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175 Chapter 5 Beyond the Festival Afterglow The essence of the carnivalesque is that one cannot tell male from female, rich from poor, black from white: those differences, ordinarily so crucial, do not matter for the duration of the carnival. Everything is freer there, everything is possible. But carnivals do not last. And the interpenetration of third and first world is not just festive. Behind the festivities are social and economic facts we should not forget. —Marianna Torgovnik, Gone Primitive I n the summer of 2003 I traveled to Waimea, Kaua‘i, to meet some of the surviving members of the Waimea Hawaiian Church Choir who had performed hîmeni choral music at the Festival. When I arrived at the house of Miriam Kaleipua Pahulehua, a crowd of relatives was busily tending an imu across the dirt road while the elders sat and enjoyed the shade. Soon after I had introduced my husband and myself, Miriam invited us to her grandson’s wedding the following day. The wedding was held in the tiny Waimea Hawaiian Church, and the wedding lû‘au was held down the road in a beach park. It was a huge event with, in addition to an endless spread of food, a performance by Sonny Ching’s hâlau hula from the Big Island, an appearance by a popular local band, and a local radio personality as the master of ceremonies. At the wedding we had noticed two casually dressed haole carrying cameras, a tripod, and a microphone. They reappeared at the reception, so we assumed that they had been hired to film the event. However, midway through the feasting, the MC brought them to everyone’s attention. “Hey everybody!” he said, “We got folks here from the Smithsonian taking pictures! They’re researching lû‘au all across the nation, so when they come around with the camera, you better smile big! You never know—you might end up in National Geographic!” Later we talked to the embarrassed photographers, who explained that they were actually from a nearby town and doing a feature on lû‘au for 176 Chapter 5 a local television station. While our inclusion in the festivities certainly speaks to rural Hawaiian hospitality, the razzing of the would-be ethnographers at the reception and the MC’s conflation of the Smithsonian Institution and National Geographic magazine say a great deal about the naturalization of the ethnographic gaze within Native Hawaiian cultural activities. On the other hand, I wondered, would he have made this particular joke before the 1989 Smithsonian Folklife Festival had turned its spotlight on this small community’s cultural traditions? At least at the level of rhetoric, the Smithsonian had left a legacy. Although most visitors and scholars focus on the Festival itself, or portions thereof, the Smithsonian envisions the festival-making process as a catalyst, not an end in itself. Advocating cultural preservation, it encourages local sponsorship to pick up where the Festival leaves off. Center for Folklife and Cultural Heritage (CFCH) literature cites successful post-Festival programs at the local level, but CFCH directors admit this outcome is not always predictable. This chapter traces the aftermath of the Hawai‘i program to look at its legacy on several levels—local and national, institutional and personal—and at the various forms in which it was transported back into a local context—performance, film, follow-up projects, and memory. Along the way it raises a number of questions about Festival aftereffects. How did the Smithsonian living museum philosophy and methods translate into a Hawai‘i socioscape many residents claimed was still operating under “plantation mentality” and where the tourist industry continues to peddle a “soft savagery” image of Native Hawaiian culture for tourist consumption? How did the Smithsonian use its institutional power to negotiate asymmetries of power between Hawai‘i’s peoples and between Hawai‘i and the rest of the nation? What happened in the transference of responsibility from national to state institutions? What effect, if any, did the Festival actually have on cultural preservation programs and policy in Hawai‘i, and what are the larger implications of institutional attention to tradition? In the Festival’s aftermath, these issues played out on the local level. I argue that beyond its time-bound performance, the Hawai‘i program provided an ongoing means of production and reproduction, but that its aftereffects were blunted by local politics and socioeconomic factors. Local Celebrities and the Festival Afterglow The Smithsonian’s validation created a palpable afterglow...

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