there exists a continuum leading from complete authenticity, through various stages of partial authenticity, to complete falseness.' ques-
tion therefore arises: Which are the diacritical traits which, for a given individual, in particular a tourist, make a cultural product acceptable as "authentic"? The questimrhere is mg-whether the individual, does or does not "really" have an authentic experience in MacCannell's (1973) sense, but rather what endows his experience with authenticity in his own view. Thus one can follow Gottlieb's approach: she " . . . assumes that the vacationers' own feelings and views about vacations" are 'au-
thentic, whether or not the observer judges them to match- the host culture" (Gottlieb 1982:168). However, while Gottlieb does. not make any further inquiries into the bases of tourists' feelings and Views, it is proposed here to open these to investigation. According the ap-
proach developed above, tourists will differ in the number and kinds of traits necessary to their mind to authenticate a cultural produCt.
As the preceding section notes, for the purist professiona1 expert, only a cultural product which appears authentic in all of its varied aspects, would be acceptable as "authentic." This may also lie the case with deeply concerned tourists. Thus, on one of the trekking trips in which this author participated in the course of his study of the penetration of tourism into the hill-tribe area of northern Thailand, a French tourist, a teacher by profession, complained about the fact that the people in a tribal village, which had been opened to tourism only a few weeks earlier, used industrially produced plastic cups instead of indigenously produced bamboo cups. The mere adoption of plastic cups, although unrelated to the penetration of tourism, already offended his sense of cultural authenticity.
While this kind of tourist often serves as the prototype of the ideal tourist, he is, statistically speaking, a minority among the huge popula-
tion of contemporary mass tourism. Such a demand for "total authen-
ticity" will be most prominent among "existential" or "experimental" tourists, seriously concerned with the Other as at least a potential elective center. The vast majority of tourists do not deMand such a "total authenticity." Even "experiential" tourists, though seriously con-
cerned with the authenticity of their experience, and entertaining strict criteria for judgments of authenticity, will often focus in such judg-
ments on some traits of the cultural product and disregard others. Hence, they will be prepared to accept a cultural product as authentic, insofar as traits, which they consider to be diacritical, are Judged by them to be authentic. These traits are then considered sufficient for the authentization of the product as a whole. One could say that they symbolize metonymically the authenticity of the tourist-oriented cul-
tural product as a whole. Therefore, such tourists will accept a com-
mercialized object as "authentic," insofar as they are convinced that it is indeed ornamented with "traditional" designs and "hand made" by members of an ethnic group (even though it may have been made of different materials or in a different form than the "traditional" product
and was produced expressly for the market). They- may similarly accept as "authentic" a commercialized replication of local customs, such as a dance or a ritual, in so far as it is performed identically by members of
the local group, as is its non-commercialized counterpart. A recent