Development of Tour Uriely 2005

206 THE TOURIST EXPERIENCE
may engage in different experiences, it also points toward the existence
of multi-type individual backpackers who correspond to more than one
mode of experience across their backpacking biography or even during
a single trip (Uriely et al 2002). In this regard, this backpacker is
akin to Feifer’s (1985) earlier conceptualization of the ‘‘post tourist’’,
who enjoys the movement across different types of experiences in a
single excursion.
The Role of Subjectivity. The current notion of the tourist experience as
a diverse phenomenon is accompanied by another development in
which attention is shifted from the displayed objects provided by the
industry to the tourist subjective negotiation of meanings as a determinant
of the experience. This shift is evident in various studies, including
the conceptualization of authenticity, the emerging research area
of heritage tourism, as well as the typologies described above. With respect
to the latter, the further classification of institutionalized tourist
conducted by Wickens (2002) serves her attempt to stress the subjective
ability of these holidaymakers to assign different meanings to their
experiences. Specifically, by drawing upon Goffman’s (1961, 1967) role
theory, Wickens (2002) shows that while holidaymakers are committed
to the individual mass tourist role arranged for them by the industry
(the provided object), they choose to step out of it and assign themselves
to one of the subjective roles or micro-types, which shape their
experiences. Similarly, Uriely et al (2002) showed that while the Israeli
backpackers are committed to this form of tourism (which could be
grasped as a given object of tourism), they subjectively construct their
experiences in line with one or more of the modes suggested by Cohen
(1979). These further classifications of well-established typologies challenge
the position that the experience is solely shaped by the industry
and carried out by passive consumers. Instead, these deconstructions of
existing typologies stress the importance of the individual’s practice, in
which the subjective negotiation of meanings by the human actor is
illuminated. Clearly, this position is also noticeable with regard to
the multi-type backpacker (Uriely et al 2002) and the post-tourist
(Feifer 1985) who subjectively construct their personal experience by
taking fragments from different modes or products provided by the
industry and reassemble them as they choose.
The shift from the objects provided by the industry to the role tourist
subjectivity in the construction of experiences is well exemplified with
respect to the issue of authenticity. In this context, Wang (2000) identifies
two object-related notions of authentic experiences that exist in
the literature (objective and constructive authenticity) and introduces
a new approach (existential authenticity), which emphasizes tourists’
subjective activities. Objective authenticity is associated with the early
theorists, such as Boorstin (1964) and MacCannell (1973), who share
a similar notion of authenticity despite their debate regarding the fundamental
quest of tourist in the modern era. Specifically, both Boorstin
(1964) and MacCannell (1973) apply a museum-like usage of the term
authenticity that stresses the originality of the toured object. In line
with this approach, authentic experiences in tourism are equated to
epistemological experiences of displayed objects which are found to