Authenticity, Cultural

PETRA TJITSKE KALSHOVEN

University of Manchester, United Kingdom

In his literary philosophical study Sincerity and Authenticity (1972), Lionel Trilling
offered a cultural history of the notion of authenticity as closely related to and emanat-
ing from that of sincerity. He argued that sincerity or “being true to oneself ” became an
ideal in Europe from the Renaissance onwards, when, after an era of play and mimesis,
the sixteenth century became wary of “dissimulation, feigning, and pretence” (Trilling
1972, 13). Trilling described the misgivings with which “mimetic skill” and “histrionic
representation” became associated in the Age of Protestantism (1972, 31). The rise of
sincerity, he suggested, was followed by a preoccupation with authenticity, which may
perhaps be understood, in an analogy with sincerity equaling “being true to oneself ”
as “being true to itself.” Trilling traced provenance of the term “authenticity” to the
museum, “where persons expert in such matters test whether objects of art are what
they appear to be or are claimed to be,” thus situating early use of the term firmly in
the realm of material culture (1972, 93; emphasis original).
One of the trimmings of modernity, it has been argued, is indeed a yearning for
the authentic in a disenchanted world (e.g., Bendix 1997; cf. Lindholm on the quest
for authenticity that is “always of great significance to those who are swept up in the
modern torrent of change,” 2008a, 145)—a world in which it has come to be consid-
ered necessary to confirm authenticity as a palpable, measurable quality, not only of
objects but also of individuals, institutions, of cultural and natural landscapes through
authentication by appropriate experts in order to provide assurance of genuine value
and worth to a doubting public. The modern aspiration of fixing the authentic in time
and space, not devoid of a generous dose of nostalgia, is eloquently expressed in Walter
Benjamin’s essay, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” (1999), in
which he approached authenticity through the time-honored notion of an aura some-
how attached to an original. He suggested that this aura could be expressed quite mate-
rially through measurable evidence of a patina as proof of an object’s age.

The presence of the original is the prerequisite to the concept of authenticity. Chemical
analyses of the patina of a bronze can help to establish this, as does the proof that a given
manuscript of the Middle Ages stems from an archive of the fifteenth century. … The
authenticity of a thing is the essence of all that is transmissable from its beginning, rang-
ing from its substantive duration to its testimony to the history which it has experienced.
… That which withers in the age of mechanical reproduction is the aura of the work of
art. (Benjamin 1999, 214–15)

The artwork’s ongoing history, then, confirmed by the presence of a patina, attests
to its authenticity. Modernity, with a cultural output characterized by mechanical

The International Encyclopedia of Anthropology. Edited by Hilary Callan.

© 2018 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. Published 2018 by John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
DOI: 10.1002/9781118924396.wbiea1807
2 A U T H E N T I CI T Y, C U L T U R A L

reproduction—that is, a mechanized making of copies—lacks patina, thus precluding

the emergence of aura and threatening authenticity.
In the social sciences, this rather essentialist view of the authentic grounded in a
material substrate has been problematized through a social constructivist lens, lead-
ing to a focus on human experience and meaning making (e.g., Vannini and Williams
2009, with contributions focusing on the “experience of authenticity”; cf. Wang 1999
on “existential authenticity” in tourist realms). One relatively early trend in anthro-
pological approaches has been a deconstruction of the rhetorics of authenticity, as in
Richard Handler’s analysis of a striking, performative example of the “politics of cul-
ture” in Québec expressed through cultural displays and formal architecture (1988).
Handler describes the process by which folklore performances (e.g., dance and music)
and architectural forms are canonized or, as he phrases it, objectified by the Canadian
Province of Québec to create a distinct, authentic identity, a Québécois patrimoine for
Québécois, both rural and urban, to rally behind. A process of governmental measur-
ing against the established performance or against architectural standards ensures that
the “right” dancers, musicians, and facades perform the “right” Québécois identity. The
interplay of performance, identity, and authenticity is also addressed by Fred Myers
in an article on an aboriginal performance in a New York gallery in 1988, albeit from
a slightly different viewpoint. Myers describes how two aboriginal men from Papunya
constructed a sand painting for an audience in the context of an exhibition on aboriginal
art, showing parts of a ritual performance that had been adapted for the purpose. Com-
ments by anthropologists, who were present to explain the event, and by members of the
audience, who wanted to know what the performance precisely represented, revealed a
preoccupation with authenticity. Similarly to Handler’s critique, Myers feels that such
concerns arise from a too static conception of culture and identity. He criticizes the
dominant position in current discourse that, in these performances, “indigenous people
(natives) should represent themselves” (Myers 1994, 680; emphasis original). According
to this position, artistic production stands for indigenous identity. Instead, Myers sug-
gests, it would be interesting to take performance dynamics into consideration and look
at resulting intercultural productions of identity without trying to pinpoint an evasive
authenticity linked to some outdated, static idea of culture.
A third example, taken from the edited volume Recasting Ritual: Performance, Media,
Identity, concerns anthropologist Felicia Hughes-Freeland’s (1998) description of two
versions of a performance of a so-called arja play in Bali, one performed at a temple fes-
tival (videotaped by the anthropologist), the other recorded in a TV studio without an
audience. She has two Balinese dance critics comment on the two versions. Almost to
the dismay of the anthropologist, who instinctively wants to grant greater authenticity
to the live performance, both commentators prefer the quality and skill of the dancing
in the TV version and consider this broadcast as a means of sustaining a tradition. They
find the live version, on the other hand, more exciting in terms of dialogue and exchange
with the audience. The TV version, Hughes-Freeland then realizes, plays a role in iden-
tity politics by bringing typical Balinese dancing to the attention of an outside audience.
In these three examples, anthropologists are seen to be grappling with and seeking
to nuance notions of authenticity, including their own, in cultural and intercultural
realms. As both an analytical and a political concept, authenticity is problematized
 A U T H E N T I CI T Y, C U L T U R A L 3

because of its nostalgic and essentialist connotations that are considered to be at odds
with the human penchant for experimentality, mimicry, construction, and reinvention.
In a postmodern era, however, widespread yearning for a graspable, measurable, and
consumable authenticity does not seem to have abated in everyday discourse and
experience. Authenticity has become a catchword with distinctly moral undertones,
connoting virtues of craftsmanship, time depth, and localness. It also comes with mar-
keting potential: the raison d’être of a burgeoning heritage industry could well lie in its
appeal to a public longing for supposedly simpler, more honest times, free from artifice
and synthetic materials, concerned with the real thing instead of a world of mirrors
and simulacra. In an article on the importance of practices of copying in everyday life
in Kyoto, Christoph Brumann aptly brings out the awkwardness that anthropologists
experience when faced with strong assertions of the authentic: “claims of originality
and authenticity are natural suspects to the anthropological gaze. And instead of
deciding themselves whether specific human creations deserve to be considered
original, authentic, or unique, anthropologists often feel more at ease on a meta-level,
studying the social contexts of such claims” (Brumann 2008, 213; cf. Lindholm 2008a).
In a bid to overcome the impasse of the meta level, Fillitz and Saris (2012), in an edited
volume that firmly resituates authenticity in modernity, emphasize the important role
played by authenticity’s opposite and call for an ethnographic focus on what social
actors aim to achieve as they make clear distinctions between the authentic and the
inauthentic—a move that Nadia Seremetakis may consider not without its risks, as she
wrote that “the notions of authenticity and inauthenticity are symbiotic concepts that
equally repress and silence non-contemporaneous and discordant cultural experiences
and sensibilities” (1994, 17: n.3). And yet, rather than indulging in a complicity of irony
or rejection that earnest invocations of the authentic or the inauthentic may provoke,
scholars increasingly pay close attention to the enduring appeal of authenticity as a
combination of material quality, value judgment, instrument, scapegoat, or ideal, by
situating it in the ways in which practitioners engage with it, in particular in practices
of identity and heritage making. As Vannini and Williams assert in another volume
about authenticity’s cultural roles drawing insights from sociology and cultural studies,
“authenticity work is skillful and craft-like” but it can also be approached performa-
tively or pragmatically, as adaptation (2009, 8–10). Subsequently, its semantic field in
academic discourse has evolved into amalgamations of the quality of a thing made
or encountered, anchored in its materiality, with the soothing or bolstering appeal
of a subjective feeling experienced on the part of the maker or actor in the presence
of an auratic medium not necessarily endowed with signs of time passing—which
emphasizes authenticity’s situational and contingent aspects.
An interesting case in point is archaeologist-ethnographer Siân Jones’s (2010) dis-
cussion of the problematic tension between constructivist approaches of authenticity
in academia and cultural criticism and materialist approaches in the heritage industry,
the former emphasizing contingency, the latter measurability. Drawing on historical
events feeding into a fieldwork experience with the excavation of a Pictish cross-slab,
Jones calls for a fruitful combination of the two approaches in paying attention to mate-
riality as an analytical site for exploring relationships between objects and people, argu-
ing that authenticity remains a compelling notion for actors and cannot be dismissed
4 A U T H E N T I CI T Y, C U L T U R A L

ironically. Offering an excellent discussion of the emerging importance of inner essence

as opposed to potentially deceptive outer surface in modernity, Jones elaborates on
Benjamin by suggesting that a felt, intimate connection with specific objects and, impor-
tantly, the relations in which they are embedded may be expressed in a kind of “aura”
or “voicefulness” that authenticates both the object and the self (Jones 2010, 189). Jones
suggests that “people use authenticity to work out genuine or truthful relationships
between objects, people and places, and this process is heightened by the forms of dis-
location and displacement that characterize the modern world” (2010, 198).
Such harnessing is done in quite deliberate ways in practices of replication aimed
at reviving or reliving the past, with consequences for a discursive location of the
authentic that are at first sight quite surprising and that pose a challenge to the alleged
losses of modernity invoked by Jones, and Benjamin before her. In an article on the
New Salem Historic Site, an open-air museum in the American state of Illinois where
living historians seek to breathe life into Abraham Lincoln’s 1830s place of residence,
Edward Bruner (1994) offers particularly interesting insights into the use of the term
“authentic” among heritage professionals. New Salem, he tells us, is called an “authentic
reproduction” by the museum staff that run the site. Rather than denouncing this
expression as an oxymoron, Bruner pays attention to the meanings attributed to “the
authentic” by staff and visitors and, in doing so, troubles a neat distinction between
originals and copies. Similarly, in a study of the skilled practices of so-called Indianists,
European amateurs fascinated by Native American material culture in the past,
Kalshoven (2012; cf. 2010) draws attention to Indianist provocative, proud, and yet
quite offhand use of the phrase “authentic replica” for successful re-creations of Native
American artifacts and situates this phrase in its social, rhetorical, and moral context.
Rather than enabling nostalgic longing for an elusive past, authentic replicas, pace
Benjamin, are shown to create social relationships in the Indianist European present
through performances of knowledge and skill. In both examples, the authentic is
located firmly in the modern present rather than in a longed-for past.
What emerges here, is a new kind of grassroots rhetorical use of the concept.
In an interesting twist, Fillitz and Saris (2012) point out that anthropology’s (and,
for that matter, heritage professionals’ and enthusiasts’) problematizing, nuancing,
and hybridizing of authenticity coincides with successful attempts by indigenous
communities to harness the concept in its more traditional sense in support of
political and economic goals, often, ironically, with anthropologists acting as experts
in validating a tribe’s or First Nation’s existence through time (see Lindholm 2008b).
Such instrumentalizing of cultural authenticity is emphasized also by Vannini and
Williams when they suggest it “may be seen as some sort of ideal, highly valued and
sought by individuals and groups as part of the process of becoming. Alternatively,
authenticity is often something strategically invoked as a marker of status or method
of social control” (2009, 3). The process of becoming a federally recognized tribe in the
United States is very much a process of cultural authentication, to which James Clifford
(1988) dedicated a fascinating chapter and analysis in The Predicament of Culture,
problematizing the idea of “endangered authenticities” that have to be defended
against an outside world. Clifford’s example of the pitfalls surrounding identity and
authenticity concerned a 1976 trial in which a Cape Cod band, the Mashpee, had to
 A U T H E N T I CI T Y, C U L T U R A L 5

prove their tribal identity in order to be able to sue for possession of 16,000 acres of
land. He offered a selective account of the courtroom proceedings, presenting the trial
as a contest between the oral (the evidence given by tribal members, the plaintiffs, who
spoke from their own experience and memories) and the literal (the archival evidence
used by the defendants). The plaintiffs called on anthropologists to support their case;
the defendants on historians. Questions were asked to establish the tribal members’
cultural authenticity that now sound particularly jarring, including: “You don’t eat
much Indian food, do you? … You use regular doctors, don’t you?” (Clifford 1988,
286). The anthropologists were capable of self-irony; the historians stuck to what they
considered to be facts. In the end, history won out over anthropology in this particular
trial: “The proceedings had been theatrical, full of contending voices and personalities,
but they ended with a historian’s methodical recitation of particulars” (1988, 339).
A major aspect highlighted by Clifford concerned the question of authority: Who,
in fact, has the authority to make statements and decisions concerning a group’s
identity or cultural authenticity (1988, 8)? That such authority may be swayed is
exemplified by later developments in the Mashpee story, as the community was granted
the status of “federal tribe” in 2007 (boston.com 2007). In Clifford’s narrative, it was
the nontribal defendants and their advisers who approached the authentic as a fixed
category with clear markers. In Charles Lindholm’s case study of the Flatheads, it
is the tribal members who “believe racial and ethnic categories are both rigid and
essential for determining one’s true being,” with enrollment into the tribe depending
on blood quantum. And yet, Flathead elders maintain that there is more to an authentic
Flathead identity than genes alone (Lindholm 2008b, 134). Not surprisingly, making
decisions about categories of inclusion and exclusion is not always straightforward
in a world characterized by an “unprecedented overlay of traditions” (Clifford 1988,
5–9), which makes it hard to draw out neat identities expressed in and strengthened
by “authentic” ritual and performance. In fact, the strength or novelty of modern,
or postmodern, uses of authenticity lies, perhaps, precisely in the quite deliberate
claiming or performing of rituals and identities in both amateur and professional
realms, shaped by the (re)construction of revived or new authenticities or, conversely,
by the blurring of supposed authenticities and expressed through experimentation
with existing, conventional forms. Cultural authenticity is a matter of negotiation,
contestation, and identity politics, thus remaining an eminently human preoccupation.

SEE ALSO: Art, Anthropology of; Copies and Fakes; Cultural Politics; Cultural
Survival; Dance, Anthropology of; Display, Anthropological Approaches to; Embodied
Learning; Essentialism; Ethnographic Spectacle; Ethnomusicology; Heritage; Indi-
geneity in Anthropology; Indigenous Theory; Language and Identity; Materiality;
Mimesis; Modernity; New Age, Wicca, and Paganism; Theme Parks, Anthropological
Study of; Threads; Tourism, Travel, and Pilgrimage; Visual Anthropology

REFERENCES AND FURTHER READING

Bendix, Regina. 1997. In Search of Authenticity: The Formation of Folklore Studies. Madison: Uni-
versity of Wisconsin Press.
6 A U T H E N T I CI T Y, C U L T U R A L

Benjamin, Walter. 1999. “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.” In Illumina-
tions, edited and with an introduction by Hannah Arendt, translated by Harry Zorn, 211–44.
London: Pimlico.
boston.com. 2007. “Mashpee Tribe Wins Federal Recognition.” Accessed November 24,
2016, http://www.boston.com/news/local/articles/2007/02/16/mashpee_tribe_wins_federal_
recognition.
Brumann, Christoph. 2008. “Copying Kyoto: The Legitimacy of Imitation in Kyoto’s Townscape
Debate.” In The Culture of Copying in Japan, edited by Rupert Cox, 213–38. London: Rout-
ledge.
Bruner, Edward M. 1994. “Abraham Lincoln as Authentic Reproduction: A Critique of Postmod-
ernism.” American Anthropologist 96 (2): 397–415.
Clifford, James. 1988. The Predicament of Culture: Twentieth-Century Ethnography, Literature,
and Art. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Fillitz, Thomas, and A. Jamie Saris, eds. 2012. Debating Authenticity: Concepts of Modernity in
Anthropological Perspective. Oxford: Berghahn Books.
Handler, Richard. 1988. Nationalism and the Politics of Culture in Quebec. Madison: University
of Wisconsin Press.
Hughes-Freeland, Felicia. 1998. “From Temple to television: The Balinese Case.” In Recasting
Ritual: Performance, Media, Identity, edited by Felicia Hughes-Freeland and Mary M. Crain,
44–67. London: Routledge.
Jones, Siân. 2010. “Negotiating Authentic Objects and Authentic Selves: Beyond the Destruction
of Authenticity.” Journal of Material Culture 15 (2): 181–203.
Kalshoven, Petra Tjitske. 2010. “Things in the Making: Playing with Imitation.” Special issue on
the theme of imitation, Etnofoor 22 (1): 59–74.
Kalshoven, Petra Tjitske. 2012. Crafting “the Indian”: Knowledge, Desire, and Play in Indianist
Reenactment. New York: Berghahn Books.
Lindholm, Charles. 2008a. Culture and Authenticity. Oxford: Blackwell.
Lindholm, Charles. 2008b. “Authenticity on the Margins.” In Culture and Authenticity, 125–37.
Oxford: Blackwell.
Myers, Fred R. 1994. “Culture-Making: Performing Aboriginality at the Asia Society Gallery.”
American Ethnologist 21 (4): 679–99.
Seremetakis, C. Nadia, ed. 1994. The Senses Still. Boulder, CO: Westview Press.
Trilling, Lionel. 1972. Sincerity and Authenticity. London: Oxford University Press.
Vannini, Phillip, and J. Patrick Williams, eds. 2009. Authenticity in Culture, Self, and Society.
Farnham, UK: Ashgate.
Wang, Ning. 1999. “Rethinking Authenticity in Tourist Experience.” Annals of Tourism Research
26 (2): 349–70.