(..) The above makes clear that the image of exclusive realms of authenticity justified the professional authority of respected, established ethnographers who claimed superior knowledge about the relative purity of particular genres of artefacts. In Bourdieu’s terminology, they had the cultural, symbolic and social capital to decide which artefacts were authentic and which were not. Crew and Sims (1991) have emphasised the dimension of power. Reflecting on claims to authenticity by museum curators, they pointed out that:
[a]uthenticity is not about factuality or reality. It is about authority. Objects have no authority; people do. It is people on the exhibition team who must make a judgement about how to tell about the past. Authenticity – authority – enforces the social contract between the audience and the museum, a socially agreed-upon reality that exists only as long as confidence in the voice of the exhibition holds’ (1991: 163).

(Maruška Svašek "Anthropology, Art and Cultural Production")