International and interdisciplinary on authenticity

- The seminar has been an extremely fulfilling experience where I could engage with scholars and researchers from various allied disciplines including law, theology, history, and anthropology, says Subhadeep Chowdhury, Ph.d. student at UiO. October 3rd to 7th the research group Holy Scriptures and Authoritative Texts at UiA hosted the autumn seminar of the national Ph.D. school ATTR: Authoritative Texts and Their Receptions, with the topic authenticity.

Local Ph.d. student Kjetil Hannevik Friestad agrees. - The seminar has been a week filled to the brim with teaching, discussion, reflection and socializing.

- Bringing together junior and senior researchers of different fields, the main theme of Authenticity has been discussed from very different positions and approaches. Additionally, the participants came from a variety of institutions in and outside Norway, Friestad continues.

The department of religion, philosophy, and history at UiA hosted the seminar because of its extensive work in manuscript studies, centred around the Lying Pen of Scribes-project.

The many valences of authenticity

An important contribution, where UiA research group Claimed Pasts also attended, came from Deise Faria Nunes, Ph.D. student at the Theatre in Context-programme at UiA. She delivered a performance-lecture where she navigates audiovisual, theatrical, and literary landscapes through bell hooks’ concept of the oppositional gaze, to examine the colonial frameworks and structures that still shape our gaze.

Another lecture was given by Raha Rafii, an independent researcher from the United States who specialises in medieval Islamic history and jurisprudence. At the seminar she explored how US/Europe-based university projects digitizing Islamic manuscripts in Southwest Asia may be geared towards mediating authentic manuscripts, while simultaneously circumventing larger questions of colonialism, inequitable resource distribution, and the rights of origin communities.

Reflecting on his own project, Chowdhury finds great relevance in the topic and discussions.

- The most critical point of reflection for my work has been related the discussions in the seminar, on approaching authenticity as both a constructivist as well as something inherent broadly related to late-nineteenth-century and early-twentieth-century regimes of intellectual property rights (IPR) via which authenticity of textiles and textile producers may have been constructed. According to historians like Maxine Berg and Prasannan Parthasarathi, trying to emulate this superior quality of Indian textiles sparked Britain’s industrial revolution. Thus, it will be a helpful exercise for me to try and frame these historical processes in the frame of both chasing an “authentic” fabric from India, and then institutionalising the same under British colonialism, of which IPR constitute a crucial facet.

Learning and community

Both Ph.D. students point to the importance research seminars to build a community that encourages exploration and discussion.

- The seminar also provided a safe environment that was conducive to raising difficult questions about research methods and methodologies that I find to be both central as well as challenging in the discipline of history, Chowdhury asserts.

- Overall, the seminar gave me a sense of having found the right people with whom I could be associated with as a community and an effective support system.

Being at an earlier stage of his work, Friestad also found a useful and conducive community of colleagues at the seminar.

- As I recently started with my Ph.D. project, I find the cross-disciplinary focus and its effect of lifting the discussions to a theoretical and principal level very interesting, but also helpful as a reminder of not becoming too narrow-minded within my own field.

He continues. - For my particular project, the most useful have been the discussions around the importance and challenges related to provenance and authenticity of manuscripts, and how scholars interested in a text and its content in (too) many cases forget about treating the manuscripts as objects whose own history might influence how and whether research on them and the text should be done.

Image 1: Deise Faria Nunes (UiA) and Christoph Kalter (UiA) engage in a group discussion following Nunes’ performance-lecture “The Gaze, Colonialism and Aesthetics”.

Image 2: Kjetil H. Friestad (UiA) and Subhadeep Chowdhury (UiO) were two of the Ph.D. students who attended the ATTR-seminar on authenticity at UiA.

Image 3: Raha Rafii lectures on the colonial structures and implications of digitalising historical manuscripts.

Text and images: Nils H. Korsvoll