Re-Imagined Elephants: Authenticity, Authority, and Culture in Indian and South African Souvenirs (thesis)

Abstract

In brief, then, to properly understand these elephants and other cultural constructions, I posit that these souvenirs present ‘imagined representations’–deliberate, economically beneficial, and performative identities maintained by cultural brokers–of their culture, which collectively yield a ‘perceived authentic’ Tourist World space simultaneously endogenous to yet separate from the rest of the culture. This thesis seeks to employ this framework to investigate how perceived cultural authenticity is constructed, who holds the authority to do this construction, and why these constructions consolidate new expressions into Western-only subspaces of India and South Africa. [From Introduction]