From Original Evidence to Ordinary Epistemes: Authenticating the Knowledge We Live by

This contribution seeks to rekindle questions of authenticity. While the term continues to figure prominently in the realms of collective heritage, the tourist industry, and the branding of food and other items in modern consumerism, our concern with authenticity leads us directly to the efforts and effects of epistemic practice. These multiple modes of knowing and validating contingent knowledge claims can be analysed as matters of correspondence that pertain to a range of epistemic criteria. Starting our discussion on the multiplicity of authenticity with an ethnographic example from a fairly common context, we then move on to elaborate authenticity as an epistemic concept and illustrate it with the works of the four contributors to our workshop at this year’s DGSKA conference in Munich. Finally, we consider authenticity as the validation of knowledge claims in cases where the legitimacy of knowledge is negotiated, and the dissemination of difficult and even harmful knowledge is contested.