Sincerity and Authenticity in Transnational Mediations

Convenor: Prof. dr Peter van der Veer

Lionel Trilling has made famous conjectures about the development of sincerity into authenticity in Western moral thought. However brilliant, his perspective remains firmly Eurocentric. It does not engage the global imperial encounters that enabled conversions, translations, interactions, and mediations between different cultures since the 16th century, but increasingly since the 19th century. The same can be said about the work of the philosopher Charles Taylor that similarly explores the problematic of authenticity in modern culture without engaging with this long history of global modernity. It can be seen as the task of anthropology to bring the theme of encounters and inter-cultural mediation to bear on the philosophical understanding of sincerity and authenticity.

Conversion to another creed immediately brings into question deeply philosophical issues of freedom (of choice), coercion, instrumental reason as well as sincerity (belief, ‘inner self’). It also raises the question of authenticity (‘being true to oneself’) in relation to the problematic of the social (and thus ‘the individual’). These questions become more urgent in the case of imperial encounters and they throw new light on Western philosophical debates. Missionary activities are paradoxically enmeshed both in searches for sincere conversion and in the defense of authentic culture in the face of colonial or postcolonial modernization. Anthropologists are the conscious or unconscious heirs of the missionary problematic with their emphasis on cultural authenticity as well as on the agency of the people they study.

A particularly fertile field for research into sincerity and authenticity in cultural encounters is that of mediation and representation which, of course, has always been a topic of great concern in religious thought. We have here ambivalences about the authenticity of the source (book or people), of the sincerity of the mediators (priests, radio, television). In prayer there is an uncertainty about its reception that is productive of a religious habitus. It is the extraordinary technology of mass mediation today that makes these old questions come alive in a new way.

This workshop is an exploration of these questions with a variety of materials from different cultural encounters.

Programme

14.00 - 14.45 Peter van der Veer, Max Planck Institute, Göttingen. What do people really think?

14.45 - 15.30 Nicholas Tapp, East China Normal University, Shanghai. Some considerations on conversion and interiority

15.30 - 16.15 Louisa Schein, Rutgers University. Title To Be Announced

16.15 - 17.15 General Discussion

17.15 Reception