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Such perspectives on authenticity thus encourage an examination of what uses to which existential or emergent conceptions of authenticity can be deployed.
Also relevant to this study is tourism scholarship. I have already touched on Deborah Che’s tourism-centered approach to Holland’s Tulip Time Festival, as well as Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimlet’s Destination Culture, which addresses issues of displays of heritage pertinent to understanding what festivals similar to Dutch-American heritage celebrations mean and do. George Hughes similarly addresses authenticity from a tourism research perspective (and makes the salient observation that “the issue of authenticity runs, like an obligato, through tourism studies” (781)). One other study in this area that deserves mention is John Dorst’s The Written Suburb, which investigates the intersections of local heritage, tourism, and postmodernity in Chadds Ford, Pennsylvania. Dorst’s work is particularly important owing to its introduction of the concept of auto-ethnography (4). Dorst argues that late consumer capitalism (or postmodernity) has resulted in a situation where a community such as Chadds Ford generates its own ethnographic texts about itself. In other words, a community is capable of observing and documenting itself (2–3). Dorst presents a model for studying a community such as Chadds Ford that involves collecting the texts the community produces about itself and analyzing them. These texts include postcards, brochure texts, comments by natives, local histories as presented on items such as restaurant menus, historical society documents, arts and crafts festivals, museum displays, photographs, popular histories, and souvenirs (5). Like Chadds Ford, each of the festivals I am studying observes and documents itself, producing a wide range of “texts”—printed and otherwise—that merit attention in analyzing what each of these festivals means and does.
The various “texts” generated by the residents of each community I am studying, then, form another incredibly valuable, albeit nonscholarly, body of literature—broadly construed—on which to draw. Residents of Holland, Pella, and Orange City have all produced several popular histories concerning their towns’ festivals. Newspaper articles from each community document the process of staging each festival from start to finish.