Staging Tourism: Bodies on Display from Waikiki to Sea World (review)

At first glance it seems that there is not much in common between orca whales and hula dancers. A folklorist might wonder if it is even possible to compare animals and humans in a productive way; however, this is exactly what Jane Desmond attempts in Staging Tourism. The common thread is performance and the iconicity of bodies in the context of the modern tourism industry. Desmond ably demonstrates how the commodification and consumption of performing bodies, whether animal or human, is a central part of modern tourism. The types of bodily display she discusses, hula performance and marine mammal shows, reinforce conservative social values while providing the illusion of communion with the "exotic."

With a background in dance and choreography, Desmond is at her best observing how bodies, both performer and audience, move through space and interact. These observations are central to her detailed analysis of how "culture" and "nature" are constructed through performance. Drawing from theorists such as Dean MacCannell, Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, and Donna Harraway, Desmond effectively illustrates the complex relationships between icon and reality and shows how tourist performances encode similarity and difference in ways that stimulate and fulfill the fantasies of modern, primarily "Anglo" tourists. Comparing these two types of tourist spectacle, Desmond concludes that "each represents a vision of a world in harmony, a vision that is at once nostalgic, utopian, and futuristic—a vision of Edenic pasts as prototypical futures" (p. 251).

The first part of her book, titled "Staging 'The Cultural,'" looks at the development of the icon of the Hawai'ian "hula girl," beginning in the nineteenth century. Although there are other instances in which the performing female body becomes an iconic representation of a culture—the "gypsy belly dancer" comes immediately to mind—Desmond argues convincingly that nowhere else has the exoticized female body become so closely identified with a specific locale and so central to tourist expectations and fantasies. She begins with a close analysis of Germaine's Lu'au, a popular attraction on Oahu, describing how the spectator's gaze and the physicality of participation in Germaine's hula show create an unproblematized ideal of "Hawai'ian-ness." She goes on to give some examples of "alternative" hula shows, which work to correct persistent stereotypes of the accessibly exotic hula girl, but she does not provide much more performance analysis of contemporary mass-marketed hula shows. Instead, Desmond provides a detailed history of the development of the hula girl as an icon, dissecting the imagery and texts found in tourist advertisements promoting Hawai'i. She also looks at the appropriation of the hula girl image by Tin Pan Alley and recounts the stories of several of the dancers who helped popularize hula on the mainland.

In the second half of the book, "Staging 'The Natural,'" Desmond shifts her gaze to animal-centered tourism, showing how the performing bodies of animals, specifically marine mammals, play a similar role to that of the hula girl. While not so closely identified with a specific locale, these performing animals are also used to capitalize upon modern tourists' need to make contact with embodied difference. Desmond returns to detailed performance analysis with descriptions of mediated animal/human encounters in the context of ecotourism, the modern aquarium, zoos, wild animal parks, and animal theme parks. These stagings of "the Natural" emphasize human/animal interaction and promote an Edenic vision of interspecies harmony. The exploitive aspects of captive animals performing for human profit are hidden beneath a discourse of mutual love and dependence.

In some ways it seems Desmond was writing two different books. Certainly a scholar with an interest in hula may be more interested in the first half; however the two parts are complementary, each side illuminating the other with insights from surprising directions. In light of Desmond's background in...