Staged Authenticity: Tourism As The Process Of Social Drama

Through an ethnography research on the Longji Huangluo village in Longsheng county, this thesis recount the core activity of the collective life of Huangluo village——the folk custom singing and dancing performance, recurring the "staged authenticity theory" of the tourism anthropology. This article manifests the whole performing process, unfolds the specific operation of the different parts in the "front stage" and "back region", and also investigates the construction of the stage,the influence of the performing content and pattern from the tourism, and shows the combat of the tour experience and the reality on the stage, and then discusses the authenticity in the tourism. Besides, this article tries to present the more lively scene, which setting on the local sociocultural change caused by the tourism as the background.This thesis mainly expands as the six steps of the "staged authenticity theory". First, it introduces the relative background of the Huangluo village, and describes the daily life of the Huangluo villagers as a whole, which equals to the Goffman's "front stage" as well as the first step of stage from MacCannell. After that, the article emphasizes the process and detailed operation of the front stage and back region of Huangluo folk performance, including the construction of the theatre, the context of the script, the behavior of the performers, the interesting stunt how to be designed and the feedback and comment from the tourists, which contain the second and third constructing steps of the front stage, meanwhile the primary and second steps of the back region that MacCannell has elaborated. At last, the article discusses the authenticity revealed on and behind the stage, which is described as "back region" by Goffman and the last step of the stage by MacCannel, discloses the conflicts and latent crisis, and points out that the reality is not only keeping changing, but also a constructed, customized authenticity, which is affected by the market and government. At the same time, the host residents participate in the pursuit and construction of the authenticity positively. As a matter of fact, the authenticity of the tourism depends on the reality aspired after by tourists and available supplied by the host.