DISCUSSING CULTURAL AUTHENTICITY: THE “PATACHITRA” OF WEST BENGAL BETWEEN GLOBALIZATION AND MODERN CONSUMER SOCIETY

The dream of authenticity, the savage sensibility, the idea that “modernity” – however meant – was a theme of very limited interest for anthropologists is a mark of the Western history of cultural analysis throughout a good part of the last century. Still today it remains in some not always marginal lines of western ideology with re- gard to other people and other places (exotic places, ethnic objects, strange rituals), as well as in a certain persistent conception of cultural anthropology such as a search for authentic cultural richness. In this paper, I concisely present the main lines of the au- thenticity debate and argue for a hybrid (and oxymoronic) notion of cultural authen- ticity focusing on an ethnographic case.