From this week’s reading, the paragraph that goes “To spell out this…site of retained authenticity” (p. 13),  touches on several significant ideas that I have seen come up in this class and other anthropology classes. The first sentence claims that study of the digital world has potential to inform us of the “mediated and framed nature of the nondigital world”. To me this seems like another iteration of studying something to learn more about its opposite. I phrased that in an intentionally reductive way, as I am seeing that often there is more nuance to be revealed about these two objects/terms/concepts that make it so they can no longer be considered opposites. I am thinking back to Mitchell’s discussion of how attempting to define the Orient could reveal more about how the Europeans define themselves. (And in class yesterday, this came up again when we talked about what words come to mind when we hear “digital” and sometimes a concept can be defined by considering what it is not.) As we discussed before, Mitchell comes to the conclusion that these categories are not opposite and calls attention to the harm done in viewing them that way. In a previous post, I had written about this and how it relates to authenticity. I can see parallels to this post and how Miller and Horst compare the virtual and its implied opposite, the real. In particular, the last sentence they say that “fetishizing the predigital culture as a site of retained authenticity” would undermine the efforts of digital anthropology. I think this echoes the consequences of the Orientalist view that a previous iteration of a culture, perhaps before the exposure to “western” technologies, is more authentic.

After thinking about this, I am very hesitant to consider things as opposite to one another. I am also now thinking about the relationship between “authentic” and “real”, I know outside of ethnographic contexts “authenticating” something means to determine whether or not it is “real”. But, I now wonder if in the context of ethnography we conflate these terms. At the end of my post I had referred to earlier, I stated that authenticity should be defined by oneself, and I think that for the most part I consider this to be true for what is “real” too, at least when doing anthropology. Maybe what I am really talking about is relativism, but I think that it is more insightful to try and understand what one considers to be real rather than get caught up in if I think that it is real. I also wonder why, when considering what is real and authentic, we have a tendency to glorify the past.