Authenticity Of Ethnic Tourism: Ethnic Villages In Sichuan

Over the past three decades the issue of authenticity, having been identified as one of the central concepts in the tourism studies, has set the agenda for lively and diverse debate and analyses in western countries. As a matter of fact, it is very hard to find a suitable Chinese word to replace the English word Authenticity, although sometimes it is translated as Zhenshixin, Benzhenxin, Yuanzhenxin, Yuanshengxin, Kekaoxin, Zhunquexin etc. In tourism studies, the conception of authenticity has been discussed mainly through four positions, objectivism, constructivism, post-modernism and existentialism. The former three approaches belong to object-related authenticity, and the last one is subject-related. While existentialist emphasis the tourist experience instead of the toured culture, the original meaning of this word thus well-kept. Among the three kinds of object-related notions concerning authenticity, while the objectivist and constructivist insist maintaining the authentic nature of tourism object, the post-modernist abandon the concept totally, and hold that simulacra is much more authentic than the origin object, they are as perfect as hyper-real. But the author holds that discussing authenticity of toured object is still critical to cultural tourism research. In the world of tourism researchers, ethnic tourism is taken as a special form of cultural tourism, emphasizing on tourist-native interaction, in which natives is a spectacle attracting tourists from afar. There is a close link between ethnic tourism and debates of authenticity, and searching for "authentic"Other is the main characteristic of ethnic tourists. So studying authenticity of ethnic tourism is more important than that of other tourism forms, and very valuable to tourism research. This paper discusses the issue of authenticity in the ethnic tourism context, based on the analysis of some literatures concerning "authenticity", and questionnaire study of tourists from some ethnic villages in Sichuan. The villages investigated are Tibetan Villages of the Jiuzhaigou Valley, the Qiang Castle in Taoping in Lixian County, and the Mosuo Villages around the Luguhu Lake. The paper compared the tourist's perceptions of ethnic tourism and authenticity of the three villages, and holds authenticity is relative, not absolute; it is the dialectic between some binary notions, such as there and here, now and then, profane and sacred. Authenticity of ethnic tourism should be symbolically constructed in the latter half of those dualisms, such as profane/sacred, fragmentation/holism, familiarity/strangeness, Change/stasis, Self/Other, here/there, and now/then. This is a decisive position will determine if the ethnic tourism subject perceive the object as authentic, and find an "authentic Self".