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Paper short abstract:

This paper discusses children’s pursuit of ‘authenticity’ through their engagement with material culture at the National Museum of Scotland. It suggests that the concept of ‘authenticity’ provides insight into constructions of cultural knowledge and belonging, relations of trust and the affective presence of heritage in the form of museum artefacts.

Paper long abstract:

"Temples of authenticity" (Handler 1986:4), museums are spaces where cultural heritage is represented in material form. The National Museum of Scotland is particularly self-conscious about its role in the performance of national identity and belonging. One of its key educational resources, Object Handling Boxes, encourages children to explore artefacts in a bid to develop their investigative skills and inspire their own understandings of the past. The children are well aware, however, that these objects are often "false" replicas of the real thing. Despite the sometimes-contrary assumptions of museum professionals, children's consistent questioning over whether objects were "real" or not, expresses 'authenticity' as a central concern within their museum experience. This paper employs ethnographic material from the National Museum of Scotland's education programmes to suggest that 'authenticity' does not have to be reduced to the intellectual and emotional projections of human 'subjects' onto material 'objects', rather museum artefacts have an affective capacity inherent to their physical nature. 'Authenticity' can thus refer to an embodied experience, a very real and physical encounter between 'things', and through which the metonymical presence (Runia 2006) of the past is felt and acted upon. Employing the politically-charged national touring exhibition of the Lewis Chessmen as a case study, this paper also examines the ways in which children in local communities across Scotland (in Edinburgh, Aberdeen, Shetland and Lewis) engage with "real things from the past" in the process of creating their own narratives of identity and belonging.

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Paper short abstract:

The appeal of stereotypical authenticity claims ought to be balanced by cautious practice but museums are vulnerable to cultural property rights claims which employ authenticity arguments framed in terms of “traditional” practice. This paper looks for a theoretically informed understanding of repatriation in this contested cultural context.

Paper long abstract:

While there are many sound and practical ways for museums to establish the provenance and connections between persons and artefacts for the purpose of judging repatriation claims, this paper looks at an instance where claims of cultural authenticity, bolstered by assertions of "traditional" practice, completely overwhelmed excellent provenance. In most museums, the power of stereotypical authenticity claims will be balanced by cautious practice but museums are as much a part of contemporary political sphere as they are the academic anthropological world. As this case shows, all museums may be vulnerable to spurious authenticity claims; they are a party to the creation of those ideas in the first place. This paper suggests that anthropology itself is at the root of one of the biggest problems, the idea that culture inheres in objects and that people can retrieve their culture, having lost it through negative experience, by reconnecting with objects that provide links to the past. Following Strathern, who argues that persons do not exist prior to their culture, and cannot lose it by any means, this paper looks a theoretical approach to repatriation claims which acknowledges the distributed personhood and cultural context of our artefactual relations at the museum.

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Paper short abstract:

This paper explores how the dongba as the ritual practitioner perceives his authenticity during the marriage ceremony in the Naxi Wedding Courtyard in Lijiang, China. Through the dongba’s life story, the paper gives rise to the performative experience of the authenticity and offers a deep understanding of the link between memory, habitus and embodied practice. The dynamic process of “becoming” authentic weaves the interaction between the individual agency and the reality.

Paper long abstract:

Being one presentation of global cultural change, tourism has been searching for "authenticity", a movement from the front to the back of human interaction that reflects the desires of tourists and consumers for genuine and credible cultural construction and representation in diverse cultural and heritage contexts. The long term academic discussion on what precisely "authenticity" means to tourism has resulted in three major approaches in conceptualizing the term, namely objective authenticity, constructive authenticity and existential authenticity. However, the existing categories seem to imply a dichotomy of objective-subjective orientation. The reaction to mediatised, commercialized and socially constructed reality is not a "thing" to possess or "a state of mind", but an instrumental embodiment aroused through the dynamic interaction between individual agency and the external world. In this sense, authenticity is neither objective nor subjective, but rather performative.

Taking the life story of a dongba named Fuhua who was born in a Dongba family, trained in the official Dongba Research Institute, and now working as the marriage ritual performer in the Naxi Wedding Courtyard as a case study, this paper aims to explore how this dongba perceives his authenticity of the ritual performance in the marriage ceremony. The notion of performative authenticity here illustrates the dynamic interaction between memory, habitus and embodied practice. The socio-economic and political transition in China, in particular the policy on culture heritage will be used as a window to explore "complex human and social engagement, relations and negotiation" in the process of tourism development.

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Paper short abstract:

The paper explores issues of belonging and authentication in a Jewish community in post-socialist Poland, where the collective legacy of the past is confronted with the transnational condition of the present.

Paper long abstract:

The Jewish Connection. Negotiation of belonging and politics of recognition in a globalized Polish Jewish community.

The paper explores issues of belonging and authentication in a Jewish community in post-socialist Poland, where the collective legacy of the past is confronted with the global condition of the present.

The majority of newcomers to post-socialist Polish Jewish institutions comes from mixed Jewish and non-Jewish families. Some can substantiate their sense of Jewish belonging by documents and embedding in the Jewish social network, while others have at their disposal only the sense of affinity and familial narratives of commonality and connectedness. Eventually, individuals that engage in the institutional Polish Jewish sociality encounter categorizations and ontologies of Jewishness forged in a transnational, multi-scalar space of Polish Jewish resurgence. The paper explicates how Polish Jewish people legitimate and negotiate Jewish belonging in the setting of minority institutions and how 'authenticity' of claims to Jewishness confronts transnational identity politics with the everyday life of the Wroclaw Jewish Congregation. I will consider how the idiom of kinship is mobilized in the negotiation of social boundaries and reflect on how 'traditional' ontologies of Jewishness are challenged and re-conceptualized to foster a more inclusive sense of community, informed by the haunting legacy of post-War Jewish life in Poland.

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Paper short abstract:

This paper uses Liverpool's ECoC status 2008 as a lens to explore negotiations of Liverpudlian identities, in particular being ‘scouse.’ Through participant observation in a social housing complex the importance of neighbourhood and community to the authentic performance of identity become apparent.

Paper long abstract:

The city of Liverpool in North West England was European Capital of Culture (ECoC) in 2008. The ECoC year placed the spotlight on the much-beleaguered city and provided an opportunity to ask questions about understandings of identity with particular reference to ideas of what it means to be 'a proper scouser'('scouser' being a colloquial term for a person from Liverpool). Following a period of participant observation in a reading group in a North Liverpool over 55s housing complex the study reveals interesting notions about constructions of self and group identity.

Locality, neighbourhood and community, whilst interrelated notions, are revealed to be salient, distinct and subjective in the ways in which members of the reading group think about their individual identities. Utilising the work of Myerhoff (1986) about 'definitional ceremonies' this paper explores how the reading group, despite their advancing years, still negotiate and problematise what it means to be part of the Liverpudlian community. This snapshot forms part of an ethnographic study into performances of Liverpudlian identities during 2008 and the following year.

The paper will note the rivalry that exists between the cities of Manchester and Liverpool based on myth, legend, football, and trade. Taking a reflexive stance by identifying herself as Mancunian the researcher acknowledges the potential barriers that might have arisen in the anthropological encounters with the group but which in fact added to the richness of the data. More generally, the insider/outsider continuum is seen as part of the authenticating processes when discussing and performing identities.

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Paper short abstract:

This paper explores efforts by Afrobolivians for social inclusion and political representation and analyzes the role of 'uniquely afrobolivian' cultural expressions that have shaped those efforts and continue to play a crucial role within the context of the country's recent reforms.

Paper long abstract:

This paper explores afrobolivian cultural and political activism and the dynamics of invoking 'uniquely afrobolivian' cultural heritage in the process of creating an identity-based movement. It further analyzes the role of concepts of culture and heritage in activists' engagement with the Bolivian state and its changing politics of recognition of cultural difference. Since the early 1980s, Afrobolivians have organized around the idea of re-valorizing and preserving their distinct identity and culture within a society that mostly ignored their existence and a state that denied official recognition as an ethnic group. In recent years, the Bolivian state has promoted significant reforms in terms of recognition of various ethnic groups, and Afrobolivians have achieved official recognition within Bolivia's new Constitution in 2009. The emphasis on 'authentic' cultural expressions that can be traced back to Africa is central in this regard. Not only has the performance of African-derived dances provided the stage for voicing demands for inclusion; the emphasis on a distinctly afrobolivian culture has also paved the way out of statistical invisibility and challenged ideas of the supposed acculturation of Afrobolivians to the Aymara population and appropriations of afrobolivian cultural elements by other sectors of society. Other efforts - such as the revival of a symbolic afrobolivian monarchy or the promotion of 'authentic' afrobolivian villages for tourism - serve as further examples of strategies employed in order to constitute their history, culture and heritage as an integral part of the multi-ethnic/plurinational society of the country, aiming at social inclusion and political representation.

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Paper short abstract:

The Native Title claim in the South West of Western Australia raises discourses of authenticity, belonging and adaptation. This paper explores the mobilisations, interactions and impacts of these conflicting perspectives developed in this context of Native Title requirements by the Aboriginal Noongars and the white Australians.

Paper long abstract:

Since the 1990s, the Noongars, the Aborigines of the South West of Western Australia, have been engaged in Native Title claims over their land and are actually negotiating with the State Government of Western Australia to settle these claims. Colonisation had a deep and devastating impact on the Noongars, white settlement and intensive farming often forced them out of their land or pushed them into adapting their traditional way of life to survive. Nowadays, most of the land is held in private property by white Australians and the Noongars are marginalised. The claiming process raises discourses of authenticity, belonging and adaptation. On the one hand, the white Australians are anxious of the impact that such a recognition could have on a land that officially belongs to them. Some feel guilty for the dispossession their ancestors have caused on the traditional land owners, others are resentful of the Noongar community which they consider has lost its traditional culture. On the other hand, the Noongars are required to prove their authenticity and the continuity of their culture in order to be recognised as the traditional owners of the South West and be granted land rights. While trying to demonstrate that their culture has survived thanks to its flexibility and capacity of adaptation, the Noongars have also engaged themselves in the revival of certain traditional customs and features and some family groups are arguing around issues of authenticity. This paper explores the mobilisations, interactions and impacts of these conflicting perspectives and discourses.

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Paper short abstract:

I wish to take a closer look at the Tangsa people living in north-east India with respect to the recent attempts made to retrieve and reinvent their ‘authentic’ culture – in songs, dances, dress and ritual practices -- in order to fashion a new ethnic identity in keeping with their modern Christian present.

Paper long abstract:

Tangsa refers to more than 30 small Naga-related ethnic groups who have migrated into north-east India from the Patkai hills in northern Myanmar and have settled in the Indian states of Assam and Arunachal Pradesh. In the last few decades, rapid changes have occurred to their lifestyles as a result of their migration down from the hills, conversion of most of the Tangsa to Christianity, and their acceptance of a 'modern' way of life in the democratic Indian state.

Initially, conversion had implied burning of traditional artefacts and giving up most of their old cultural practices, but many Christian Tangsa have slowly realised that their new religion cannot help them secure their ethnic identity. On the other hand, the few non-Christian Tangsa still left have also understood that putting religious divide before ethnic unity could lead to their annihilation, in the face of the very complex ethnic situation in the area. Therefore, there have been intense efforts in recent years, on the part of both groups, to come together to retrieve and reinvent their 'authentic' traditional culture in order to deliberately fashion a common ethnic identity.

In this paper I wish to take a closer look at some of these attempts made, as manifested in present-day Tangsa festivals, in terms of training youth in 'authentic' traditional dances and songs, going back to the hills to 'find' their traditional costumes, and in modifications admittedly made to the supposedly authentic rituals and practices in order to fit better with modern times.