theme/authentic
"Authenticity" is often appealed to in condemnation of all themed places. I do not think that this is a useful criterion. For instance, the barn in the picture was being constructed on the grounds of the farmhouse on Prince Edward Island which Lucy Maud Montgomery used as a modelin writing her story about Anne of Green Gables. The farm belonged to one of her relatives. Now it is called Green Gables and has become a place of pilgrimage visited by huge numbers of tourists, notably from Japan. Various rooms and places on the grounds are pointed out as where this or that event from the books "happened." The house is "real" and helped inspire the stories, but is now overlain by the stories; the barn is newly constructed to fit the stories. What is authentic here?
It is not easy to decide just what authenticity is, nor to apply it to concrete places, as can be seen from discussions of tourism*. Inauthenticity* is not necessarily a bad thing.
The accusation of authenticity does, however, point up the need to resist the simplification of identity and life that is offered by themed places.
(c) David Kolb, 1 August 2001