Authenticity

4

Rendering Authenticity

WHAT TO DO

WHERE DO PEOPLE, AND BUSINESS, TURN TO SATISFY THEIR desire for authenticity? One place is to the past. Being forever gone and inalterable, the past represents an ideal form of authentic experience—the pure. Of course, just as travel to past times is impossible, such purity is unattainable. Yet people do gain a measure of this pure past through a whole host of here-and-now experiences. Think of such quintessential cultural encounters as downing a pint of beer in an English pub, sipping coffee with a Sacher torte in Vienna, participating in a formal Chinese tea ceremony, eating sushi in Japan, having a sauna in Finland, and taking in a baseball game in the United States. These activities constitute forms of ...