an impor-
tant holy site for Islam. Playing host to numer-
ous crucial historical events as well as three of
the world’s major monotheistic traditions has
led to the formation of a substantial tourist
industry that caters to both religious pilgrims
and secular visitors in search of some authen-
tic piece of the city’s several thousand years of
history (Indinopulos, 1994; Walker, 1994;
Rosovsky, 1996).
Prior to 1967, the Old City and the Jewish
Quarter were under Jordanian control, and
could not be accessed by Jews interested in
learning more about their history and wanting
to access some of their holiest sites. In order to
address these desires, as well as to generate
tourist revenue, the Model of Jerusalem was
constructed during the years 1962–1966 (see
Figure 1). The model is a 1 : 50 scale structure,
located in the west part of the city. It recreates
the city core of the Second Temple Period, and
successfully blends history, education, aes-
thetic achievement and entertainment into one
compact venue. Initially, interest in the model
was modest, however, after the Israeli victory
in the Six Day War, Jews became able to access
their holy sites, extensive archaeological exca-
vations became possible, and interest in the
model dramatically increased as the country
experienced a surge in national spirit. The
model has since become one of Jerusalem’s
Int. J. Tourism Res. 6, 57–73 (2004)
62
Figure 1. The Model of Jerusalem
Source: K. Cohen-Hattab
most enduringly popular tourist attractions,
attracting both domestic and foreign visitors.
Through the second half of the 1990s, the
model drew between 230 000 and 320 000
tourists annually, capturing 10% of Israel’s
tourism market (MTI, 2000; Holyland Hotel,
2002). The proven strength of the Jerusalem
model as a tourist attraction has also spawned
imitators, including a recently constructed 45
Copyright © 2004 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
K. Cohen-Hattab and J. Kerber
by 25 ft reproduction of the model located
within the Holyland Experience attraction in
Orlando, Florida (Holyland Experience, 2002).
In contrast to the lengthy urban history, high
visitorship and established tourism infrastruc-
ture of Jerusalem, the Canadian Prairie city of
Moose Jaw has only recently embarked upon
the establishment of a tourist industry to
showcase its colourful local history. In part, the
development of tourism has been undertaken
as an economic initiative designed to slow
depopulation and revitalise a declining rural
economy (Widdis, 2000, p. 234; Larsen and
Libby, 2001, p. 209; Osborne, 2002, p. 19).
Although there is no single central tourist
attraction that is quintessentially associated
with Moose Jaw, the city has managed to
develop a growing tourism industry by creat-
ing a combination of sites asserting varying
levels of uniqueness even as they strive to be
representative of broader historical trends.
Moose Jaw’s tourism industry draws upon two
major historical narratives, namely the tale
of hardship and eventually triumphant settle-
ment of the Canadian West, and the accompa-
nying narrative of the Wild West that explores
the seedy, exciting and dangerous underbelly
of the settlement project (Moon, 1979; Knight,
1982).
The successful marketing of the city and its
surrounding area as a heritage tourist destina-
tion is accomplished through the promotion of
several different attractions, among them the
Sukanen Ship Pioneer Village and Museum,
Temple Gardens Mineral Spa, the Murals of
Moose Jaw and the Tunnels of Moose Jaw
(Cabasin, 1999, pp. 225–226; American Auto-
mobile Association, 2001, pp. 238–239). The
first site (and here, our primary focus — see
Figure 2) offers a haphazard blend of the
exceptional and the typical, situating a sea-
worthy ship constructed on the open prairie
by an eccentric settler in the 1930s amongst
an assortment of antique automobiles and
pioneer buildings ranging in dates of con-
struction from 1881 to 1936. It is unlikely that
any of these structures (including the ship)
would have survived had they been left in
their original isolated locations, much less
been visited by tourists. The establishment of
the museum in 1997 has thus allowed for the
preservation of these structures at the same
Int. J. Tourism Res. 6, 57–73 (2004)
The Limits of Authenticity
Figure 2. The Sukanen Ship
Source: J. Kerber
time as it provides visual referents for the
telling of a heritage story that pays tribute to
the ‘indomitable human spirit of the Canadian
pioneer’ (Sukanen Ship Pioneer Village and
Museum brochure). The ‘essence’ of the struc-
tures on the site and the ‘spirit’ they evoke are
Copyright © 2004 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
63
promoted as conferring a pioneer-type of cul-
tural identity, even if they have undergone
some structural repairs and their spatial con-
texts have been altered substantially. Although
significant attention has been paid both to the
Mural project (Widdis, 2000) and the Tunnels
of Moose Jaw (Osborne, 2002), much less aca-
demic attention has been given to the Sukanen
Ship Museum, even though the intriguing
history surrounding the ship has generated
substantial interest in other areas, leading most
notably to the novel Dustship Glory (Schroeder,
1986).
A final site located between Moose Jaw and
Jerusalem in both temporal and geographical
terms is the Isle of Wight. Located immediately
south of the English mainland region of
Hampshire, the Isle of Wight has long been a
popular destination for tourists seeking sun,
rejuvenating sea air, freedom from congestion
and a liberal dose of national nostalgia.
Tourism on the island was sporadic until
the Victorian era (Ordnance Survey, 1994,
p. 5), and it is the Victorian legacy of seaside
holiday resorts, gardens and imperial tradition
that continues to dominate the island’s tourist
map. The Isle is often promoted as a
microcosm of an idyllic England of a bygone
era (Couling, 1978, p. i; Ordnance Survey,
1994, p. 4), and this nostalgia is reinforced by
many of its most popular attractions, including
Osborne House, the summer home of Queen
Victoria and Prince Albert, Carisbrooke Castle,
site of the imprisonment of Charles I, and the
Isle of Wight Steam Railway, which was started
in 1859 and now runs mainly as a tourist
attraction using Victorian and Edwardian tech-
nology. The ease and frequency of transit to
and from the island means that almost half of
the island’s 2.7 million annual tourists are now
day visitors (Isle of Wight Council, 2002).
Tourists are attracted to the island in part
because it satisfies a desire for ‘comfortable
remoteness’: its lack of industrial develop-
ment, its quaint historicism and its extensive
walking trails give one a sense of visiting a dif-
ferent time and space, while at the same time
the history, culture, language and landscape
remain overwhelmingly familiar (Dicks, 1979,
p. 140). As one guidebook comments, ‘[b]oth
scenically and culturally, the Isle of Wight is a
miniature replica of the south-east of England’
Int. J. Tourism Res. 6, 57–73 (2004)
64
(Parry and Parry, 2000, p. 9). The Isle is often
promoted as being safer, cleaner, and easier to
navigate than a mainland that offers many
similar attractions, however, it is arguable
whether the Isle improves upon, or merely
sanitises, what it represents.
A site that effectively encapsulates some of
the Island’s most appealing tourist features is
the Model Village at Godshill (see Figure 3),
located in the southeastern region of the
island. This model village is one of several
throughout England, most of which seek to
recreate a particular historical period in an
easily accessible, non-intimidating manner
as a way of generating tourist interest and,
of course, revenue (EntsWeb, 1999). In
operation since 1952, the Model Village is set
in one and a half acres of the gardens of the
Old Vicarage, and contains more than 30
models built to the scale of 1 : 10. Most of the
models replicate actual buildings still standing
in the village of Godshill and the neighbouring
town of Shanklin, particularly those that are
already of historical and cultural interest in
their own right, such as the Church of All
Saints in Godshill. The Model Village serves as
an interesting microcosm within a microcosm,
providing those desiring to visit a ‘kinder,
gentler England’ with additional smaller
worlds that seek to teach and delight while
also miniaturising and fixing the complexities
of history and architecture that provide the
broader contexts in which the actual buildings
are situated. The Model Village can be inter-
preted both literally and figuratively, for not
only does it literally consist of scale models,
but it also serves figuratively as a representa-
tion of the Isle of Wight’s model village, for
Godshill is ‘probably the best known and most
photogenic village in the Island’ (Parry and
Parry, 2000, p. 64). Promotional materials
suggest part of the appeal of touring the model
structures lies in appreciating the realism of
each model, comparing it to its original just up
the street. The caption attached to one promo-
tional photograph which features the model
Church (All Saints) in Godshill with the full-
size church in the background begs the ques-
tion: ‘The model and the real church — but
which looks the most realistic?’ (Isle of Wight
Nostalgia).
Copyright © 2004 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
K. Cohen-Hattab and J. Kerber
Figure 3. The Godshill Model Village
Source: Long P. (2001). The Hidden Places of Dorset,
Hampshire & the Isle of Wight.
PROMOTION AND CULTIVATION
OF THE TOURIST SITE:
A TYPOLOGICAL PROPOSAL
Recalling the glory days: appeals to
religious, historical and national identity
The success of tourist sites often depends on
their perceived historical legitimacy, and a key
means of producing and reproducing legiti-
macy is to associate a site with a historical
period emblematised by key events and
notable figures who either visited or dwelt
there. The period portrayed is thus seen as par-
ticularly formative of the current identity of
the place. The well-crafted tourist site then
provides a kind of imaginative access to a
remote time and culture that incorporates a
range of senses, from sight and sound, to even
smell and taste (Taylor, 1994). In keeping with
its tourist theme as a central sacred site in the
ancient world, Jerusalem draws upon associa-
tions with famous figures from all three major
monotheistic traditions in order to attract
tourists. David and Solomon are central figures
within the Jewish tradition, and the presence
of Jesus and his followers in Jerusalem attracts
Christian pilgrims and secular tourists.
Muslims are also drawn to the city as the
site of Mohammed’s ascension into heaven
(Shoval, 2000, p. 4).
The model of Jerusalem presents the period
of King Herod, who ruled the city at the end
of its prosperous Second Temple Period and
whose legacy is outlined by the model recon-
Int. J. Tourism Res. 6, 57–73 (2004)
The Limits of Authenticity
struction of his ‘nonpareil public works, pri-
marily the Temple’ (Wahrman, 1987, p. 196). Of
course, Herod’s Jerusalem is also that of Jesus,
and the guidebook description of the model
Copyright © 2004 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
65
confidently asserts that ‘this is how it looked
when Jesus reached the Mount of Olives,
beheld the city’s beauty and lamented
its impending destruction’ (Wahrman, 1987).
Int. J. Tourism Res. 6, 57–73 (2004)
66
The viewer is left with the impression that he
or she is sharing a historically convincing —
even divine — vision, even if that vision is
only one-fiftieth the actual size and is free of
the animated movement that would have con-
tributed to the living vibrancy of the city in
ancient times.
Moose Jaw lends a sense of legitimacy to its
heritage drama in part by evoking the pioneer
experience of Prairie settlement, and uses the
Sukanen ship as a visual means of prompting
tourist identification with this experience.
Although there is relatively little information
about its creator in official archival documents,
this does not necessarily hinder the Sukanen
ship as a marker of a particular national and
historical pioneer identity. The rich folklore
surrounding its builder, Tom Sukanen, has
largely compensated for and in some cases
even supplanted the poverty of historical
records. The ship, set starkly on the Canadian
Prairies, functions as a sign in search of a sig-
nified: it provides a strong visual referent of
the ‘typical’ Prairie pioneer spirit, which visi-
tors can then invest with meaning by attaching
their own individual, family and community
stories to it. The idealised legacy of rural
pioneer life — captured in the physical struc-
ture of the ship — also becomes part of the pas-
toral myth by which an increasingly urban
prairie reasserts its ‘roots’ even as the latter
tends to overlook contemporary rural people
and their predicaments. (For an exploration of
a similar situation in regard to the mytholo-
gised Canadian North, see Shields (1991, p.
197).)
The Isle of Wight delves slightly further back
in history to uncover its own interpretation of
‘glory days’, drawing primarily on the Victo-
rian period, but also appealing to less his-
torically-specific ideas about ‘Britishness’: for
example, the tourist is encouraged to partici-
pate in quintessentially British activities such
as bracing seaside walks and drinking tea (Isle
of Wight Nostalgia — Godshill Model Village,
2002). Queen Victoria and her husband Albert
ordered the construction of Osborne House as
a country retreat in 1845–1848, and it became
one of the monarch’s favourite residences and
was the site of her death in 1901. Its status as
a national memorial now reminds the visitor of
the now-faded glory of the British Empire,
Copyright © 2004 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
K. Cohen-Hattab and J. Kerber
which reached its height during Victoria’s
reign. Indeed, a significant amount of the Isle
of Wight’s self-promotion is based upon the
desire to access what is often an idealised past,
when Britain played a more powerful global
role. Victoria’s association with the island
contributed to its attractiveness for well-
known artists and other figures, including
Tennyson, Longfellow, Dickens, Darwin and
Lewis Carroll. Not only does the association of
these individuals with the island confirm the
latter’s status as a retreat that contained the
ingredients to fuel artistic and scientific genius
amidst the heady days of Empire, but it also
suggests that if such luminaries found the
island worthy of visitation, then certainly so
should contemporary tourists. At the same
time, part of what drew Victorians to the Isle
was its diminutiveness, quaintness and sense
of timelessness in a world of rapid technolog-
ical and social change (Parry and Parry, 2000).
These more abstract — yet no less important
— desires of the Victorian period are well
reflected in both Godshill and its Model
Village. The thatched roofs and numerous tea
shops that are promoted as part of Godshill’s
attractiveness prompt the visitor to associate
the village with an earlier, idyllic England that
is a composite of the historical, the mytholog-
ical and the poetic. The model, for example,
contains figurines of Morris dancers — cer-
tainly a marker of traditional English identity,
but hardly representative of the lives of most
contemporary citizens of the Isle of Wight (Isle
of Wight Nostalgia — Godshill Model Village,
2002). Here, the present-day reality of the
village disrupts the identity cultivated by the
idealised portrait of island culture given in
the model.
Identification with the site as ‘work of art’
the claim to aesthetic uniqueness
Regardless of the occasionally dubious legiti-
macy of the larger ideological connections they
assert, the Jerusalem model, the Sukanen ship
and the Model Village at Godshill are rarely
questioned in terms of aesthetic merit. Con-
fronted with the visual impressiveness of
the structures themselves, the visitor often
relegates questions of authenticity to the
background. The type of building materials,
Int. J. Tourism Res. 6, 57–73 (2004)
The Limits of Authenticity
the mode of reconstruction and even the loca-
tion often become less important than the artis-
tic acumen behind the design and construction
of the structure itself. An emphasis on unique-
ness and artistic genius demands flexible
notion of authenticity; hence, directing visi-
tors’ attention to aesthetic qualities may also
allow for the more liberal application of tech-
niques that would otherwise be questioned
more rigorously.
Concerning the model of Jerusalem, for
example, the guidebook literature claims that
the building materials are ‘as “real” as can be’
(Wahrman, 1987, p. 196), however, no further
explanation is given about what constitutes
the ‘real’, nor why the term is encased in
ironic quotes. Further, the visual referent of the
model initially leads the visitor to believe that
all of the structures contained therein are exact
1 : 50 scale reconstructions of actual buildings
that stood in Jerusalem during Herod’s reign,
but further consultation reveals that the
reconstruction of several structures are based
on equivalent structures elsewhere, mimick-
ing the known architectural style of the
period (Wahrman, 1987, p. 197; Cipriani, 1999,
p. 61). What is emphasised is the intellectual
and aesthetic genius of the man behind the
project, Professor Michael Avi Yonah of the
archaeology department at Hebrew University
(Cipriani, 1999, p. 196). The degree of histori-
cal accuracy achieved by the model at the time
of its construction is lauded in the promotional
literature; because it was built before extensive
archaeological evidence could be retrieved
from excavations in the Old City; Professor
Avi-Yonah had to rely significantly on ancient
written sources such as the Mishna (oral
Jewish laws), both Talmuds (Babylonian and
Jerusalem), the Tosephta (supplement to
Mishna), Josephus, and the New Testament
(Levi et al., 1996; Cipriani, 1999).
Similarly, the Sukanen ship is hailed as an
amazing feat of engineering accomplished by
one man during a period of intense economic
and social stress. The fact that the ship
had to be reassembled from disparate parts,
repainted, stabilised by a concrete pad and
braces, and most importantly, moved approxi-
mately 150 km from its original location, are
not depicted in the tourist literature as a liabil-
ity against identification with the site. Instead,
Copyright © 2004 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
67
these factors are characterised as a testament to
the importance of restoring the ship in order to
recognise the extraordinary achievement of
its creator. It is reported that upon seeing the
pieces of the ship being loaded for their
long journey to the museum site south of
Moose Jaw, one elderly Scandinavian man
commented to his friends that ‘She’s going
home boys: she’s on her way’ (Mullin et al.,
2001, p. 4). Although in many respects this
could be interpreted ironically, for the ship was
in fact moving away from its original home, it
was also seen to be recovering its legitimate
identity by being reassembled and restored to
its creator, whose remains were also eventually
relocated to reside next to the ship. The
museum literature that recounts the reassem-
bly of the vessel also repeatedly emphasises
the quality of the workmanship of Tom
Sukanen that enabled the vessel to survive a
harsh climate and neglect for so many decades;
the dual focus on vision and craft has strong
appeal for local visitors in the Prairie region,
particularly those who have personal memo-
ries of ingenuity in the face of pioneer hard-
ship (Mullin et al., 2001, p. 5).
Perhaps nowhere is the construction of
the tourist site as the focus of appreciation
of art for art’s sake more evident than in
Godshill’s Model Village. Compared with the
model of Jerusalem, which portrays something
that no longer exists, the Model Village is a rep-
resentation of structures that are still standing
and can be observed without payment of an
admission fee. The model, however, remains a
very popular attraction for several reasons, not
the least of which is its ability to instantly crys-
tallise for the viewer those structures that are
deemed worthy of note in architectural, cul-
tural and historical terms. The model village
also enables the visitor who has limited time,
finances, or even interest to see two villages at
once, as the model contains replicas of build-
ings located both in Godshill and Shanklin,
the latter of which lies eastward on the coast.
The promotional literature suggests that the
aesthetic appreciation associated with viewing
miniature sites is derived from witnessing how
the model’s builders recreate a desired period,
dealing with differences in scale and me-
thods of construction while still making the
Lilliputian village look ‘authentic’. At the
Int. J. Tourism Res. 6, 57–73 (2004)
68
model village, this is accomplished by giving
many of the structures thatched roofs made of
actual straw, as well as using miniature trees
and shrubs to visually correspond to the actual
vegetation of the villages (Long, 2001, p. 81).
The high level of visual realism that is a crucial
part of the model’s attractiveness in turn
allows the visitor to engage in his/her own
act of art-making, usually in the form of taking
photographs in which the model is made to
stand in for the actual village. The model also
pays playful homage to the concept of model-
making itself, as it contains replica villages
of the replica village, at scales of 1 : 100 and
1 : 1000 respectively (Long, 2001).
Literature, tourism and the complication of
cultural identity
Where, then, does an appreciation of aesthet-
ics leave us in the debate about tourism and
cultural identity? When we become less inter-
ested in the multiple cultures and histories
informing a site, both the site and the
tourist’s experience of it are impoverished.
So, the question then becomes, ‘how might
we challenge our assumptions about both
tourism-oriented textual representation and
identity in order to arrive at more comprehen-
sive understandings of people and place?’
Clearly, aesthetic representation in the form of
models and built structures can play a signifi-
cant role on both sides of the tourism experi-
ence, in both the presentation and the
consumption of sites. However, there are other
modes of artistic expression that do not neces-
sarily fit under the tidy labels of either host or
visitor; it is these works that can sometimes
provide the necessary space for insightful
reflection and commentary on tourism and the
continuing question of authenticity.
To this point, literary representations of
places (via fiction, drama, poetry and creative
non-fiction) as sites of contestation and possi-
bility have not received enough serious atten-
tion in the debates surrounding authenticity
in tourism studies. Literary interpretations
highlight not only the fictionality of all textual
materials, but also are places where struggles
over cultural identity as related to place are
played out. They provide a space for the liber-
atory exercise of imagination (which ironically,
Copyright © 2004 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
K. Cohen-Hattab and J. Kerber
may allow the tourist a greater sense of
‘existential authenticity’, as Wang (1999) terms
it). Literary interpretations of place may also
provide space for other cultural groups and
movements to tell their stories, which are often
overlooked by the dominant cultural history of
a site, thereby also envisioning a different kind
of politics. As Michel Foucault contends, it is
possible to
make fiction work within truth, to induce
truth-effects within a fictional discourse,
and in some way to make the discourse
of truth arouse, ‘fabricate’ something
which does not yet exist, thus ‘fiction’
something. One ‘fictions’ history starting
from the political reality that renders it
true, one ‘fictions’ a politics that doesn’t
yet exist starting from an historical truth.
(Foucault, 1979, pp. 74–75)
Certainly, all ‘factual’ tourist materials tell
a story, but sometimes it is only when these
materials are held up against overtly fictional
materials that ‘tell a lie in the service of truth’
that their fictionality is highlighted. As who
wins the struggle regarding what dominant
story or stories help construct the dominant
identity of a cultural place is partly a function
of power, one of the useful things about
literary representations is that they can open
up sites of resistance that can either counter or
affirm the dominant stories about a place, thus
giving a more complex portrait of the tourist
site.
When each of the global sites outlined
above is viewed through the works of poets
and fiction writers, aspects of the site that the
standard tourist literature neglects are brought
into relief. An example of the kind of work we
are referring to is Shulamith Hareven’s (1977)
novel set in Jerusalem, City of Many Days,
which offers a complex view of a city with a
long and varied history. Although the novel is
obviously not a historical document legit-
imised by the state, it nonetheless captures
effectively the dilemma of living in a city
visited by tourists who view it more through
the lenses of its past and future than its
present. As one character remarks to another,
‘we live, my friend, caught between a forgot-
ten crusader past and a yearned-for biblical
Int. J. Tourism Res. 6, 57–73 (2004)
The Limits of Authenticity
future, with nothing to hold onto but the
present, this damnably difficult here and now’
(Hareven, 1977, p. 96). In encouraging the
visitor to believe that he or she can access the
city by engaging in tourism as an unproblem-
atic act of archival retrieval, tourism literature
can forget that history is constantly absorbed,
reworked and reproduced to suits the needs of
an everchanging present. Israeli poet Yehuda
Amichai (1987) points out that history and con-
temporary circumstances operate in dialogical
relationship with one another; hence in
opening one’s eyes to the ever-shifting politi-
cal and social dynamics that affect the present
of a place, one might arrive at new interpreta-
tions of its historical and cultural legacies. In
the latter half of his poem ‘Tourists’, Amichai
(1987) explores how the almost exclusive
emphasis on historical sites in Jerusalem leads
tourists to overlook those contemporary
residents without whom the city would be a
dead ghost town. The story of Jerusalem that
contributes to its status as a place of vibrancy,
diversity and contestation is not merely one
of history, religion and cemeteries, but
rather also consists of a living culture of the
everyday:
Once I sat on the steps by a gate at
David’s Tower, I placed my two heavy
baskets at my side. A group of tourists
was standing around their guide and I
became their target marker. ‘You see that
man with the baskets? Just right of his
head there’s an arch from the Roman
period. Just right of his head.’ ‘But he’s
moving, he’s moving!’ I said to myself:
redemption will come only if their guide
tells them, ‘You see that arch from the
Roman period? It’s not important: but
next to it, left and down a bit, there sits a
man who’s bought fruit and vegetables
for his family.’ (Amichai, 1987, p. 177)
The poem suggests that the tourist experi-
ence reduces the multiple, shifting identities
of a place and its people into a diluted site,
when it is insulated from the complex charac-
ter of the present. Unfortunately, as tourist
visits to Israel decline in length and more
tourists opt for audio-visual and virtual expe-
riences of place instead of active touring
Copyright © 2004 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
69
(Shoval, 2000, p. 6), one wonders if the diverse
stories of present-day Jerusalem will be heard.
Similarly, the tourist experience also can
become less rich when representations over-
simplify the complexity of the past. The pro-
motional literature that identifies the Sukanen
Ship Pioneer Village and Museum as a tribute
to the pioneering spirit that helped to settle
the Canadian West, for example, fails to
sufficiently acknowledge the multifaceted
character of Tom Sukanen, as well as the often-
fractious relationships he had with other
members of the surrounding community. In
researching what he had originally intended to
be a biography of Sukanen, Canadian author
Andreas Schroeder (1986) explains that what
he initially perceived to be a wealth of author-
itative history quickly dissipated upon further
investigation: ‘Cross-checked and cross-
examined, the huge file of Sukanen mytho-
logy dwindled rapidly. The many newspaper
stories turned out to be largely elaborations of
a few superficial seed-pieces, which them-
selves brimmed with inaccuracies. Old-timers’
recollections often proved second-hand and
hazy’ (Schroeder, 1986, p. vi). In the end,
Schroeder produced a novel instead of a biog-
raphy, but he remains convinced that the
resulting portrait effectively conveys the iden-
tity of the shipbuilder, arguing that the fiction-
alised text ‘bears a closer resemblance to the
real Tom Sukanen than most of his contempo-
raries, friend or foe, have been prepared to
countenance’ (Schroeder, 1986, p. vii).
Like the other literature surrounding the
tourist site, Schroeder’s (1986) novel may not
offer the visitor the past, but it does offer a
useful interpretation of it; introducing this
literature to the tourist might then be a step
towards allowing the site once again to become
a place of multiple stories. Certainly, Dustship
Glory prompts one to reconsider the museum
and its apparently unified narrative of Western
Canadian settlement. For example, one char-
acter in the novel expresses dismay that
Sukanen’s life has been chosen as the lens
through which a broader Prairie experience is
interpreted and articulated:
I can’t for the life of me understand why
anyone would be interested in him. What
did he ever do for this community except
Int. J. Tourism Res. 6, 57–73 (2004)
70
cause ruckus and fuss and live like
a Limb of Satan? There are dozens of
people around here whose stories I could
tell, people who stood their ground
through that Depression, who worked
themselves deaf, dumb, and blind to save
their farms and bring their families
through with decency and dignity. Those
are the people that ought to be written
about. Those are the people who suffered.
(Schroeder, 1986, p. 119)
Not everyone, then, necessarily views Sukanen
as an apt representative of ‘the indomitable
spirit of the pioneer’; at the same time,
however, the eccentricity of his character and
the aesthetic quality of his project do make
him historically notable. Faced with this
dilemma, the museum seems to strike an
uneasy compromise: its literature portrays
Sukanen as a unique genius worthy of
historical attention, overlooking some of the
unsavoury aspects of his character in order to
also have him encapsulate a broader, heroic
Prairie narrative of resilience through the
DustBowl. Ironically, Sukanen thus ends up
representing many of those who would have
shunned association with him during his life-
time. (Although it is beyond the immediate
scope of this paper, it must nonetheless be
stated that although the museum tells these
two stories well, its silence regarding others
is noteworthy. For example, the museum’s
limited focus on the experience of the immi-
grant pioneer fails to consider how the experi-
ence of other cultural groups — namely, First
Nations people — was and often continues to
be supplanted in tourist representations by an
optimistic colonial narrative of settlement.)
The appeal of a good story thus seems to be
central to the success or failure of tourist sites
around the globe, and yet there often remains
the lingering suspicion that effective story-
telling is accomplished at the expense of
portraying ‘authentic’ religious, historical, or
national identity. British novelist Julian Barnes,
however, insists that fiction may succeed as a
kind of truth-telling in ways that a catalogue
of documents may not; Barnes (2000, p. 57)
explains that literature is ‘a process of produc-
ing grand, beautiful, well-ordered lies that
tell more truth than any assemblage of facts’.
Copyright © 2004 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
K. Cohen-Hattab and J. Kerber
Although Barnes overstates the case some-
what, his point about textuality and interpre-
tation is nonetheless worth bearing in mind. To
accept the legitimacy of literary representation
is not necessarily a denial of the legitimacy of
other state, historical or religiously sanctioned
representations, but instead it draws attention
to history, identity and tourist representation
as always mixtures of the real and the unreal,
as always a kind of fiction. Barnes’ work effec-
tively highlights how all of these representa-
tions function within an ever-shifting network
of economic, political, and social relations. His
novel England, England (Barnes, 1998) explores
questions of identity, tourism and authenticity
by taking the frequent description of the Isle
of Wight as a microcosm of England (Hughes,
1967, p. 9) and pushing it to its satiric limit. In
the novel, the megalomaniacal entrepreneur
Sir Jack Pitman succeeds in turning the Isle
of Wight into a sanitised and miniaturised
England specifically designed in every aspect
for the mass tourism market: ‘Sir Jack’s choice
of the island had not been a matter of carto-
graphical serendipity. Even his whims had
costing behind them. In the present instance,
relevant factors had been: the size, location
and accessibility of the Island, plus the extreme
unlikelihood of it being spot-listed by
UNESCO as a World Heritage Site’ (Barnes,
1998, p. 106). The recreated site, now renamed
‘England, England’, encapsulates a range of
features that are associated with the national
and global ideal of England, while at the same
time it is a completely new structure that dis-
places the local character of the Isle of Wight.
Although Barnes argues that the identity,
history and culture of a place is always a
mixture of the real and the fabulous, the novel
is also a cautionary tale about fulfilling the
tourist desire for a coherent narrative in the
service of profit while viewing the particulari-
ties of place as expendable. The novel thus
highlights the difficulties of freeing oneself
from the burden of history and the demand
for authenticity without also compromising
present identity.
CONCLUSION
The discernment of the relationship between
cultural identity and textual representation in
Int. J. Tourism Res. 6, 57–73 (2004)
The Limits of Authenticity
tourism literature is certainly not straightfor-
ward. As the visits of today’s tourists decline
in length, it is likely that the types of sites out-
lined above will become increasingly popular;
however, one is left wondering what stories are
ignored in these representations that make
various appeals to identity. Although much
critical attention has been paid to the concept
of authenticity as operative in tourism, there
are clearly limits to using authenticity as a
means by which to critique the homogenisa-
tion of tourist representation, especially con-
cerning the way sites promote themselves
via literature. Authenticity becomes an increas-
ingly slippery term that relies on a notion of
essence that is always elusive. Although some
critics have tried to recuperate authenticity by
associating it with existence, experience and
activity, so far this discussion has faltered
because of its inadequate attention to social
power relations.
The comparative examination of a wide
spectrum of literature surrounding three global
tourist sites allows us to steer away from an
exclusive (and ultimately frustrated) concern
with authenticity, to a potentially more helpful
discussion about the politics of representation.
An examination of tourist literature enables one
to contemplate identity on a number of fronts:
first, it opens up questions about how religious,
historical and national identities are formulated
in and through the tourist site; second, it facili-
tates the assessment of a site’s claim to status as
a unique work of art that prompts identification
on the basis of aesthetic merit; and finally,
it opens the door to considering how other
kinds of artwork — in this case, novelistic or
poetic literary texts — both affirm and question
the identities cultivated by more standard
tourist literature such as pamphlets, maps and
guidebooks. Literary representations not only
create and reinforce identities that conform to
those perpetuated in promotional and guide-
book materials, but can also act as sites of resis-
tance that ‘fiction’ an alternative politics of
place and identity into being. Literature, like
cultural identity, is an active site of struggle, a
place where what it means to claim a particular
identity — be it religious, national, or as part of
a migrant group with a mythologised set of
qualities — can be reinforced or challenged. As
such, the creative literary approach can offer
Copyright © 2004 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
71
interpretations of the tourist site that might
sometimes do a more adequate job of relaying
its multiple social, historical and geographical
particularities than more widely accepted
forms of ‘tourist literature’. The sites them-
selves, the contemporary and historical con-
texts that inform them, and finally the
experience of the tourists who visit these places
might all be enriched by stories that continually
strive to do justice to their engaging, contradic-
tory and entertaining complexity.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
The authors would like to dedicate this work to
Professor Paul Simpson-Housley, who first ini-
tiated this project, and passed away in March
2002. We also express our gratitude to the
late Alice Kerber of Saskatoon, Canada, and
Evelyn Marcil of the Moose Jaw and District
Chamber of Commerce for their assistance
in gathering promotional and statistical
materials.
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