Being Ourselves for You: The Global Display of Culture (review)

Being Ourselves for You: The Global Display of Cultures, by Nick Stanley. Material Culture Series. London: Middlesex University Press, 1998. ISBN 1-898253-16-1, 211 pages, photographs, maps, notes, bibliography, index. Paper, £14.95.

While researching Pacific artifacts at the Chicago Field Museum of Natural History, Nick Stanley stumbled on a performance by Asmat and Dani tribespeople who were participating in a Festival of Indonesia. Watching them, Stanley starts to ask what distinguishes their mode of ethnographic performance from earlier ones held in the same space during the 1893 Columbian Exposition. Stanley contends that while the actual performance itself may not have changed much, the self-consciousness of the performers is what has emerged explicitly. The Asmat and Dani--like the Solomon Islanders, Welsh miners, Kwakiutl, and other groups covered in this study--are applying the tropes of salvage ethnography to their own cultural representations.

In this compact and energetic volume, Stanley probes at the meanings and visual strategies of a variety of contemporary ethnographic displays. The study covers an impressive geographic and analytic terrain: both large and small performance sites in locales as far flung as the western Pacific, south Wales, the Pacific Northwest, and Taiwan. While World's Fair modes of racialized visual display declined with imperial powers, Disneyland, Stanley asserts, continued the tradition with newer technology, as in "It's a Small World." With its hyperreal, spectacle-driven approach, Disneyland updated ethnographic display for the post-World War II period. The performers in this study--most of whom are indigenous people or relics of Fordist economies --are producing their own brand of spectacular culture à la Disney through ethnographic theme parks, indigenous cultural centers, and postmodern ethnographic performances.

In contrast to other tourism studies that Stanley feels are devoted to the tourist's experience, he embarks on his journey with the intention of explicating the role of the performer. He operates according to the proposition of "the performer as volunteer": all performers, he maintains, participate in cultural demonstrations "willingly and usually with some pride." This wholesale claim, however, is not always an accurate or substantiated one; for example, performers from communities with sparse economic opportunities may find themselves with little choice but to grudgingly submit to the tourist marketplace. He also may be missing more informal economies of exchange at work in between the market and pure "volunteerism."

In the first part of his globetrotting, Stanley tackles large-scale ethnographic theme parks in Hawai'i, Indonesia, mainland China, and Taiwan. The Polynesian Cultural Center in Lâ'ie, O'ahu, remains the most influential and successful example of large-scale cultural tourism to which the other parks aspire. Affiliated with the Church of Latter-day Saints, the Polynesian Cultural Center practices cultural preservation according to a "living museum" model, consolidating the Pacific Islands (at least a smattering of them) into one site. While similarly geared toward the visually spectacular, the Indonesian and Chinese parks pose different challenges for their architects. Taman Mini (Beautiful Indonesia in Miniature Park) and the "Chinese-style" tourist parks (eg, China Folk Culture Villages, Taiwan Aboriginal Culture Park) are national projects that aim to produce "unity in diversity" through multicultural displays. By integrating ethnic minorities into a coherent visual narrative, these cultural parks promote a sense of nationalism and modernity.

The book turns to case studies of "indigenous curation" in the Western Pacific as alternatives to government-sponsored or tourist-focused enterprises. Spearheaded by indigenous communities and often geared toward local consumption, museums and cultural centers in Vanuatu and the Solomon Islands accommodate visions of both the past and the future. While by no means unproblematic, indigenous museums are upheld as a viable way for local communities in a postcolonial Pacific to juggle cultural recovery and the tourist marketplace.

Stanley continues to explore other alternative displays, namely heritage centers in Ireland and south Wales where salvage ethnography is supplanted somewhat by the presence and discourse of live interpreters...