Authenticity Richard Handler Anthropology Today, Vol. 2, No. 1 (Feb., 1986), 2-4. Stable URL: httpflinksjstor.orgsici?sici=0268-40X%28 1986002%292%3A1%3C2%GIAAMWIELO.CORSB2-P Anthropology Today is currently published by Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Treland. Your use of the ISTOR archive indicates your acceptance of ISTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use, available at flip: feworwjtor org/aboutterms.htmal. ISTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use provides, in par, that unless you fave obtained pcior permission, you may not dowaload an cnt isus of @ journal or multiple copies of articles, and you may use content inthe ISTOR archive only for your personal, non-commercial uss. Please contact the publisher cegarding any further use of this work. Publisher contact information may be obtained at bhupsforw.jstoc.org/joumals/tai. html. Each copy of any part of a JSTOR transmission must contain the same copyright notice that appears on the screen or printed page of such transtnission. ISTOR is an independent not-for-profit organization dedicated to creating and preserving a digital archive of scholarly journals. For more information regarding ISTOR, please contact support @jstor.org- hup:thrwwjstor.orgy Wed Oct 27 06:18:47 2004and is no doubt very necessary in the United States ‘contest. But when ane af the debaters at an open meeting fof the Association of Black Anthropologists wryly defined their organizational problem as being whether to come inta Master's house or say out inthe garden, ‘ne could see what she was driving at. ‘Whether a community is most itself in its great ceremonies or in its rundane everyday transactions is amatter for unending debate. twas something of atelief ‘visit, two days ater, the anthropology department at Princeton University, because this must be typical of anthropology departments all over the world. tis housed inoneof the moremodest buildings in Princeton, which fs among the wealthiest American universities. The campus magazine for that week (Weekly Nassau, 5 December) included an article on the contrast between richand poor departments, The rich department selected (or study is the new $29 m. ‘state of the-art’ molecular biology facili: The poor departments... anthropology, which is also one of thesmallest with only 7 and a half facelty. The publications record of the staff, says the reporter, isoutstanding, but there are problems in small staff numbers: a student who has recently switched her ‘major from anthropology to art history observes that professors are ‘atways coming and going [because of their fieldwork! and ‘the department is very much its own little island’. Gananath Obeyesekere, the department head, is pictured with his eyes rolled upwards, alongside a photograph of the apparently meagre departmental library with its nearly bare shelves, His arguments in favour ofthe subject are reported: ‘Students ueed to be shaken from the world in which they live .. The administration is fully aware and determined to do something for Anthropology: The student who ‘switched, Leste Wu, asserts that ‘t's not anthropology Left, [really liked the professors. {found anthropology asa fleld to be very flexible since t's basicaly the study of life Is the department that Lett. It has to shout ‘to berecognized ard that’s a shame because it shouldn't have t0 shout! Jonathan Bonthall 1. St Clair Deakesimerestng Reflecions on Ancheopalogy and che Black Experience (4nthron & Buc: Quarterly IX2. Summer 1978, pSS¢f) is an article of considerable opica) interest boeaue it shows thatthe complicated relaonship Daven social antoropology andthe ant-racimoverent has along background in the USA. Authenticity RICHARD HANDLER Richard Handler is sistant profesor at the ‘department af Sociology ‘and Anthropotoay, Lake Forest College, Minas The aril is based on @ per siven at aw insted secon, Tn and Out of Boundaries organized by ‘the Society for Humansstic Anthropology of the American Anthropological ‘Association annual meeting last December Washington, RC. ‘May I spell out ehcee initial presuppositions. Firs, [take ‘authenticity’ to be a cultural construct ofthe modern Western world. That ithas been acencral, though implicit, idea in much anthropological enquiry is a function of a Westen ontology cather than of anything in tbe non-Western cultures we study. Our search for authentie cultural experience - for the unspoiled, pristine, genuine, untouched and traditional + says more about us than about athers. Explaining anthropologicat notions of authenticity wll ive us yet another example of the startling degree to which anthropological diseaurse about others proves to be a working-out of our owa myths. ‘Second, authenticity isa cultural construct closely ted to Western nations of the individual. Following Tocqueville (1835) and Dumont (1977) J take individualism, which I define broadly to include an aperoack the physical universes wells tothe human ‘world, to bea defining aspect of modern culture, ‘The individual” has a central place in our understanding of reality Third, che bonds uniting authenticity and individuatis: remain tight in both commonsense and anthrapotogical ideas about culture, even though we usually consider discussions of culture to focus on collective aspects of human existence rather thar or individval persons. Thisis because cultutes are imagined as discrete, bounded unite, each unique - ike a ‘personality configuration, as one suggestive simile has 1 - and all of equal value, at least in the abstract Cultures, in our coramon sense, are the individuated entities of world society, just as, in our commonsense understandiia of political reality, nations are the individual actors of international o: World polities. This perspective is especially transparent in nationalist and ethnic ideologies, af which anthropological theory is 4 closely related though more sophisticated variant (Handler 1985a). Thus nationalist ideologies as well as anthropological thought attach authenticity to cultures Just as the larger ‘consumer culture’ that we live it attaches t to individual euman beings. am suggesting thatthe same constellation of eultual ideas which allows. aseft drink to be marketed as ‘the real ching", with the suggestion that those wha chaose it thereby gain areal ‘or authentic existence, underlies the anthropological search far cultural authenticity ‘Any discussion of authenticity should begin with a profound exercise in eulture history, Lionel Trilling!’ Sincerity and Authenticity (1971). Using a comparative hermeneutic which anthropologists will ind congenial, “Trilling interprets ‘sincerity’ and ‘authenticity im relation (o each other, shosing how both concepls emerge (as an overworked ver’ images i) with the emergence of ‘re modern world from che medieval, and, further, how authenticity teplaces sincerity asa central elerentin the individualist world view. Trilling defines sincerity as ‘the absence of dissimulation or feigsing or pretence’ (013), andy elsewhere, as ‘a congruence between avowal and actual Feeling™ (@2)."According to Trilling, the intense concern with sincerity which came to ‘characterize certain European national cultures at the beginning af the modern epach would seen £0 have developed in connection with a great public event, the extreme revision of traditional modes of ‘comriunal organization which gaveriseca the ensity ‘that iow figures in men’s minds under the name of society (p26) ‘Thus Trilling links sincerity fo modern notions ofindivideal and society, those new ideas with which ‘Westerners used 10 imagine themselves and their place inhistorical and, utimately, narara reality, As Cassirer remarks, in @ comparison of Enlightenment conceptions of natural science fo thoseof the Middle Ages, ‘the world ceased to bea “cosmos” in the sense ofan immediately accessible order of things’ (1932:37). To elaborate: in the medieval world view the cosmic order was understood as ordained and encompassed by God, as ‘a hierarchical whole in which humans and all other features of the natural world are subordinace parts whose ultimate reality has been assigned to diem by God, and depends upon their relationship to the other parts ‘ofthe whole. By contrast, individualism allows people to locate ultimate sealty within themselves. And their social world is no longer part of the divine hierarchy, but ‘society’, a human construction seen as the sum of {individual energies and desires. To quote Cassirer again, ‘on the modern ontology of ‘nature’ Nature .. implies the individuality, the Independence and particularity of objects. And trom his characteristic force, whichradiates from every ‘object as. special center of activity, is derived also the inalienable worth which belongs to it in eke totality of being. All this i now summed up in the ‘word ‘nature’, which signifies the integration ofall parts into one all-inclusive whale of activity ad life Which, nevertheless, no longer means mere subordination, For the part not only exists within the whole bur asserts itself agains it, constituting a specific element of individeality and necessity (en) As we shall see, thisidea ofthe part, unit, or individual asserting itself against the rest of the world asa locus of uhimate meaning and reality underlies modern notions of authenticity Rut to return for the moment to ‘sincerity: Telling takes the social changes accompanying the rise of individualistic culture - changes that we suromarize with the phrase “unprecedented sacial mobility’ ~ as the relevant backdrop to the birth of ‘sincerity’ With individualism (in whieh, as Dumont (1977: 4] reminds us, every person is considered equally representative of an abstract “humankind’) and with unprecedented ‘mobility, persons are no longer necessarily defined by their positon in the social hierarchy. They can rise or fall, and, more important, their humanity transcends their social place in any determination of who or what ‘they ‘eally ae’ Thus, a8 Tiling (p16) poines out, the term ‘villain’ once ‘refered roche man who stood lowest in the scale of fedalsociecs, whereas i eatly-modern novels ata plays the villain is ‘a persan who soeks t0 rise above the station to which he was bora’ In other words, as the feudal cosmos gave way ta the ideas of society and individual, persons were no longer content ‘wdefinethemseives, orto be defined by others, in terms ‘of their social rank. Yet such socially determined definitions of «person's Identity did nat disappear avernight, but survived, as it were, to do battle with more modern conceptions of the individual. The result was he coneera for sincerity that Trilling notes. [nthe medieval ward each human. being ‘exprestes' not Individuality - an inviolable sel? + but ‘a social condition’ {p37}, By contrast, once it ‘became ipariant to foeus on the individual self apart {op social status or position in the divine hierarchy, people were led to ask ahout the congruence berween ‘one’s cuter position, of te role ane played, and one’s Innes or true self. Hence the concern for sincerity, of which the quiscessential definition is. aiven "by Shakespeare ‘This above all: €o thine own self be true ‘And it doth fallow, as the night the day, ‘Thoe canst not then be false to any mart (Heritet 1.79.81) Telling suggests that the conception af sincerity ‘expressed heres ultimately ‘publi’ or social in thesense that sincerity is demanded not for the sake of the self ‘but forthat of others, thats, asa means 0 honest social ‘clationships (p9)- And he points out that sue sincerity is today no fonger highly valued precisely because it privileges social relationships rather than individual selfhood. Indeed, the early-modem obsession with sincerity is more an obsession with insincerity, and, according to Tiling, is closely linked to another newiy ‘mporcant idea, the idea ‘that everyonein society . acts apart, takes “position” does bis dance, eveq the King himseit (931). That a king can be imagined as playing the socal role of king suggests how greatly the moder ‘outlook defers from the medieval, which, presumably, the king simply was king, by vite ofthe essential being God had granted him, Society, chen, is the lacus of role-playing and of insincerity, As Rousseau putsit, discussing theemergence of ally formed civ society, It rew became the intrest ‘of men to appear what they really were not (1755: 86) And, as Trilling points out, sincerity itself, when practised because iti a social virtue, rotommended to us by the Poloniuses of the world, leads to insineeity ‘we play the role of being ourselves, we sincerely act the part of che sincere person, wich che result that 2 judgement may be passed upon ou sincerity that i is not authentic’ (pid) ‘So we arrive at ‘authenticity, which has wo do with ‘our true self, our individual existence, nt a8 we might present icto others, but asic ‘eal i} apa from any roles we play. We should here recall Cassirr's interpretation of the modern ontology of ‘nature’. in ‘which every objector thing in the universes seen asa special center of activity, a ‘specific element of individuality and necessity! Each thing is authentic because itis it exiss, on its own as well asin a larger universe of equally indeneedent entities. To describe authenticity, Telling horvaws a phrase fram Roxssesu, ‘the sentiment of being’. We moderas are ‘eharacteristically anxious about being, about ‘eality, ‘oy, more particularly, about our lack of realty, about ‘our lives Which seem, es the popular term hast, "unreal (cf. Leats 1981), To quote Tiling aga: “Thacthe word. (axthentcity) has become part ofthe moral sang of our day pointsto the peculiar nature of our fallen condition, ‘out aaxiety over the credibility of existence and af individual existences" (293), Now it is precisely anxiety about existence that characterizes nationalist ideologies, whose fundamentel premises always that ‘nation, bounded and distinctive, exists. Such anziety is particularly apparent where national or ethne groups find themselves in 2 struggle for recognition, seeking either national sovereignty or equal rights within a larger paliy. Thus, to aive same ‘examples frow 19th century Europe, we find Mazzini ascccting that ‘The Tealian] cation has nat as yer existed; therefore, ic must exist ithe future! And Renan: “The existence of ¢ nation isa plebiscite of every day, as the existenceof the individual isa perpetual affirmation af life! And Hyde: ‘tis felure of the Irish people... bas bocen largely brovalt about by therrace .. ceasing to be Irish withour becoming English (all quoted in Kohn 1965: 119, 139, 147. All sue rhetoric, which seeks 10 prove the existence af a nation, will proceed to define