After yesterday’s discussion about authenticity, I really wanted to dive in deeper in some aspects that came up to me. After the conversation on the two native communities and as we rewatched the clips from the natives and the shot went from inside the circle to outside the circle, I started thinking about the principle of authenticity from different perspectives. From what I understand, authenticity is dependable of perspective or point of view. We were discussing which group was more authentic but this can only go so far as we aren’t not activity part of either group and only have an “outsider’s perspectives”.
One could argue that we did in fact get a inside look as members of the community were given a camera to film their own experience from “inside the circle”, but again, how can one be certain when the camera is cut off, the subjects’ actions change completely? This is similar to Matthew’s point in his post-production post on reality TV that every action captured on screen could be totally fake but to the people watching, they seem authentic.
Jerome – this post seems to be wrestling an issue of getting a true account of Kayapo culture, but one’s visual perspective and the act of editing reduce the truth value of the video. I think the Kayapo themselves would suggest that all representations are by their nature socially constructed – and the more social and the more constructed the more “authentic” they are. This runs opposite to how we think of representation in the modern European system, as Mitchell accounts for it. But like the Kayapo, Mitchell shows us that these ideas about representation are themselves a social construct.