Authenticity and Authentication of Heritage presents an assimilation of chapters that critically address some of the key emerging areas associated with authenticity. It presents a variety of inspiring pieces of work that range from host-guest authentication and intangible heritage to knowledge transfer processes, authenticating heritage in fairy-tale settings, authenticity and anxiety in the smell of death and life, understanding the boundaries of authenticity, nostalgia, sustainability, marketing, destination competitiveness, examining affective connotations of authenticity, and their contribution towards optimizing hedonic and eudaimonic well-being during times of disruption.
The contentious concept of authenticity continues to be valorised in heritage tourism. This scholarly initiative seeks to broaden the discursive parameters of authenticity and identify power mechanisms that shape the way authenticity is produced, marketed and consumed. This is an attempt to share contemporary views on how the contemporary notions of authenticity are derived, interpreted, applied, processed and legitimised in local and global contexts. Furthermore, the significant relationship between health and authenticity is explored. To put it simply, this pandemic has significantly halted the way people connect with their cultural resources and seek authenticity within their inner selves and the outside realms in the heritage tourism system. Heightened sense of global consciousness is a call to polish our authentic selves and elevate above inauthenticity or moral hypocrisy. So, is authenticity an evolving story or is it a story of floating immobility? Who can tell the story and who decides what elements to fossilise? How can existentialist authenticity and self authentication promote moral selving and well-being of the self and the society? Many questions like these have emerged in recent literature, and this book uses conceptual, empirical and theoretical explorations to identify and engage with such inquiries.
The chapters in this book, except for the concluding chapter, were originally published as a special issue of the Journal of Heritage Tourism.
Preface
Introduction: Authenticity and the authentication of heritage: dialogical perceptiveness
Deepak Chhabra
1. Host–guest authentication of intangible cultural heritage: a literature review and conceptual model
Shahida Khanom, Brent Moyle, Noel Scott and Millicent Kennelly
2. Knowledge transfer processes in the authenticity of the intangible cultural heritage in tourism destination competitiveness
Desiderio Juan García-Almeida
3. Development of intangible cultural heritage as a sustainable tourism resource: the intangible cultural heritage practitioners’ perspectives
Soojung Kim, Michelle Whitford & Charles Arcodia
4. Time, authenticity and photographic storytelling in The Museum of Innocence
Kevin Hannam and Edward Ryan
5. Fairytale authenticity: historic city tourism, Harry Potter, medievalism and the magical gaze
Jane Lovell
6. The smell of death and the smell of life’: authenticity, anxiety and perceptions of death at Varanasi’s cremation grounds
Nitasha Sharma and Jillian Rickly
7. Using geographical and semiotic means to establish fixed points of a never-ending story: searching for parameters of authenticity in a case study of Australian history
Michael Fagence
8. The role of authenticity, experience quality, emotions, and satisfaction in a cultural heritage destination
Ana M. Domínguez-Quintero, M. Rosario González-Rodríguez and José Luis Roldán
9. Authenticity and nostalgia – subjective well-being of Chinese rural-urban migrants
Zhenhao (Mark) Meng, Liping A. Cai, Jonathan Day, Chun-Hung (Hugo) Tang, Ying (Tracy) Lu and Hongmei Zhang
Conclusion: Wellbeing and Moral Orientations of Existentialist Authenticity
Deepak Chhabra
Biography
Deepak Chhabra is Associate Professor in the School of Community Resources and Development at Arizona State University, Phoenix (USA). Her research interests include authenticity and authentication of heritage; social and economic viability of different forms of tourism; and wellness and wellbeing through alternate healing/preventive therapeutic settings and programs.
