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Debating Authenticity
Debating Authenticity
Concepts of Modernity in
Anthropological Perspective

Edited by

Thomas Fillitz and A. Jamie Saris

with the editorial help of Anna Streissler

berghahn
NEW YORK • OXFORD
www.berghahnbooks.com
 Published in 2013 by
Berghahn Books
www.berghahnbooks.com

©2013, 2015 Thomas Fillitz and A. Jamie Saris

First paperback edition published in 2015

All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages

for the purposes of criticism and review, no part of this book
may be reproduced in any form or by any means, electronic or
mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information
storage and retrieval system now known or to be invented,
without written permission of the publisher.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Debating authenticity : concepts of modernity in anthropological perspective / Thomas Filitz

and A. Jamie Saris, [editors].
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-85745-496-6 (hardback : alk. paper) – ISBN 978-1-78238-912-5 (paper-
back : alk. paper) – ISBN 978-0-85745-497-3 (ebook)
1. Anthropology–Philosophy. 2. Authenticity (Philosophy) I. Filitz, Thomas. II. Saris,
A. Jamie.
GN33.D44 2012
301.01–dc23
2011052019

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Printed on acid-free paper.

ISBN 978-0-85745-496-6 hardback

ISBN 978-1-78238-912-5 paperback
ISBN 978-0-85745-497-3 ebook
 Contents

List of Figures vii

Acknowledgements ix

Introduction. Authenticity Aujourd’hui 1

Thomas Fillitz and A. Jamie Saris

Part I. Authenticity and Authenticating

1. Revisiting ‘Culture, Genuine and Spurious’: Reflections on 27
Icons and Politics in Ireland
A. Jamie Saris

2. Deceptive Tentacles of the Authenticating Mind: On Authenticity 46

and Some Other Notions That are Good for Absolutely Nothing
Rajko Muršič

Part II. Moral Discourses of Authenticity

3. Authentic Wilderness: The Production and Experience of Nature 63
in America
Lawrence J. Taylor

4. The Moral Economy of Authenticity and the Invention of 78

Traditions in Franche-Comté (France)
Jean-Pierre Warnier

5. ‘Oh, That’s So Typical!’ Discussing Some Spanish ‘Authentic’ 91

Essential Traits
Jorge Grau Rebollo

Part III. Authenticity: Popular and Academic Discourses

6. Is Form Really Primary or, What Makes Things Authentic? 111
Sociality and Materiality in Afro-Brazilian Ritual and Performance
Inger Sjørslev
vi Contents

7. A Cultural Search for Authenticity: Questioning Primitivism 128

and Exotic Art
Paul van der Grijp

8. Wooden Pillars and Mural Paintings in the Saudi South-west: 142

Notes on Continuity, Authenticity and Artistic Change in
Regional Traditions
Andre Gingrich

9. True to Life: Authenticity and the Photographic Image 160

Marcus Banks

Part IV. Entangled Spaces of Authenticity

10. Questions of Authenticity and Legitimacy in the 175
Work of Henri Gaden (1867–1939)
Roy Dilley

11. Constructing Culture through Shared Location, Bricolage 196

and Exchange: The Case of Gypsies and Roma
Judith Okely

12. Cultural Regimes of Authenticity and Contemporary Art of Africa 211

Thomas Fillitz

Notes on Contributors 226

Index 229
 List of Figures

1.1. Old money made into jewellery. 35

1.2. Two boys on a horse. Picture Jamie Saris. 38
1.3. The Horse Protest: Eddie Kershaw in front of Mansion House. 41
3.1. Frederic Church, 1846, Hooker and Company Journeying 68
through the Wilderness from Plymouth to Hartford in 1636.
The Wadsworth Athenaeum.
3.2. Edward Moran, 1875, Mountain of the Holy Cross. 69
Autry Museum of Western Heritage, Los Angeles.
5.1. Bailaora magnet. Picture Jorge Grau Rebollo. 92
5.2. Refraction as intentional distortion. Diagram Jorge Grau Rebollo. 94
5.3. Bullfight as souvenir. Picture Jorge Grau Rebollo. 97
5.4. Torero and Bailaora costumes. Picture Jorge Grau Rebollo. 98
5.5. The silhouette of the bull, found throughout Spain. 98
Picture Jorge Grau Rebollo.
5.6. Flag and bull: two national icons embodying a new one displayed 99
at many news-stands in tourist locations. Picture Jorge Grau Rebollo.
5.7. The Catalan donkey on a starred Catalan flag next to the 99
‘Spanish’ bull. Picture Jorge Grau Rebollo.
5.8. A pile of typically Mexican/Spanish hats. Picture Jorge Grau Rebollo. 100
5.9. A piece of folk authenticity. Picture Jorge Grau Rebollo. 101
8.1. Geo-morphological map of Saudi Arabia’s south-western 147
provinces (from Dostal 2007).
8.2. Defence architecture of a mountain hamlet in Bilad Zahran, 147
al-Baha province. Picture Andre Gingrich.
8.3. Main varieties of village architecture in southern Hijaz and 148
Asir (from Gingrich 2007).
8.4. The village of Dhi ’Ayn below the escarpment face of 149
southern Hijaz. Picture Andre Gingrich.
8.5. Decorated wooden pillar in a living room of southern Hijaz. 149
Picture Andre Gingrich.
8.6. Defence architecture of a rural skyscraper in northern Asir. 150
Picture Pascal and Marie Maréchaux.
viii List of Figures

8.7. Mural paintings from earth colours inside a living room of Asir. 151
Picture Andre Gingrich.
8.8. Mural paintings from industrial colours on external walls of 154
an Asiri village. Picture Pascal and Marie Maréchaux.
9.1. A reproduction of a contact print taken from the original 162
glass-plate negative of ‘Frances with the fairies’, July 1917,
taken by Elsie Wright. Photograph courtesy of Brotherton
Collection, University of Leeds, England.
9.2. A frame still from the Crown Film Unit production In Rural 165
Maharashtra (1945), a film about agricultural production in
India during the Second World War. Note the strong diagonals
and vanishing-point perspective in the image. Photograph courtesy
of the National Film and Television Archive, Pune, India.
10.1. Henri Gaden as a young man and colonial officer early in his 178
military career. Archives municipales de Bordeaux, copyright
cliché A.M. Bordeaux.
10.2 and 10.3. Two images of Samory Touré, taken by Gaden, 179
the second of which was immediately after his capture by a
detachment of troops led by Gaden at the camp of the resistance
leader near Nzo, West Africa, September 1898. Archives
municipales de Bordeaux, copyright cliché A.M. Bordeaux.
10.4. A scene captured by Gaden of the interior of a colonial building 180
with a French officer, champagne glasses, attendants and a local
woman. No date or location given, but probably taken after the
Samory campaign. The juxtaposition of these diverse and striking
images in the scene doubtless appealed to Gaden’s sense of irony.
10.5. A picture by Gaden of French colonial troops moving through 182
the West African bush, 1897–98. Archives municipales de Bordeaux,
copyright cliché A.M. Bordeaux.
10.6. A picture by Gaden of French colonial troops moving through 183
the West African bush, 1897–98. Archives municipales de
Bordeaux, copyright cliché A.M. Bordeaux.
10.7. A girl at Beyla with a French officer, n.d., probably between 184
1897–99. Archives municipales de Bordeaux, copyright
cliché A.M. Bordeaux.
10.8. A detachable European shirt cuff inscribed with an Islamic 189
amulet to protect the wearer from injury by metal objects,
from Gaden’s archive in Centre des Archives d’Outre-Mer,
Aix-en-Provence (15 APC 1(7), item 117), n.d. Picture by
Roy Dilley from Centre d’Archives d’Outre Mer, Aix-en-Provence.
 Acknowledgements

The contributions to this volume were presented at a ten-day Sokrates-Erasmus In-

tensive Programme in August 2006 at the Department of Social and Cultural An-
thropology of the University of Vienna.
Fourteen scholars, affiliated to the University of Copenhagen, the Autonomous
University of Barcelona, the University René Descartes/Paris-5, the University of Sci-
ences et Technologies/Lille-1, the National University of Ireland/Maynooth, the Uni-
versity of Ljubljana, the University of Stockholm, Brunel University, the University
of St. Andrews, the University of Oxford and the University of Vienna examined
the social practices that produce authenticity, as well as the regional, national and
global circuits that make authenticity a stake in the lives of people in concrete social-
historical circumstances.
We regret that Johan Lindquist from Stockholm and Werner Zips from Vienna,
who delivered papers at the seminar, finally could not contribute to this collection.
We wish however to thank them for their active participation. Our colleagues Anna
Streissler and Ulrike Davis-Sulikowski (both University of Vienna) have produced in-
valuable comments on authenticity during the event in Vienna, as did the participating
students from the various partner institutions: Andreas Bandak and Peter Bjerregaard
(University of Copenhagen), Mario Buletic (Autonomous University of Barcelona),
Sabrina Hamache and Anthony Mahe (University René Descartes/Paris-5), Clothilde
Sabre and Laurence Nabitz (University of Sciences et Technologies/Lille-1), Fiona Lar-
kan and Fiona Murphy (National University of Ireland/Maynooth), Katarina Altshul,
Jana Drasler and Sarah Lunacek (University of Ljubljana), Johanna Gullberg and
Hanna Sarnecki (University of Stockholm), Sarah Winkler-Reid (Brunel University),
Jan Grill (University of St. Andrews), Saadia Abid, Rao Nadeem Alam, Stefan Bayer,
Sabina Bernhard, Sabine Decleva, Julia Doppler, Christina Fischer, Rita Glavitza, Mela-
nie Haider, Gregor Jakob, Judith Keppel, Theresa Leissinger, Kathrin Leitner, Georg
Leitner, Severin Lénart, Alexander Maleev, Martin Nagele, Maximilian Neusser, Wa-
nako Oberhuber, Julia Oberreiter, Nadja Petsovits, Johannes Pitschl, Lena Possliner,
Katharina Schallerl, Eva Schmid, Katja Seidel, Julia Sonnleitner, Claudia Trupp, Stefan
Wolf (University of Vienna) and Monika Weissensteiner (University of Bologna).
The European Commission financed this seminar as a Sokrates-Erasmus Inten-
sive Programme (28545–IC-2–2004–1–AT-ERASMUS-IPUC-3). The Austrian Na-
tional Agency co-funded the project, the University of Vienna and the Department
x Acknowledgements

of Social and Cultural Anthropology provided the infrastructure and the technical
equipment. These two institutions also sponsored the participation of Marcus Banks
(University of Oxford). We thank all these institutions for their generous funding
and support.
We are grateful to Berghahn Books and Ann Przyzycki, Associate Editor, for sup-
porting this project and Mark Stanton for his expert editorial work.
Last but not least, we wish to express our particular, deep gratitude to Anna
Streissler. Without her insight, her ideas, her engagement and energy, neither the
Sokrates-Erasmus Intensive Programme, nor the production of this collection would
have been possible: Anna co-organized this seminar and has acted as editorial assist-
ant for the present volume.

Thomas Fillitz and A. Jamie Saris

Vienna and Maynooth, Spring 2012
 Introduction

Authenticity Aujourd’hui

Thomas Fillitz and A. Jamie Saris

Introduction
It is difficult to live in Europe or North America and not be struck by the ubiquity
of the notion of authenticity and cognate terms in the society at large. Modern con-
sumer society in late capitalism is intimately entwined with debates about authentic-
ity, not just with products, whose validity needs somehow to be authorized – from
organic food to art (that is, the sense of authentic origins) – but also with respect to
certain sorts of experiences and ways of being-in-the-world (that is, in the sense of
the authentic correspondence of content). At this level, authenticity presents us with
some productive ambiguities. The modern deployment of authenticity – from its use
to sell certain kinds of food, exotic artefacts, works of art, to particular kinds of expe-
riences, such as adventure holidays – presupposes that there is a downmarket variety
of what is on offer. Cost is one of the ways of avoiding this part of the market, but
connoisseurship is even more necessary. Some marketers such as Michael Silverstein,
for example, discuss this phenomenon in terms of a ‘Treasure Hunt’: with consumers
willing to spend considerable time saving money on some items in order to devote
more time and resources to discover socially sanctioned value for specific purchases
(Silverstein and Butman 2006). Yet, the basis of this connoisseurship is always imper-
illed as the market massifies, as the treks become easier, and as just what constitutes a
genuine class of consumer item becomes subject to ever-greater scrutiny and scepti-
cism (again, think of organic food). Authenticity, then, possesses a surprising social
resonance at this moment in history – at once po-faced and ironic – its conditions
of possibility seem to be constantly rendered untenable even as it enthusiastically
engages more and more of our collective lifeworld.
Our starting point, then, is that authenticity and inauthenticity need to be under-
stood as part of the same process of situated social actors engaging culturally salient
ends. Its explosive growth in ideological importance may indeed be a recent concern,
2 Debating Authenticity

as the philosophers tell us (especially Trilling 1971, Berman 2009, and Taylor 2003),
but its social deployment always requires a specific type of work: an understanding of
(and developing ways of avoiding) the inauthentic, whether this opposition exists as
a barrier to personal achievement, as the nefarious resource of the despised other, as
a challenge to the integrity of the self, or as the cunning fake that can, at times, fool
even the most sophisticated connoisseur. In other words, the quest for authenticity
(Lindholm 2008) requires collective work to discover, recognize and authorize the
‘real thing’, as well as collective effort to thrust away its opposite.

Into the Field: Anthropology and the Authentic

Viewed thought this optic, anthropology’s engagement with authenticity has been
complex and deep-rooted, precisely because of the way that debates about authentic-
ity demonstrate the necessary connectedness of terms that are often taken to be far
apart in other social sciences, such as individual and social or cultural and psycho-
logical. On the one hand, authenticity highlights the philosophical roots in various
thinkers who can be loosely labelled ‘Romantic’, and, on the other, it exposes some of
the peculiar ambiguities and opportunities that the primary methodological tools of
the discipline, that is long-term ethnographic fieldwork, provided for its practition-
ers. In other words, anthropology has had, from the beginning, what one might call a
professional interest in, and connection to, authenticity. Its subjects were understood
to have had (for the most part) more of it than its practitioners, but, happily, some of
this authenticity could be invested in both the experience of the Other and in bits of
their material culture, and thus be assimilated into the person of the anthropologist.
On the other hand, anthropology has had an equally long history of seeing the neces-
sary relational quality of authenticity, as an integral part of any sort of truth claims.
‘Genuine’ genealogies that villages struggled over in order to invest legitimate po-
litical authority (Comaroff and Roberts 1986), or the socially recognized efficacy of
magic, and hence the recognition of authentic workers of eldritch powers as distinct
from the charlatans (Lévi-Strauss 1967) were the very stuff of classic anthropology
constituting both the analysis and much of the drama to be found in ethnographic
texts. Thus, the empiricist orientation of method (finding out what really was out
there), the very-often individually jarring quality of fieldwork, and the theoretical
background of the discipline intersected in mutually revealing ways.
These intersections provided a distinct register of academic writing, the ethno-
graphic, some of whose impact we trace below. For example, analyses of how truth
was established in radically different settings, e.g., how good and bad divinations
were separated from one another amongst exotic people in far away places, say in
witchcraft accusations, became one of the main ways that the strange could be ren-
dered familiar (e.g., Evans-Pritchard 1976), providing a new conceptual lens through
which one could examine both ‘savage thought’ and ‘irrational belief ’ (see also Good
1994). At the same time, the familiar could also be rendered strange through this
technique. Consider the effective way that Malinowski juxtaposes the attitude of
 Introduction 3

his readers towards the British Crown Jewels with the kula items he is interested in
understanding, precisely to challenge the category of ownership seemingly so evident
to the Western mind (Malinowski 1984). If there was not an obvious correspondence
between a Western sense of ownership and alienability for certain very highly valued
items, then perhaps, there might be room for a calculating individual rationality to
authentically orient itself to other kinds of value besides that defined by marginal
utility through the object’s alienation.
It is therefore somewhat regrettable that recent anthropological work on this most
protean but very socially relevant category has tended to move in an analytical di-
rection, trying to get a handle on the defining features of authenticity, in order to
properly study it. Lindholm (2008), for example, looks at authenticity for a modern,
post-crisis anthropology. Through a series of comparisons, he attempts to develop
a place for the anthropologist to investigate authenticity as a social fact (and in the
process rehabilitate a comparative sensibility in the discipline at large). Each of his
vignettes (encompassing, food, dance, national tradition, among many other phe-
nomena), ends in a similar impasse, stressing what is sometimes called the paradox
of authenticity. Subjects search for it in ways that are either contradictory, i.e., the
sense of the authenticity of origins is often at odds with the sense of the term that
comes from identity or correspondence, or authenticity appears in social life in ways
that seem to self-interestedly conflate different social levels in the service of claim-
ing specific socially desirable goods (how the Slow Food movement situates itself in
the U.S.A., for example). Lindholm calls for a respect for the quest for authenticity,
alongside a scepticism as to its possible achievement. His use of the term ‘quest’, how-
ever, seems rooted in a very Durkheimian discomfort with social change as such, as
the desire for authenticity (whatever obvious and immediate upset, up to an includ-
ing personal and social revolution, it entails) is supposedly but a means to an end of
a new stability (a renewed Golden Age, becoming a better person, etc.). In a world
where specific types of experience are ever more central to everything from specific
productions of subjectivity to the mode of production itself, however, the problem
of the inauthentic is clearly ever more fraught (and, of course, ever more interesting).
In this case, it might be the quest itself, with its attendant temporalities, tensions and
travails that should concern us, than either its beginnings or conclusions.

The Search for the Genuine, the Real and the True
The search for origins of the authentic leads us to some of the founding figures in the
social sciences. It is worth recalling that two philosophers, who had a large impact
on the nineteenth-century roots of anthropology, are also generally placed at the
beginning of reflections of authenticity – Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Johann Gott-
fried Herder (e.g., Bendix 1998, Lindholm 2008). Rousseau developed the notion
of l’homme naturel, in opposition to the malevolent effects of civilization he felt he
observed in his own contemporaries, represented by the French Court. According
to this argument, civilization had been degenerating and was continuing to do so,
4 Debating Authenticity

degrading the body of the citizen with it, in the process inhibiting the free expression
of his emotions and actions (see also Berman 2009). In Emile, for example, Rousseau
contrasts the images of the machine and the tree to model this opposition. As Ber-
man notes, these images were not opposites, per se, the tree had in fact given birth to
the machine: the challenge for Rousseau was what to do with this situation (Berman
2009: 160–170).
In a different context, in reaction to the German situation in which the nobility
claimed civilization (generally articulated in French) for itself, as against the sup-
pressed (or non-existent) German bourgeoisie, Herder developed a similar idea rather
differently. For Herder, the inner qualities of the subject, expressed in the arts and
humanities was allocated a specific collective reality. Subjects participated in a specific
national genius as a condition of such expression and, in turn, the distinctiveness of
national genius was developed through such expressions. The good, the true and the
beautiful, then, would find specific expressions through the particular characteristics
of each nation. This move was based on two important assumptions. First, some
understanding of difference was categorical in understanding humans, or, to put it
better, to be human, one needed to have collective specificities (language, custom,
kinship, way of life), as a precondition of creativity. Second, these specificities grew
organically (think of trees above) from stable physical and social soil, that is, a group
of humans attached to a specific place for a long period of time. This take on authen-
ticity relied heavily on the science of geography for its data, its metaphors and its
anxieties. The data of geography could be understood theoretically through this sense
of genius, as the harmonious connection between climate, landscape, way of life and
artistic expression. Everything from traveller tales through to the published records of
early scientific expeditions could then be read anew. The increasing conquest of space
that made such descriptions possible (increasingly easy movement and technical in-
novations in transportation), however, were themselves disruptive and potentially
fatal to this sense of genius. European crimes against natives were the most obvious
ways that specific geniuses were being destroyed, but movement as such (of both
people and ideas) could become a source of worry.
Both Rousseau and Herder value a connection between an inner state and an
external expression. Hegel later conceived this relationship as central for the develop-
ment of man. As described in his Aesthetics, the externalization of the inner state ena-
bles the individual to reflect upon her/himself and to get a step further in his spiritual
being (Hegel 1986). As we well know, Marx reversed this relationship and considered
the external state of social actors as determining their being. Thus, the alienation
under the capitalist mode of production negated the subject’s chance to enter human
history as an authentic, self-conscious agent, unless and until external changes in the
mode of production occurred. This sort of polarity has left the authenticity debate
stranded in a series of hoary binarisms, even as it recognises the special quality of au-
thenticity to precipitate out, and variably value, temporal, spatial and subjective for-
mations: a lost Golden Age, the undesirable nature of other communities, getting the
real thing and being more or less true to a self all jostle against one another because
of the peculiar history of this term. Regina Bendix’s thesis outlines, if not necessarily
 Introduction 5

resolves, this tension:‘Authenticity, … , is generated not from the bounded classifica-

tion of an Other, but from the probing comparison between self and Other, as well as
between external and internal states of being’ (Bendix 1998: 17).
Not surprisingly, it is now a commonplace in anthropology and related disciplines
that artifice and authenticity are intimately related, and that real people in concrete
social-historical circumstances spend as much time working on their understandings
of inauthentic as they put into imagining the more valued part of the opposition. The
irony is, as Berman has argued, in the increasing contradiction between

The permanency of men’s pretensions and the transience of their conditions, between
the solidity of the identities they claimed for themselves and the fluidity of the roles
they actually played. (Berman 2009: 118)

The leitmotif of the historical development of capitalism is how a particular sort of

exchange models and remakes increasingly diverse spheres in its image in a fashion
that seems designed to intensify this paradox. All that is marketable potentially (may-
be inevitably) gravitates towards kitsch, and, of course, nearly everything is market-
able. Yet, through it all the stock of authenticity rises. Thus, Benjamin’s justly famous
reflections on the aura of a work of art seems to need some modification, in the light
of several decades. Aura now seems invested in increasing numbers of things and
processes. Indeed, we live in an age where even our simulacra are subject to a high
standard of perceived verisimilitude – from Hollywood movies to Disneyland rides
to political reflections on what our collective heritage is or might mean.1 But aura is
transient, not because of mechanical or, indeed, digital modes of reproduction per
se, but because of how aura has itself become a significant source of philosophical,
social, and economic value, and therefore increasingly subject to understandings like
‘inflation’ and ‘fraud’. Ironically, we are encouraged by the modern market to ‘keep
it real!’ at a time when reality seems to be able to be replicated with ever-increasing
virtuosity (see also Appadurai 1996).

On the Trail of the Authentic

Anthropology has had to regularly engage each of these facets of authenticity: from the
search for personal and social genuineness to the authorization of specific objects, vari-
ous types of connections, even claims of extraordinary experience as real. The results of
this engagement have been both contradictory and productive. The salvage sensibility
of the first decades of the discipline’s existence, for example, now sits very uncomfort-
ably with the scepticism and seeming humility of the post-Writing Culture critique
(Clifford and Marcus 1987), but both of these sensibilities are specifically configured
around productive ambiguities in the discipline’s appreciation of authenticity.
For this reason, Franz Boas’s conversion from scientific to humanistic approaches
to knowledge in Baffinland still lives in the lore of the discipline, if only as a palimps-
est. If all things were not exactly made new through this aphoristic conversion, then
6 Debating Authenticity

at least many things were newly made anthropological. In a different time, however, a
new understanding of authentity in anthropology (one based on a desired correspond-
ence between the world-as-it-is and its representation) sees something almost sinister in
another incident in Boas’s long career, i.e., the cleansing of Kwakiutl Long Houses of
certain white trade goods before taking their photographs (see the various contributors
to Stocking 1985, also Fabian 1983). Somehow this depiction failed both the Kwakiutl
and the discipline on a measure of authenticity. It is more rarely asked: what was the
precise nature of Boas’s failure in this photograph? Did his interest in taking an au-
thentic picture of Kwakiutl with regard to his understandings of their origins override
some sense of authenticity with respect to the correspondence between this series of
photographs and the Kwakiutl life with which he had in fact observed and with which
he had successfully interacted? Banks, following Dutton, considers precisely this ques-
tion: how and in what sense can a photograph be labelled inauthentic (see Banks this
volume). Yet, the modern disappointment in Boas’s photograph seems to also construct
a very naïve reader, incapable of decoding the framing of not just this work, but of any
representation, and furthermore, seems to suggest that there might be a genre of more
authentic representations somewhere, something closer to Rorty’s ‘Mirror of Nature’
(1979), that what is on offer in this series of photographs.
More than anything else, the Kwakiutl photographs forces us to confront ethnog-
raphy from the viewpoint of culture collecting. Clifford also draws our attention to
the ways how social and cultural facts have been selected, and how they have been
translated afterwards into monographs of authentic, isolated cultures, such as the fa-
mous ones written by Malinowski (Trobriand Islands, 1922), Evans-Pritchard (Nuer,
1940), of Griaule (Dogon, 1938), and well as many others.

From a complex historical reality (which includes current ethnographic encounters)

the select what gives form, structure, and continuity of a world. What is hybrid or
‘historical’ has been less commonly collected and presented as a system of authenticity.
(Clifford 1996: 231)

Clifford clearly sees this work as a way of awakening anthropology from the dream
of authenticity, thus he critiques the research focus on isolated, ‘primitive’ societies
grew out of this discursive production of an ethnographic timelessness as against a
deracinated and disenchanted modernity. Indeed, until the 1940s, modernity was a
theme of only limited interest to many anthropologists (with the qualified exception
of those working in the U.S.A. on acculturation). Most of the scholars described
societies as relatively unaffected by culture contacts and colonialism, more or less cul-
turally homogeneous, in which every element functionally fitted within the general
system. These descriptions were a result of their particular anthropological interest.
Clifford extensively describes the strategies applied by researchers to produce these
images of social and cultural realities, and, of course, during the past quarter-century
the discipline has internalized these critiques (see e.g., Hymes 1972, Fabian 1983,
Clifford and Marcus 1986, Amselle and M’Bokolo 1999, Sahlins 1999). The notion
of culture, too, has been radically, sometimes painfully, refigured (e.g., Barth 1989;
 Introduction 7

Keesing 1994, Fox and King 2002) in the wake of this critique. Critical concepts of
culture now have to consider that cultural traditions have ideological connotations,
constitute a complex interplay with various subsumed and dominated traditions, and
have to look at the production and reproduction of cultural forms as problematic in
itself (Keesing 1994). Hannerz postulates combination and impurity as fundamental
qualities of culture (1992; 1996). Culture, then, is now understood as ‘contested,
temporal and emergent’ (Clifford and Marcus 1987) or a ‘combination of diversity,
interconnectedness, and innovation, in the context of centre-periphery relationships’
(Hannerz 1996: 67), formulations that seem to confine authenticity as a concept and
the search for it to the dustbin of history.
Fieldwork, of course, has been deconstructed in similar terms, by situating it with-
in broad Western intellectual trends, as well as by highlighting its darker political
impulses. In response to such critiques, new approaches have been elaborated, such as
multi-sited fieldwork (Marcus 1995), fieldwork at home, or new ways of ‘construct-
ing the field’ (Amit 1999), which may now be the Stockholm ballet (Wulff 1997) or a
street in London (Miller 2008). These studies need to be understood, at least in part,
as a response to the critical reflections outlined above. Concepts of reflexivity were
introduced into the ethnographic research process, e.g., the shared social experience
for a more general understanding of the culture under scrutiny (Hervik 1994), or in
terms of ‘participant objectivation’ as proposed by Bourdieu ‘… to explore not the
“lived experience” of the knowing subject but the social conditions of possibility –
the effects and limits of the act of objectivation’ (Bourdieu 2003: 282).

Reading Anthropology while Searching for Authenticity

Such critiques now have a canonical quality in the discipline and they live comfort-
ably as the received wisdom passed on from elders to graduate students during the
course of professional training. Nonetheless, the exceptional quality of this encounter
with difference created by the intersection of this earlier moment of anthropological
theorizing, with classic ethnographic fieldwork and a sense of authenticity should
not be lightly discounted. Data and objects were collected and disseminated and new
forms of knowledge were produced and circulated. Ideas of other, perhaps even bet-
ter, more authentic, realities became widely available to reading publics, and certain
very charged discussions (of sex and sexuality, of different forms of consciousness and
of reflexive understandings of Western society) were given a certain scholarly space,
and sometimes even a scientific imprimatur. Genuinely radical impulses (at least ac-
cording to their followers and, indeed, according to some of their contemporary
critics) found these products of fieldwork central to certain re-imaginings that clearly
invoked an understanding of authenticity, even if such movements now provoke wry
grins or embarrassed grimaces (indeed, if they are remembered at all). Reich’s feverish
annotating of Malinowski’s observations on authentic sexuality amongst savages (Re-
ich 1971) to distinguish sex-positive from sex-negative societies, Gauguin’s exoticism
(see van der Grijp, this volume), even Castaneda’s kitsch reworking of south-western
8 Debating Authenticity

American ethnography (e.g., 1975), now are subject to disciplinary erasure or deri-
sion, but they are not generally given their just due for how they functioned upon
their release for at least some readers, at least some of the time, that is, as a scholarly
sanction to entertain the idea that other people minding other sheep in other valleys,
might indeed have some insights into living better, more genuine lives than ‘we’ do
now. The romance of the other, while certainly not an anthropological innovation per
se (see Dilley this volume), found a stable discursive platform in classic anthropologi-
cal theory and ethnographic writing practices upon which some social critics found it
possible to stand (see also the various contributors to Stocking 1989).
Perhaps it is not surprising, then, that the spectre of authenticity can still be found
at the anthropological banquet: if not at the table, then at least as a ghostly presence
in the room. The institutionalization of anthropology’s twin crises of representation
and legitimacy, for example, also demarcates a historical moment where politicized
First Nations movements have scored a string of impressive political and economic
victories in large part on the back of a discourse constructed around a seemingly naive
sense of authenticity of origins (especially in Canada and parts of South America),
often relying on data collected by an older generation of anthropologists. Indeed,
during this period, some anthropologists have embraced this discourse as explicit
activists (e.g., Turner 1989, Mayberry-Lewis and Howe 1980). More often, however,
anthropology has become engaged, often very uncomfortably, in this process through
the production of expert testimony that is almost always understood as an exercise
in validation: certifying the continuity of a particular group or authorizing the prov-
enance of an artefact within politically charged settings, where adjudicated claims of
authenticity are the primary political stakes [think of the conflict around Kennewick
Man in U.S.A. (see Thomas 2000; also Baumann 1999)]. At the same time, in other
clashes, anthropology has been marshalled on the side of the state to critique land
rights and compensation claims because the unit claiming was not really the same as
the unit that was historically aggrieved.

The Contemporary Longing for Authenticity

The twentieth-century anthropological struggle with authenticity, however, was clear-
ly a part of a much broader trend in Western societies’ reimaginations of themselves.
In the following section we want to scrutinize the contemporary quest for authentic-
ity as a function of that hoary social science construct modernity and in particular its
seeming acceleration under the aegis of the globalization processes that marked the
end of the twentieth century.
The concept of the autonomous individual in European early modernity gave
rise to the personal search for the proper external expression of inner states: direct
correspondences were valued as sincere, pure, real, natural and their opposites were,
of course, maligned. Art, in particular was seen as a privileged sphere of this search
and artists as some of its pioneers. Thus, in the early twentieth century, a community
of artists founded a colony on a hill above Ascona, Switzerland and named it Monte
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