Authenticity in analogy between past and present: towards an anthropology of cultural change

Abstract

The question of authenticity emerges in contexts of cultural innovation when people question whether innovative expressions of culture imply discontinuity with the past. In this article, it will be argued that this modernist concept of authenticity is alien to Pacific modes of thinking about cultural innovation and change. It draws on extensive fieldwork in Māori society of Aotearoa New Zealand, where people rarely, if ever, refer to cultural practices as inauthentic. Instead, they focus on analogies between the past and the present, for instance in kinship terminology and aesthetic practices such as tattooing. In so doing, they defy connotations of inauthenticity and sometimes even cultural change at large. This is not to say that change is denied as it is implied in the comparative analogy between past and present that aims at accounting for cultural change. Thus, Māori somehow characterise change as continuity. Although analogies in Māori society are distinctive in cultural terms, speaking to the continuance of cultural practices irrespective of the disastrous impact wrought by colonisation, it is suggested that this understanding of change is more broadly applicable, e.g., as a means to understanding home-making strategies of youngsters in a migration context.