Cultural Forms 3

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

The Autonomy of Culture: Provocative Implications

文化的自由: 引起議論的含意

There are classic examples of cultural extinction and degradation due to colonialism and the neo-colonialism of tourism, and there are equally powerful cases where the issues of artistic expression and the rights to control cultural symbols, images and narratives have been fought for (Simons, 2000) and won. I have argued that there can be a balance (Hunter & Suh, 2007). But in tourism we stand close to the edge, risking culture by transforming it into a resource to support the replacement economy of tourism that boosts failing primary and secondary sectors. There is also the risk of falling under the hegemony of the inbound market and its economic superiority (poorer people do not travel to richer countries!). The core reality of tourism is tied up with economic dependency and geo-politics.

It is important to recognize how the combination of festivals and culture parks can be a mechanism for providing a sustainable, profitable and responsible tourism system/infrastructure that can simultaneously ensure a community’s robust local culture while providing for satisfying experiences for visitors. The combination of these two institutions results in a synergy effect maximizing local identity and the profitability of tourism. In addition, this can be accomplished without the dangerous concerns of geo-political or economic hegemony. Conversely, instances where culture parks hold ‘festivals’ and where festivals are transformed into ‘culture parks’, can only fail because in the first instance there emerges an absurd contrivance and in the latter, a demolition of social experience.

The beauty of a festival is that it is a scene where people are reproducing and contesting their culture to find meaning for their own lives. Culture, like ethnicity, is a “fundamentally ‘manufactured’ and heavily iconic activity” (Hollinshead 1998, p. 123). It is a mythical expression, heavy with ritual, and is often inexplicable to the eyes of the outsider. And the risk of the culture park is in its contrivance, as “that which is too obvious cannot be true” (Baudrillard 1996, p. 98). Filled with markers, the culture park obliterates its cultural features, with signs and souvenirs (MacCannell, 1976). But for the tourist, concerned only with his own experience, that contrivance is met with bemusement, and acceptance.

Deeper Implications: Comparing Two Islands

更深層的含意: 兩座島嶼的比較

Using Jeju as a benchmark, the concerns of nation (foreign and domestic) and hegemony in the context of Taiwan and China might be addressed, in the context of this paper. Jeju can be compared with Taiwan in terms of their similarities as Islands, and in regional proximity to their most significant tourism markets. Jeju receives close to 6,000,000 tourists a year, largely from its most proximal source market, the Korean Peninsula. On the other hand, Taiwan is lucky to receive 2,000,000 tourists a year in spite of its size and massive inventory of diverse natural and cultural resources. Jeju has been systematically developed as a tourism destination since it was designated as such by the Korean Economic Development Plan of 1964. Taiwan has never properly addressed its own potentially lucrative tourism potential. The China market could be the source of massive tourism revenue.

However, on both islands concerns with autonomy and the maintenance of authentic cultural identity overwhelm the fact, that when properly employed, the mechanism of festivals and culture parks can reduce the problem of ‘foreign tourists’ to simple win-win economics. The synergy of festivals and culture parks at a destination can act as a socio-cultural buffer, absorbing revenue while protecting against certain undesirable influences. Practical tourism requires systematic development and regional consciousness. Thinking geographically rather than geo-politically, controlling length of stay, regulating tour operators and generous investment in local intangible cultural resources can prevent, for Taiwan, Chinese tourists becoming what the Taiwanese are for the Indigenous Tribes, a dangerous and overwhelming crowd. For Taiwan, like Jeju, local culture is real power, in its internal form manifest through festivals, and in its outward form, as culture parks and other museums.

References

Baudrillard, J. (1983). Simulations. Paul Foss, Paul Patton and Philip Beitchman,

(Trans.). NY: Semiotext.

Baudrillard, J. (1996). The Perfect Crime. Chris Turner, (Trans.). London: Verso.

Burke, K. (1935). Permanence and Change. New York: New Republic.

Dewey, J. (1989). The Later Works, 1925-1953; Volume 10:1934, Art As Experience.

Jo Ann Boydston, (Ed.), Carbondale IL: Southern Illinois University Press.

Gallarza, M. G., Saura, I. G. & Garcia, H. C. (2002). Destination image: Towards a

conceptual framework. Annals of Tourism Research, 29(1), 56-78.

Geertz, C. (1995). After the Fact: Two Countries, Four Decades, One Anthropologist.

Cambridge Massachusetts: Harvard University Press.

Hollinshead, K. (1998). Tourism, hybridity, and ambiguity: The relevance of Bhabha’s

‘third space’ cultures. Journal of Leisure Research 30(1), pp. 121-156.

Hunter, W.C. & Suh, Y.G. (2007). Multimethod research on destination image

perception: Jeju Standing Stones. Tourism Management, 28(1), 130-139.

Laxon, J.D. (1991). How “We” See “Them:” Tourism and Native Americans. Annals of

Tourism Research 18(3): 365-391.

MacCannell, D. (1976). The Tourist: A New Theory of the Leisure Class. NY:

Schocken Books.

MacKay, K.J. & Fesenmaier, D.R. (1997). Pictorial element of destination image

formation. Annals of Tourism Research, 24(3), 537-565.

Simons, M.S. (2000). Aboriginal heritage art and moral rights. Annals of Tourism

Research (27)2 pp. 412-431.

Urry, J. (1990). The Tourist Gaze: Leisure and Travel in Contemporary Society.

London: Sage.

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.

Cultural Forms 1

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

Cultural Image and Representations in Tourism

觀光學門研究中的文化形象與表徵

In tourism studies, and parent disciplines of sociology and anthropology, the notion of culture has always been problematic. As Clifford Geertz famously wrote, it is highly unlikely that anyone can grasp “so vast a thing as an entire way of life and (find) the words to describe it” (Geertz 1995, p. 43). So a wide array of definitions exists in theory, each with their own set of problems, most of which are related to the functional problems of tourism/leisure promotion and commoditization. There is much less interest in the fundamental reality, or condition or health of local culture until it ceases to be attractive to tourists – and it is then and only then that the problems of ‘sustainability’ or ‘development’ arise.

In tourism and to a lesser degree in leisure studies, operators, managers and policy makers – all the players on the development side are concerned about attractiveness. It is the overwhelming urge to enhance the cultural event, or product, to ensure it conforms to the tastes and interest of the tourist or participant. The tourist gazes on landscapes, townscapes, ethnic groups, lifestyles, historical artifacts, bases of recreation and ‘sand, sun and sea’ (Urry 1990, p. 57), and this ‘tourist gaze’ is structured around “culturally specific notions of what is extraordinary and therefore worth viewing” (p. 66). It is in this sense that stakeholders will invariably favor image over content, and the tastes of the visitor, no matter the effects (immediate or long-term) on those whose culture is being commoditized.

The problem is, however, that an ideal or sustainable means of tourism promotion or commoditization has not yet emerged in spite of 30 years of research and experimentation (MacKay & Fesenmaier, 1997; Gallarza & Saura, 2002). Tourism development remains haphazard, scavenging for the most visual representations of culture that will appeal to the market and totally exploiting them. Representations are the stuff of tourism. They succeed in “presenting the world in a new experience” (Dewey 1989, p. 89), reinforcing a symbolic system already in place within the social cosmology of the viewer. Better yet, representations are already commodities (Laxon 1991, p. 380). They offer an immediacy that motivates visitors to realize carefully contrived events at certain attractions as irrefutably real. The cautious, however, realize as Kenneth Burke did, that “a way of seeing is always a way of not seeing” (Burke 1935, p. 70).

Too often best efforts at promoting a destination come across as contrived. Experience is reduced to image, where “every photographed object is merely the trace left by the disappearance of everything else” (Baudrillard 1996, p. 85). A simulated experience replaces the ‘real’. For tourism there is a real without origin or reality, a hyperreal where image replaces meaning.