Authenticity on the ground: Engaging the past in a California ghost town

This qualitative study explores how the concept of authenticity is construc ted, experienced and employed by visitors and staff in the provocative land scape of the ghost town of Bodie, California. Bodie State Historic Park, on ce a booming gold-mining town, now greets some two hundred thousand tourist s annually and is widely applauded for its authenticity. In this paper, I e xplore the meaning of this term in its ghost-town context: while boom-town Bodie was a bustling commercial center, ghost-town Bodie appears abandoned and devoid of commercial activity. Thus, authenticity in a ghost town is no t tied to the accuracy with which it represents its past. Yet a version of Bodie's past is what both visitors and staff experience: they employ Bodie' s authenticity to engage with the mythic West, a romanticized version of th e Anglo-American past that upholds dominant contemporary Anglo-American val ues. Bodie's false-fronted facades and ramshackle miners' cabins call forth these images, familiar to visitors from movie Westerns. Since ghost towns have few or no residents, it is largely through the landscape and the artif acts that are part of that landscape that these mythic images are experienc ed. Thus, an experience of authenticity is not the end result of a visit to Bodie; rather, authenticity is a vehicle through which both visitors and s taff engage with powerful notions about American virtues. In this paper, I explore how the notion of authenticity is triggered by landscape, and exami ne the narratives about the past that the concept of authenticity enables.