missed

I was sitting in for a little while on a class on indigenous approaches to conflict studies. I miss time this week and skip it.

The conversation in the class struck me as profound. The professor wanted to bring home to his graduate students that a real thing - a knowledge, a series of practices, a way of being together - had been lost. Not a utopia. "The king used to spit in someone's mouth so he didn't waste saliva. He would rest his spear in someone's foot." Not savagery. But a real complex thing. And lost completely. With no archives or means of reconstruction. And that what existed now was a hybrid of that culture (or really set of cultures) and a modern, Western culture. So, how do you talk about authenticity inside of hybrid culture? He even brought it into the body - asks the class: do you know you're African? Completely?

I imagine Marx. I imagine it involves a question of who controls the tools of producing culture now, of directing the synthesis. I imagine it also has something to do with what principles guide that synthesizing.

I imagine a real problem with the word "authenticity".