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12/15/1890 Louis Brandeis and Samuel Warren published “The Right to Privacy.” This brilliant paper argued for a new chapter in American law to protect the right to privacy.
The Right to Privacy Originally published in 4 Harvard Law Review 193 (1890)

The Paradox of Authenticity: Folklore Performance in Post-Communist
Slovakia. By Joseph Grim Feinberg. 2018. Madison: University of
Wisconsin Press. 234 pages. ISBN: 978-0-299-31660-0 (hard cover).

Reviewed by Hande Birkalan-Gedik, Johann-Wolfgang Goethe Universität
(bi************@**************rt.de).

[Word count: 1359 words]

As one of the keywords of our discipline, the concept of authenticity
appears in folkloristics quite often, suggesting a complex web of
interactions, especially in the days of globalization, mass
production, and neo-liberalization.

Not the scholarly views, per se, but the emic understandings of
lovers of authentic folklore are at stake in The Paradox of
Authenticity: Folklore Performance in Post-Communist Slovakia. At
hand we have folk-dance as a representative genre, and Slovakia as an
ethnographic site. In this book, originally written as a doctoral
dissertation, Joseph Grim Feinberg treats the term “authenticity” in
a post-socialist, or as he terms it, a post-Communist context,
presenting the understandings of performers of folklore next to
eclectic scholarly views on authenticity in a variety of disciplines.
The idea of authenticity, the author argues, is rooted in the
intentions of people, in folk-dancers’ claims of “returning to
authentic folklore,” an idea that Feinberg characterizes as a
contemporary movement in Slovakia. The performers accentuate the
premise that, under Communist rule, the people forgot what authentic
folklore is, partly due to the popularity of “stylized” folklore
events organized and supported by Communist rule (he uses the term in
the capitals, referring to the activities of the Communist Party).

Feinberg concentrates on the folk-dance performances in
post-Communist Slovakia, particularly evidenced ethnographically in
the city of Košice, juxtaposing the work of folklore performers with
the performances conducted under the ancien régime. The author
attends to the activities of the Club of Authentic Folklore Lovers
(Klub milovnikov autentickeho folkloru/KMAF) at tanecný dom, the
dance-houses or cultural centers of folk-dance, where the performers
and spectators gather to dance various village folk-dance styles. But
the ethnographic sample in this study is not limited to this city and
this group.

The idea of a return to authentic folklore comes across as an
remarkable and challenging case, as the author delves into the
processes, actors, and sites involved in the making of what the
participants take to be authentic folklore. Feinberg takes the reader
through the customary discussions of authenticity, as seen in North
American contexts — a matter that I will return to later. Feinberg
locates the concept of authenticity in the creative tension of many
dualisms, especially those outlined and discussed in detail in his
conclusion under the rubric “reflective authenticity” (see pages
187-202), a term he borrows from the Italian political philosopher
Alessandro Ferrara (1998). Feinberg contends that in Slovakia,
authentic folklore should be understood to be an intimate affair.
Relying on his informants’ words and his participatory experience at
the dance houses, he underscores that real folklore is not
transmitted through mass media for an anonymous reading or viewing or
listening public, but that it should take place in face-to-face
contexts and must be passed on from person to person.

The book is organized into four chapters, which are preceded by an
introduction and followed by two creative essays (one, in lieu of a
conclusion). The author is attentive to the discussions on
authenticity in North American folkloristics, and he enriches these
through a presentation of European and East European scholarship on
modernity and folklore, weaving (political) philosophy, sociology,
ethics, and anthropological perspectives into this central
folkloristic concept.

In the introduction, Feinberg presents a context of folkloric
performance during the time of Communism. He endeavors to demonstrate
that under Communism, folklore meant staged performance, rapaciously
put to use as public spectacle. To bolster his arguments, he takes
the reader through statements of the Slovak Communist officials as
well as into the aesthetic views of Slovak novelists. In chapter 1,
titled “The Paradox of Publicizing Folklore,” the author argues that
in the post-Communist context folklore, here specifically folk
dancing, is innately authentic when it is practiced in the intimate
realm. Folklore, he argues, is no longer authentic as soon as it is
brought into the public realm to become an object of the public gaze.
In chapter 2, “Folklore as Performance and Organization,” Feinberg
discusses problems involved in the performances and organizations of
folk dances. He participated and observed as a dancing member of a
folk dance group, combining participation and observation in his
fieldwork. Chapter 3, “Folklore and Festivals between the Public and
the People,” describes folklore festivals in Slovakia, with a
particular focus on the Východná Folklore Festival, where amateur
ensembles perform folk dances for an international audience. Here we
see that the tension between public spectacle and the intimate domain
creates a dilemma. In chapter 4, “The Poetics of Authenticity,” the
author discusses the symbolic categories employed by his lovers of
authentic folklore, describing the role of choreography and
improvisation. Here, he delves into the ambiguities of authenticity,
framed through concepts of presence, self-expression, style and
skill, performance and anti-performance, internalization, and the
composition of dances. The authentication process presents further
ambiguities and dialectics, in such terms as publicizing/performance,
politics/poetics, and public/people, which cannot be fully resolved
in his analysis. These symbolic categories are not seen as conclusive
but rather as blurring our understanding of the case study of
Slovakia. Feinberg argues that the juxtaposition of intimate (people)
versus public (spectacle) makes sense only in the presentation of
folklore in contexts of modernity, where the frame of the public is
included in the concept of folklore.

One can see this book as addressing problems of performance and the
reconceptualization of “the people” in post-Communist Slovak
folklore. But it is not a simple task to illustrate the politics of
culture on display. Overall, the book signals the importance of
ethnographic insight as well as aesthetic theory and political
philosophy. Furthermore, Feinberg’s treatment of folklore performance
goes beyond the discussion of public folklore in the United States as
he weaves in eclectic literature on the topic. Among other sources,
he draws on Søren Kierkegaard’s philosophy of paradox and Theodor
Adorno’s The Jargon of Authenticity (1973 [1964]). Last, but not
least, the treatment of authenticity against the backdrop of
sociological and philosophical stances is a novelty for readers in
the United States. In particular, the author presents perspectives
offered by Jürgen Habermas on the notion of the bourgeois public.
This is perhaps something that North Americans are not accustomed to
finding in discussions of public(izing) folklore.

These European frameworks should be read, however, vis à vis North
American discussions, for example, those on “public folklore” (e.g.,
Spitzer) and “folklorists in public” (e.g., Kirshenblatt-Gimblett).
Some folklorists might not have worked closely with the notion of
intimacy as in discussions of “folklorismus” (e.g., Bausinger) and
“fakelore” (e,g., Dorson), to offer two examples. Feinberg also
references Regina Bendix, who notes that performance-oriented
folklorists tend to present performed folklore as more authentic than
unperformed folklore. Perhaps this is a result of these scholars not
closely examining the tension between public performativity and
intimate authenticity.

I find the author’s usage of the term “authenticity” without any
quotation marks throughout the text interesting, and I suspect it to
be a deliberate choice due to the “emic” identifications of his
informants.

In winding up this review, I kept thinking about performativity and
authenticity beyond folk dancing, which is one of the most “suitable”
genres for public display (in festivals, for dance organizations, or
touristic purposes). I wonder if the argument on intimacy and the
will-to-authenticity can be sustained in the case of less canonical
verbal or material folklore genres in Slovak folklore. Lastly,
different settings for folklore movements, from the Baltics to the
Americas, inform different political, cultural, and economic
contexts, as a brief perusal of recent literature over the last
decade shows. Joseph Grim Feinberg takes a less traveled road as he
brings ethnography, philosophy, and history together, and he offers
fresh insights on folklorization, authenticity, and publics. Overall,
I find it interesting that anthropologists are delving into the study
of concepts that are deemed central in folklore studies – often, it
is the other way around. The author presents what I see as new
literature for folklorists (or old literature, but perhaps new to
many folklorists). But a note of caution is warranted: if readers
have not yet encountered these sources, they may need to detour to
these texts as they take up The Paradox of Authenticity. Folklore
Performance in Post-Communist Slovakia.