Authenticity Anxiety and Counterfeit Confidence

Abstract

This article focuses on a group of Bai minority market women in Dali, Yunnan: while expressing anxiety over “fakes” in China’s reform era, they have, when selling souvenirs to transnational travelers, simultaneously created them, engaging in authenticating and outsourcing techniques that imitate larger global economic processes. The author argues that concern over authenticity does not arise only in a European-style modernity in which individualism is key. Instead, such anxiety proliferates during periods of increased commodification and intensified circulation of unfamiliar people and objects, when the prestige or profits to be gained from impersonation, falsification, and imitation are worth the risk. Moreover, the same people who express anxiety over authenticity as consumers may “counterfeit” as producers and distributors.