This exciting, interactive whole-day event will give you the opportunity to share your views and experiences about authenticity and pulque / acarajé / flaounes / Welsh cider. It will also be an opportunity to visit the picturesque Aberstwyth and the internationally acclaimed National Library of Wales. When? Saturday, 16 May 2015 (10.00-16.00) Where? National Library […]
Consuming Authenticities
Cooking Inauthentically: An Experiment with Flaounes
Before meeting Anna Charalambidou at the AHRC Care for the Future workshop where we developed the ideas for this research project, I had never heard of flaounes before. These are celebration Easter pies from Cyprus that Anna is investigating from the point of view of Greek Cypriot women who make them. I wanted to take […]
“London Cider”- an inauthentic compound?
Whilst researching at the National Library of Wales I came across this book from 1842 (1819): “A practical treatise on breeding, rearing, and fattening all kinds of domestic poultry, pheasants, pigeons, and rabbits” by John Lawrence who was around from 1753 until 1839. At the back of the volume there was a quite in-depth section […]
A tax on authentic cider?
A new tax on cider, or more properly, the end of a tax exemption for small cider producers is currently being demanded by the European Union, at the same time as a PDO designation for Welsh cider is being proposed. It is predicted that the end of the exemption will have a detrimental effect on […]
The Story of Pulque Part 2: A Tangle of Origins
In the last post, I described one of the stories about the discovery of pulque that was recorded in the 17th century and purportedly related to historical events that took place some 7 or 8 centuries previously, in the last generations of the Toltec empire. However, differing accounts of pulque’s origins circulated in pre-Columbian and […]
The Story of Pulque, Part 1
In the 17th century, the Mexican historian Fernando de Alva Ixtlilxochitl recorded a pre-Columbian legend about the origins of pulque. According to Ixtlilxochitl’s version, a noble maiden named Xochitl presented the 8th Toltec king – Tecpancaltzin – with a gift of pulque, a fermented alcoholic drink with a foamy, milky-white appearance. Xochitl’s father had learned […]
The Aesthetics of Authenticity in the Modern Chain Pub
In the last post, I referred to the undercurrents of authenticity running through an edited volume I’ve been working on, Biographies of Drink. To mark the publication of this volume, I thought it would be good to reflect on the chapter that tackles the problem of authenticity head-on, as a means of analysing the design […]
Alcohol and Authenticity
For some reason I always expect January to be a relatively low intensity month in which some leisurely research and reading can be achieved, but it has never worked out that way. Aside from the usual flurry of marking of last semester’s final assignments and teaching preparation for the coming semester, two projects related to […]
The Importance of Authenticity
As we outline on our project website, to designate a cultural product, like a particular food or drink, as authentic can be a politically, economically and culturally charged process, partly because the ways we think about time and history are deeply involved in this process. The slippery concept of authenticity is at the heart of […]
Introducing the Project
Consuming Authenticities is all about how history, as well as different categories of time and temporality, can be mobilised in making particular cultural products seem “authentic” – the “real” thing. The project grew out of a conversation about the workings of authenticity at a workshop designed to develop new projects that related to the AHRC’s […]
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