Cultural Forms 2

Emic and Etic Cultural Forms and their Commoditization:

Comparing the Roles of Festivals and Culture Parks in Jeju and Taiwan

主體和旁觀的文化形式與兩者的商品消費化現象:

濟州和台灣的節慶活動與文化園區之間的角色比較

Forms of Culture: The Festival and the Culture Park

文化觀光的形式: 節慶活動與文化園區

The two most common forms of culture incorporated into tourist attractions are festivals and the culture park. No matter how similar the two may seem at first, they are absolute opposites. A festival is a representation of the spirit and living tradition of a community, ethnic group or tribe. A culture park, on the other hand, is a collection of displays and performances, representations of cultural remains that have been museumified. One is living and one is dead. Or better yet, one is the emic experience of a way of life whereas the other is the etic or performance of cultural forms in a way that caters to the tastes and expectations of the visitor. One is an experience in the making or a ritual. The latter is a fossilization of cultural forms that have been reduced to curiosities.

Drawing such a distinction between festivals and culture parks does not imply that one is better than the other. They simply serve different and complementary purposes. Since cultural forms and the goods produced by them are place-dependent (Williams, Patterson & Roggenbuck, 1992), extra care must be taken in the management of events or facilities where culture is experienced or displayed. A festival can no more be reproduced at another location than can foreign values and sensibilities impose regulations on that festival. In the same sense, the display, performance and preservation of a peoples’ culture cannot be standardized. Yet this is what happens, over and over again, in international tourism destination development. We should standardize the tourist, not the destination.

The notions of cultural ownership and authentic (emic) cultural identity are run down or absolutely cast aside in favor of standardized, global commodity fetishism. And the result it a sense of creeping surrealism, as the sign value of a cultural form slowly becomes detached from the thing it once actually was (Baudrillard, 1983). But all this can be avoided if planners and operators are conscious of the different forms and functions of festivals versus culture parks and their potential synergy effect.

At the festival, a unique local mythology is at work. Even when celebrating a common seasonal event such as the Lunar New Year, or the Harvest, in different places starkly different attitudes and forms are manifest. In addition, boundaries are maintained. Visitors only have access to certain spaces, since the festival is meant primarily as a ritual reproduction, or re-enactment of community identity.

At the culture park, there is a standardized format of cultural simulation regardless the country in which it is located. What differs is only the scale of the spectacle and the style of primitivism involved. It is an empty space that facilitates the visitor’s experience. Culture parks are safety zones or interstitial spaces where tourism revenue is generated under the guise of research, learning and display.