Quality and Genuineness in the World of Sicilian Olive Oil

Abstract

This article draws on the concept of authenticity as it is often deployed in regards to food, and specifically in regards to foods with Geographical Indication certifications (GIs). Authenticity, as a concept, does boundary work by coding some objects or subjects as authentic, defining them against inauthentic others. Power dynamics inhere in any use of the processes of authentication, which render the authentic as noteworthy (Bendix 1997). Following calls to practice the “arts of noticing” (Tsing 2015) and to question our own ethnographic categories (De Martino 1975), this article takes the case of the olive oil sector in Sicily, Italy, and Sicilian Protected Geographical Indication (PGI) extra virgin olive oil, to think through authenticity and processes of authentication through the lens of two related concepts: quality (qualità) and genuineness (genuinità). I conceptualize qualità as a top-down articulation of authenticity: Sicilian olive and olive oil producers’ articulation of authenticity and excellence in response to a global hierarchy of value (Herzfeld 2004) in which they are situated and to which they respond. Genuinità, on the other hand, I argue is a bottom-up articulation of authenticity and goodness, one concerned less with international recognition and chemical purity and more with social relationships of trust and practices of commensality. I argue that qualità is a powerful measure of authenticity and a livelihood strategy for Sicilian oliviculturalists, but that genuinità is perhaps an even more powerful measure of authenticity in its capacity to create or reinscribe social bonds.