Claudia Bell

The big 'OE' - young New Zealand travellers as secular pilgrims.

‘OE’ stands for ‘overseas experience,’ a cultural institution in New Zealand. This rite of passage for young adults is an extended journey overseas. While little examined in academia, OE is clearly understood in everyday life, and well documented in fiction and in literary biographies. The journey is a quest or pilgrimage from one of the world’s most remote countries, to the places familiar in national and family histories, popular media, and in tales from previous OE travellers. This article identifies these young travellers as ‘secular pilgrims’, as they re-enact familiar rituals of departure, arrival and return. Parallels are drawn with the work of Coleman and Elsner on religious pilgrimages. The New Zealanders are undertaking a rite of passage, a ritual, a journey with metaphorical resonances, and while doing so they are collecting narratives of adventure and returning with tokens of place. Their low budgets test the acclaimed national characteristics of independence and initiative. National difference is reflected upon: from a distance myths of place - home - intensify. The return home provides an audience for travel narratives. A rite of passage has been achieved.

Tourists infiltrating authentic domestic space at Balinese home cooking schools

Over 2.5 million tourists visit Bali, Indonesia, each year. Attracted by the warm climate, its sheer physical beauty and its reputation for affordability, friendliness and great food, Bali provides an exotic respite from the Western world.

Community in the new epoch: the social ergonomics of community design

Abstract ‘Community’ as both location and structure of relationships is undergoing change. In the Western world the rate of changes will inevitably accelerate in this new century. Our predictions include: the vast growth of cyber communities, and an increasing bandwidth, immersivity and interactivity in such communities; the expansion of the surveillance age in urban and rural communities, as rampant public crime works against community safety; an increased emphasis on social control in highly conservative communities that foster conformity; the development of Smart Towns with every service, facility and communication accessed by fibre-optic cable technology. Style will become a major priority in the 2025 community. The gurus of the age will be the Community Designers. At first these will be multi-disciplinary visionaries, who will be accorded the fame and celebrity of late-twentieth-century film stars. Their ideas for planned communities will take into account the above, but also offer grand schemes for the development of theme towns. Our scenarios indicate the continuing need by many citizens for ideals and ideology of traditional community life, but encased in new guises, with individual well-being and entertainment as priority. In general, current trends of disenfranchisement through globalization, multinationals and non-consultative government act to increase the chances of our scenarios coming about. A major social change through political awakening of the young, global neo-environmental movements and other massive global paradigm shifts would mitigate against our scenarios. We see the latter as unlikely.

A Vernacular Food Tradition and National Identity in New Zealand

Abstract The humble meat pie is one of the most consumed casual takeout foods in New Zealand. Readily available in every bakery, corner dairy, café and gas station, they were traditionally the mainstay of roadside food vendor wagons known as “pie carts.” This paper demonstrates how that modest, familiar feature of everyday life in New Zealand—the roadside pie cart—is a site where values of national identity were/are enacted. Contemporary pie carts no longer necessarily sell pies—but the name remains. Traditional pie carts do however live on in the memories and narratives of patrons. This paper investigates the role of these carts, past and present, in reiterating national food attitudes, and as a reflection of social change.

Kiwiana goes upmarket: Vernacular mobilization in the new century

Kiwiana refers to popular cultural items that distinctly reference New Zealand. This research focuses on the interplay between the material and social worlds, as attitudes to traditional items have evolved to a new, highly commercial, phase. The makers and consumers of new items that draw on the old kiwiana references, ignore, defy, or have simply moved on from the hazardous debates about cross-cultural appropriation. In the face of globalization and the flood of mass consumer items into local markets, the revival and recasting of kiwiana can be explained as an eager search for items that express a bicultural localism. This research demonstrates how nostalgia, creativity and design entrepreneurship can amalgamate to convey a confident nationalism. The revised versions of kiwiana have claimed a unique space in the expression via materiality of some of the cultural accelerations of post-colonialism. This article concludes that a significant and visible part of national identity construction and expression is being actively and consciously undertaken by the creative industries, and by the purveyors and purchasers of their creations.

Tourist Performers at the Crazy House, Dalat, Vietnam

The Hang Nga Guesthouse, better known as the Crazy House, in Dalat, Vietnam, is owned, designed and operated by a Vietnamese architect, Madame Hang Viet Nga, PhD (Moscow). The series of organic buildings, with unpredictable curves of ochre ferro-cement, comprises a complex that combines accommodation and tourist attraction. Day visitors may wander about for an hour or so up the narrow winding staircases, through rough-formed arches and grottos, to marvel at the themed mini-apartments with their large ferro-cement animal inhabitants: the tiger room, the eagle room, the kangaroo room. Small irregular polygonal windows illuminate these spaces. The overall effect is quirky and charming; and extremely unusual in Vietnam. Significantly, at this site the guests, too, become attractions or exhibits for the day visitors, the usual role of anonymous gazer inverted. In the dining room—also a shrine to the political career of the architect’s late father—guests eat as tourists file past, taking photographs. In one’s tiny living room, although there is a chain across the entrance, visitors nevertheless stoop underneath for a closer look. In this place of sculptural enchantment one’s domestic space becomes public. The tourists themselves are as items for display and consumption: this is a novel strand in tourism discourse. Franklin & Crang (2001) suggest that tourism studies investigate the sensual, embodied and performative aspects of contemporary tourist practices. The Crazy House raises questions of public and private tourist space, of the performative touristic body, and about finding a language with which to express responses to sensual experiences and novelty.

A Town Called Jenniferann.com

In the year 2000, a small conservative New Zealand town received a new name. Pokeno became JenniferAnn.com. Why take on such a name? Familiar to motorists as the town at the end of the Southern Motorway, in the 1990s Pokeno was also “Bacon Country.” Distinctive welcome signs featured pink pigs that smiled at the 12,000 motorists entering Pokeno daily. They sat within a plethora of messages: Coca Cola, Mobil, Kodak, speed limit signs, and utility instructions. In 1999, the motorway bypassed Pokeno. With reduced traffic, how could this little town retain a place on the map? Enter JenniferAnn.com, brainchild of the owner of an Internet lingerie business. Renaming the town JenniferAnn.com was a stunt to propel Pokeno—and JenniferAnn.com—to great publicity. The town moved from having a name to being a brand. The highly local became global. Pokeno—now JenniferAnn.com—became a site in cyberspace.

Bar talk in Bali with (s)expat residential tourists

Bali, Indonesia, is a popular destination for retiree migrants. Most people who settle there have experienced Bali as holiday makers. It is this lifestyle mode they hope to continue in their later years, with little concern about impacts on the local culture. For this project, the goal was to investigate various aspects of their new lives: their decisions to relocate, their daily activities, finding and participating in a new community, engagement with local people, and how their personal happiness had changed through the move. This paper focuses on just one group of residential retirees, single Australian men. During fieldwork, it quickly became apparent that the ‘official’ personal stories the respondents recounted excluded some of their actual agendas and activities in Bali. The face-to-face interviews with a female researcher did not comfortably facilitate this. In ‘unofficial’ bar conversations, another layer of narrative took place, excluding the researcher and giving rise to ethical considerations regarding the use of those unsolicited commentaries, often about sex tourism. The inclusion of those tales and explicit dialogues into this account of expats in Bali is not merely incidental, but pivotal to understanding this category of residential tourist. This study responds to calls for research into the nature and impact of privileged mobility in the age of globalization. It contributes an investigation of both macro and micro issues regarding the growing practice of residential tourism for retirees in Bali. At the same time, it highlights the limitations of fieldwork interviews; far more revealing material was collected informally. This gives rise to considerations of ethical issues when undertaking such research.

Collectors as Guardians of National Artifacts

ABSTRACT In New Zealand various modest household artifacts that were produced locally in the 1940s and 1950s have become sought-after collectibles. As resistance to the homogenization brought about by globalization, “kiwiana” collectibles are valued for their distinctive “New Zealandness.” Some collectors construct households in which they can immerse themselves in kiwiana, effectively creating private museums of national artifacts. Their homes become showcases for the nations history of locally manufactured domestic goods. While the collectors rejoice in the quirky charm of their lovingly assembled artifacts, they also claim a role of guardianship of items that might otherwise have been lost to the nation. The research demonstrates that a significant and visible part of national identity preservation in New Zealand is being deliberately and enthusiastically undertaken by private collectors.

Local Claims to Fame Rural Identity Assertion in New Zealand

Throughout New Zealand, giant roadside objects—sheep, cows, dogs—and murals depicting local history denote local claims to fame. As a collection, these artifacts tell the rural sectors story of agriculture and productivity. The 1980s rural downturn led to a declining rural population and a perceived declining status of rural dwellers. The ongoing construction of place markers indicates that the need to express identity is a continuous project. In the face of the huge competition for markets and for media attention, as a consequence of globalization, local residents draw from what they know best: versions of their own history and of local character.