Commodification, culture and tourism

This article revisits the question of tourism’s role in the commodification of culture. I argue that an acceptance of a cause and effect relationship between tourism and cultural commodification requires an acceptance of a problematic notion of ‘authenticity’. This is because the belief that tourism causes cultural commodification is based on a largely unexamined reliance on Marx’s labor theory of value, source of what Barbara Herrnstein Smith has referred to as a ‘double discourse of value’, in which an intrinsic and sacred cultural sphere of value is presumed to circulate independent of an unstable and profane economic sphere of value. Given the social fact that everything, including ‘culture’, is a potential commodity, it would be useful for research to focus on how individuals and groups in host societies gain access to new forms of exchange rather than simply on the fact of commodification.