Abstract:
This article offers and analyses of the contemporary touristic experience in South Africa, based on the travel accounts published in the Polish press during 2000-2006. Attempts to explain the authenticity of touristic experience as made by MacCannel in his work 'The Tourist: a new theory of the leisure class' (1976), which is viewed as a classic today. Argues along the lines of postmodern thinkers, such as Slavoj Zizek, whose findings enabled the author to elucidate the contemporary 'touristic habitus' to a more satisfactory level. Claims that it is a tourist's, not an ethnographer's, appreciation of 'authenticity' in the postmodern period that is superior.
