When “Authentic” Becomes a Performance for Us
The “authentic village experience” came with a price list and scheduled cultural shows.
I stood in what was marketed as an untouched rural community, watching villagers perform traditional dances for busloads of tourists who photographed everything and understood nothing. The irony was suffocating: we’d traveled here seeking authenticity and created a performance of it instead.
This is the paradox that destroys what it seeks to preserve—tourism’s demand for authentic experiences forces authentic places to become inauthentic versions of themselves.
The village elder explained this with surprising candor. “Before tourists came, we danced for celebrations, for festivals, for our own joy. Now we dance because you pay us to dance. It’s the same dance, but it’s not the same dance.”
He was right. The movements were identical, but the meaning had shifted from expression to exhibition, from culture to commodity. We’d turned their lived experience into our entertainment, and everyone involved knew it was fake but pretended it was real.
But here’s what confused me: who was I to define authenticity for them? Maybe adapting their traditions to tourist expectations was itself authentic—an authentic response to economic necessity, an authentic way of preserving culture by making it economically viable.
The young woman selling handicrafts at the cultural center had studied business in Dhaka before returning to her village. “Tourism saved our traditions,” she told me. “My grandmother’s weaving was dying out. Now young girls learn because there’s money in it. Is that less authentic?”
Maybe authenticity isn’t about purity—maybe it’s about continuity. Maybe traditions that evolve to survive are more authentic than traditions that die to remain pure.
I thought about our own country, how we’ve created “authentic Bangladeshi experiences” for foreign visitors. The rickshaw tours of Old Dhaka, the cooking classes teaching dishes many urban Bangladeshis don’t eat regularly, the craft workshops in villages that now exist primarily for cultural tourism.
Are these performances fake because they’re designed for outsiders? Or are they real because they employ locals, preserve skills, and create economic opportunities?
The problem might not be tourism’s effect on authenticity but our definition of authenticity itself. We seem to believe authentic culture exists in museums, unchanged and unchanging. But culture has always been dynamic, always influenced by contact with others, always adapting to new circumstances.
The elderly craftsman who taught me traditional pottery techniques had learned from his grandfather, who had learned from his grandfather. But the tools he used were modern, the clay came from different sources than in the past, and the designs had evolved over generations of contact with different communities.
Which version was authentic—the original techniques, the adapted methods, or the contemporary innovations?
Maybe the search for authenticity in tourist destinations reveals more about our romantic fantasies than about cultural reality. We want to find places untouched by the modern world, but we arrive carrying smartphones and expecting clean bathrooms and English-speaking guides.
What if authenticity isn’t something you find in destinations but something you bring to your encounters with them?