Peeling Back the Onion of 'Authentic' Culture

"In a nice metaphor from Kwame Anthony Appiah, a Ghanian scholar who teaches at Princeton, examining a culture is like peeling an onion, where you discover layer upon layer of influences, borrowings, re-imaginings, and wholesale imports from other places. As an example, he points out that in West Africa, traditional Herero dress for women comes from nineteenth-century Lutheran missionaries. In Canada, it is customary for political leaders to give as gifts to visiting dignitaries Inuit soapstone carvings, but few Canadians realize that carving was introduced to the Inuit by a white carver in 1948.

Examples like this are endless. Every aspect of almost every culture, from musing to music, from dining to dance and everything else you can think of, has been shaped by trade in goods, ideas, technologies, and--more than anything else--by the simple fact of people moving around the planet and interacting with one another. One of my favorite examples is the steel drum ensembles of Trinidad, whose main instruments are the fifty gallon oil barrels left behind on the island by U.S. forces after the Second World War. These drums, along with other metallic objects such as biscuit tins and frying pans, almost completely replaced indigenous drum technology, which used bamboo. But does anyone think Trinidadian steel drum music is any less 'authentic' for it?

A healthy culture is like a healthy person: it is constantly changing, growing, and evolving, yet something persists through these changes, a ballast that keeps it upright ad recognizable no matter how much it is buffeted by the transformative winds of trade."

-Andrew Potter, The Authenticity Hoax

http://www.amazon.com/Authenticity-Hoax-Lost-Finding-Ourselves/dp/B004NSVFOU