Erve Chambers on tradition and “authenticity”

“Richard Handler and Jocelyn Linnekin have contended that our tendency to judge authenticity in terms of the faithfulness by which traditions are passed intact from one generation to another fails to account for the ways in which traditions actually serve human communities. Traditions, they argue, are invariably defined in the present and reinterpreted to meet the ideological needs of the living. The invention, appropriation, and reconstruction of tradition is not a consequence of modernity, but perhaps more nearly a necessary condition for the construction of all human culture. Modernity and capitalism did not create these mechanisms, although they might have helped speed them up and, in so doing, perhaps made them more transparent. This transparency, which serves to render previously implicit cultural traditions more explicit, makes it increasingly difficult to perceive modern tourist images as being ‘real.'”
–Erve Chambers, Native Tours: The Anthropology of Travel and Tourism (2000)