International colloquium "La preuve imaginaire: Asseoir l'authentique dans les sciences sociales", November 17-18, online

International symposium organized by the research center Plurality of Languages and Identities: Didactics - Acquisition - Mediations-PLIDAM (Inalco, Paris), the Institute of History "Nicolae Iorga", Romanian Academy (Bucharest), the National Museum of the Romanian Peasant (Bucharest), theUniversity of Bucharest, Faculty of History (Bucharest), the Revue Ethnologie française (Paris), and the Centre de recherche sur les Cultures et les Littératures Européennes-CERCLE (Université de Lorraine).

Thursday, November 17 and Friday, November 18, 2022 - distanciel
Schedules:
Thursday, November 17: 09:00-17:30
Friday, November 18: 10:00-18:00
Free and compulsory registration.

Imaginary proof: Asseoir l'authentique dans les sciences sociales. Du faux et de la preuve imaginaire en ethnologie

Imaginary Evidence: Establishing the authentic in the social sciences. Imaginary proof and "the fake" in ethnology

Nowadays, in its ordinary and scholarly acceptation, the adjective "authentic" designates "being in its own truth", "in adequacy with itself". The term comes from the Greek authentes, "that acts on its own authority". As can be observed, its etymology emphasizes the idea of an action or mode of existence that is self-evident; thus is revealed the strong association between personal or collective authenticity and realized identity (Boyarin 2019).

But "being oneself" is a question that implies a double positioning: "looking at oneself" or "being looked at", "evaluating oneself" and "being evaluated", "classifying oneself" or "being classified". Double taxonomy, double administration of proof, double foundation of truth.

The history of the social sciences can be understood as a tension between these two points of view: the truth of oneself and the truth of the other about oneself. This symposium aims to revisit the history of the social sciences of culture - anthropology, ethnography, sociology, history, philosophy - by examining the different ways in which each administers proof of authenticity.

The construction of proof will be apprehended in its historical and contextual dimension. In particular, we will examine the constitution of ethnographic archives, museum collections and manuscript collections as repositories of cultural authenticity. The selection of archived or collected items, the criticism of their materiality, and the historical-critical and philological analysis of texts follow a variety of protocols, depending on the place and time. The Enlightenment did not have the same criteria as Romanticism, or the Renaissance. Similarly, the episteme that makes a point of "flushing out the false" (Copeman 2018) is challenged by the ontological turn (Latour, Holbraad, Pedersen, Viveiros de Castro 2014), which admits a plurality of modalities of proof.

If the authentic is difficult to establish, the false is, for its part, ambivalent. In some contexts, it is seen as "a copy that does not hide its true nature", "an approximation of the thing" in contrast to "the thing in its fullness" (Crăciun 2012). The scope of the false, the inauthentic, illusion and forgery will therefore be examined, phenomena that are far from unambiguous and whose "truth-revealing" value is emphasized by many scholars (Copeman, da Col 2018).

In addition to the questions already raised, this symposium also proposes to examine the political uses of the true and the false in the construction of authenticity, particularly in the context of countries that have experienced late modernity; the role of the media - from printing to social networks - in establishing the authentic; the canonization of the authentic thanks to acts of documentary collection and institutions dedicated to their preservation - archives, museums, UNESCO; the challenges of proof specific to each discipline; the commodification of the authentic.

Organizers:
Madalina Vartejanu-Joubert, PLIDAM, Inalco, Paris
Corina Iosif, PLIDAM, National Museum of the Romanian Peasant, Bucharest
Maria Pakucs, Institute of History "Nicolae Iorga", Romanian Academy, Bucharest
Ecaterina Lung, University of Bucharest, Faculty of History, Bucharest
Nicolas Adell, Revue Ethnologie française, Paris
Didier Francfort, Centre de recherche sur les Culture et les Littératures Européennes, Université de Lorraine