understand intuitively what is meant by it. It is a quest for that unity between the self and societal institutions, which endowed pre-modern existence with "reality" (Berger 1973:85). The alienated modern tourist in quest of authenticity hence looks.for the pristine, the primitive, the natural, that which is as yet-untouched by modernity. He hopes- to find it in other times and other places (MacCannell 1976:160), since it is absent from his own world.
The difficulty with this use of the concept of "authenticity" in tourism studies is that it is a philosophical concept which has been uncritically introduced into sociological analysis.. Furthermore, in tourism studies, the concept is used to characterize a criterion of evaluation used by the modern tourist as observer. The question, whether the "tourees" ob-
served by the tourist at all possess such a concept, and if so, which traits of their own culture they consider to be "authentic" is rarely, if ever raised. Finally, the social analyst is tacitly assumed to understand the tourist's quest for "authenticity" because both belong to the modern world; they both appear to conceive of "authenticity" in similar, unpro-
blematic terms. "Authenticity" thus takes up a given or "objective" qual-
ity attributable by moderns to the world "out there." The only apparent difference between the tourist and the social analyst is that the latter is more circumspect than the former. He is therefore assumed to be able to penetrate beyond appearances, and discover the deception of "staged authenticity" (MacCannell 1973) perpetrated by the tourees, or the tourist establishment. The unsuspecting tourist, who is less sophisticat-
ed and knowledgeable than the analyst, is assumed to be taken in by such prevarications. It then follows that, if the tourist had the analyst's debunking knowledge, he would reject the "staged authenticity" of the sights as contrived and lacking in authenticity. MacCannell and others who adopted his conceptual framework did not raise the possibility that the tourist and social analyst may conceive of authenticity in different terms.
In contrast to MacCannell, it is suggested that "authenticity" is a socially constructed concept and its social (as against philosophical) connotation is, therefore, not given, but "negotiable." The manner of the negotiation of its meaning should hence be made a major topic in the sociological and anthropological study of tourism. Several specific issues have to be distinguished.
Differential Conceptions of Authenticity
According to Trilling (1972:93) the provenance of the word "authen-
ticity" " . . is in the museum, where persons expert in such matters test whether objects of art [and by extension, ethnographic objects] are what they appear to be or are claimed to be, and therefore . . . worth the admiration they are being given." The approach to "authenticity" current until recently among curators and ethnographers will hence help to clarify the socially constructed nature of the concept. One of the paradoxes of the progressive professionalization of curators of primitive and ethnic art in the world's museums has been that a growing number of objects were declared to be "fakes," not because any new information had been discovered on the objects themselves, but rather because the