Penelope Eckert

The trouble with authenticity

 

Sociolinguists have tacitly defined authenticity as a relation between the individual speaker and some established social or geographic entity. This emerged in its purest form in Labov’s (1966) theory of the vernacular, according to which authenticity is a fundamental, immutable quality of the individual, revealed through the working of unconscious processes. The individual’s most unguarded speech reveals a fundamental membership in the community if not of birth, at least of one’s youth. Bucholtz and Hall (2004), on the other hand, have located authenticity in practice, proposing a process of authentication by which speakers use language to lay claim to authenticity of some sort. It’s this “sort” that will be the focus of this talk. Building on the notion of authentication, I will problematize the target of authentication by connecting it to Silverstein’s (2003) theory of indexical order. Based primarily on ethnographic and sociolinguistic research among preadolescents, I will argue that the process of authentication is not simply an effort to establish the self as a member of a category, but an effort to construct oneself in keeping with some aspect of the social meaning of the category.  In turn, cumulative attempts at authentication are integral to the construction of indexical orders.