Authenticity as a travelling concept: from heritage conservation to archives

The cultural theorist Mieke Bal introduced the notion of “travelling concepts” as a model for enriching interdisciplinary dialogue. Concepts travel in the sense that they are taken from one setting or discourse and applied in others; as they move across historical periods, disciplines, or communities of practice, concepts are adapted, reframed, and reformulated. Engaging with concepts that travel is a useful way of finding common ground in cross-disciplinary exchanges and can enrich the theoretical and methodological foundations of specific disciplinary knowledge. In this article I follow the travels of authenticity in the field of cultural heritage conservation from its association with “originality” and “genuineness” in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries to its emergent understanding in the twenty-first century as “networks of relationships between people, objects, and places” (Jones, J Mater Cult 15:181–203, 2010). By following these travels I hope to make a case for the value of reorienting archival thinking around this crosscutting concept and to consider whether the story of authenticity’s travels in the field of cultural heritage conservation might provide a jumping off point for a more expansive and expressive conceptualization of authenticity in the field of archival studies.