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Formal norms govern appearances and behavior in the front. In the back, the local team of intimates can relax, blow off steam, tease and joke, and berate customers or the neighbors. In fact, we are normatively required to dramatize more relaxed standards in the back lest we threaten the intimacy and solidarity necessary to credible team performances out front. Should someone comport herself too formally in the back, she might be regarded as a spy for the management, or at least as an untrustworthy toady.

13 14 | The Ubiquitous Tourist Erik Cohen, Ed Bruner, John Urry, and others have accused me of overstating the case that tourists are on a quest for authenticity. They argue that not all tourists are upset about the shallowness of their lives or feel a need to seek glimpses of authenticity in the lives of others. In Culture on Tour: Ethnographies of Travel, published in 2005, Bruner says the tourists he studied were “successful,” and “affluent,” and “quite secure about their own identity,” not alienated or anxious in ways my article seemed to suggest.

I wondered if a similar transposition of back to front occurred in other tourist contexts. My initial thoughts into this matter were set off by an empirical observation of a salad being prepared, an observation of a particular kind, one that did not fit into existing relevant theory, that is, by an anomaly. Goffman was meticulous in explaining how much of our humanity hangs on the separation of front and back. Here is the reticent way he introduced the concept of back region in The Presentation of Self: “In order to appear in a steady moral light it is necessary for performers to ‘accentuate’ some facts while suppressing others.