Last week, I thoroughly interrogated the nuances of ethnography’s contextualization, using “authenticity” as a benchmark of a study’s success. However, as I mentioned in my comment on Gallery 347, this is problematic in itself, due to the culturally relative nature of its definition. As Rei famously pointed out in a previous class, perceptions of authenticity are highly situational and dictated by subtle, almost Foucauldian conceptual schema in the public discourse surrounding the idea of representation. In other words, what signifies authenticity for one person may not for another, depending on which cultural ideology they identify with. In this post, I intend to investigate the implications of authenticity’s cultural relativism. Although this topic has already been extensively discussed in others’ post-productions, I plan on extending the existing discussion by illuminating a simple yet previously overlooked question: why does this cultural relativity matter? Of course, conceptualizations of representation and authenticity are immersed in inextricable webs of culture, everything is, but what does that mean? How should that inform the practices of ethnographers?

These are all questions I feel like we failed to devout commensurate attention to, as we mostly focused on identifying the embeddedness of this concept. They are all complex questions that require complex answers, and I am merely hoping to alert others to these areas of discussion and help stimulate other people’s thinking. To offer my own personal insight, I believe it is hard to ignore that using authenticity as a benchmark to judge the success of a cultural representation probably has an impact on the continual, cyclical production of discourse, culture and media. As I wrote about in one of my first post-productions, true power lies in the ability to subliminally control the production of culture through the limitation of a community’s conceptual framework. Thus, if “the western trap of authenticity” continues to dominate and dictate existing scholarship, excluding diverse and non-Western voices, the external validity and standing of ethnography as a whole could be challenged (Rei). After all, if Western conceptions of “authenticity” are used to gate-keep against those that don’t share that understanding, how is the anthropological community supposed to achieve the true diversity required to repurpose ethnography’s contextualization to their benefit, as I discussed in my last post?  This in itself should incentivize ethnographers to attempt to expose and dismantle this cultural bias when challenging or critiquing others. While I understand how the differing standards of authenticity could impact the review of others’ work, its effect on the rhetorical construction of the ethnography itself is less obvious to me. I would love to explore this topic in detail and hear your thoughts on Thursday. How do you think authenticity’s cultural relativism should inform the conceptualization, creation and editing of ethnographies? Do ethnographies even need to take this concept into account during their construction or is the onus mostly on the consumer to illuminate and eliminate the cultural bias in our dialectical responses to new ethnographic contributions? Looking forward to learning more in class this week!