Authenticity and Cultural Heritage Connections within Food Culture
Authenticity and Cultural Heritage Connections within Food Culture

Summary/Abstract: Our paper focuses on the problem of authenticity as a fundamental element in the definition of cultural heritage. From a cultural semiotic point of view, food is considered as a language, as a system of meaning in the processes of cultural communication. On the one hand, including food practices in the category of intangible cultural heritage implies their designation as authentic, as representative of the community. On the other hand, the search for authenticity is an explicit objective of ethno-anthropological research, a qualitative research whose results can be influenced by the perishability of the relational, dialogical nature of the intangible heritage. There is an important economic aim for the tourism area, trying to recover the local specificities and the tradition. Modern culinary discourse (advertising, media, and menus in restaurants) is sometimes subject to a constructivist logic of authenticity. In relation to food practices considered as a system of meaning in the process of cultural communication, this cultural semiotics of the intangible cultural heritage discovers and researches the authentic identity while preserving the relation of otherness.

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