Culture S And Authenticity

This book critically analyzes various means by which the authentic is searched for, staged, admired, dismissed, replicated or simply taken for granted. What is at work in such discursive practices is a poetics of imitation. This is seen as a paradoxical kind of poetics which renounces the authenticity of the created text.

Authenticity is taken-for-granted as an absolute value in contemporary life. In Culture and Authenticity, Charles Lindholm calls upon anthropological case studies from different cultures, historical material, and comparative philosophy, to explore how notions of authenticity develop, what forms it takes, and how it changes over time. Examines the idea of authenticity and its role in modern culture Explores society’s preoccupation with authenticity and the search for ‘real’ experiences Looks at how the concept of authenticity intersects with questions about religion, ethnicity, and race Investigates authenticity in the context of fields such as dance, cuisine, travel, and the modern marketplace

Many people in the West or global North now live in a culture of 24/7 instant messaging, iPods and MP3s, streamed content, blogs, ubiquitous digital images and Facebook. But they are also surrounded by even more paper, books, telephone calls and material objects of one kind or another. The juxtaposition and proliferation of older and newer technologies is striking. Making Digital Cultures brings together recent theorizing of the 'digital age' with empirical studies of how institutions embrace these technologies in relation to older established technological objects, processes and practices. It asks how relations between 'analogue' and 'digital' are conceptualized and configured both in theory and inside the public library, the business organization and the archive. With its direct engagement with new media theory, science and technology studies, and cultural sociology, this volume will be of interest to scholars and students in the areas of media and communication and science and technology studies.

While the practice of branding is typically understood as a tool of marketing, a method of attaching social meaning to a commodity as a way to make it more personally resonant with consumers, Banet-Weiser argues that in the contemporary era, brands are about culture as much as they are about economics.

Authenticity is taken for granted as an absolute value in contemporary life. We speak of authentic art, music, food, dance, and people. Authenticity, in its many guises, offers seekers a sense of belonging, connection and solidity. This work argues that the pervasive desire for authenticity is a consequence of a modern loss of faith and meaning.

This volume contains an Open Access Chapter. This collection explores the complex and controversial idea of authenticity. Addressing the concept from an interdisciplinary perspective and offering a diverse range of topical cases.

Across sociology and cultural studies in particular, the concept of authenticity has begun to occupy a central role, yet in spite of its popularity as an ideal and philosophical value authenticity notably suffers from a certain vagueness, with work in this area tending to borrow ideas from outside of sociology, whilst failing to present empirical studies which centre on the concept itself. Authenticity in Culture, Self, and Society addresses the problems surrounding this concept, offering a sociological analysis of it for the first time in order to provide readers in the social and cultural sciences with a clear conceptualization of authenticity and with a survey of original empirical studies focused on its experience, negotiation, and social relevance at the levels of self, culture and specific social settings.

It is not uncommon for white suburban youths to perform rap music, for New York fashion designers to ransack the world's closets for inspiration, or for Euro-American authors to adopt the voice of a geisha or shaman. But who really owns these art forms? Is it the community in which they were originally generated, or the culture that has absorbed them? While claims of authenticity or quality may prompt some consumers to seek cultural products at their source, the communities of origin are generally unable to exclude copyists through legal action. Like other works of unincorporated group authorship, cultural products lack protection under our system of intellectual property law. But is this legal vacuum an injustice, the lifeblood of American culture, a historical oversight, a result of administrative incapacity, or all of the above? Who Owns Culture? offers the first comprehensive analysis of cultural authorship and appropriation within American law. From indigenous art to Linux, Susan Scafidi takes the reader on a tour of the no-man's-land between law and culture, pausing to ask: What prompts us to offer legal protection to works of literature, but not folklore? What does it mean for a creation to belong to a community, especially a diffuse or fractured one? And is our national culture the product of Yankee ingenuity or cultural kleptomania? Providing new insights to communal authorship, cultural appropriation, intellectual property law, and the formation of American culture, this innovative and accessible guide greatly enriches future legal understanding of cultural production.