Authenticity

Geurds & Van Broekhoven Creating Creating Authenticity ‘Authenticity’ and authentication is at the heart of museums’ (eds.) Authenticity concerns in displays, objects, and interaction with visitors. These Authentication Processes in Ethnographic Museums notions have formed a central element in early thought on culture and collecting. Nineteenth century-explorers, commissioned museum collectors and pioneering ethnographers attempted to lay bare the essences of cultures through collecting and studying objects from distant communities. Comparably, historical archaeology departed from the idea that cultures were discrete bounded entities, subject to divergence but precisely therefore also to be traced back and linked to, a more complete original form in de (even) deeper past. Much of what we work with today in ethnographic museum collections testifies to that conviction. Post-structural thinking Authenticity `Creating brought about a far-reaching deconstruction of the authentic. It came to be recognized that both far-away communities and the deep past can only be discussed when seen as desires, constructions and inventions. Notwithstanding this undressing of the ways in which people portray their cultural surroundings and past, claims of authenticity and quests for authentication remain omnipresent. This book explores the authentic in contemporary ethnographic museums, as it persists in dialogues with stakeholders, and how museums portray themselves. How do we interact with questions of authenticity and authentication when we curate, study artefacts, collect, repatriate, and make (re)presentations? The contributing authors illustrate the divergent nature in which the authentic is brought into play, deconstructed and operationalized. Authenticity, the book argues, is an expression of a desire that is equally troubled as it is resilient. ISBN 978-90-8890-205-5 Sidestone Press Sidestone ISBN: 978-90-8890-205-5 edited by Alexander Geurds & Laura Van Broekhoven 9 789088 902055 Sidestone Press / RMV 4 2 Mededelingen van het Rijksmuseum voor Volkenkunde, Leiden This is an Open Access publication. Visit our website for more OA publication, to read any of our books for free online, or to buy them in print or PDF. www.sidestone.com Check out some of our latest publications: CREATING AUTHENTICITY Sidestone Press CREATING AUTHENTICITY Authentication Processes in Ethnographic Museums edited by Alexander Geurds & Laura Van Broekhoven Mededelingen van het Rijksmuseum voor Volkenkunde, Leiden No. 42 Mededelingen van het Rijksmuseum voor Volkenkunde No. 42 ISBN 978-90-8890-205-5 © 2013 National Museum of Ethnology Published by Sidestone Press, Leiden www.sidestone.com Published in Cooperation with the National Museum of Ethnology, Leiden www.volkenkunde.nl Head of Publications Committee: Fanny Wonu Veys Lay-out & cover design: Sidestone Press Photograph cover: Front: Authentic productions in action. Visitors interacting with objects in the permanent Mesoamerica gallery at the National Museum of Ethnology (Rijksmuseum Volkenkunde, Leiden). Back: top – Gold mamuli (Rijksmuseum Volkenkunde, Leiden; Liefkes 334); central – Mosaic skull (Rijksmuseum Volkenkunde, Leiden; 4007-1); bottom – Jar, Iran 13th century, metal lid 19th century addition (Victoria and Albert Museum, London; 2433-1876) Contents Preface vii Culture Sketching: The Authenticity Quest in Ethnographic Museums 1 An Introduction Dr. Alexander Geurds Real, Fake or a Combination? 11 Examining the Authenticity of a Mesoamerican Mosaic Skull Martin E. Berger When is Authentic? 39 Situating Authenticity in the Itineraries of Objects Prof. Rosemary Joyce Authentic Forgeries? 59 Prof. Oliver Watson From Lukas to Liefkes? 73 Age and Authenticity of Gold Jewellery from Sumba, Indonesia Francine Brinkgreve The Real Stuff: Authenticity and Photography from East Greenland in the Netherlands 101 Dr. Cunera Buijs Alternative Authenticities (and Inauthenticities) 137 Prof. Sally Price Authenticity and Curatorial Practice 151 Dr. Laura N.K. Van Broekhoven List of contributors and addresses 163 v PREFACE The papers in this volume are the outcome of a one-day symposium at the National Museum of Ethnology in Leiden, The Netherlands, titled “What is Authenticity? Questions of authenticity and authentification in ethnographic museums.” Originally organized by Laura Van Broekhoven, the symposium took place on November 30, 2012. Thanks are due to the staff of the National Museum of Ethnology for their organizational efforts, hospitality and interest. Thanks are due to the symposium’s participating scholars for their enthusiasm. We are grateful to Mariana Françozo for leading the panel discussion which stimulated discussions about the issue of authenticity. Two papers were ultimately not included in this volume, one by Cristiana Panella on unprovenanced objects and the opacity or transparency agendas of museum policies, and one by Wim van Zanten on living culture and authenticity in UNESCO world heritage conventions. They, together with all other participants, provided for a stimulating day of presentations and discussions, giving the inspiration to publish these papers. Alexander Geurds and Laura N.K. Van Broekhoven vii CULTURE SKETCHING: THE AUTHENTICITY QUEST IN ETHNOGRAPHIC MUSEUms An Introduction Dr. Alexander Geurds Introduction Objects are pliable. They can be dressed and unpacked, mimicked and feared, placed and hidden, adored and valued, commodified and singularised. Objects are thus complicated – ‘bundles’ of contextual meaning, to invoke Keane (2003). Though their physical form and substance allude to a seemingly limited range of interpretations and values, the object’s potential force as signifier is boundless. Consider the example of artisanal and agricultural tools. A sickle and a hammer conjure up worlds of ideology (communism), colours (red and yellow), and could even be in the running for most potent twentieth-century symbol. This representational pliability adheres to all things when they are caught up in audiences that speak of them as ‘objects’. There is a constant process of this kind going on in today’s cultural industry, including – though not of course exclusively − ethnographic museums. While such objects and the collections they make up were once ‘read’ by expert custodians (museum curators), ethnographic museums in the post-colonial era invite dialogue about collections, engaging with local audiences and groups who express a form of rootedness in the things preserved in the museum, destabilising notions of fixed cultures, while simultaneously creating or reinforcing cultural identities (Clifford 1988). This paradoxical dynamic may be uncomfortable for museum professionals but it is also impossible to dismiss, given that the number of case studies narrating such dialogues is increasing at a near-exponential rate (see e.g. Van Broekhoven et al. 2010). The symposium drew attention to the authority of UNESCO in highlighting institutionally-recognised types of cultural heritage. As the growing list of tangible and intangible world heritage testifies, these types are ranked in orders of authenticity, privileging some types over others. Still, these are unstable hierarchies. Certainly within the heritage industry, the notion of ‘authenticity’ as an objective standard for what should be preserved is now being questioned (Holtorf and Schadla-Hall 1999; Lowenthal 1995; McBryde 1997). To date, the social sciences, the humanities and the heritage sector appear to be discussing authenticity almost exclusively as historically situated − that is, contingent and 1 Creating Authenticity subject to change, echoing what David Lowenthal (1995) called the ‘flux of authenticity’. This implies that the authentic is still being located and determined on a daily basis. Contemporary examples from anthropology forcefully stress this process. Anthropological studies of commodities and commoditisation, for example, suggest that even the explicitly inauthentic can be reconceptualised into something authentic. Objects and their interpretation are so pliable as to eventually overcome being branded ‘inauthentic’ by achieving a ‘sufficient’ degree of authenticity, thereby breaking the binary debate of authentic versus inauthentic, instead creating degrees of authenticity. Crăciun (2012) analyses this broadening of possible object validations as an ‘approximation of the ideal’, largely accomplished by stressing particular desirable material qualities of the object. As brand authenticity in commodities resides largely in their origin (a well-known commercial brand, for instance), other aspects of materiality are necessarily invoked. This is not mere strategising by sly producers and duped consumers of ‘fakes’; this dynamic handling of objects by their users reveals that authenticity is a construct achieved through social experience (Brown 2010). Predictably, producers of high-end market brands would join many museum collection experts in challenging this view. As we hope that this volume will illustrate, however, authentication through provenance and/or age determination alone is as problematic as using legal arguments to prove commodity authenticity. By their very nature, objects remain pliable: they evoke ideas, realise images, and are a fundamental node in networks between people and places. Well into the second decade of the twenty-first century, and having installed a critical museology on the shoulders of French theory, we might ask where museum practice currently stands in this debate. Where and when do museums

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