This essay explores the tension between processes of cultural commodification and processes of authentication in the marketing of the Trinidad Carnival. The Trinidad and Tobago Industrial Development Company, the National Carnival Commission, and the University of the West Indies have worked with the travel business in Trinidad and Tobago and abroad to appeal to both "cultural tourism" and "sun, sea, sand, and sex tourism" markets while maintaining what they see as Trinidad's cultural uniqueness. The presentation demonstrates the tense, sometimes contradictory, sometimes complementary relationship between competing desires for cultural integrity and economic autonomy. This essay explores how concepts of authenticity, processes of cultural objectification, and international marketing are intertwined in the name of economic and cultural nationalism.This essay explores how the process of authentication as part of a broader movement of cultural nationalism and the process of cultural commodification as part of the development of a cultural tourism industry necessitate the objectification of cultural forms and practices. My particular focus is on the effects of this objectification on the Carnival of Trinidad and Tobago. My analysis comprises three key elements. First, authenticity enhances the economic value of the cultural commodity. Second, cultural brokers commodify cultural products and practices that they believe possess greater cultural authenticity. Third, the commodification process requires the objectification of the cultural processes through which cultural objects are made and practices undertaken. The objectification of cultural forms and practices leads to the condemnation of innovation and the stifling of cultural creativity in the name of a well-intentioned yet misplaced cultural nationalism. Cultural nationalists, in seeking to solidify national culture, authenticate some forms over others. These authenticated

Public festivals provide not only the occasion to make statements about national identity but also offer opportunities to culture brokers seeking foreign exchange through tourism. Within the matrix of the international culture industries and the hegemonic international order of nation-states, culture is both a commodity and a source of national pride. In this article I examine efforts at `cultural entrepreneurship' regarding the Carnival in Trinidad and Tobago. Attempts to market the Carnival and, in a larger sense, Trinidad and Tobago, reveal profound ambiguities about cultural authenticity, ambivalence regarding international recognition, and contested ideas about national identity in a complex multi-ethnic, multicultural, postcolonial state. I criticize what I call `academic nostalgia', the propensity of academics, including anthropologists, to lament the supposed inauthenticity and commercialism that is said to accompany changes in Carnival. I show how this concern mirrors local critiques of Carnival, and how this preoccupation was itself a recurrent theme throughout the 20th century.