There are a number of reasons I’m uncomfortable with the term.  First, if some experience is ‘authentic’, it means there are experiences that are ‘inauthentic’. But how can that be the case?  All experiences occur and therefore are ‘authentic’ to those who experience them.  The fact that some experiences fit a closer sense of our (travellers) expectation may make them closer to what we want to get from them, and what we want to see or experience, but this doesn’t make the experience any more authentic or inauthentic from the perspective of those who we interact with. It is in the context and in the interpretation of the experience.

This therefore raises the possibility that as travellers (remembering that almost by definition, we are outsiders), our search for an ‘authentic’ experience starts to impose our notions of authenticity onto other cultures. This can be very dangerous in the sense that the cultural exchange occurring between traveller and local begins to get defined by the outsider.

To give an example, I remember someone telling me once about a trip they had been on.  They had paid to have a tour of a long house in a south-east Asian country, and he had paid to stay for one night there. His experience, as he described it, was both positive and negative.

It was positive because he was in the longhouse, he interacted with an extended family who cooked for him, provided local drinks and accommodation in a room.  He was able to observe and experience everyday life of the extended family for the tI me he was there.  The trip to the longhouse by boat was part of this construction of ‘authenticity’.  He took pictures of the family in their ‘traditional’ dress, cooking their ‘traditional’ food, using their ‘traditional’ methods, in their ‘traditional’ house.

It was negative because the family, for all this ‘traditional’ hospitality, wanted to sell him souvenirs, and this was not ‘authentic’.  They also asked for tips, again not ‘authentic’.

Secondly, the search for authenticity has embedded in it, I would suggest, an assumption that cultures are static things. This of course depends on how ‘authenticity’ is constructed, both by the traveller and the local. So when we search for a sense of authenticity, we may well be assuming that authenticity is there for our benefit as travellers and is somehow frozen in a romanticized view of what we want and expect. As soon as we do that, we start to impose a set of assumptions on living cultures and living people.

Of course, this is not always one-way.  I remember working in the buffer of a protected area in South Asia a few years ago, a park that was trying to attract ecotourists.  My concern was the park management’s concept of ecotourism was quite broadly defined – at the time, there was a big push by governments to have ecotourism implemented and, as with lots of things, when you push for a quick implementation you lose the reflection, the dialogues and critical discussions and the cooperation required to make things work well.  So I was a bit worried about that.

A village had just formed a dance/cultural entertainment group to entertain the ecotourists who were to come and I happened to be there during one of their early performances. There were a few people in the audience – perhaps 6 – and they were all westerners.

Group members began to dance, women dancing on their own, men dancing on their own.  There was a description of the dances by one of the group’s members, with the narrative focusing on harvests and long-life and good fortune.

Then, as the night reached its end, the men and the women danced together, and once that had finished, the dancers went and got members of the audience to dance with them. The narrative for this was one of tradition – that this dance was not often seen by outsiders, rarely performed beyond the confines of the small village and family networks within other villages.

And yet, they were dancing with members of the audience.

As you could imagine, there were cameras flashing during the night, but especially when the westerners were brought up on stage. My heart was very heavy.

Afterwards I spoke with some of the members of the group and asked them to describe their ideas for the dance group.  What they wanted to achieve was to both maintain their cultural traditions, but to also generate income for the village and for village facilities.  The group was set up as a cooperative and profits went to village enterprises rather than individual households.

I understood all this, but not about the dance with the audience.  I asked why, if the dance was so seldom done, so special, it was being performed with audience members.  The person I was discussing this with smiled and said ‘Brian, that’s just a story. It’s to keep the tourists happy. We just made it (the dance) up as we went along’.

I laughed at the thought that the audience members, happy in their notion of ‘authentic’ would be showing pictures of dancing that they were privileged to see – dancing that was seldom performed, and they happened to be able to see it.  They would have felt special and would have showed their images and constructed their own stories and narratives of this cultural exchange, not knowing that their stories were based in their own construction of their experience.

And for the dancers, they were dealing with authenticity on their own terms, rather than on the terms of the travellers. They knew what they wanted to achieve – improvements in village facilities.  They found a way to achieve it, and they recognised that they didn’t want or need to sell out their own cultural ideas, values, changes and aspirations, to the authenticity assumed by the tourists looking at ‘the other’. The dancers engaged with the complexities of this exchange, and did it on their own terms.

For me, this is an important story for LoST travel. We need to move well beyond notions of ‘other’ and notions of ‘tradition’ and ‘authenticity’.  As LoST travellers our aim is to recognise the dynamics of our interactions and to reflexively understand the assumptions of our interactions.  For us the focus is not on the journey or the interaction, but on the package of journey, interaction, ethics, assumptions, expectations (and how they’re formed) and our aims for our interactions.

I’m in reflective mode and its taken a little time for me to understand why specifically this should be the case.  I think it’s the parrots, sitting in the trees just across from my terrace. It’s not the specific species, just the fact that there are parrots in the trees. This favourite landscape of mine has lot’s of parrots – they’re one of my first memories of it, back when I was a kid travelling around with my father who would visit for his work. And now, after more than 40 years and countless visits of my own, it is very deeply etched into my memories, my work, my life and my sense of identity.

The landscape I’m thinking about is one where I’ve camped, cycled, walked, canoed, photographed, worked with communities in planning sustainable futures, and all kinds of things.  I’ve been their on my own, with friends, with students, with colleagues, with family.

These connections are multi-layered. They are partly framed by my values and ethics (and in turn the landscape actually frames them), partly by memories of sights, sounds, meetings, discussions, sunrises, moon-rises, chill in the air in autumn, cold in the air in winter,  heat in the air in summer and who knows what else.

For me, LoST is ultimately about these multiple connections to landscapes and their people.  These don’t have to be (and don’t need to be) developed over X years of visiting – they can be developed through a slow trip through a landscape. What is important is we are open to these connections, these multiple points of being part of a landscape.  It is a state of mind, an ethical framework, and a value-base and they come together in a landscape.

How often do we hear people implore travellers to ‘keep their mind open’ for experiences.  But for me, the important thing is how we actually interpret and reflect on these experiences, not just ‘experience’ them. Without this reflection, we just superficially experience – we grab yet some more experiences and they become part of our travelling life.  But they don’t have the depth of connection and interpretation that is only possible as we move towards our own approach and interpretation of local, slow travel.

In a tiny corner of the landscape…

So as I sit here on the terrace, a little chillier now, the parrots represent my ‘now’, but they also represent my connection to a landscape on the other side of the world. We don’t have to be in the landscape to remember it, we just need to be able to feel its connections with us. And when we feel this, that landscape has become an important part of us, and we have actively engaged with it, in our own way. And it’s a nice feeling.

This has got me thinking about the connections between LoST, national parks, local communities and landscape sustainability. These are incredibly important connections, not the least because national parks are an international system of conservation and therefore provide important connections on a global scale.

Look out for a post that looks at this in the coming weeks – it’s a topic dear to my heart!

There was an interesting small story on travel trends in Melbourne’s The Age newspaper yesterday (available here). A number of emerging and current trends were identified and discussed.

Among these are:

• organised tours using more public transport to take their tour groups around
• visits to smaller restaurants in locations
• ethical holidays where you contribute to a greater good
• holidays that allow travellers to meet locals

Whilst it’s good to see these trends emerging, I think the challenge is still going to be the extent the focus of the experience is on the traveller, the local communities or the integration of both sets of experiences.  To my mind, that is one of the defining characteristics of the LoST experience – the extent the journey and the location are integrated, and the ways in which the traveller’s experiences form part of a move to sustainability for travellers and the landscapes within which they travel. I’ll devote a longer post to this specific issue in the near future.