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Vital Signs: Paper Session 4b
Wednesday 10 September, 3.30-5pm, Room G32
4b. Authenticity, artificiality and consciousness
‘”We strut with borrowed plumes”: Real life and the force of imitation’ – Dr Petra Tijtske Kalshoven (University of Aberdeen)
‘We strut with borrowed plumes.’ This remark, delivered with an ironic undertone by a German practitioner of Indianism—a contemporary form of serious leisure involving re-enactment by non-Native people, on European soil, of nineteenth-century Native American life on the Plains—will act as a guiding rod in my paper on the makings of real life. In an effort to explore ‘what life was really like’ among North American Indians in the past, European Indianists routinely and passionately play at ‘other’ identities in other times and places. Outsiders consider their practice a mismatch in terms of temporality, geography, and genealogy. As I found in my ethnographic fieldwork in 2003-2004, Indianists themselves, while aware of the ironies of their mimetic practice, emphasize the high degree of authenticity in both their historical re-enactments and their skilful replicas. Indianism, as it oscillates between the real and the fake, violates expectations about normal categories of behaviour and artefacts (Pascal Boyer). This ‘devious’ exercise in style and imitation evokes the struggles with the ontological status of forgery played out in the philosophy of art. Practices of re-enactment and forgery strut with borrowed plumes, creating something new in the process. They represent the play element exemplified by Lucretius’ clinamen, the swerve of an atom deviating from the parallel flow of fellow-atoms, enabling clashes from which life and society emerge. Conceiving of re-enactment and forgery as creative forces of imitation, I will argue that real life is best theorised where it appears most strikingly fake.
'Photogenic authenticity in tourism' - Dr John Taylor (University of Manchester)
This paper explores issues concerning the much-debated 'tourist gaze' and concept of authenticity in relation to two instances of tourism-related practice in Vanuatu. In the first, tourists attend the South Pentecost 'land dive' (gol) to see boys and men hurl themselves from wooden towers with vines tied to their ankles in death-defying displays of masculinity and richly 'authentic' culture. Here, however, the at once alluring and troubling distance of such authenticity is eclipsed by awesome spectacle and the I-witness 'experience' of human bodily limits. In the second, when cruise ships visit Luganville town, ni-Vanuatu children are displayed by their parents in gaudy, doll-like costumes, to be photographed by the visiting tourists. Here, from the co-mingling of an apparently 'inauthentic' image of faux-'nativeness' with that of a happy, prelapsarian innocence emerges a peculiar sense of uncertainty and friction. This paper juxtaposes these two instances to re-examine the fraught relationship between the gaze, authenticity, experience and cultural difference.
