Kathleen M. Adams

The genesis of touristic imagery Politics and poetics in the creation of a remote Indonesian island destination

Although the construction and amplification of touristically celebrated peoples’ Otherness on global mediascapes has been well documented, the genesis of touristic imagery in out of the way locales, where tourism is embryonic at best, has yet to be examined. This article explores the emergent construction of touristic imagery on the small, sporadically visited Eastern Indonesian island of Alor during the 1990s. In examining the ways in which competing images of Alorese people are sculpted by both insiders and outsiders, this article illustrates the politics and power dynamics embedded in the genesis of touristic imagery. Ultimately, I argue that even in remote locales where tourism is barely incipient, ideas and fantasies about tourism can color local politics, flavor discussions of identity and channel local actions.

The politics of heritage in Tana Toraja, Indonesia: Interplaying the local and the global

Introduction In late April of 2001 there was cause for jubilation in the highland Toraja village of Ke te Kesu on the island of Sulawesi, Indonesia. Residents had just learned that their rural hamlet was poised to achieve international fame and reverence, on a par with Borobudur or the palaeolithic caves of Lascaux. For their village had just been nominated for consideration as a World Heritage Site by the South-East Asian members of the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO). Over the previous week South-East Asian delegates and UNESCO representatives had gathered in Tana Toraja Regency to attend a UNESCO meeting devoted to nominating and reporting on South-East Asian World Heritage Sites. The selection of Tana Toraja Regency as the venue for this meeting was far from haphazard–it was, in part, the culmination of years of lobbying by local Toraja cultural activists and Indonesian politicians. While convening in Tana Toraja Regency, UNESCO delegates toured the area in their leisure hours, becoming acquainted with the cultural richness and natural beauty of the region. Ultimately, a UNESCO team appraised the touristically touted Toraja village of Ke te Kesu , determining that it satisfied many of UNESCO’s criteria for World Heritage Sites. According to Indonesian news reports, Sulawesi government officials and locals were optimistic that Ke te Kesu would soon join the ranks of official South-East Asian World Heritage Sites (Hamid, 2001). UNESCO has a clearly articulated definition of what constitutes a World Heritage Site. The groundwork for UNESCO’s role in determining, preserving, and protecting World Heritage Sites was established at the 1972 UNESCO General Conference in Venice. At this meeting, UNESCO delegates ratified the World Heritage Convention. As decreed by this convention, UNESCO would embark upon compiling a ‘World Heritage List’ registering unique sites of supreme universal value. The convention stipulated that the governments of UNESCO member countries could nominate sites for inclusion on the World Heritage List. If a nominated site is determined to meet the established criterion for inclusion on the list, it could potentially merit resources for its protection and preservation. In short, the underlying motivation for creating the World Heritage List was the notion that certain locales embodied properties of ‘outstanding universal value’ and deserved international conservation efforts. Today, in keeping with the 1972 convention, cultural, natural, and mixed sites are included on the World Heritage List. Cultural heritage sites are monuments, groups of buildings or locales with historical, archaeological, aesthetic, scientific, ethnological, or anthropological value. Natural sites, in contrast, are locales that embody outstanding examples of the earth’s history, biological or ecological evolution, habitats of biological diversity or threatened species, and exceptional natural beauty. Finally, mixed sites, also termed cultural landscapes, ‘encompass both outstand-

Public Interest Anthropology in Heritage Sites: Writing Culture and Righting Wrongs

In an era of increasingly contentious identity politics and growing tensions over whose narrative should predominate at heritage sites, public interest anthropology offers a valuable approach for scholars engaged in heritage research. As the articles in this issue illustrate, not only does public interest anthropology offer more nuanced insights into the complex social dynamics surrounding these sites, but this more engaged approach also offers promise for finding the common ground necessary for constructive dialogue between the varied stakeholders and for ameliorating social inequalities at these heritage sites.

Cultural Displays and Tourism in Africa and the Americas

In reflecting on the articles that comprise this special issue, I am struck by how this ensemble is indicative of a significant shift in anthropology. As recently as the mid-s, it would have been hard to imagine a special issue of Ethnohistory grouping together articles ranging from an examination of identity displays at a Mashantucket gaming resort to a discussion of Maya migrants’ milpa-ization of Cancún, an exploration of two Kwakwaka’wakw museums, a historical tracing of s Lac du Flambeau Indian Bowl performances, and an analysis of cyber and touristic representations of tribal villages and the Lost City resort in South Africa. Fifteen years ago, analyses of touristic venues and cultural identity displays were largely consigned to themargins of anthropological discourse, to the realms of applied anthropology and museum anthropology. Although some prescient, well-established anthropologists had made pioneering explorations of these topics (cf. Benedict ; Buck ; Graburn ; Smith ), for the most part, such studies did not regularly take center stage in established, mainstream anthropological journals.What is interesting about this assemblage of articles is that they represent the convergence and maturation of several channels of anthropological thought, all sharing the theme of identity negotiation in cultural border zones.1 Whereas many early studies of tourismwere predominantly concerned with evaluating the impact of foreign guests on indigenous hosts or with examining tourism as a possible passport to development, the studies presented here avoid what Robert Wood () has characterized as simplistic ‘‘billiard ball’’ models of tourism, where tourism is conceptualized as an external force, striking and jostling stationary indigenous cultures.

Tourism and Ethnicity in Insular Southeast Asia: Eating, Praying, Loving and Beyond

The late 20 century landscape of tourism and ethnicity studies in insular Southeast Asia has tended to emphasize a set of dominant themes, including ethnic commoditization in tourism and tourist arts; the politics of touristic ethnicity; tourism and cultural development; and the performative dimension of interand intra-ethnic touristic encounters. How have these earlier research themes transformed in our current era of intensified neoliberalism, cyber-connectivity and mobility? This article draws from the title of the blockbuster 2010 film Eat Pray Love (partially set in Bali) to highlight several emergent 21 century themes that bear relevance for our understanding of the interplay between tourism and ethnicity in insular Southeast Asia. Starting with “eating”, I outline how the increasing appeal and rhetoric of the slow and sustainable food movements offers a promising avenue for scholarship on tourism and ethnicity, opening up new lines of research spotlighting the multisensory dimensions of touristic ethnicity, as well as the ties between food, ethno-cultural sensibilities and visions of morality. Turning to the theme of “praying”, the article explores emergent research on religious and spiritually-inspired tourism in insular Southeast Asia. I also discuss the need to better understand how the post 9-11 and post-Bali bombing era of heightened religious identity-consciousness in insular Southeast Asia (as well as on the part of travelers) bears relevance for emergent dynamics pertaining to tourism and ethnicity. Finally, I turn to examine the third component of the film’s title, “love” and its relevance for novel insights into tourism and ethnicity in contemporary island Southeast Asia. I draw on this final term loosely as a springboard for considering the need to better explore the realm of the emotions in our studies of tourism and ethnicity. Here, I underscore the need for further nuanced studies of tourists who take on or celebrate idealized identities of ethnic Others, either through marriage, emulation, or by partaking in festival tourism. I also address some of the complex emotional ambivalence regarding ethnic heritage experienced by Southeast Asian diaspora tourists and return migrant tourists. Throughout the article I illustrate some of the potentials and challenges entailed in these new avenues of inquiry with reference to recent anthropological and sociological work in various parts of island Southeast Asia. I also draw on examples and illustrations from my on-going research on far-flung Toraja (Indonesian) migrants whose recreational returns to the homeland for family visits and international festivals entail varied re-imaginings of identity and ethno-cultural heritage.

Analysing Pilsen Mexican Neighbourhood in Chicago through the lens of competitiveness and social cohesion

Debates concerning the future of cities often center on the twin issues of competitiveness and social cohesion. Scholars focuses on these two objectives because urban competitiveness, being often economic competitiveness, tends to occur at the expense of social cohesion (Ranci 2011; Ache 2008; OECD 2006). Yet, without both elements in place, urban locales cannot thrive.

Love American Style and Divorce Toraja Style: Lessons from a Tale of Mutual Reflexivity in Indonesia

Abstract The author recounts an episode from her ethnographic research in Tana Toraja, Sulawesi, Indonesia, when she was obliged to shed her comfortably familiar ‘fieldworker’ role and stray from a pre-plotted research agenda into emotionally dangerous terrain. She explores the serendipitous insights that can emerge only when the classic division between the realm of research and ones private life is muddied. By recounting some Toraja responses to the news of her impending divorce, the author examines the unexpected and occasionally destabilising understandings that emerge from these personal exchanges. The unanticipated insights concern both Toraja and American conceptions of marriage and its unravelling, and evoke visceral appreciation for the vulnerabilities inherent in violating the borders of acceptable anthropological genres. The story shared here seeks to explore the ways cultural knowledge can derive from a personally revealing approach to fieldwork, embracing rather than fleeing the research side-roads opened up by emotional challenges.

Public interest anthropology, political market squares, and re-scripting dominance: from swallows to ‘race’ in San Juan Capistrano, CA

This article explores a disturbing irony of certain touristic festivals and heritage sites: although these festivals and sites tend to draw heavily on the language of shared heritage and community, the dominant narratives and cultural symbols embodied in these venues sometimes celebrate more traditional and problematic ‘racial,’ ethnic, and gender hierarchies. Via a case study of the annual swallows festival held in the California Mission town of San Juan Capistrano, this article offers an illustration of the value of embracing a public interest anthropology (PIA) framework for identifying and addressing the hidden racisms underlying some heritage tourism sites. Moreover, the article suggests that the political market square metaphor for conceptualizing tourism festival management could be productively reframed and paired with a PIA approach to facilitate more inclusive, color-blind approaches to developing tourism policy.

A Paean to the Epistemological Potency of Artifacts

Over the past two decades, material culture has once again become fashionable in sociocultural anthropology. This book by Amiria Henare, a museum anthropologist at Cambridge, is both a product of and an argument for this renewed interest in objects’ potential for yielding insights into cultural dynamics. It is simultaneously a historical and a material ethnography. Henare’s focus is on the shifting significances and movements of artifacts in New Zealand and Scotland from the late eighteenth century to the present day. Within this historical framework, she explores how objects and collections both constitute and instantiate social relations. In so doing, she offers a meticulously researched, object-centered historical account of changing tides in both anthropology and museums. She also shows that certain theoretical trends in anthropology have sometimes obfuscated the ways in which museums and their collections have served compound aims and purposes, often embodying myriad and opposing agendas. As one might imagine, Henare’s work is grounded in a theoretical perspective in which objects’ meanings are generally in flux. However, she is careful to articulate that her endeavor is distinct from anthropological work that conceptualizes objects as vehicles for human agency, as well as from work that views objects as “texts” with encoded meanings awaiting anthropological unpacking. As she observes, such studies tend to eclipse the sensuality of objects and the ways in which their physicality can instantiate meaning. In this sense, she is arguing for a view of objects similar to that proposed by Robert Plant Armstrong, although he is missing from her extensive bibliography. Armstrong (1971) pioneered a vision of art as an “affecting presence,” arguing that certain material objects, by way of their physicality, their repeated appearances at significant events, or their associations with cultural codes, become imbued with emotive force. As Henare’s book and other recent works attest, this approach to material and expressive culture is enjoying renewed popularity in anthropology (see Adams 2006; Krantz 1994). Likewise, while Henare nods to studies that highlight the social lives of objects and applauds scholars’ recognition of the parallels between people and objects (our corporeality in the world, etc.), she underscores that while our presence in the world is limited by death, artifacts are able to perform their unique roles in social life precisely because of their potential longevity—they “collapse spatial and temporal distance, bringing people together who would otherwise remain quite literally out of touch” (p. 6). Henare returns to this point throughout her book, offering compelling historical and ethnographic examples drawn from New Zealand and Scotland. By the end of her book, readers will most likely appreciate her corrective to critiques likening museums to prisons that remove artifacts from communities (thereby severing flows of exchange). As she surmises, a view of museums as enclaving objects from social life obscures the fact that museum artifacts still enable social ties. Museums, she argues, bring together researchers, descendants, curators, and others to study their collections. Although they certainly restrict the mobility of objects in space, in so doing museums ensure the ability of these artifacts to move through time. While Henare’s perspective may seem conservative to advocates of repatriation, she offers her intervention with delicacy and finesse. Still, I wish that her position had been presented in tandem with a broader array of the voices of peoples whose objects inhabit these museum collections. Henare strengthens her argument concerning the social potency of museum artifacts by interweaving her historical analysis with brief excerpts from her field notes. These excerpts recount her experiences on research visits to collections in Scotland and New Zealand. Sometimes she is joined by the Maori artist Maureen Launder, whose creative works grow out of her own studies of Maori artifacts. Through these personal vignettes, readers gain additional glimpses of the ways in which museum artifacts make possible social ties and indirect dialogue between people from distant times and places. Henare’s first substantive chapter traces the movements of some of the artifacts acquired by Captain Cook and his men in New Zealand. Acknowledging and engaging with the prior work of scholars such as Nicholas Thomas (1991) and Adrienne Kaeppler (1978), Henare recounts how Maori and early European explorers used these objects, in tandem with verbal exchanges, as the basis of engagements, challenges, and seductions. She also explores the shifting significances attached to these “artificial curiosities” in eighteenth-century Britain. Her second chapter traces Joseph Banks’s journey to the Scottish highlands shortly after his travels on Cook’s first voyage, noting the comparisons he drew between Scottish highlanders and groups such as the Maori. As Henare observes, Banks and other Enlightenment thinkers relied heavily on objects, as well as language, as keys to understanding these “hinterland” cultures: artifacts in this era were emerging as valuable scientific specimens that could yield insights into the nature of their creator peoples. In her words, “Like their makers, they were objects not only of measured curiosity and detached speculation, but of sensuous engagement. . . . [Thus] the treatment of artifacts epitomized the entanglement of reason and the passions in the Enlightenment, the coupling of sense and sensibility” (p. 73).