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17 Chapter two Identity Issues, Research Methods, and Ethnography When approaching the music and dance of living ethnic groups activelyappreciatedby others,beitzydecoorBalkanmusicorsalsa, it is difficult to escape a rhetorical opposition of insiders and outsiders . Indeed, the first chapter employs this opposition in describing the tableau of “Down At The Twist And Shout” (a band of insiders and a dance floor full of outsiders) and in analyzing the song’s possible receptions using a range of perspectives from outside to inside Louisiana French culture. This prevalent habit of thinking in terms of insiders and outsiders has had a fundamental impact on the intertwined developments of Cajun and Creole ethnicity and the mass-mediated consumption of Cajun and Creole culture as we know them today. This chapter grapples with questions of identity as they apply to Cajun and Creole history, to the author and his research methods, and to how the book is written. In the course of the discussion, it should become clear what is meant by the book’s subtitle, Modern Pleasures in a Postmodern World. Modern Pleasures The opposition of insider and outsider contains within it the seeds of two opposingviewsofidentity . Identity definitionrevolvesaroundtheinsider, whohassomething that the outsider does not have that involves belonging to a group. Whether that belonging is based on racial characteristics, or someplace where one was born and raised, or a language spoken, or a religion practiced, or some combination of these circumstances, such an identity is taken to be an essential, lifelong experience for those who belong to the group. The sentiment about rural living, “You can take the boy out of the country but you can’t take the country out of the boy,” exemplifies this essentialist view of identity, as does the notion of roots when we talk about 18 Identity Issues, Research Methods, and Ethnography “roots music,” “I’m going back to my roots,” and so on. Stuart Hall describes such a view of identity this way: [T]he language of identity has often been related to the search for a kind of authenticity to one’s experience, something that tells me where I come from. The logic and language of identity is the logic of depth—in here, deep inside me, is my Self which I can reflect upon. It is an element of continuity. I think most of us do recognize that our identities have changed over time, but we have the hope or nostalgia that they change at the rate of a glacier. So, while we’re not the fledglings that we were when we were one year old, we are the same sort of person.1 Hall’s explanation of identity immediately brings in another problematic term, authenticity, that is integral to how many people talk about Cajun and Creole music. References to the authentic or to its correlates—genuine, original, traditional , real, or heritage—serve both as shorthand and as a power move. They are shorthand for an intellectual history that goes back over two hundred years to Herder, Rousseau, and others. The discourse around authenticity combines various ideas of what modernity has displaced—nature displaced by civilization, oral tradition by the printed word, innocence by constant reflection and alienation concerning our place in the world—and expresses a longing to recover what has been lost. Popular sentiments run parallel to intellectual history along these lines—for example, themes of loss and longing in the words sung in Cajun dance music. The etymology and semantic associations around the word authenticity— “one who acts with authority,” “made by one’s own hand,” the determination of sacred relics or masterworks of art as genuine or spurious—resonate with power. To declare something authentic is to legitimate it, perhaps even to suggest that it has been touched either by God himself (in the case of sacred relics) or through the intermediary of inspired human genius. That genius has typically been traced to a great artist by name or to a folk community expressing its emotions in a “natural ” (God-given) fashion.2 In her book on the scholarly and popular search for authenticity through folklore in German-speaking Europe and in the United States, Regina Bendix grants that “this search arises out of a profound human longing, be it religious-spiritual or existential,” and yet if she had her way she would abolish the concept: “If this work assists in removing authenticity—in particular, its deceptive promises of transcendence—from the vocabulary of the emerging global script, its major purpose...

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