culture appropriation

Letters Author(s): Robert Layton, Gilbert Manley, Olivia Harris, Susann Palmer and Arjun Appadurai Source: Anthropology Today, Vol. 2, No. 4 (Aug., 1986), pp. 24-25 Published by: Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3032715 Accessed: 19-03-2018 00:05 UTC

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attended by individuals from South Africa, which thereby had the effect of turning away many other Third World scholars. To permit participation of South African residents is thus in effect to refuse the participation of other Third World scholars. In practical terms the RAI Council's first resolution cannot be universally implemented by the archaeology congress organizers. To whom, then, is preference to be given?

The organizers were given an explicit brief to encourage maximum attendance by Third World scholars. To this end an unusual and imaginative programme was

developed and an impressive range of funding secured, with the aim of attracting Third World citizens who are normally unable to attend international scholarly gatherings. If First World archaeologists and anthropologists truly aspire to build relationships of mutual regard and cooperation with their colleagues in other parts of the world then they must, one would suppose, have some understanding of the abhorrence Third

World academics feel toward a regime whose very foundations are built on a denial of equality between citizens whom it classifies as racially different. If Western academics intend to maintain an equal dialogue with Third World scholars, then they will have reservations about opening that dialogue with an announcement that it will only be conducted on terms they have pre- determined. We suspect that, viewed from the perspective of the Third World, this would look very like intellectual colonialism.

By failing to acknowledge these issues, the majority of our fellow Council members seem to have turned their backs on the real world, within which the Archaeology Congress is operating, and which those who carry out research involving serious contact and extensive help from those they are studying must also of necessity confront.

Robert Layton, University of Durham

Gilbert Manley, University of Durham

Olivia Harris, Goldsmiths' College, University of London

Up-to-date news of the World Archaeological Congress will be found in the news columns under 'International Conferences'. Editor.

Further to thelexcellently-worded article by Jean La Fontaine in the July issue of A.T.: although I was born in South Africa and grew up there, I do not approve of apartheid and left 40 years ago when the present stifling situation began to arise. However, I also feel that it is very sad that the Congress should be used to try and fight this unfair situation. Two wrongs can never make a right. The ban on our South African colleagues must be

regarded as a very serious restriction on

academic freedom, one which must not be

condoned. Their con7tribution to goodwill

could have been immense. It is therefore even more distressing

that the present Committee is refusing to

refund the subscriptions of people who

have withdrawn on a matter of principle. I - and I know many other people - have written several times to ask for our money back. We had sent our ?180 early in good

faith after the first Circular of the 11th Congress of the International Union of Prehistoric and Protohistoric Sciences. I am sure that I do not need to point out

how very unfair this decision is and how it will only widen the chasm between

archaeological colleagues throughout the world. It will certainly not enhance the image of the Congress.

As I have now retired from my museum

profession, I would not be able to attend the UISPP Congress in.Mainz next year

unless I get my ?180 back. With very great reluctance I am considering legal action.

Susann Palmer

9 Lime Grove

London W12.

On Culinary Authenticity

During the academic year 1984-85, while I was a Fellow at the Center for

Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences (Palo Alto), I co-edited a periodical report on restaurants (and gourmandise generally) in the San Francisco Area, which was produced for

Fellows at the Center. The following brief

essay was my contribution to one issue of 'Food Notes'. The essay casts a slightly

different light on 'authenticity' the topic of Richard Handler's recent essay in A.T. (February 1986). My thoughts were stimulated in part by a recent essay by my

colleague Brian Spooner ('Weavers and Dealers: The Authenticity of an Oriental

Carpet' in A. Appadurai, ed., The Social

Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspective, CUP 1986). The co-editor of 'Food Notes', Dennis Thompson of Princeton University, helped to sharpen and clarify the main points in the essay.

Few words play as important a role in the vocabulary of the food critic as does the word 'authenticity'. But we have taken some pains to avoid using it in our reports to you. Our reservations about the

concept go to the heart of important issues in the philosophy of the social sciences.

Authenticity measures the degree to

which something is more or less what it

ought to be. It is thus a norm of some

sort. But is it an immanent norm,

emerging somehow from the cuisine

itself? Or is it an external norm, reflecting

some imposed gastronomic standard? If it is an immanent norm, who is its

authoritative voice: the professional cook? the average consumer? the gourmand? the housewife? If it is an imposed norm, who is its privileged voice: the connoisseur of exotic food? the tourist? the ordinary

participant in a neighbouring cuisine? the cultivated eater from a distant one?

These questions lead to the first puzzle

of authenticity. Authenticity is typically

not the concern of the native participants in a culinary tradition, except when they

(and the food) are far from home. It generally arises in the contexts of export, tourism, gourmandise, and exoticism. The concern with authenticity indicates some

sort of doubt, and this sort of doubt is rarely part of the discourse of an undisturbed culinary tradition. It is the problem of the outsider. Yet its very invocation reflects our yearning, as outsiders, for a set of criteria of genuineness in the cuisine we are

exploring. Like all mirages, authenticity drives us to immense efforts in our

pursuit of it, but invariably vanishes just when we think we have it. When a cultivated external concern looks for an untutored internal basis, frustration is the inevitable result. It follows that an expert in an alien cuisine is a person who has access to another expert.

The second puzzle about authenticity is its relationship to quality. Quality is

typically the insider's concern, authenticity that of the culinary tourist. We often admit that there is food that,

though inauthentic, is good. But can we as easily speak of food that is authentic but bad? It is difficult to come up with

examples of the latter sort. What is involved in such cases are items that we

intuitively suspect exemplify their culinary tradition in one sense but not in another. These senses are difficult to discriminate,

especially in practice. The final puzzle about authenticity

reminds us of Hegel's observation about

the 'Owl of Minerva'. Authenticity as a

criterion seems always to emerge just after its subject matter has been significantly transformed. How is one to generate

stable criteria of authenticity for traditions that are always changing? All

cuisines have a history: tastes shift,

regional distinctions go in and out of

focus, new techniques and technologies appear. New foods come in and go out of vogue in all complex culinary traditions. The idea of authenticity seems to imply a

timeless perspective on profoundly historical processes. Thus, the

transhistorical ring of aulthority with which the word authenticity is sometimes

used in the evaluation of foreign cuisines is spros

Arlun Appadurai Associate Professor of Anthropology,

University of Pennsylvania

25

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