Sacrosanct Culture. The Authentication of Cultural Form 16-17 April 2009 Venue: Meertens Institute, Amsterdam Conference Organized by the NWO research program Heritage Dynamics: Politics of Authentication and Aesthetics of Persuasion in Ghana, South Africa, Brazil and the Netherlands Convenors: Marleen de Witte, Birgit Meyer, Herman Roodenburg, Mattijs van de Port (Social and Cultural Anthropology/VU Institute for the Study of Religion, Culture and Society, Meertens Institute) The ubiquitous presence of discussions on authenticity in contemporary societies is hard to miss. In the West, millions have embraced the discovery of their ‘authentic Self’ as the fundamental goal in life. By now a whole industry caters to this ideal – from wellness centers to confessional talk-shows and from new therapeutic forms to religious organizations. Inextricably tied up with the ideal of the ‘authentic Self’ are cultural formulations and re-formulations of ‘authenticity’. These formulations are particularly prominent in arenas such as the art world, religion (regarding a broad array of new and old religious traditions geared toward generating experience), (roots)tourism, the media (with their search for ever more real ‘reality formats’ and their unrelenting interest in the back-stage), amateur genealogy, ‘craft consumption’, culinary ideals such as ‘slow food’ or ‘raw food’, debates about child delivery at home, spirituality on the work floor, and last but not least heritage politics. What this seems to indicate is that, more and more, ‘authenticity’ has become a value attributed to people, objects, and performances, rather than an inherent quality that might be revealed in them. A perspective which considers the attribution of authenticity – and which thus highlights ‘the politics of authentication’, distinguishing authenticators and authenticees in a field structured by power – typifies an anthropological take on authenticity. Wherever and whenever people claim authenticity, the anthropological incentive is to lay bare the man-made, historical and ultimately contingent character of such claims. For example, anthropologists tend to get excited about such findings that politicians are media-trained so as to appear ‘authentic’ on screen, or that the ‘authentic ritual’ staged by indigenous peoples are probably not grounded in a living tradition, but reinventions relying on historical-ethnographic sources. As Charles Lindholm stated: whereas anthropologists have long been ‘scavenging for the vestiges of a vanishing authenticity’ they now generally take up the more lofty position of ‘floating above local claims for transcendence or truth’ and have made it their main business to ‘demonstrate again and again that these claims are political and ideological representations supplied by self-interested parties pursuing domination’ (2002:334).

While stressing the value of a deconstructivist take on authenticity claims, and taking up a critical stance towards the essentialism such claims promote, our conference nonetheless seeks to offer a forum for exploring possibilities to move beyond this position. We call attention to the gap that exists between, on the one hand, anthropologists unveiling the ‘made-up-ness’ of authenticity claims, and on the other hand, people’s own search for authenticity, as well as their finding it – subjectively, experientially, false-consciously perhaps, but sufficiently persuasive so as to lend a felt grounding to cultural identities. Questions to be discussed are: How is it that people manage to transcend the constructedness of their life worlds? How is it that, against all philosophical considerations and anthropological findings,

people seem to be quite capable to convince themselves that they are in possession of authentic Selves and live authentic lives? Which role do religious and cultural institutions play in this process, and what are the power relations involved? What are the dominant tropes of authenticity, and what are the subjectivities that come into being through these tropes? How is the body implicated in producing a felt authentic grounding to cultural form? How does memory authenticate history? In what ways are authenticity claims rooted in – or animated by – the primordial realms of bios and psyche? Pursuing these questions might get us closer to an understanding how cultural form becomes sacrosanct. The conference will take place at the Meertens-institute. Joan Muyskenweg 25, Amsterdam, phone: 020 462 85 00, (via Metro 50 or 51, Stop Overamstel). This event is made possible thanks to the support of the Center for Comparative Social Studies (CCSS), Faculty of Social Sciences, VU; the Royal Dutch Academy of Sciences (KNAW); the Netherlands Foundation for Scientific Research (NWO); the Meertens Institute; the Department of Social and Cultural Anthropology (VU); and the VU Institute for the Study of Religion, Culture and Society (VISOR).

Programme Day 1: Thursday 16 April 2008 09.00 Coffee/tea 09.30 – 09.45 Welcome and introduction: Birgit Meyer 09.45 – 11.15 Panel 1: The question of authentication Chair: Birgit Meyer Discussant: Marleen de Witte Charles Lindholm, Modes of Authenticity

David Chidester, Intensity, Structure, and Surplus: Authenticating Encounters with African Religion

11.15 – 11.30 Coffee/tea 11.30 – 13.00 Panel 2: Dreams of authenticity

Chair: Birgit Meyer Discussant: Patricia Birman Dick Houtman, From counter culture to mainstream: Dreams of authenticity in a world without foundations Mattijs van de Port, Subjectively Essential: Lacanian understandings of Desire in processes of World Making’

13.00 – 14.15 Lunch and move to Tropenmuseum, Linneausstraat 14.15 – 16.15 Panel 3: Negotiating authenticity (NB Venue: Tropenmuseum!) Chair: Mattijs van de Port

Discussant: Francio Guadeloupe Maria Paula Adinolfi, Swinging between immaterial and material: Brazilian cultural politics and the authentication of Afro-Brazilian heritage Olivia Maria Gomes da Cunha, Coloring the Ethnographic Map: on Haitians, Communities, and Difference in Cuba Markus Balkenhol, Trauma, truth, and recognition: The politics of authentication and slavery in Dutch memory culture Frans Fontaine, Between Authenticity and Hollywood Corruption: Some reflections on the exposition Vodou, Art and Mysticism from Haiti

16.15 – 17.00 Visit exhibition Vodou: Art and Mysticism from Haiti 17.00 Drinks in Soeterijn Day 2: Friday 17 April 2008 09.00 Coffee/tea 09.30 – 11.00 Panel 4: Performing authenticity

Chair: Marleen de Witte Discussant: Annelies Moors Patrick Eisenlohr, The deictics of authenticity in religious performance André Bakker, Being a ‘Real Indian’ and/or a ‘Real Crente’: Reflections on Authenticity, Media and Conversion to Pentecostalism in a Pataxó Indigenous Community in Brazil

11.00 – 11.15 Coffee/tea

11.15 – 12.45 Panel 5: Mediating authenticity Chair: Marleen de Witte Discussant: Stef Aupers Jeremy Stolow, Materializing Authenticity: The Technology, Agency, and Aura of Jewish Print Commodities in the Digital Age Herman Roodenburg, The Paradox of the Preacher: On Authenticity and Affective Memory

12.45 – 13.45 Lunch 13.45 – 15.30 Panel 6: Styling authenticity

Chair: Herman Roodenburg Discussant: Pál Nyíri Katharina Schramm, Visiting authentic places of suffering: Signboards and the reconstruction of the slave route in Ghana Ferdinand de Jong, The Door of No Return. Authenticating a Lost and Found Self Rhoda Woets, “This is what makes Sirigu unique”: Canvas paintings from Northern Ghana and the demand for authenticity

15.30 – 15.45 Coffee/tea 15.45 – 17.15 Panel 7: Politics of authenticity

Chair: Herman Roodenburg Discussant: Irene Stengs Kodjo Senah, Politicization and Contestation of the Sacrosanct: The Case of Ghanaian Chieftaincy Luis Nicolau Parés, Bureaucratization of the sacred: Notes on the tombamento of Afro-Brazilian temples

17.15 – 17.45 Outlook and general discussion Drinks

Sacrosanct Culture. The Authentication of Cultural Form 16-17 April 2009, Meertens Institute, Amsterdam

Abstracts Panel 1: The question of authentication Discussant: Marleen de Witte, VU University Charles Lindholm Boston University Modes of Authenticity I would briefly discuss how authenticity has become a motivating category in Western thought and then consider alternative models for authenticity, outlining several cultural-religious constructions of super-real emotional experience, including adab in Islamic thought and rasa in Hindu eschatology. David Chidester University of Cape Town Intensity, Structure, and Surplus: Authenticating Encounters with African Religion On 23 August 1905, delegates of the British Association for the Advancement of Science, including its leading anthropologists, Alfred C. Haddon and E. Sidney Hartland, visited a sugar plantation near Durban, South Africa, to witness a Zulu war dance. The scientific tourists authenticated the ritual in three basic ways. First, they found that the war dance was genuine because of the intensity of the sights, sounds, and emotions they experienced, reporting their awe and terror, even though these emotions were somewhat muted by the knowledge that the colonial government had taken away the dancers’ assegais. Second, they authenticated the ritual by rendering it as an icon of a deeper structure, whether that structure opposed what Haddon called the “ethnology of the lower races” to the “sociology of the higher races,” or opposed heathen savagery to Christian civilization, as the war dance was followed by songs and a sermon from Zulu Christians, providing what biologist J. D. F. Gilchrist called “an object lesson.” Third, they confirmed the authenticity of the ritual by appropriating its surplus, not only through their reports and photographs, but also by acquiring artifacts, such as the Zulu witchdoctor’s necklace that Hartland purchased in Durban, which was underwritten by a certificate from the dealer stating that the witchdoctor had not wanted to part with it. These three registers of authentication—sensory intensity, iconic structure, and appropriation of surplus—are suggestive of the ways in which cultural forms are authenticated as sacred in both religious practice and national heritage.

Panel 2: Dreams of authenticity Discussant: Patricia Birman, State University of Rio de Janeiro Dick Houtman Erasmus University Rotterdam From Counter Culture to Mainstream: Dreams of Authenticity in a World without Foundations This paper critiques sociologically naïve ideas about a process of individualization that has increasingly liberated individual selves from society since the counter culture of the 1960s. Although the 1960s have certainly been decisive for cultural change in the West, they have not so much resulted in a disappearance of social control, but in an increased discursive power of discourses pertaining to personal authenticity, individual liberty, and rebellious nonconformity. These discourses are no longer situated at society’s countercultural fringe and are no longer simply morally ‘progressive’ either: as new and binding moral regimes, they now constitute society’s cultural mainstream. Drawing on evidence from the fields of consumption, religion, and politics in Western countries (especially the Netherlands), it is argued that today’s widespread emotionalism, subjectivism, and anti-institutionalism are not merely “fodder for psychologists”, but powerful post-traditional cultural discourses. Mattijs van de Port VU University Subjectively Essential: Lacanian Understandings of Desire in Processes of World Making’ In my presentation, I would like to talk about essences, ignore the alarm bells that start to ring with the uttering of the e-word (urging me to take immediate deconstructive action): what are the ‘registers of the real’ that make the work of culture really real, beyond doubt, essential? In Lacanian thought, the real of desire is unquestionable: it is really real, beyond doubt, essential. The one force that cannot be doubted. Speaking for myself I can only confess: that indeed is the nature of desire. So can we – in our efforts to study processes of authentication, and who knows, in our attempts to authenticate anthropological worldmaking – afford not to discuss desire? Panel 3: Negotiating authenticity Discussant: Francio Guadeloupe, Radboud University Nijmegen/KITLV Maria Paula Adinolfi VU University Swinging between the Material and the Immaterial: Brazilian Cultural Politics and the Authentication of Afro-Brazilian Heritage The Brazilian nation-state has long portrayed itself as a melting pot, where cultures (and “races”) have merged to form a distinctively mixed national identity. Although minority ethnic groups have been important to depict Brazil as a “racial democracy”, they have been no real subjects of rights and citizenship until very recently. It is only after the Constitution of

1988 that such groups’ claims for political participation and social equality have gained expression in law and public policies. However, most of the rights granted have assumed the form of cultural rights: culture (and ethnicity) has become the language in which social differences and social rights are articulated. This primacy of ‘culture’ is a clue to understand the current renewed interest for cultural heritage. The declaration of cultural assets as national heritage has largely been the result of decisions made by members of IPHAN (National Historical and Artistic Heritage Institute, founded in 1937). These decisions are based on ‘technical’ grounds, that is, based on these assets’ ‘inherent’ artistic qualities or ‘evident’ historical importance for the building of narratives of the nation. The assets recognized have usually been those connected to the Brazilian colonial past, that is, to the Luso-Brazilian architecture and arts, that very much represented the habitus of Brazilian upper classes. But since other ethnic groups started making strong claims for representation in national narratives, there has been a “rush for heritage”, and for the first time the proponents of the register of cultural assets are not state agents, but black or native groups’ agents. The nature of the objects of register has changed too, shifting from arts and architecture to maroon sites, Afro-Brazilian candomblé temples and the so-called “immaterial” practices, such as samba de roda or the “traditional craft” of making acarajé, a fried pastry originated in candomblé ritual cuisine. While to the state emphasizing the immaterial aspect of such cultural practices and territories has for many reasons been the preferable way to incorporate Afro-Brazilian claims, to black agents, and particularly to candomblé adherents, there have been new ways to state and display its materiality as a fundamental element of their authenticity. This paper aims to address the disputes and negotiations over these two different forms of attributing value to cultural heritage, so as to legitimate it and, further away, authenticate it. Olivia Maria Gomes da Cunha National Museum, Federal University of Rio de Janeiro Coloring the Ethnographic Map: On Haitians, Communities, and Difference in Cuba Two years after the 1959 Revolution, State institutions and policies were formed to bring about a radical transformation in relationships between government institutions and society in Cuba. This process resulted in the creation of some of the diverse initiatives that would have a particular impact on the production of knowledge on the “Cuban population.” Forms of property ownership, labor relations, and the living conditions of rural workers fosters an “ethnographic” focus on the nation in which the image of the “Haitian workers” and “Haitian communities” takes on a unique shape. In the early 1960s, a cultural mapping initiative gained a specialized approach, and would inform a specific viewpoint on the possibility of a “culture” and religious faith – respectively described as “Haitian culture” and “Haitian Vodu” – signaling the presence of “los haitianos” among the Cuban “pueblo” and “culture.” In the 1970s, some of these interpretations became linked with other institutional programs and projects of mapping “folklore traditions” and the production of Atlas Etnográfico de Cuba. This paper seeks to describe the current political implications of place of Cuban of Haitian descent in this national map on the current mobilizations of Haitian descent groups.

Markus Balkenhol Meertens Institute Trauma, Truth, and Recognition: The Politics of Authentication and Slavery in Dutch Memory Culture Speech about slavery is politically charged; how, then, does it offer a reliable grounding for Afro-Dutch identity? In the Netherlands of the 1990s, speech of slavery functioned to refer to absolute and incontestable inhumanity in debates ranging from economic neo-liberalism (the market deprived of its freedom) and anti-socialism (the cruelty of the USSR) to animal rights campaigns (economic exploitation in chicken farms). At that time, the descendants of slaves in the Netherlands began to claim recognition for the injustice done to their ancestors. Now, after more than a decade of negotiation, a number of slavery memorials are erected, slavery and the trans-Atlantic slave trade are being commemorated on a national level, and they are included in the national historical canon. What are the dynamics that led to their success in re-negotiating a more 'truthful' colonial history? Interestingly, while slavery had clearly been established as incontestably inhumane, the greatest effort seemed to be bringing slavery home as a historical responsibility of the modern, post-colonial Dutch nation. In this negotiation of the past, 'trauma' and 'truth' figured most prominently as politics of authentication. By unifying the diverse group of Creoles in the Netherlands, a seemingly homogeneous Afro-Dutch identity of the rightful (but wronged) descendants of slaves has been created. If we want to understand how people manage to transcend the constuctedness of such life-worlds, it is crucial to look at 'trauma' and 'truth' as forms of felt cultural grounding. This paper will show how 'truth' and 'trauma' as cultural constructions can speak to the body – how they make themselves felt in order to be convincing and thus create a reliable grounding in people's personal lives. Frans Fontaine Tropenmuseum Between Authenticity and Hollywood Corruption: Some Reflections on the Exposition Vodou, Art and Mysticism from Haiti Based on my experience as co-author of the present exhibition Vodou, Art and Mysticism from Haiti, this talk will address the dilemmas and choices the museum made preparing this exhibition. Vodou, or as most people know it: Voodoo, is a term corrupted by prejudice, by Hollywood Zombie movies and stories about dolls and pins. Knowing that 90% of the visitors will somehow be influenced by this ‘Hollywood Corruption’, it is imperative to take this fact into account when thinking about content, selection of images and overall design of the exhibition. The goal of the Haitian counterparts (the loan-givers and the foundation who owns the collection), was to promote Vodou as an ‘authentic religion’ that has played and still plays a crucial role in the history of Haiti, a religion ‘as any other’ that offers solidarity, strength and faith to believers in one of the poorest nations in that hemisphere. In short, to create understanding and respect for a highly ’incriminated’ religion. All in all it is a complex story that cannot be told completely within the limitations of a medium such as an exhibition. Choices have to be made.

Panel 4: Performing authenticity Discussant: Annelies Moors, University of Amsterdam Patrick Eisenlohr Utrecht University The Deictics of Authenticity in Religious Performance Taking the example of a Hindu pilgrimage in Mauritius, the paper addresses authenticity in a diasporic context. I look at two dimensions of religious practice that are centrally involved in making the pilgrimage an authentic experience. First, I examine two different semiotic processes that establish links between the pilgrimage in Mauritius and religious practices in India understood as a diasporic homeland of Hindus. Second, I explore the role that different temporalities regimenting religious practice play in reinforcing or complicating such a link. The performative outcome of the pilgrimage is a sense of authenticity that is less concerned with orthopraxy in a narrow sense, but foregrounds the creation of a diasporic Hindu identity that subsumes internal differences among Mauritian Hindus. Overall, the paper makes a case for a Peircean semiotic approach attentive to consubstantiality and qualitative likeness for coming to terms with the continuing social and political importance of authenticity in the contemporary world. André Bakker VU University Being a ‘Real Indian’ and/or a ‘Real Crente’: Reflections on Authenticity, Media and Conversion to Pentecostalism in a Pataxó Indigenous Community in Brazil Over the past 20 years, the indigenous village of Coroa Vermelha (Santa Cruz Cabrália, Bahia State, Brazil) has been watching an outstanding growth of tourism and of evangelical churches throughout its territory. After the celebration of Brazil’s 500 years in the year 2000 – and after a significant shift in governmental policies concerning the indian’s citizenship status after the 1989 Constitution – the Pataxó indians who today dwell in the urban area where Pedro Álvares Cabral arrived in the 1500’s and where the first Catholic cult was celebrated, started to be proclaimed by the Bahian state and to proclaim themselves as the “discovery indians”: authentic descendants of those who first saw foreign feet to walk over the Brazilian land. Dressing themselves with cocars and plums and painting their faces and bodies with urucum, they are approached by the countless tourists from Brazil and abroad to sell all sorts of artifacts, to take pictures with them, and to take them around their reserve in the jungle, showing them their ancient traps for hunting animals, telling them their history and performing the Auê traditional ritual, where tourists are allowed to film, photograph, and in the end partake in the dance themselves – the increasingly growing ‘ecotouristic’ circuit promoted and organized by them. Simultaneously over this period, more than eight different evangelical denominations have been settling themselves in the indigenous reserve, engendering a very significant movement of conversion. Whilst most of them require the new convert to abandon their earrings and other traditional piercings, to stop partaking in the traditional dances and rituals filled with bodily painting and exposure – and where occasionally the traditional spirits, the encantados, come to possess the pajé’s (shaman) body, to perform marriages, to counsel or to reveal mysteries and prophecies – the church Maranata has opted for an harmonic conciliation of both identities, translating its evangelical chants to

Patxohã language, allowing the performance of traditional Pataxó dances in some of its cults, constructing a church in the format of a traditional indian house. This paper will discuss how the Pataxó cultural inheritage – or, at least, what is conceived to be so by the Pataxó indians – relates to the current movement of convertion to Pentecostal Christianity: the ways in which certain features of it are criticized, contested as diabolic or evil, or yet praised, valued by the Christian churches and appropriated into its practices of mediation. My main purpose will be to examine how “traditional” and “new” media and practices of mediation relate to each other in the making of religious experiences amidst the Pataxó, and how a particular image of authentic ‘indianness’ relates to the movement of conversion to evangelical churches in Coroa Vermelha. Panel 5: Mediating authenticity Discussant: Stef Aupers, Erasmus University Jeremy Stolow Concordia University Montréal Materializing Authenticity: The Technology, Agency, and Aura of Jewish Print Commodities in the Digital Age ArtScroll Publications—a major contemporary Orthodox Jewish publishing house based in Brooklyn, New York—offers a compelling case for studying the role of materiality in religious print culture. This presentation draws upon actor-network theory to examine the “material agency” of key ArtScroll publications, such as prayer books, Bibles, and cookbooks, showing how these artefacts play an active role within various arenas of Jewish social life, from public prayer to domestic display to kitchen labour. By focusing on the role of illustrations, typeface and layout, book covers, binding materials, and graphic icons in the constitution of ArtScroll'’s material agency, my presentation will explore how these devices help to define patterns of ritual performance and consumer lifestyles and how they contribute to struggles over institutional identity and the politics of Jewish authenticity. By so examining the actual processes of distribution of actions among people and their books, the goals of my analysis are (a) to complicate the stereotypical image of Jews as a “people of the book”, and (b) to challenge sweeping claims about Jewish text-centrism, particularly in our contemporary moment, the so-called 'digital age', putatively figured the death of the book and the ascendance of electronically-based texts and images. Herman Roodenburg Meertens Institute/VU University The Paradox of the Preacher: On Authenticity and Affective Memory Preachers have always studied actors to improve on their own bodily eloquence. In my paper, taking Diderot's Paradoxe sur le comédien as my starting point, I will explore not the 'paradox of the actor' but the 'paradox of the preacher. I will look at the preacher’s body as his primary instrument or, to borrow from Birgit Meyer, as his primary ‘sensational form’ (Meyer 2006: 9). Whether we look at Diderot's contemporary, the sentimental novelist and Anglican

minister Laurence Sterne, or at the Ghanaian charismatic preacher Dr Mensa Otabil, we might say that through their bodies the transcendental reveals itself, is made ‘sense-able’. I am especially interested in the preacher as ‘authenticator’, in how he emotionally addresses and engages the faithful through his body, how he succeeds in having his bodily eloquence resonate with their habitus. I will look especially at notions of ‘bodily memory’ and ‘affective memory’ – terms that have been associated with Marcel Proust’s A la recherche du temps perdu but also with the drama theories of Konstantin Stanislavsky and Lee Strasberg. Panel 6: Styling authenticity Discussant: Pál Nyíri, VU University Katharina Schramm Martin-Luther-Universität Halle-Wittenberg Visiting Authentic Places of Suffering: Signboards and the Reconstruction of the Slave Route in Ghana In the wake of increasing international attention to the history of the slave trade and recent African American heritage tourism to West Africa, the Ghanaian state and local entrepreneurs alike have begun to identify more and more landmarks as part of a slave route network. Natural features such as rivers, trees or rocks, which in themselves cannot be clearly distinguished from their surroundings by the uninitiated, now become explicitly associated with camp-sites, slave markets or places of refuge. Along the roads throughout the country one finds signboards that point out formerly hidden or forbidden places to potential tourists. They form part of a pilgrimage circuit by which the contemporary landscape is assigned deep historical and spiritual significance. At the sites themselves, other signboards have been erected which serve to interpret the landscape along the lines of a dominant tourism narrative. This narrative is mainly aimed at African American visitors. It is presented in such a way that the more recent experiences of inner-continental slave-raiding and -trading appear as part of the transatlantic slave system and therefore as relevant to Diasporans. This paper examines the processes through which meaning is created and mediated through signboards and oral narratives for both visitors and local communities at those former slave sites. I will consider the dynamic interplay of absence/presence in the construction of the authenticity of place. Moreover, I will ask about the criteria that make this authentification work in some contexts while it seems to fail in others. Ferdinand de Jong University of East Anglia The Door of No Return: Authenticating a Lost and Found Self Gorée Island off the Senegalese coast is one of the trading posts from which slaves were historically deported to the New World. It is now a UNESCO World Heritage Site. Many African-Americans and Caribbeans visit the island and the House of Slaves in particular as part of their ‘roots’ pilgrimage. This paper examines the materiality of the House of Slaves and its various representations in order to assess how the slave trade is re-presented today.

Surveying postcards of the island and promotional pictures of President Clinton’s visit to the House of Slaves, this paper suggests that the legacy of the slave trade at Gorée Island is visualised in icons that serve both the commodification of the history of the slave trade and the authentication of a poetics of self-making. Commodification and authentication actually seem to coincide in the politics and poetics of commemoration and this paper argues that they do not contradict each other but are in fact intricately intertwined. Rhoda Woets VU University “This is What Makes Sirigu Unique”: Canvas Paintings from Northern Ghana and the Demand for Authenticity The village of Sirigu is situated in the Northern part of Ghana, near the border with Burkina Faso. It is well known for its architecture of clay buildings where women decorate their husband’s houses with motives and patterns. The ‘tradition’ of wall painting has recently been revived to attract tourists to the village. In a visitors centre, the women sell pottery and woven baskets to supplement their income. They also learned canvas-painting from Dutch artists and have been quite successful as their paintings with wall motives and abstract animals have been exhibited in capital city Accra and in several galleries in the Netherlands. Although the women paint in acrylic, they are more or less bound to use the three colours that match the “traditional” pigments (made of clay and stone), used in wall paintings. When the group started to experiment with different colours, materials and styles, tourists objected the paintings were not “authentic”. The founder of the organisation decided for the painters group that they should return to “traditional” styles and colours on their canvasses as she argued that the three wall colours is what makes Sirigu unique. In this paper I will explore issues of “tradition” and “authenticity” in the discourse and work of the female painting group in Sirigu. I will go deeper into -the often static- expectations tourists and foreign curators have of their work and how the women respond to these expectations. I will analyse these questions at the local level and also in regard to the exhibition series of paintings from Sirigu in the Netherlands in 2007 and 2008.

“Cow and lizard”, Acrylic on canvas by several artists

Panel 7: Politics of authenticity Discussant: Irene Stengs, Meertens Institute Kodjo Senah University of Ghana

Politicization and Contestation of the Sacrosanct: The Case of Ghanaian Chieftaincy

Chieftaincy is important to the people of Ghana; it is guaranteed by the Fourth Republican Constitution of the country. Chieftaincy is one of the most resilient traditional institutions of Ghanaian communities and has displayed remarkable adaptations from the pre-colonial through colonial and the post-colonial eras. In the post-colonial state, its insignia and nuances resonate in both public and private space. Beside the glamour of chieftaincy, however, chiefs today carry onerous responsibilities and face great challenges: divested of much power and resources, chiefs must partner political authorities to fight hunger, diseases, poverty, environmental degradation and local conflicts, among others. This paper examines some of the emerging problematics as Ghanaian chieftaincy, by default, 'de-sacrilizes' itself in the realm of national political processes.

Luis Nicolau Parés Federal University of Bahia Bureaucratization of the Sacred: Notes on the Tombamento of Afro-Brazilian Temples The text presents some very preliminary notes on the relation between heritage, property, commodification and the production of value. It examines the interaction (perhaps dialogue of the deaf) between the state's "secular sacralization" of selected Afro-Brazilian temples as cultural heritage and the religious congregations' strategic use of this political initiative in terms of their own inner micro-politics and interests. Based on a particular case study, some attention is paid to producers, consumers and mediators in this "symbolic market of distinction".