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As Tad Tuleja points out, for Hobsbawm and Ranger, “invented traditions” tend to be imposed by an elite on the masses for purposes of social control on a national scale (1–3), and such is clearly not the case with these five festivals.
As far as authenticity is concerned, this study will, following Regina Bendix, Richard Handler and Jocelyn Linnekin, and Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimlet, regard ethnicity, tradition, and heritage displays as categories that are inherently constructed, and therefore cannot be divided into “authentic” and “inauthentic” camps. Bendix, who comments, “[E]thnicity and authenticity have grown to be uneasy partners,” also observes that, when applied to ethnicity, authenticity is “contextually emergent, lacking the lasting essence that human beings have wished to attach to it” (210). Regarding tradition, Handler and Linnekin argue that it is “an ongoing interpretation of the past” (274), and that it is always “invented because it is necessarily reconstructed in the present, notwithstanding some participants’ understanding of such activities as being preservation rather than invention” (279). Accordingly, “it is impossible to separate spurious and genuine tradition, both empirically and theoretically” (281) because, quite simply, “to do something because it is traditional is already to reinterpret, and hence to change it” (281). And Kirshenblatt-Gimlet, building on the insights of Handler and Linnekin, argues that heritage, “while it looks old…is actually something new. Heritage is a mode of cultural production in the present that has recourse to the past” (7). In terms of the five festivals I am studying, one could say that the performances therein (or each festival-as-performance) do not simply reflect, recall, or remember heritage, tradition, or ethnicity. Instead, these festivals actually help construct the heritage, tradition, and ethnicity on display. As Joseph Roach states,