authenticity

who am i to say what is authentic and what is not. i guess i had preconcieved ideas about what "authentic" Vietnamese traditional music should be like, but no one can really say what is or isn't authentically Vietnamese. this music IS Vietnamese. How can it not be when it is here in Vietnam. Vietnamese music was very influenced by China and India centuries ago... why not western Europe now? it is hard to say that anything is pure and authentic. i don't agree with everything he says, but Kwame Appiah makes some good points in his article the Case for Contamination, which was adapted from his book "Comsopolitanism: ethics in a world of strangers" for Jan 2006 NYT magazine. It is easy to talk about being cosmopolitan like Appiah when the king of Ghana is his uncle by marriage. But many many people on the world do not have the resources that he has access to. Appiah teaches philosophy at Princeton. His interview with Brian Lehrer is also interesting and can be heard below. We dicussed these in Ted Levin's Ethnomusicology class, winter of 06.