Charles Lindholm, an anthropologist at Boston University, here writes on the search for authenticity in the West. At first, I had assumed that his title was intended to echo Matthew Arnold’s 1869 classic, Culture and Anarchy. But it is not. Arnold was writing about the preservation of religion, especially ethics, in literature. Lindholm is writing about the finding of authenticity almost anywhere.
Lindholm’s take-off point is the contemporary classic Sincerity and Authenticity (1972) by the American literary critic Lionel Trilling. As Lindholm summarizes, Trilling argues that authenticity had not existed before the sixteenth century, when traditional, fixed, face-to-face relationships among persons began to break down. “This stable world was transformed utterly by the breakup of the feudal system and the massive movement of individuals out of the countryside and into mixed urban environments. Henceforth, people were no longer quite sure where they belonged, what their futures held for them, or who their neighbors were” (3). In short, feudalism gave way to modernity, “which can be succinctly defined as the condition of living among strangers” (3). The pleasure of mobility was nixed by the pain of alienation.
First there emerged the quest for sincerity, or one’s true identity. Lindholm, following others, links sincerity to the emergence of Protestantism, with its search for the true individual self within. Outward action no longer sufficed. One had to act out of sincerity. But sincerity, or “self-interrogation,” was problematic: “How could persons thrown back on their own interpretations of themselves and their duties be certain that the appearance of sincerity was not actually the result of self-delusion and pride” (4)—that is, be certain that one was not deceiving oneself into assuming sincerity? Though Lindholm does not put his point this way, he is contending that sincerity presupposes authenticity. One had to be certain who one was in the first place before manifesting oneself sincerely.
Lindholm then turns to his main theme: the efforts made by present-day Westerners to find their authentic selves. The quest for authenticity, like that for sincerity, is a cultural, not merely a personal, endeavor. Lindholm devotes chapters to the quest for authenticity in various domains—for example, in art, where he rightly cites Walter Benjamin’s classic work on “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” (in Benjamin’s Illuminations [1969]); in music; and in travel. Hence “tourism is an immensely popular way for ordinary people to escape from the everyday, manufacture[d] meaning in their lives, and pursue a more intense reality ‘elsewhere’” (47).
There is the yearning for authentic goods and authentic ways of life. Folklore surely falls here: the locals or the natives represent authentic ways of cooking, singing, or dancing. Lindholm cites the effort by Starbucks “to appear different, casual, and genuine,” even though this appearance is “combined with its aggressive absorption of local coffee shops worldwide” (63). Spirituality as an alternative to institutionalized religion is seen as another attempt at uncovering the authentic.
Lindholm then shifts from individual quests for authenticity to national ones. The tango expresses true Argentinean character, the rumba true Cuban character, native cuisine true French character. These efforts are responses to the uncertainty of who is Argentinean, who Cuban, who French, and in a separate chapter, who Jewish. Tracing one’s family tree is one desperate way of finding out who one really is.
Lindholm ends by bemoaning the special difficulty that professional anthropologists face when they go to the field. Are they outsiders, insiders, or both? By whose standards do they evaluate the people among whom they reside? Do they remain sure of who they themselves are?
For me, what this book says is obvious. At the same time, things are perhaps a mite more complicated than Lindholm assumes. The issue is as much that of multiple, competing identities as of a missing single identity. The author continually cites Emile Durkheim, but for Durkheim the presence of many identities, crisscrossing relationships, is as much a characteristic of modernity as is alienation. In The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life (1912), he concentrates on Australian aborigines rather than on twentieth-century Parisians because aboriginal relationships are less cluttered, not just because aboriginal relationships are more fixed.
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[Review length: 692 words • Review posted on January 22, 2011]