Pacific Performances pp 174-190 | Cite as
‘As You Always Imagined It’: The Pacific as Tourist Spectacle
Abstract
As we saw in the last chapter, Bloody Mary’s trade in yellow grass-skirts, shrunken heads and model canoes documented that the South Pacific had well and truly become a tourist space. Her US servicemen customers were evidently more than eager to document their Pacific experience (which for many would end in death or wounding) in terms of authentic native curios. By this time, the Pacific had begun to trade on its discursive history. It had become a sign of itself, which is a prerequisite of the tourist experience. For a place or culture to attain this state of virtual existence, whereby the phoney and contrived version of cultural experience is perceived as more authentic than the actual state, a sustained process of verbal, visual and very often performative representation must have occurred. The preceding chapters have engaged in different ways with this historical process. The redefinition of hula and haka in the nineteenth century (Chapter 4) created two performance forms that, in their versions at least, became metonymic representations of their respective indigenous cultures. The popular ethnographic spectacles of late nineteenth-century Europe (Chapter 5) could be considered as armchair-tourist performances. The popularization of Hawaiian music and dance in the wake of Richard Walton Tully’s play The Bird of Paradise (Chapter 6) had an important influence on the growing tourist trade to Hawai‘i.
Keywords
Tourist Performance Happy People Tourist Spectacle Coconut Tree Tourist SpacePreview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
Notes
- 2.Dean MacCannell, ‘Staged Authenticity: Arrangements of Social Space in Tourist Settings’, Journal ofAmerican Sociology, 79:3 (1973), 589–603. MacCannell argues that the various forms of constructed tourist attractions dissolve the clear dichotomy between ‘staged’ and ‘authentic’, or between ‘front’ and ‘back’ situations as Erving Goffman terms them. In reality one should speak of a continuum linking the ideal poles of ‘staged’ and ‘authentic’ with at least four intermediary or crossover categories between them (598). These categories are by no means immutable because the insatiable tourist appetite for ‘sights’ seems to provoke redefinitions of space to cater for this need.Google Scholar
- 3.For anthropological perspectives, see particularly Nelson Graburn (ed.) Ethnic and Tourist Arts: Cultural Expressions from the Fourth World (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976); and Valene L. Smith (ed.), Hosts and Guests: The Anthropology of Tourism (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1989).Google Scholar
- 4.Richard Schechner, Between Theatre and Anthropology (Philadelphia: Pennsylvania University Press, 1985), particularly chs 1 and 2. The most prominent performance studies scholar in this area is probably Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, Destination Culture: Tourism, Museums, and Heritage (Berkeley, Los Angeles and London: University of California Press, 1998). Jane Desmond’s study of tourist destinations in Hawai‘i, Staging Tourism: Bodies on Display from Waikiki to Sea World (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1999), is also an exemplary combination of performance and cultural studies.Google Scholar
- 6.Terry Webb, ‘Highly Structured Tourist Art: Form and Meaning of the Polynesian Cultural Center’, The Contemporary Pacific, 6:1 (1994), 59–86; here 73. Webb is a Hawai’i-based anthropologist who has devoted much research to the PCC. A Mormon view is provided by Max E. Stanton, ‘The Polynesian Cultural Center: A Multi-Ethnic Model of Seven Pacific Cultures’, in Valene E. Smith (ed.), Hosts and Guests, 247–62. Stanton is a faculty member of the adjoining Brigham Young University. He argues that the PCC is constructed around the notion of ‘a model culture’ portraying ‘the best of those tangible, believable aspects of Polynesian culture with which the tourist can identify’ (251). See also James Whitehead, ‘The Polynesian Cultural Center in Hawai’i, Journal of American Culture, 12:1 (Spring 1989), 1–6. Whitehead argues that the Mormon faith has had a beneficial effect on encouraging Polynesian dance forms at the Center in comparison to the early missionary repression of dance.Google Scholar
- 9.For a list, see Andrew Ross, The Chicago Gangster Theory of Life: Nature’s Debt to Society (London: Verso, 1994), ch. 1 ‘Cultural Preservation in the Polynesia of the Latter-Day Saints’, 44. In this chapter Ross provides arguably the most perceptive and critical assessment of the PCC published to date, in addition to a wide-ranging discussion of the cultural idea of the Pacific today.Google Scholar
- 13.Homi Bhabha, ‘Of Mimicry and Man: The Ambivalence of Colonial Discourse’, in his The Location of Culture, (London: Routledge, 1994), 91. See also the discussion of mimicry in Chapter 1 in this volume.Google Scholar
- 14.See Henry Louis Gates Jr., The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of African-American Literary Criticism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988). I would like to thank Marvin Carlson for drawing my attention to the similarity between the Polynesian performances and Gates’s theory.Google Scholar
- 17.Both cultures have experienced intensive cultural revivals over the past decade, as suggested in Chapter 4. For an assessment of the Hawaiian cultural renaissance, see Elisabeth Buck, Paradise Remade: The Politics of Culture and History in Hawai’i (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1993).Google Scholar
- 18.See James Clifford, ‘Of Other Peoples: Beyond the “Salvage” Paradigm’, The Politics of Representations, ed. Hal Foster (Seattle: Bay Press, 1987), 121–50; here 121.Google Scholar
- 20.Diana Taylor, The Archive and the Repertoire: Performing Cultural Memory in the Americas (Durham, NC, and London: Duke University Press, 2003), 19.Google Scholar
- 21.Jonathan Culler, ‘Semiotics of Tourism’, TheAmerican Journal of Semiotics, 1:1/2 (1981), 127; see also John Frow, ‘Tourism and the Semiotics of Nostalgia’, October, 57 (1991), 125.Google Scholar
- 22.John Urry notes: ‘Indeed acting as a tourist is one of the defining characteristics of being “modern” and is bound up with major transformations in paid work.’ The Tourist Gaze: Leisure and Travel in Contemporary Societies (London: Sage, 1990), 2f. MacCannell links the feelings of ‘shallowness’ and ‘inauthenticity’ of the ‘modems’ with their interest in ‘the sacred in primitive society’; ‘Staged Authenticity’, 589f. Frow defines tourism among other things as a quest for an authentic domain of being: ‘It is thus a marker of the spiritual self-reflexivity of modernity and directly parallel to the self-consciousness of intellectuals about their own alienation’; Frow, ‘Tourism’, 129.Google Scholar
- 30.See Frederik Errington and Deborah Gwertz, ‘Tourism and Anthropology in a Post-Modern World’, Oceania, 60:1 (1989), 37–54; here 49. The ‘hazers’ are the four members of the initiation ritual who carry out the procedure, consisting mainly of berating and humiliating the initiates.Google Scholar