In the early 1970s Dean MacCannell for the first time introduced the concept of staged authenticity in tourism. In 2007 Pine and Gilmore published the book Authenticity: What Consumers Really Want. Pine and Gilmore are not only thinking of tourism, but of consumer culture in general. In this period of nearly 40 years, the discussion of what authenticity really means has been going on in many different academic fields, from questions about realism, representation and reality in aesthetics and media studies, to 'authenticity as idea' related to national identity and cultural heritage, as well as 'authenticity as strategy' in marketing and place branding. Our ambition has been to view the question of authenticity as a cultural concept in tourism and consumer culture from different analytical views, and relate the discussions of authenticity in tourism studies to other theoretical and academic fields.

Researching authenticity regarding spatial experience, emotional and embodied geography has regained new interest. Many recent phenomena within the cultural economy (Ray & Sayer, 1999; Gay & Pryke, 2002) such as tourism, leisure time experiences, individual and collective identityand history management, branding and marketing utilise authenticity strategies as important components in their design in order to appeal to certain emotional modes amongst the receivers/users. Emotional geography is a growing field of interdisciplinary research in which the second stage of globalisation and its localisation strategies is reflected, together with the effect of the experience economical paradigmatic shift (Pine & Gilmore, 1999; Gilles Lipovetsky, 2006), the increasing 'culturalisation' of the market as well as the 'marketisation' of culture (Ray & Sayer, 1999; Gay & Pryke, 2002) and the new economy in the cultural field (Löfgren & Willem, 2005).