Debating Authenticity

Concepts of Modernity in Anthropological Perspective

Thomas Fillitz, A. Jamie Saris, Thomas Fillitz, A. Jamie Saris

• Publisher: Berghahn Books
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN: 9781782389125
• eBook ISBN: 9780857454973
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Scienze sociali
• Subtopic: Arte generale

The longing for authenticity, on an individual or collective level, connects the search for external expressions to internal orientations. What is largely referred to as production of authenticity is a reformulation of cultural values and norms within the ongoing process of modernity, impacted by globalization and contemporary transnational cultural flows. This collection interrogates the notion of authenticity from an anthropological point of view and considers authenticity in terms of how meaning is produced in and through discourses about authenticity. Incorporating case studies from four continents, the topics reach from art and colonialism to exoticism-primitivism, film, ritual and wilderness. Some contributors emphasise the dichotomy between the academic use of the term and the one deployed in public spaces and political projects. All, however, consider authenticity as something that can only be understood ethnographically, and not as a simple characteristic or category used to distinguish some behaviors, experiences or material things from other less authentic versions.

PART I

Authenticity and Authenticating

Chapter 1

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REVISITING ‘CULTURE, GENUINE AND SPURIOUS’: REFLECTIONS ON ICONS AND POLITICS IN IRELAND¹

A. Jamie Saris

Introduction

The concept of authenticity has both defined and dogged anthropology from its foundation as a discipline. With roots in both the Romantic Movement and the largely Germanophone critique of the Enlightenment, the concept drew strength from the seeming triumph of its opposite: a disenchanted, deracinated modernity. For most of the history of anthropology, these worries tracked on at least two levels, which often, but did not necessarily, overlap: (1) the problem of living authentically: being true to oneself, which especially worried the Romantics in the nineteenth century² and (2) a concern for human relationships within different collectivities, in other words, a concern about the types and qualities of connections between individuals, especially those that were now possible in the modern moment.³ The assumption was, of course, that face-to-face relations, natural ties to kin and home and land, perhaps especially their larger analogues at the level of the nation-state, were fraying or even disappearing under the relentless individuation of subjects in modernity. It became easy, then, to fuse a sense of personal authenticity, a subject-centred sense of wholeness, with a more social sense of genuineness in the culture at large. It also became easy to see the contradictions between a mode of production that melted all that was solid into air and the complaints of classes thrown up by this process that eternal principles were being promiscuously destroyed (Berman 2009).

The lure of this concept for a discipline, that, by the late nineteenth century, had claimed, as its proprietary interest, small-scale societies, often in exotic places, was altogether predictable. The apocryphal incidences and occasional embarrassments that this sensibility has evolved for anthropology are almost too numerous to mention: from road-to-Damascus humanistic conversions in the field to stripping the clocks and other European trade goods from Kwakiutl Long Houses before snapping photographs of authentic lifeways, to list merely some quasi-mythologized elements of Franz Boas’s illustrious career (Stocking 1994). It is this sensibility that became the object of Fabian’s scathing critique, concerning the denial of coevalness between the ethnographer and his or her Other (Fabian 1983, see also 2000). The strong form of this critique challenges the very condition of the possibility of collective patterns of meaning that are not epiphenomena of either unique individual creativity or the impersonal machinations of political economy. The weaker form of the argument simply avoids much discussion of the problem.

I wish to enter this knotty problem through the work of Edward Sapir. Of course, few anthropologists have not had to read Sapir (at least as an honoured ancestor) as part of their graduate training. His contributions to various branches of the emerging science of anthropology in the first half of the twentieth century are too numerous to list. He was amongst the most talented theorists of language of his time, for example, as well as being a fine fieldworker, a brilliant social theorist and an important public intellectual.⁴ He both help to found (and then trenchantly critique) the Culture and Personality School in the United States.

Of all of Edward Sapir’s contributions, however, his article, ‘Culture, Genuine and Spurious’ (1949), seems to bear most directly on our topic. This work has tended to be read as something of an enigma over the last few decades: an important piece, to be sure (at least judging from the number of reading lists on which it still appears), but one hard to square with the discipline’s current scepticism about setting itself up as an arbiter of what is authentic, or even valuable, here, there, or anywhere else.⁵ Those who know something of Sapir’s biography sagely connect it to his artistic temperament: a musician by avocation, he also wrote and published poetry in some of the leading literary periodicals of his day, as well as producing a lot of art criticism (Darnell 1990). Ironically, this way of drawing the connection between Sapir and this work, however, allows ‘Culture, Genuine and Spurious’ to be sidelined as a significant contribution to the current debate on authenticity: a cri de cœur of a poetic soul, rather than the finished product from the analytical brain of a great scholar. Thus, even Bendix’s book-length treatment of authenticity in folklore studies (1997) largely sidesteps Sapir or this article. I want to offer what I hope will be a useful re-reading of this piece, showing that the way that Sapir develops some of the themes in his argument suggests a way that we can move beyond some of the sterile antimonies that plague debates about authenticity or the lack of it.⁶ I then try to work this reading through some of my own data on how certain objects and images have appeared in specific cultural-political struggles in Ireland.

What Does Sapir Mean by Genuine and Spurious?

There can be no doubt that ‘Culture, Genuine and Spurious’ is a sustained reflection on authenticity: its conditions of possibility and the many hurdles that it faces to be actualized in the lives of real people and real groups in concrete social-historical circumstances. Those familiar with the context of American anthropology during this period will recognize that one of the evident targets of this piece was Lowie’s diffusionist ‘shreds and patches’ dismissal of any type of pattern in culture. In other words, Sapir is expressly critiquing the claim that any sense of the ‘hanging-together’ of the meanings a subject experiences within a context is the result of ‘secondary realization’, an explanation generally composed of some combination of special pleading, forgetting and outright falsehood (1929, 1937). Sapir addresses this issue by moving away from a deracinated history of ostensibly discrete traits into a carefully constructed argument of how culture (in the singular) can be genuine or spurious, authentic or inauthentic from a subject-centred perspective, and, in turn, how selves can be genuine or not, depending on the nature of their interactions with meaningful forms within specific cultural contexts.

To begin with, then, I want to point out how Sapir fuses the two levels I outlined above. A genuine culture, he argues, produces genuine selves (and vice versa). On first reading, then, his argument conveys a very romantic sense of how badly most modern societies provide for the possibility of individual and group authenticity, and how especially badly current American society fares by this measure (see also Darnell 1990). At this level, the argument looks disappointingly derivative, on the one hand, from a continental tradition of critiquing modernity that by the early twentieth century, was already firmly embedded in sociology thanks to the work of Weber (the iron cage), Durkheim (excessive individualism flowing from the increasing division of labour) and Simmel (the tragedy of culture), and, on the other, from various philosophical and psychological authors, from Wilhelm Dilthey through William James, who had been making seemingly similar points, again, sometimes decades beforehand. Even Sapir’s justly respected scholarship: his many references to, say, Periclean Athens or unspecified groups in Native North America, or, indeed, his adopted North American society are uncharacteristically general, lacking the detail that proves so rhetorically powerful in so many of his other pieces.

On closer inspection, however, Sapir’s argument reads less like a romantic elegy on the loss of authenticity in the modern world and more a reflection on the relationship between an individual’s psychic economy and various other systems, such as the material economy and certain types of ‘cultural’ production, that are experienced as external to the self.

So long as the individual retains a sense of control over the major goods of life, he is able to take his place in the cultural patrimony of his people. Now that the major goods of life have shifted so largely from that of immediate to that of remote ends, it becomes a cultural necessity for all who would not be looked upon as disinherited to share in the pursuit of these remoter ends. No harmony and depth of life, no culture, is possible when activity is well-nigh circumscribed by the sphere of immediate ends and when functioning within that sphere is so fragmentary as to have no inherent intelligibility or interest. Here lies the grimmest joke of our American Civilization. The vast majority of us, deprived of any but the most insignificant and culturally abortive share in the satisfaction of the immediate wants of mankind, are further deprived of both opportunity and stimulation to share in the production of non-utilitarian values. Part of the time we are dray horses; the rest of the time we are listless consumers of goods which have received no least impress of our personality. In other words, our spiritual selves go hungry, for the most part, pretty much all the time. (Sapir 1949: 101)

It seems to me that much of Sapir’s later work on culture and personality, as well as his contribution to theory-making in psychiatry, is interestingly foreshadowed in his laying out the problem in this fashion. We can also see how his radical understanding of linguistic structure as being individual or social solely as a function of perspective and research interest is predicted here, as culture’s status as internal or external in this argument is a function of the subject’s experience of alienation from its value production, not as a quality in culture itself, or even in the context, per se. This sense is nicely captured in the seemingly repetitive use of the word ‘share’ in this quote. Its use as a verb sandwiches its deployment as a noun: we wish to ‘share’ in the production of cultural value, but we know that our ‘share’ in the ownership of the means of this production is vanishingly small. Or, to put it another way: people produce their cultural relationships (clearly not in a time or place of their own choosing) which are then either experienced as owned or controlled by them (genuine), or as something somehow done to them (spurious).

From this perspective, ‘Culture, Genuine and Spurious’ starts to look less like the reflection of an anguished poetical soul and more a sophisticated analysis of the relationship between production and alienation. Indeed, to the extent that Sapir is connecting a mode of production (including cultural production) with specific types of widely shared alienation, it echoes certain contemporary trends in Marxist literary theory, such as the work of Georg Lukács, who in ‘Reification and the Class Consciousness of the Proletariat’ (1923) predicted that this sense of extreme alienation was going to be an increasingly central part of modernity, insofar as the experience of being proletariat (that is, alienating one’s labour power as the main means of gaining money and so articulating to the economy) was becoming universalized.

To put my argument in its strongest form, then, we could usefully read Sapir as endeavouring to liberate a notion of alienation from the crude sense of material production in which the interpreters of Marx had mired it (those whom Gramsci will be critiquing in a few years time), and to develop a model of authenticity based on the sense of ownership (or a feeling of having a share in) the means of cultural production. This reading of Sapir’s argument belies the notion of an unreflexive relativism supposedly then at large in American anthropology, as current (middle-class) American culture comes out as especially spurious in Sapir’s analysis, but not simply as a relationship of lack of economic privilege. Thus, the examples that Sapir chooses for his alienated (perhaps straw-) man and woman are, not surprisingly, connected to the market, one from the great well of alienation that Marx found, the proletariat (Sapir’s example of the telephone girl), but the second comes from the bourgeoisie, a sort of standard average factory owner, whose economic privilege is contrasted both with his cultural paucity and his shrunken potential for self-realization. Note the ‘we’: all of us (with a few exceptions) are alienated from the means of cultural production, just as in the material economy we have (almost universally) seen the means of production slip from our control. In all these examples, then, culture and self have little to say (even worse, they actually lie) to each other subjects feel themselves to be passive recipients of received cultural forms rather than active cultural creators.

In the Market for Authenticity

Somehow, then, the market and modern property relationships are bound up with authenticity.⁷ Indeed, authenticity seems to be strongly threatened by the market whenever they meet. This is scarcely surprising, given the history of the terms describing inversions of authenticity – fake, spurious and kitsch, among others – all of which can serve as descriptions of products found at the lower end of the mass market (see Saris 2005). I believe that Sapir’s connecting of genuine selves and genuine culture through production, however, allow us to formulate a more useful definition of authenticity than the one forever threatened by the violation of a penetrating market economy. This reworking pivots on how Sapir discusses the nature of a genuine culture. Genuineness or authenticity is neither a state, nor simply a relationship between objects. Like alienation or fetish, these terms denote the quality of the relationship between a human subject and a product of human labour, in this case a cultural product. For Sapir, a subject either shares a sense of ownership towards a cultural form that her material-spiritual labour has helped to make, or she feels that these forms are external, if not actually oppressive. In turn, genuine cultural forms are experienced as internal resources, democratically shared, if not actually popularly owned, while still being available to creative individual ends. The past is of critical interest here.

And, for the time being, those other of us who take their culture neither as knowledge nor as manner, but as life, will ask of the past not so much ‘what?’ and ‘when?’ as ‘where’ as ‘how?’ and the accent of their ‘how’ will be modulated in accordance with the needs of the spirit of each, a spirit that is free to glorify, to transform and to reject. (Sapir 1949: 110)

Culture (note the singular) comes and goes precisely as this ‘how’ varies. This issue of control, then, is central to my rereading of ‘Culture, Genuine and Spurious’ and my subsequent argument. This emphasis forces us to confront the specificity of, say, reproduction, alongside the complexity of the market, even the mass market, in the promulgation of cultural forms. As I argue below, certain types of reproduction, even mass production, can indicate and instantiate just such a desire for control, while making a certain sense of ownership a potential personal and political reality. The metaphor of (especially external) culture as an object or possession: concentrated in certain high artefacts but quantifiably in other objects has too long a political history to yield to a simple deconstruction (even one as sophisticated as Handler 1986, 1992), but Sapir’s sense of ‘how’ might be a way of moving this discussion forward. Ownership in the modern capitalist sense, for example, ill reflects how individuals orient themselves to meaningful products, especially at critical historical junctures, nor does the concept, because of its modern resonance of alienable possession, encompass the precise sense of how subjects actually struggle to be connected to such products. The fixed nature of capitalist ownership (something is owned or it is not) also fails to reflect the temporal nature of this process, whereas Sapir’s ‘how’ has this sense built into it. Sharing, however, gives a much better sense of this issue. In other words, this sense of sharing is a process, needing regular regeneration. Thus, one era’s genuine form can be experienced as spurious by another, because of the feeling of being alienated from its production both temporally and socially, rather than simply experiencing it as being owned by someone else. But, in all these cases, the sense of democratic control, the harnessing of cultural labour in pursuit of individual creative ends is at the core of our analysis.

Horses and Jewellery in Ireland

To illustrate these points, I want to examine the production of two different icons of Irish tradition during politically contentious times: ‘Irish-themed’ jewellery in the mid-nineteenth century and the struggle over the ownership of horses in certain Dublin neighbourhoods that peaked towards the end of the twentieth century. I make no comment on any issues of hybridity in Ireland, or, indeed, on any other tradition. Instead, I start with the simple observation that jewellery and horses, in two different historical circumstances existed, as both icons and indexes that were experienced by a wide variety of subjects, internally and externally, as denoting things Irish: and that, despite surface dissimilarities, ‘Irish’ possessed similar valences in both contexts. Thus, the motifs that appear on jewellery for sale on O’Connell Bridge are experienced by seller, buyer and passerby as Irish, whatever the history of similar motifs in similar examples of material culture, say, in the La Tiene culture in Central Europe. At the same time, other collectivities, other nations, use the horse to carry meanings about their cultures, but certain representations of the horse have historically (and continue to have) great resonance for things Irish. My argument is that these things are fought over precisely because of their relationship to a self-...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Figures
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction. Authenticity Aujourd’hui
• Part I. Authenticity and Authenticating
• Part II. Moral Discourses of Authenticity
• Part III. Authenticity: Popular and Academic Discourses
• Part IV. Entangled Spaces of Authenticity
• Notes on Contributors
• Index