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| A STUDY ON DOUBLE IDEOGRAPHIC STRUCTURE OF SYMBOL OF TOURIST ATTRACTION AND ITS AUTHENTICITY |
| CHEN Gang |
| College of Humanities, Hangzhou Normal University, Hangzhou 310036, China |
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Abstract Authenticity in tourism is still a problematic and insufficiently explored concept, which has not been generally recognized by the academic community as a system. The concepts of authenticity in tourism experience proposed by different Scholars include and are difficult to complement each other, thus made it inconvenient for further empirical study. So it is necessary to construct a system of concepts of authenticity in tourism experience based on a unified background. MacCannell's study on symbols of tourist attractions was based on Pierce's semiotics, and made the cognitive processes of tourists as his starting point of research. Making tourist objects as the basis, and tourists as invisible components of symbols of tourist attraction, this paper systematically analyzed the double ideographic structure of symbols of tourist attractions. As a product of social construction, Symbols of tourist attractions have been internalization as the evaluation standard of the authenticity in tourism experience. Thus, studies on symbols of tourist attractions with double ideographic structure help to further explore the authenticity in tourism experience. Based on Barthes' semiotics of double ideographic structure, we can discover the fact that symbols of tourist attractions also contain such a double ideographic structure. Different forms of symbols of tourist attractions are made up of different forms of signifier and signified. Double ideographic structures of symbols reveal that tourists have different expectation of authenticity toward the signifier(tourist objects) and the signified(different psychological or behavior patterns) of different symbols of tourist attractions. Based on the systematic analysis of the structures of different symbols of tourist attractions, this article attempts to construct a concept system of authenticity in tourism experience: the authenticity based on objectivism, the authenticity based on enriched meaning, the authenticity based on behavior pattern, the authenticity based on theme related texts, the authenticity based on hedonism, as well as the authenticity based on a combination of subjectivism an objectivism.
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Received: 25 June 2011
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2012, Vol. 27 
