Exclusive boundaries, contested claims: authenticity, language and ideology
Despite recent critical attention, authenticity remains problematic and paradoxical. It is problematic in various ways. (1) It is notoriously hard to define. According to Trilling (1972:120), it is one of those words “which are best not talked about if they are to retain any force of meaning.” (2) It is often vacuous, as in the claims of travel companies to offer tourists „the authentic Finnish experience‟, „authentic Ireland‟, and the like. (3) And yet, it still matters; we seek to achieve authenticity for ourselves and our forms of life, and may have strong views about what that means in a given context. To acknowledge the plurality of the term‟s potential meanings, therefore, is not necessarily to avoid conflict about it in any particular case.