Blurb:

In addition to the 28 chapters, this volume has a longer, more substantive Introduction and Afterword that offer a variety of examples exploring what’s at stake in discourses on authenticity and how they are inextricably linked to what Jean-François Bayart terms “operational acts of identification.” The Afterword, in closing the volume, offers a final, extended example—incorporating a mix of the approaches and arguments throughout the volume—to demonstrate how these analyses are not strictly limited to a particular case study. The Afterword centers on the question of how authenticity discourses are employed to construct (or delegitimize) notions of an ancient Scottish heritage through (re)branding and commodifying strategic origins narratives.