goyablog

It’s weird how you set out with something in mind to write and then it turns out going some other way. Today that happened as I launched into chapter three, code-titled “‘Tropical Image Up’: Cultivation under (Tourist) Occupation,” in part two “Creations and Recreations” of the book (“Beachheads: War, Peace, and Tourism in Postwar Okinawa”). I had re-read a bunch of stuff on how various Okinawan, Japanese, and American consultants and promoters and government advisory committees in the early 1960s in Okinawa (still under U.S. occupation although the U.S. didn’t call it that) were trying to take more seriously the prospect of tourism development there. My plan was to use the material to contexualize in an intro to the chapter the scene in which the tropicalization of physical and symbolic landscapes heated up. Well, I never got that far. After a catchy little opening paragraph laying out the extent of tropical tropes in Okinawa today, I detoured into a critique of commonplace notions of cultural authenticity after commenting that despite an awareness of the artificiality of this manufactured tropicality, it is in some sense naturalized. So, rather than proceeding to flesh out the early 1960s context, I do a paragraph that implies that considerations of “authenticity” in cultural production are ultimately meaningless, at least as it is commonly conceived, i.e., as an attempt to reproduce faithfully objects and practices of a so-called traditional past. Following Erve Chambers in his book Native Tours: The Anthropology of Travel and Tourism, I displace the measure of authenticity to the agency of the participants. In other words, as in Chambers’ example, if a community decides on its own to tear down historic building to build a golf course for tourists, they are acting more authentically than if they were forced by government policy to preserve the buildings out of concern for maintaining the integrity of their past history and culture. I like this idea of situating authenticity (if one must talk about it at all) in the degree to which a person or persons or some kind of community or non-governmental organization (even in some cases a governmental organization) has control (agency) over changing (or not) their social setting. Authenticity no longer resides solely in the past. Being forced by higher authorities to preserve a cultural object of the past when your community might have other ideas about what to do about it in the present results, from this perspective, in an inauthentic act. Your community is not acting according to its own will and volition (regardless of whether that will and volition leads to an arguably stupid act such as destroying rare old objects for shiny new ones). At this point in the analysis one is forced to question what lies behind the common criteria and valuation of what is usually considered “authentic” and by association “traditional.” In other words, one is forced to unpack the ideological bundle represented by the label “Made in [fill in the blank]“….