American Aloha: Cultural Tourism and the Negotiation of Tradition

Publications in review / Annals of Tourism Research 36 (2009) 353–360

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Annals of Tourism Research, Vol. 36, No. 2, pp. 355–356, 2009 Printed in Great Britain

American Aloha: Cultural Tourism and the Negotiation of Tradition By Heather Diamond. University of Hawai’i Press (www.uhpress. hawaii.edu) 2008, xv + 261 pp (figures, glossary, bibliography, index) $55.00 Hbk. ISBN 978 0 8248 3171 4 Julie Tate-Libby University of Otago, New Zealand American Aloha is an examination of the staging of Hawai’i at the 1989 Smithsonian Festival of American Folklife. Using archival materials and interviews, this book provides a nuanced narrative of the structures surrounding the festival as well as an historical lens through which to view its effects. By focusing on an historical event, the book avoids simple ethnography and situates the festival as a counter-narrative against tourism images. The book begins by describing the 1989 Folklife Festival, locating it within Hawai’i’s history of cultural intervention by institutionalized forces. Beginning in the Nineteenth Century, the preservation of traditional arts and crafts became a covert resistance by the Hawaiian monarchy against increasing hegemonic ideals of Europeans and missionaries. Later, under the territorial government, native arts were suppressed, only to be revived and encouraged as tourist fare. By the 1920s, religious institutions as well as national and local governments actively worked to shape a Hawaiian ethnic identity by sponsoring ethnographic studies and cultural revivals. Chapter Two describes the program’s planning, including fieldwork to determine what types of performances should be included. Agency personnel and cultural practitioners negotiated conflicts over ‘‘tradition’’ and ‘‘authenticity’’ in order to project a narrative of ethnic diversity in opposition to the homogenized and ‘‘Hawaiian-only’’ identity of the tourism sector. Ultimately, despite a long list of ethnicities, only nine ethnic groups were chosen to portray Hawai’i as a multicultural community, with its ‘‘best foot forward’’ (p. 58). Importantly, the focus on folklife erased haoles from the picture, even though haoles made up 25% of the population. This omission belied power structures in Hawai’i, particularly the colonial and ongoing legacy of the kama’aina haole elites. The criteria for inclusion in the festival sparked sometimes heated debate among fieldworkers, agency planners, and cultural practitioners. In the end, an emphasis on grouping by ethnicity trumped more hybrid versions that Hawai’i’s participants had of themselves. Chapter Three analyzes how authenticity was negotiated by the physical and constructed spaces of the festival on Washington DC’s Mall. The result moved Hawai’i from its place at America’s periphery to its symbolic center. Festival planners’ concern with countering tourism imagery resulted in confining culture into a navigable space that linked ethnicities by their plantation heritage (Chinese, Japanese, Portuguese, Filipino) and Hawaiians as separate. The remapping of ethnicity and culture spawned spontaneous innovations during the event itself, described in Chapter Four. In resistance to the ethnic frame-

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Publications in review / Annals of Tourism Research 36 (2009) 353–360

work installed by officials, participants constantly renegotiated their identities by mixing cultural forms and crossing ethnic boundaries. Whereas the production stage had carefully constructed a narrative of cultural diversity and creolization, participants negotiated this rubric along much more fluid lines. Chapter Five describes the festival aftermath, including a brief restaging of the festival in Honolulu. While the festival in Washington was concerned with educating American mainlanders and potential tourists, the restaging was performed for a local audience to educate them on cultural practices and diversity. For various reasons such as time constraints and a dispersed layout, the restaging lacked the strong emotional and empowering appeal of the first event. In the wake of the 1989 Festival, federal funding hit an all-time low and proposals for a new cultural resource center to utilize the festival’s momentum and wealth of material was never implemented, although the festival was to have a lasting impact on cultural tourism in Hawai’i. Throughout the retelling of the 1989 Festival, Diamond emphasizes the incongruities associated with staged reproductions of culture. Foremost, she argues that official narratives of racial harmony and cultural values erased the social and political contexts of the time. The year 1989 coincided with the 30th anniversary of Hawai’i’s transition from a US territory to statehood, and the political realities of the day were rife with debates over land, socioeconomic disparities, tourism, and development. While the intent of the festival was to present a more authentic and nuanced image of Hawai’i than the homogenized ‘‘Hawaiian’’ of popular culture, the compartmentalization of Hawai’i by ethnic boundaries belied real ethnic and cultural fluidity while concealing historical tensions of the plantation economy. Formal categories based on ethnicity and tradition excluded any arts forms associated with the tourism sector, such as hapa haole music, or Christian symbols. The rewriting of Hawai’i’s cultural script avoided the ‘‘real’’ because it did not fit with agency-defined notions of tradition. The effect was to empower cultural practitioners while projecting an alternative vision of Hawai’i to America. In this way, the 1989 Festival was ‘‘subversive’’. However, the Smithsonian script also obscured political realities such as the growing sovereignty movement. Social ills and power structures of the haole kama’aina were effectively removed from the festival landscape, erasing enduring power relations in existence. In addition, while adamantly opposing the tourism-created imagery of Hawai’i, the festival reiterated commonly used tourism tropes such as aloha and ’ohana in effort to present Hawai’i as a harmonious place. While the tropes contributed to the commoditization of Hawai’i in the tourism sector, they have also been used to assert resistance, as in the case of an Hawaiian nationality. Diamond’s book is a well-written, nuanced version of the relationship between culture and tourism. It provides an accurate and compelling narrative of Hawai’i’s cultural identity as well as teases out the complexities of tradition, culture, and institutional intervention. By focusing on one historical event, it carefully and articulately examines important issues. On the other hand, it does not address the structures of tourism against which the festival is posited; rather these are assumed to be some form of mass tourism. While mass tourism in American Aloha holds a pivotal place, it is not defined or discussed in detail. This omission, however, does not negate the effectiveness of the book. Overall, American Aloha is a must-read for scholars interested in Hawai’i, cultural productions, folklife, or tourism. Julie Tate-Libby: Department of Tourism, University of Otago, Dunedin, New Zealand. E-mail Assigned 29 July 2008. Submitted 11 September 2008. Accepted 12 September 2008. doi:10.1016/j.annals.2008.09.007