American Aloha: Cultural Tourism and the Negotiation of Tradition

Chapter 3 Interpreting an Authentic "Sense of Place"

98 Chapter 3 Interpreting an Authentic “Sense of Place” Like sex, tourism is based on experience, juxtaposition, and contrast. Beauty rather than truth is the key word, and the eye of the beholder is the unpredictable key. Truth would instill too many doubts. —Lucy Lippard, On the Beaten Track E ach year just prior to the annual Smithsonian Folklife Festival (SFF), the National Mall is a fenced-in flurry of activity as construction crews barrel about in trucks and carts, scurrying to get tents hoisted, stages and backdrops built, signs mounted. Electrical generators must be set up to run stage equipment and lights, food vendors and portable toilets must be set up, and most of the CFCH staff physically moves into portable trailers on site that become temporary offices. Elsewhere, the annual book of the Festival must be completed, and supplies must be obtained and delivered for everyone from cooks to volunteers. The production process leading up to this frenzy of activity happens primarily behind the scenes, but it manifests in the highly visible end products of site design, signage, and the Festival book that create the visual and textual support for performance . From design work to dirty work, from tracking down funding to searching for supplies, the Festival production phase is caught up in the construction of authenticity. The Hawai‘i program, like any museum exhibit, was skillfully crafted over a rhetorical and spatial armature. Once the fieldwork phase of the festival-making process, in which the performance content and performers were selected, was completed in Hawai‘i, the torch was passed to the skilled Festival staff, and the production phase was set in motion in Washington, D.C., where an experienced design team began the complex process of transforming the program concept into a multi- Interpreting an Authentic “Sense of Place” 99 sensory educational event. Skillful rhetoric about the reciprocal value of tradition and the ability of the Smithsonian to frame it authentically had garnered the donations of money and goods necessary to produce “the real Hawai‘i” in the nation’s capital while strategic mapping of authenticity ideology onto the space of the Mall manifested that “reality” as the stage on which “the real Hawai‘i” would be enacted. Seeking to produce authenticity is particularly problematic in a festival-making process that attempts to negotiate between community self-definitions and institutional definitions and applications. Regina Bendix’s study of the how the history of folklore studies has developed in relation to changing ideas about authenticity claims that the issue is rooted in dichotomous thinking: “The notion of authenticity implies the existence of its opposite, the fake, and this dichotomous construct is at the heart of what makes authenticity problematic” (1997, 9). This avoidance of the “fake” was a central concern to the Hawai‘i program staff as they worked to manifest an alternative to glitzy, market-produced images of Hawai‘i. What had become clear in the early meetings in Hawai‘i was that the Hawai‘i and Smithsonian people had different interpretations of authenticity as it applied to Hawai‘i culture and that these views were critical to envisioning the site and its accompanying textual support. For both groups, however, the “fake” was associated with tourist productions and the “authentic” with an ideal of non-commercialized cultural practices. Although the objective was to present the real Hawai‘i, Hawai‘i reality did not necessarily sort out along these lines. For example, many Native Hawaiian living traditions had evolved in the spaces between communities and the cultural marketplace; however, limitations imposed to avoid the fake meant that traditions appropriated by tourism could be used only if they were pared down to roots traditions, symbolically returning them to their ethnic sources and eliminating culturally viable practices like hapa-haole music. The issue of root traditions as the measure of authenticity posed a different problem in relation to immigrant groups. Hawai‘i fieldworkers had insisted that hybridity was authentic Hawai‘i, and what was “traditional” was cultural sharing. Adhering to the multicultural model used by the Festival in the 1980s, with traditions clearly attributed to particular ethnic groups, made it difficult to place the many hybrid forms of culture that had evolved in Hawai‘i’s overlapping communities. How these debates were resolved in the production process solidified and transmitted the program narrative for public consumption. This chapter tracks the production phase of the Hawai‘i 100...