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Recent critiques of the concept of authenticity in tourism studies have had the unfortunate effect of silencing claims and counter-claims as to the authenticity of tourist performances amongst host communities, and have tended to focus purely on the effects of authenticity as a device for temporally distancing the Other. Rather than simply being an obsession of Western observers however, understanding competing claims as to the authenticity of these performances is of central importance to the understanding of the wider social context and divisions within which tourism is practiced. This argument is illustrated ethnographically with regard to behind the scenes debates surrounding a tourist event in Papua New Guinea.