Thomas Apchain (T.A.): Professor, Goffman’s sociology obviously had a pivotal function when you wrote The Tourist and gave rise to the concept of “Staged Authenticity”, and you wrote a paper about him (MacCannell, 1983) that stated your respect for him and his important position in the history of sociology (and, we could say, in the history of thinking from a broader/transdisciplinary perspective). Today, I wish to reflect with you about his legacy when it comes specifically to the study of tourism as I believe there is still plenty to be learned from him in this matter. But first could you take us to the moment when your first encountered Goffman’s sociology and what it meant to you, even before you started studying tourism, which–as we shall recall–was not yet a recognized sociological topic? Maybe you could start by explaining how you actually met him?

Dean MacCannell (D.C.): Erving Goffman was my teacher, mentor and friend. We were neighbors in Philadelphia in the 1970s. How did I meet him? It was at “Berkeley in the 1960s.” Still today, this phrase has mythic resonance. It marks the beginning of the end of politically conservative control of US popular culture. The Beat movement, the Black Panthers, the anti-war movement, new forms of Rock ‘n’ Roll, underground comic books, the Free Speech Movement, the New Left, all erupted together in the San Francisco Bay area. Soon to be followed by Women’s Liberation, folk revivals, and hippies. The campus of the University of California at Berkeley was Ground Zero.

The State of California had recently invested heavily in making Berkeley its flagship institution. In the 1950s California was flexing its booming post-war economic muscles. It didn’t want Berkeley to be the best university in the state or the nation. It wanted Berkeley to be the best in the world. Many programs received funds to hire “as necessary” to become globally dominant. By 1960, some Berkeley departments including physics, sociology, and anthropology had attained top international ranking. This was the setting for Goffman’s first academic appointment in 1958 as assistant professor of sociology. In the fall of 1960, I arrived on campus as a transfer student in anthropology.

Most in my group, the poor, leftist students, were very critical of the Berkeley curriculum. We were suspicious that the various fields and disciplines were preparing us for a life of corporate servitude. In the coffee houses and bookstores just off campus we gathered and compared notes about who was not being taught. There was no Marx in our economics classes, so we all read Marx. There was no Freud in our psychology classes, so we all read Freud. There was no Sartre in our philosophy classes, so we all read Sartre. Etc. Our faculty were rigorous in their handling of the limited material they presented to us, and we all knew that we had to submit to their version of rigor in order to survive. But we also had a strong sense that we were getting our true educations outside the classrooms by pursuing everything that had gained intellectual standing elsewhere, but not in the Berkeley curriculum.

Sociology as a discipline was especially derided as being an apologia for the societal status quo. Here is how I heard Erving Goffman’s name for the first time. I was sitting with casual associates and a few strangers in one of our favorite coffee houses and someone opined, “You know that most sociologists are shit sociologists.” (Strong affirmations of agreement.) “But we have Erving Goffman who is the only no-shit sociologist.” “No-shit” is American vulgar slang meaning “truthful” or “genuine.” Goffman never stated a political position, but his sociology was immediately embraced by hard left students as trustworthy. Probably because it was not obviously tilted right like the rest of sociology as it was taught at Berkeley in the 1960s.

I walked across Telegraph Avenue to Cody’s Books and bought The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (Goffman, 1959). The paperback copy that I still own has a price of 95 cents printed on its back cover. I read most of it in a single sitting. It was immediately obvious to me that I was in the presence of an entirely new voice in academic social science, penetrating in its insights, and accessible.

What initially attracted me to Goffman’s sociology was the way he conceptually framed his observations of daily life. We are all aware of the kinds of details he seized upon. The difference was he gave each of his observations a half-turn on its axis. He revealed significance and functions that were there for the taking but remained disattended until he began to give us names for them.

It was difficult for me not to take him personally. When I was about four, someone told me the story of the young James Watt staring at his mother’s tea kettle and conceiving of a use for steam that would change the world. The story made me angry at myself. I had watched the steam coming from my mother’s kettle many times and never imagined using it as a source of power. I spent the rest of my childhood wondering if there were other commonplace, everyday things occurring all around me that I was failing to see their potential. Here was Goffman, pulling a James Watt on me in a field adjacent to my own, explaining the potential power of everyday gestures, architectural arrangements, affectations, mannerisms.

Reading Goffman felt to me like a first tentative step toward understanding that the human and the social are not the same, are sometimes at odds with one another, and it might be possible to map the points of tension between the two. I didn’t have the vocabulary to express it at the time of my first reading, but it felt like he was analyzing the unconscious of commonplace situations, interactions and relationships. Reading Goffman can feel like he has taken hold of your humanity and is running off with it. When you succeed in grabbing it back, you will find it changed; tuned-up and better able to deal with the social.

T.A.: We can see that, even if Goffman never committed himself politically, his teachings were, for Berkeley students, imminently political. You have undertaken to specify his front/back distinction by intermediate stages, can you lead through this process?

D.M.: Interestingly I know the exact moment when I conceived the need for a modification of Goffman’s front/back distinction to adapt it to the study of tourism. I wrote about it briefly in The Ethics of Sightseeing:

The idea for writing about the special status of back regions in tourism came to me as I watched a salad chef in an exclusive restaurant prepare an elaborate salad on a cart in view of guests who were about to eat it. It was likely a scene in a movie as I doubt, at age twenty-four, I had eaten in so fine a restaurant. I had recently sat in an Introductory class by Erving Goffman and read his Presentation of Self. While watching the preparation of the salad I thought to myself, “Wait a minute, that’s supposed to be a back region activity.” I was beginning graduate school at Cornell and had already decided to study tourism. I wondered if a similar transposition of back to front occurred in other tourist contexts. My initial thoughts into this matter were set off by an empirical observation of a particular kind, one that did not fit into existing relevant theory, by an anomaly. (MacCannell, 2011, p. 16)

I did not reference it in place but that last word, anomaly, was intended to bring the full weight of Thomas S. Kuhn’s Structure of Scientific Revolutions to bear on my process. Kuhn argues that western science progresses only when anomalous empirical observations bedevil existing conceptual paradigms (Kuhn, 1962). In Ethics I would eventually argue that there is almost nothing left of Goffman’s front in the so-called “post-modern” world. Where there used to be formal front regions, now there is only staged authenticity. The cant and hypocrisy of pseudo intimacy.

Once I noticed the anomaly, there remained the crucial matter of giving it a name. I was reading Marcuse’s One-Dimensional Man (Marcuse, 1972 at the time and beginning my study of the Frankfurt school. The first name I came up with for the behavioral arena between Goffman’s front and the back regions was “the space of ‘inauthentic demystification.’” Very Frankfurt School. My finding was that in tourist settings, there is often a pretense that some authentic, behind the scenes reality has been revealed—ordinarily hidden away production processes like whipping up the salad; other aspects of local daily life as it is really lived. But it is not real life as lived by the local people, it is a show they put on for tourists. Is it even possible to live your life authentically when outsiders, who have no instrumental role in what you are doing, are looking on, gazing, even gawking? I gave it more thought. “Inauthentic demystification” is a lot of negation and a lot of syllables. My observations and idea were based on Erving’s work. What would he call it? “Staged authenticity,” obviously.

T.A.: The staging of authenticity, I feel, has mainly been (abusively) interpreted as a commercial strategy to fool tourists, in the line of Boorstin’s comments on tourists (Boorstin, 1961). But, in the end, it is much less that than it is a defense strategy of those who are placed under the tourist gaze and who intend to preserve a back region, safe from tourists. Would you agree to say that staged authenticity is a defense mechanism?

D.M.: I didn’t explore or emphasize this enough in my study of “Staged Authenticity,” but you are correct in pointing out that one of the main functions of creating pseudo back regions for tourists would be to protect and preserve normal human relationships and activities away from the tourist gaze. The importance of this privacy can be measured in the performative costs of maintaining two fronts—the front and the staged back, that is also a front. When I visited Santa Fe, New Mexico, many years ago, the city had just passed an ordinance that required the Native American women who sold jewelry, pottery and baskets in the central plaza to sit on blankets on the ground. They had been sitting on folding chairs displaying their wares on folding tables. This was much more comfortable for them than sitting on the ground. The (white) city council decided that sitting on a chair at a table looked “inauthentic.” Everyone is aware of the costs of maintaining a “false front.” The performative costs of maintaining a “false back” are at least as great or greater. Some of the older Indian women were physically unable to sit on the ground and get back up again. There is also the risk that tourists may have no interest in the actual back region activities of the local people—that “being-an-authentic-Indian-for-others” is the only commercially viable option.

T.A.: You said that there is only staged authenticity left today. That’s obvious in a way, the one that makes us say that there is no longer really a front because almost all front settings are at least tinged with staged authenticity. But, for all that, there are still back regions, aren’t there?

D.M.: The spread of staged authenticity beyond tourism has brought forth a new generalized definition of the situation where everyone is required to seem unguarded, authentically open, hip, and casual at work, play, in public, with our children, etc. I.e., engaged in back region informality and familiarity. In California where this first emerged as an ethic of everyday life it is called “laid-back” and “cool.” This is a better description of a corpse awaiting its autopsy on a slab in a morgue than of any live human performance.

I don’t think that the norm shift you are noticing, i.e., the rejection of Puritanism and “uptight” bourgeoise society, did much to relax social controls, though. The new requirement to seem casual and open (i.e., “authentic”), not just in the back regions of society but in all our dealings, is as rigorous and demanding as any Goffmanian front region formality. The new social imperative, “ENJOY,” can be even more cruel and demanding than the old, “THOU SHALT NOT.” One who does not maintain a casual, happy-face ethos risks gaining a reputation as unable to cope, “up tight,” or one who is guarded and unfriendly. Successful Silicon Valley CEOs no longer wear suits and ties. After Steve Jobs, CEOs began wearing black turtlenecks, blue jeans, and sports shoes when making formal presentations. Now, (Elon Musk) some dress even more casually and admit to smoking weed.

‘But for all that there are still back regions.’ Yes, absolutely. The social changes happening in parallel with the growth of tourism all apply to the changing definition of the situation in the front. To the extent that the social world mirrors human consciousness, there will always be “back regions.” Goffman discovered and analyzed the functions of the most accessible back region of both mind and society—the semi-private spaces where human intimacy is formed and attempts to affirm and express itself. Even before the changes that I tried to bring to light—staged authenticity in tourist settings and the eventual routinization of staged authenticity everywhere in the modern world—there were back regions on beyond Goffman. E.g., hide-outs where crimes are planned, kangaroo courts in prisons, extra-judicial torture sites, sex dungeons equipped for perversions beyond what ordinary bedrooms can support, laboratories where biological, nuclear and other hideous weapons are designed, sewers and other places so filthy that only those charged with maintaining them will enter, the most restricted wards of mental hospitals, every real place that might serve as a model for hell itself. On the flip side, the back region continues to shelter private quests for nirvana—for those who believe that the only way to extinguish desire completely is to satisfy it completely.

In October, 2006, at Berkeley, I gave a talk titled “Staged Authenticity Today” in which I began to trace the historical movement of staged authenticity out of tourist settings into almost every current urban, domestic, work, political, and interpersonal setting. My talk contained observations of the new “open plan” house design, up-scale powder rooms in McMansions, “hooking-up,” “same person” marriage, new forms of celebrity, casual attire in what used to be formal settings, luxury trucks, show trials, reality shows, news leaks, loft and prison design. I would eventually publish an expanded version of this lecture as a chapter in my book The Ethics of Sightseeing. My lecture concluded that the wholesale elimination of the “barriers to perception” that, according to Goffman, once separated front from back regions in our society, does not mean that everything is now out in the open. It means the opposite. The pretentious revelation of supposed back region secrets suggests that what remains actually hidden in postmodern society is so appalling or sensuous we cannot permit it to appear even behind the scenes, or joke about it backstage.

T.A.: Reading Goffman, then Ethics of Sightseeing, I have the impression that there are two forces at work, and I wonder if they are entirely related. On the one hand, there is the emergence of tourism and its quest for authenticity which is pushing for the opening of back regions. On the other hand (or maybe not), there is a cultural change that makes many people decide to diminish the front and back dichotomy (by acting, speaking, dressing, etc. in ways that use to belong to back regions). It is probably a rejection of Puritanism and bourgeois society (the kind of society that has refined the distinction between front and back). We can perhaps say that Goffman is speaking at a time when social control is still very strong, and the social world he describes is made up of a still very strong opposition between front and back. And it is perhaps right at a social tipping point that you have modified Goffman’s model because it was necessary.

Is it fair to see in these questions a way of linking the rise of tourism (because I think we can say that the rise of tourism as we know it is born of the refinement of staged authenticity, thus of the intermediaries between back and front) with a relaxation of social control?

D.M.: Ed Bruner was in the audience in the 2006 Berkeley talk I gave and, as usual, he asked a number of questions. I don’t think I answered very well, because he continued to ask them by email after the conference. I am including some of our exchange here because Ed brings up the same idea that new freedoms and other important shifts in modern culture obviates Goffman’s front/back dichotomy. Ed wrote:

Dean, Possibly the world has changed so much from the 1950s to 2005, that the front-back metaphor is not as applicable anymore. From listening to your paper, I didn’t hear you raise that possibility, but of course it is suggested by the paper. As women and gays and so many groups have been liberated, and more out in the open, in front, then what is left for the back? Or is that now the wrong question to ask. Just some thoughts.

I was in Europe lecturing when I got this note from Ed. My initial response was hasty. Our correspondence continued and eventually I answered more fully as follows:

Dear Ed, No. the question you ask is important. I think that today, no less than in the 1950s, the back persists conceptually as the primary ground of fantasies of fulfillment. In my 1973 article (MacCannell, 1973) and The Tourist (1976), I described some clever or funky social arrangements to service those fantasies. Real back regions promise the possibility of connection, even human intimacy. The reason “staged authenticity” stirred up so much confusion is that while everyone is capable of enjoying the imaginary, no one is willing to accept that their intimacies and enjoyments might be forced, false, or fake. There can be no staged authenticity without the persistence of actual back regions to support belief in their existence.

Goffman’s barriers to perception continue to function as necessary screens or foils for human dreams and desires. Understanding the dynamics of culture and cultural change still requires that we give close analytical attention, as Goffman did, to the structural supports of the distinction between the seen and the unseen, the accessible and the inaccessible. Applied to tourism, we now know that Goffman’s barriers to perception support fantasy by surrounding the grounds of make-believe while providing the openings to enter myth, the gates to fantasyland. That is why the creation of staged authentic environments is such a profitable enterprise. They promise to resolve everyone’s contradictions. Gays can be out and they can be nostalgic for the days of the closet. Women can be liberated and still long for patriarchal protections and the pretense of purity those protections supposedly provided.

In the end, I answered Ed’s specific question, ‘No.’ I think that Goffman’s back in the expanded sense of scientific unknowns, and as the locus of quotidian fantasies of fulfillment is even more important today than it was in the 1950s. As we rush into more permissive social arrangements and greater tolerance of once hidden human differences, barriers to perception between front and back shifted their ground but they did not go away. The idea of a hidden backstage continues to service our seemingly overwhelming wish that the last true “primitive” has not disappeared forever from the face of the earth; a longing for and fervent desire to protect pristine, untouched nature; the idea that human kind would be happier without all the contrivances that clutter up our personal fronts—simple living; belief that an anthropologist or a psychoanalyst might eventually decipher the deeply unknown parts of our culture or our psyches; or here in the architectural reconstructions of Colonial Williamsburg, the past is really real.

T.A: This brings us to another important point. We have mostly seen the back/front dichotomy, for the moment, in terms of tourist settings. But also important is the idea of tensions between the human and the social that leads to the idea of a tension between the self and society, and the risks of alienation that it entails. With Goffman, this difference between human and social is expressed in a distinction between back and front regions, but we might also say between a front (social) self and a back (authentic) self. For Goffman, individuals are aware of the need to modify their behavior and appearance when they enter a situation that they codify as social, and in which they have specific roles to play. Rather than awareness, let us say that they have a sense of what is appropriate and, in fact, correspond to behaviors that are not likely to put them in danger. For Goffman, there is a certain fatality relative to this danger: to manifest a role distance is to expose oneself to sanctions, but to play a social role perfectly is to renounce the authenticity of one’s humanity. The second evil often prevails over the first. This is also how the back/front division works, spaces of intimacy that are a partial (when in affinity society) or total (in solitude) suspension of one’s social roles. But the idea of the tension between front and back, and between social and human, is also very important in your work, and doesn’t start nor end with the idea of its impact on tourist settings. I think we can say that if we don’t understand the Goffmanian idea that the human and the social are in tension, we don’t understand what you have written about tourist motivations. Aren’t your tourists individuals who, through travel, seek to rediscover the human buried under the social? In a certain way, isn’t the theory of tourism that you have constructed rooted in the reference to a Goffmanian kind of violence, of malaise, leading to a momentary rejection of society?

D.M.: I almost hate to answer this because it stands so powerfully on its own as a rhetorical question that everyone should be required to contemplate.

You have done an almost perfect job of distinguishing what I have called the ethical sightseer from the mass of those who are simply going through the motions of being a tourist. A tourist attraction, any tourist attraction even the most tacky and commercial, embodies everything consciousness needs to pull the human out from under the social. Or, as Lacan might put it, to breathe life back into the symbolic. And yes, it is an act of violence. Or of “dialectical” violence if there can be such a thing; a fleeting moment of overthrow of what Barthes called the “fascism of language.” (Barthes, 1977).

We should give Goffman the last word here. He was a dialectical thinker and also smart enough to know that his primary audience, Anglo-American social science, had (has?) zero tolerance for dialectical thought. So, he had to keep his methods largely hidden from view. The essay where he openly reveals the tension between the human and the social is “Role Distance.” (Goffman, 1961a). I have always read “Role Distance” as Goffman’s most penetrating meditation on Durkheim. Written about the time of his wife’s suicide, “Role Distance” can be seen as a brilliant reflection on, and extension of, Durkheim’s study of Suicide. Recall that Durkheim defined “altruistic suicide” as over conformity to social norms. When ordered to do so, military discipline requires a soldier to attack the enemy. But dying while running directly into machine-gun fire to drop a grenade into an enemy bunker is suicidal and called “gallantry above and beyond the call of duty.” If every soldier used every opportunity to demonstrate this much devotion to role, the army would be destroyed by its enemy in short order.

What Goffman discovered in “Role Distance” is if society ultimately succeeds in the violent suppression of the human, like an army of over-conformists, society would cease to exist. There is a transcendent social norm that holds over conformity to norms to be abnormal. Manifestations of detachment from social roles are required if the roles are to be performed effectively. For society to function, most of us must wear our social roles lightly most of the time. I would revise the last words of “Role Distance” as follows: ‘For if an individual is to show that he is human, or someone much less human than anyone need be, then it is through his using or not using role distance that this is likely to be done.’ Tourism may not be a total break from ordinary social routines. But it can be an opportunity to practice some detachment. And far from undermining the social order, that kind of detachment is precisely necessary to it.

T.A.: In the end, what could we learn from Goffman as scholars who study tourism even if Goffman himself never wrote about tourism?

D.M.: While it is true that Erving Goffman never wrote specifically about tourists and tourism, if you look for them, they are omnipresent in his writings. Several of his observations are obviously of people on tour. But he chose not to frame behavior on tour as different, or separate, from the rest of life. While some tourism researchers like John Urry (1990) and Nelson Graburn (1977) define tourism as a “break from the everyday,” Goffman did not find any touristic interactions worthy of their own distinctive conceptual treatment. In The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life, the first long quote (from a work of fiction on page 5) is a description of a pompous British tourist who is trying too hard to impress his fellow tourists while on vacation at a beach in Spain. But Goffman treats this (fictional) tourist’s pomposity as ordinary, everyday pomposity, not as distinctively touristic or connected to his being on tour.

The one place where Goffman notices there might be something interesting or distinctive about tourists and tourism can be found on the last pages of Presentation of Self. He is clearly bemused by the trending tendency at the time to upgrade and prettify kitchens to the point that they are no longer unambiguously “back regions” and can now be used for entertaining guests, not just the messy business of preparing salads, etc. It is almost as if he is shrugging, saying, in effect, “this doesn’t make much sense.” He noted “a peculiar social movement which led some factories, ships, restaurants and households to clean up their backstages to such an extent that like monks, communists, or German aldermen their guards are always up and their front is down while at the same time members of the audience became sufficiently entranced with society’s id to explore the places that had been cleaned up for them.” (Goffman, 1959, p. 247). This is Goffman annoyed about something he has noticed but deciding to let it go.

I regarded this passage as evidence of unfinished work. Goffman is clearly noticing something distinctive, or at least odd, about tourists and tourism that he is leaving unanalyzed. It was precisely at this juncture that I began my studies and developed my concept of “staged authenticity.”

I was relying on Goffman’s noticing of tourists, without noticing anything special about them, when I claimed that ‘“the tourist’ is one of the best models available for modern-man-in-general.” (MacCannell, 1976, p. 1) It is not difficult to demonstrate that everything Goffman wrote about social settings and interaction, with minor, straightforward, conceptual modification (e.g., staged authenticity), is directly applicable to understanding tourists and tourism.

Other areas of tourist studies would have already achieved a much higher stage of development had more researchers grounded their work in Goffman’s relevant formulations. If his essay on “Where the Action Is” had been systematically applied to “Adventure tourism” and “extreme tourism,” these sub-fields would have transcended their current standing as merely descriptive categories. Researchers who study cruise ship tourism could benefit a great deal from using Goffman’s models in Asylums of “total institutions” and “underlife.” (Goffman, 1961b). And research that insists tourism is not about society, authenticity, alienation, etc., but instead is only about escapism, pleasure, and enjoyment, could be revolutionized by a close reading of “Fun in Games.”

T.A.: Those are important reflections that you’re giving here. I would like to end our exchange by mentioning one of Goffman’s last books, “Frame Analysis” (Goffman, 1974), that in my opinion has not been used enough, maybe because it is more difficult. In “Frame Analysis” Goffman takes on a question asked by William James who wondered “What is reality?” and starts to ask about the conditions required for people to define a situation as real. Doing so, he rephrased the question and asked how people answer the question: “what is going on here?” The change is subtle but significant because what Goffman immediately states is that people always have a range of preconceptions that help them to define, often very quickly and easily, what the situation is. Those preconceptions are called frames. The reason I’m bringing that up, is because it brings to our attention that every social situation, however extraordinary they might be and even if we are not directly involved in it, is codified or framed. Everyone involved or even simply witnessing a situation characterized by the presence of tourists tries to apply the right frame to it, and also to assign specific exigences about how people are supposed to conduct themselves in it. In Goffman’s scenarios, all individuals do it easily, often with a simple look. But in Goffman’s analyses, they are always people from the same cultural backgrounds, and they have a good knowledge of the social grammar. Isn’t it different when it comes to tourist situations, and generally in cross-cultural encounters? Does Goffman’s sociology still apply in that sort of situation?

I’m not convinced that we should give up on Goffman when facing cross-cultural situations. Moreover, I would like to try and formulate an audacious hypothesis. I do believe that framing operations are only widely simplified in tourist situations because the different groups that are momentarily brought together do not possess a complete knowledge of the ways they could understand and classify each other’s behaviors and actions. Therefore, I wonder if the central place of “authenticity” in tourist situations (where the question would, therefore, be “what makes what I see authentic and not designed for me”) could be explained simply because it’s the simpler question a tourist could ask himself in a situation where he knows so little of the grammar. In my research in Rio de Janeiro’s favelas, I found that tourists have difficulties trusting what is shown or told to them, but are much more able to believe that what lies beyond is the authentic: the interior of a home, a scene of the daily life gazed from afar, etc. You show that perfectly: tourists often reach beyond staged authenticity. Ultimately, staged authenticity begins the moment tourists become part of the situation. And authenticity can be understood as something that can only be sensed or glimpsed at, something clear of one’s own presence. So, to sum up my thought, I wonder if we could not find a way to confirm your hypothesis (drawn from a macro perspective) with a micro (more Goffmanian) angle: judging the authenticity of a situation is the simpler framing operation one could make when placed in a situation that cannot be understood with the complex frames ordinarily used in daily life. The tourist can only choose between authenticity (a primary frame) and staged authenticity (a frame that has been transformed).

D.M.: You are right that Frame Analysis is poorly understood and underutilized in general, and there are valuable insights awaiting its first application specifically to situations involving tourists. This could well be the most productive line to emerge from our conversation about Goffman’s potential contribution to tourism research.

You express concerns about the lack of shared cultural understandings between tourists and locals as perhaps limiting this approach. I don’t see this as a problem so much as an opportunity to demonstrate the strength of Goffman’s method for any and all types of human encounters. The assumption of shared understanding is always tenuous even when the participants in the situation are from the same cultural (or even family) background. The tourist encounter is clearer on this matter: the constitutive features of the frame, i.e., the shared understandings of the participants, include the assumption that they don’t share understandings; that no one easily and immediately comprehends what the others are saying, thinking and feeling. In many ways, the tourist encounter might be regarded as a primary frame, calling into question the intersubjective connections in other kinds of encounters. The partial or total absence of shared cultural understandings doesn’t mean there will be incomprehension of what is going on. When tourists are present, there is very little need to ask “Why?”; “What are they doing there, and what may they need or want?” An enormous industry has been built on the assumption that we know answers to these questions. Not all the answers, but many. Unlike other situations where total strangers mingle in public and semi-public spaces, those identifiable as tourists are owed some things—beginning with a certain amount of consideration for their ignorance. They have come not just to spend money, but also to appreciate what the locals in the situation take for granted as a part of their day-to-day existence. There are many different forms of tourist/local encounter, but this is the framework of one of the most common, and the basis for continuing interaction if a rudimentary common language can be found—e.g., gestures, drawing pictures, wordless economic exchanges.

Also, the material supports for the tourist/local encounter have some distinctive framing functions. Some tourists “dress the part,” making no effort to hide their guidebooks, maps, cameras, etc. Others try to blend in. Those who are obviously tourists are more approachable with offers of assistance than random strangers. In Goffman’s terms, the primary framework around the tourist encounter would be special in the following way: the dialogic nature of the tourist encounter is minimized. Instead of taking turns being performer and audience, the tourist is somewhat stuck in the role of “audience” and the local people are the “performers.” This is only the primary framework of the tourist encounter. In any actual run of tourist-local interactions, the locals can easily turn the tables on the tourists and make them unwitting performers of their own blindness or ignorance. Or the tourists can become painfully aware of their image in the eyes of the locals and try to minimize how “touristy” they appear. But primarily, the locals perform for the gaze of the tourists

Authenticity is projected by the tourists onto the “primary social frameworks” of the others—i.e., daily life as it is lived and understood more or less without effort on the part of the local people. I think you are correct that the tourists are more confident that they have witnessed an “authentic” performance if they also believe the local people haven’t noticed them noticing, or if it is evident that the local people don’t care about the presence of the tourists. I.e., when the tourists are not a meaningful part of the interaction. This may explain why some Americans in Paris try so hard to “blend in” with the local population—dress, mannerism, hair styles, etc. A strategy that is not so easy to employ in more exotic destinations. 

Of course, the local people don’t think of their primary frames as “authentic.” They are just life. If you are saying that staged authenticity is the re-keying of behavior, or reframing of life, when the tourist becomes a part of the situation, I agree completely.

Ethnographically, this opens a number of questions about differences in the ways the local people actually frame or stage performances of their “authenticity” for others: burlesque, parody, stereotypes, anti-stereotypes, exaggeration, selective revelation... Goffman will have much to say about this.

T.A.: There is one last question I would like to ask you. Goffman is often seen as a sociologist of interactions and associated, perhaps too quickly, with a microsociology. However, your use of Goffman is immediately macro, it serves a general theory of tourism developed in The Tourist. You seem more interested in macro phenomenon. Goffman, on the other hand, even if he gives a real theory of it, almost never leaves the space of interaction. How do you see this passage from the micro to the macro?

Consigning Goffman to a micro-level of analysis is, to my mind, a needless artifact of mid-20^th century academic politics. Goffman’s sociological colleagues strongly resisted any suggestion of the possibility that his approach and method might be useful for macro-level analysis. Sociologists preferred that he be read as providing an idiosyncratic and probably non-reproducible perspective restricted to face-to-face interaction. There are numerous complaints in academic reviews of his work suggesting he had nothing worthwhile to say about groups, communities, social classes, institutions, or society itself. To my knowledge, The Tourist was the only contemporaneous English language study that scales up Goffmanian concepts to the societal level.

His reception within academic sociology notwithstanding, Goffman’s approach to interaction renders it readily accessible to be scaled up to the societal level. He did not report on restricted or highly distinctive, localized social arrangements as found in mini-ethnographies of tour groups or resorts, or the studies of so-called “primitive societies” in the classical ethnographic record. Instead, he took care to focus on aspects of interactions that occur generally, i.e., throughout societies. This is nowhere more manifest than in his transition from his Ph.D. dissertation on “communication conduct” in the Shetland Islands, and the book he made of it, The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. Presentation can be read as a treatise on the many ways we interact with one another that are the same or similar to the ways Shetlanders interact with one another. The kinds of interactions he observed may involve only a few individuals, but they repeat themselves across vast expanses of historical time and social space. They are micro in the scale of their individual occurrences, but macro in their ubiquity.

This is why our discussion of his “front/back” division so easily transitioned to the macro level. We found that continued close study of this replicant form, as it weaves its way into and out of different domains (tourism, everyday life, expressions of intimacy, e.g.,) with very little further conceptual modification, can be foundational for a macro-level of analysis.

Let’s not forget Goffman’s indebtedness to Durkheim, perhaps the greatest master of macro-level social analysis. Goffman adapted Durkheim’s concepts of religion, ritual, and the normative framing of social ties and relations to his ethnography of micro-occasions. This led him to discover that Durkheim’s “Society,” something we used to think of as very large, like “French society,” is also found in the fine-grained details of our most seemingly intimate interactions.

We have discussed ways in which Goffman’s micro-sociology meets and melds with Durkheim’s macro-sociology. And how a few modifications of Goffman’s front/back division, readily transforms it into “staged authenticity” and opens free passage between micro and macro levels of analysis. These conceptual moves were necessitated by the new questions that arose when dealing with the social and cultural changes accompanying the growth and spread of tourism.

Meeting Durkheim half-way might be regarded as a minor theme of The Tourist. I argued that sightseeing is a ritual tourists perform to the differentiations of society and that tourist attractions symbolically represent those differentiations. I openly derived my concept of “social structural differentiation” from Durkheim’s “division of labor,” and my “stages of sight sacralization” from Durkheim’s Elementary Forms of the Religious Life (1965, New York, The Free Press, Opd, 1915).

Perhaps we have arrived at a place where macro and micro designate only empirical domains and make little sense at the theoretical level.

T.A.: What remains of Goffman’s theories when they are used in another scale? And finally, do you consider yourself to be a Goffmanian?

D.M.: Goffman’s theories are a strong foundation for almost all of my work. But, as we have discovered in the course of our conversations, very few of Goffman’s concepts survive without minor tinkering and sometimes major modifications to fit observations I have made of tourists and tourism.

If the term “Goffmanian” suggests some kind of doctrine, orthodoxy, or school then you will need to count me out. I am strongly of the opinion that there is no place for “schools of thought” in research and scholarship. They only serve to enable stagnation; academics who have nothing new to say wave around their self-identification as “postmodernists,” or Foucaultians, or “deconstructionists,” in hopes that their membership in a school will obscure their failure to contribute to it.

In this sense, I am not a Goffmanian, nor was Goffman a Durkheimian.

My only strong attachment is to problems that I find to be significant. I chose tourism in 1965 because I thought it was about to reshape human life on an unprecedented scale and no one else was studying it at the time. My primary aim was to improve understanding of tourism by observation and reasoning. Of course, I began with the work of others that might potentially prove helpful including Goffman, Durkheim, Marx, Lévi-Strauss, Barthes, et al.

I never deductively entered my subject (tourism) viewing it only through Goffman’s eyes or another theorist’s. An orthodox Goffmanian might have produced an account of the ways tourists and guides interact, or tourists and locals, or tourists and tourists. Or, with sufficient ambition, all of these. This kind of work is valuable for putting flesh on the bones of an existing paradigm. Thomas Kuhn called it “normal science,” and explained why it cannot lead to the creation of new paradigms.