The Question of Authenticity

I think that there is an issue that not only I, but many others who study abroad struggle with living in a foreign country and that is the search for an "authentic" experience. This can get a bit absurd at times and difficult to define, but the basic idea is that we don't want to travel halfway around the world, just to spend our time eating at Burger Kings and watching Hollywood movies. We want to avoid going to venues and stores and sites that cater to tourists and where everyone speaks English to you and go to places where "real Argentines" hang out.

There are a couple of problems with this pursuit. For one, it is hard to define what is authentic as sometimes those things that are the most traditionally culturally important are also of the most interest to foreigners for the same reason. For instance I was warned by a friend who had studied abroad in Buenos Aires, not to bother taking tango classes, because they are "for tourists". The vast majority of young argentines are more likely to be found dancing to electronic music at a disco than to tango at a milonga.

For me the comparison with the American swing scene is an obvious one--while swing is certainly classic American music, swing dancing is definitely not mainstream, and I understand that I am not in the majority in this respect. Nonetheless, this doesn't make me any less of a real American because I do it. Similarly I don't think that I necessarily need to avoid tango to experience Argentina, I just have to recognize the place it holds in Argentine society, which is necessarily different from the place it would hold in other countries, but is still certainly not pop music.

On the other hand, I don't think that having an authentic experience has to mean sacrificing cultural imports from the rest of the world. It wouldn't be any more authentic to shut oneself off from the music of the rest of the world, because in a cosmopolitan city like Buenos Aires that isn't what the locals do either. By contrast you hear American Top 40 everywhere in Buenos Aires. This sort of phenomenon complicates the issue immensely. I don't listen to American Top 40 in the U.S. so I'm certainly not going to listen to it here. But interestingly this will make me interested in different music than someone here might be interested in. Ironically if I am interested in foreign music, people like me who share an interest in music from foreign lands would be interested in "my" music while I am interested in "theirs".

At the same time as we look for authentic experiences I think it's important to not be restricted by this either. Just because Jazz wasn't born in Argentina, doesn't mean that there's something "fake" about seeing a jazz here, and there is always something different. Music is always colored by where it's created so the jazz scene in Buenos Aires is still a different scene than the scene in Cleveland or the scene in New York. For instance Jazz Clubs in Buenos Aires also feature tango groups, something which cannot be said of American cities, where if tango is performed it probably falls under the purview of "world" music or classical music.

For this reason it is interesting to see how they categorize music here versus how we categorize music at home. Flipping through the paper I saw that "Jazz, Blues and Hip-Hop" was one section, tango another section, singers, folk and rock/pop. A little bit different from how we would classify them in the United States.

I think that one has to move past a sort of artificially imposed definition of authenticity as being "this is real Argentine culture and this is not". That's the sort of thing that dictators do, like Mao Zedong did in the cultural revolution. The fact is that culture is organic, and authenticity to the extent that we can say it exists, is a relative thing, and it isn't so obvious or black and white as we often assume.

In sense this whole issue shows one of the advantages of being in a place, like Cleveland, that is not at all popular to the rest of the world. You never have to worry about being in the real Cleveland--that's all you've got. I don't know that many people come to Cleveland as tourists, so there's nothing that's catered to foreigners with lots of cash.