Questioning cultural authenticity: three case studies 

 

This blog portrays my Muslim Popular Culture intervention. The intervention tackles cultural authenticity, as inspired by the class discussion and the “Rebel Music” excerpt on musical authentic identity and regional politics.

In an attempt to expand the discussion beyond the class, I interview three people – Adam from Egypt, Selma from Bosnia and Herzegovina, and Dhia from Indonesia. I discuss commonalities and differences in defining cultural authenticities through music, local culture and customs, and within its relationship with Islam.

The link to the video can be found here: Video

My interview questions are the following:

  1. Please state your name and your country of origin.
  2. How would you define cultural authenticity of your country?
  3. What are key words you would use to describe authenticity?
  4. What would you say is the musical authenticity of your country?
  5. How would you preserve cultural authenticity?
  6. How would you challenge cultural authenticity?
  7. Which social groups benefit from such cultural authenticity? Examples are welcomed.
  8. Which social groups suffer from such cultural authenticity? Examples are
  9. What is the relationship between authenticity and Islam? Would you put it in the modern-traditional binary?
  10. Does such a relationship define your bond with Islam? If yes, to what extent? Examples.

Each of the three participants was given the above stated questions and five minutes to compose answers. They were then recorded in a single shot. The video footage averages 30 minutes of material, however the final video itself is around 12 minutes long. The background songs include a Bosnian traditional song called “Zute Dunje” and a live audio of Umm Kulthum’s concert.

The question I started my inquiry and subsequent intervention with was concerned with the notion of unchanging authenticity and how much its definition changes across cultures. I define authenticity as an undefinable and changing entity – a characteristic of every singular society that cannot be grasped and captured within a fixed form. To be authentic, in other words, is to change. What I found peculiar during the interviews was that each of the three interviewees agreed on the difficulty of defining cultural authenticity. The lines are blurred. The borders are vague and moving. Nothing is fixed.

Additionally, I attempted to connect these stories with our critique of the chapter in “Rebel Music” of cultural authenticity of the gnawa musical tradition and its fusion with jazz. It all starts and ends with politics, someone once said. And I believe it applies to authenticity of music and cultural traditions as well. Their lines cannot be clearly delineated from modernity and new influences that extract their core and upgrade them to a better-sounding system of sounds and tradition.

Ultimately, I take an excerpt from the chapter in “Rebel Music” and run a machine learning analysis of the words in order to understand the patterns that tackle cultural authenticity and its relationship with music. The image is the cover image of the blog:

Culture with a capital “C”

I structured the image in the shape of the letter “C” to mark the core concept of our class – the binary between Culture and culture. The size of the words denotes how often they are mentioned in the excerpt. I find the results quite interesting.

In sum, I want to thank you for allowing me the chance to explore the topic of my interest through multiple media. I used interviews, video technology, machine learning and visual arts in an attempt to understand the essence of cultural authenticity.

 

 

Sources:

Aidi, Hisham; “Rebel Music: Jazz to the Rescue” (excerpt)