AUTHENTICITY AND THE PSEUDO-BACKSTAGE OF AGRI-TOURISM

• The studied summer farmers have a double role as farmers and tourist hosts.
• Coping with this double role they have developed different strategies of staging.
• They arrange a pseudo-back stage: a temporal front stage in the guise of a back stage.
• By creating this pseudo-back stage they mediate virtues such as intimacy and rareness.
• Simultaneously they negotiate the notions of authenticity and heritage with the tourists.

This article explores how summer farmers in Bregenzerwald (Austria) and Valdres (Norway) deal with their double role as farmers and tourist hosts. Based on qualitative interviews with farmers, the authors discuss how this double role influences tourist-host interactions and the staging of summer farms, and the ways in which the discourses of authenticity and heritage manifest themselves therein. In both Austria and Norway, summer farms are objects of idyllisation. They are highly suitable places for agri-tourism, which is regarded as more intimate and less detrimental to culture and environment than mass tourism. The authors suggest that one feature of such agri-tourism settings is the arrangement of a pseudo-backstage—a frontstage that is presented as an ‘actual’ backstage.