Debating Authenticity Hardcover

Thomas Fillitz

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 emphasize 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.

9780857454966

English

Berghahn Books

07-Jan-13

Thomas Fillitz is both Associate Professor of Social Anthropology and Director of the Department of Social and Cultural Anthropologyat the University of Vienna. He has been a visiting professor at the Universite des Sciences et Technologies Lille-1 (2001, 2003), at the Universite Lumiere Lyon-2 (2008), and at Universite Paris Descartes (2011). He has published Zeitgenosssische Kunst aus Afrika. Vierzehn Kunstler aus Cote d'Ivoire und Benin (2002) and many other articles and book chapters. A. Jamie Saris is Senior Lecturer at the Department of Anthropology at the National University of Ireland-Maynooth and Co-Chair of the Combat Diseases of Poverty Consortium. He has been working more than fifteen years in medical and psychological anthropology in Ireland, North America and Africa. For the past five years, he has focused on issues connected to poverty and structural violence in European cities, especially Dublin. He sits on the editorial board of Culture, Medicine, and Psychiatry and was previously the Editor of The Irish Journal of Anthropology.

A. Jamie Saris