Ritueel en toerisme: huwen met water

In the tourist world of today everybody gazes at everyone else, and a perennial question is how that changes us. How does being gazed at impact on a culture? Especially in the case of rituals, which are often the core items of cultural performances and thus of touristic experiences, what is the impact of tourism on locally performed rituals? Is a touristy ritual 'inauthentic'? In this article I argue that 'authenticity' is a mythical con-cept that is important in directing cultural tourism, but has very little analytic value. Three cases of rituals under the intense scrutiny of tourists will pass muster: the central case is from Venice, Italy, the ritual of the marriage with the sea, the so-called Sensa. Two shorter cases come from elsewhere: Bali, Indonesia, and the Dogon from Mali, West Africa. In all three cases the rituals in question are shown to have a complex rela-tionship with the tourist presence, which cannot be subsumed under the simplistic dichotomy 'positive' or 'negative'. Tourism not only provides a specific kind of stimulus