Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2016. x, 270 pp. (Illustrations.) US$68.00, cloth. ISBN 978-0-8248-5560-4.
As its title flags, this volume is a study of cultural tourism in the Trobriand Islands based on fieldwork in 2009–2010. The research is focused on four groups: tourists, Trobriand Islanders, government officers involved in tourism, as well as tour operators and hotel owners. MacCarthy investigates how these groups interact in four contexts: formal performances, informal village visits, souvenir shopping, and tourist photography. Her work is based on lightly structured interviews as well as that old standby, participant observation, and she lived with a local family. The book is quite reliant on anecdotal material and her interviews are generated from only 186 tourists (for a minimum 3-night stay) who visited the islands during the author’s time there. The strength of this volume is in its detail about tourism in this particular place and time. The author writes fluently and exhibits a warm rapport with the many people she interviewed.
Although this study is of cultural tourism, MacCarthy sets herself a larger task: “I merely use tourism as a means and the Trobriands as a place, through which I can access questions fundamental to anthropological theory” (5). Within this larger framework she is interested in the way in which anthropological concepts, culture, tradition, custom, authenticity, and primitivity are appropriated and manipulated by producers and consumers in this local-global interaction. At this level, the volume is not quite as successful. While making some acute observations, the author does not develop a sophisticated enough framework to draw out the implications of her material. She suggests that the experience of the travellers and the Trobriand Islanders is a constructed one, and that distortion, myth, and fabrication operate in the interactions between various parties. Individuals experience events as what the author calls “singularities,” a category of cultural commodity that downplays commodity status to generate an increased sense of the primitive and authentic, but these “singularities” are experienced according to non-uniform criteria, that is, an individual’s own background and expectations, using broad tropes about culture and the primitive.
What I took away from these observations was a sense that here strangers encounter each other in a kind of trance, mixed with some curiosity and exchange, the trance being a global ideology about culture and authenticity. Rather than following up the potential of this intriguing material, which surely points to a need for a critical idea of culture as based not simply on invention, but on misconception and illusion—that is, a notion of culture as that which separates, alienates, and blinds—the author instead explores that which is entirely expected in tourism: that all parties use a series of not very intriguing tropes about culture, the primitive etc. No surprises here. This lack of criticality is partly because of a pedestrian reliance on over-used standbys, such as Roy Wagner’s 1975 notion of culture as invented and relational. The concept, as used in this book, is rather bland—yet the history of the Trobriand Islands, where cultural tourism seems, on the author’s own evidence, a very precarious enterprise that has failed more than once, is ripe for a more critical analysis of cultural tourism, and of the notion of culture itself, which is the author’s overarching concern. Culture can be a site of isolation and blindness, but one would never know it from this volume, which presents a picture of a rather banal, vaguely commoditized kind of interaction.
The volume is thorough in its coverage of the complex history and anthropology of the Trobriand Islands and the author provides some interesting summaries of the many films and books about the area, but in her attempt at coverage she doesn’t really do much original analysis. In these sections the volume is like a very particular kind of tourism, the Cook’s Tour—rapidly stopping at many sites—exhaustive and exhausting. Rather than delving deeply into any one subject she skips through a multitude, lightly binding topics such as the gift, notions of art/artifact/commodity and the spectacle around her four themes: interactional notions of culture, authenticity, custom, and primitivity.
Despite this over-all coverage, certain subjects important to understanding the tourism in the Trobriands are lacking sufficient detail, for example, the history and background of the two lodges, Bukia and Kiriwina. I had nagging questions about these, which distracted from a focus on the author’s points. On whose land are these hotels built? Is there conflict over land on which the lodges are built? The volume provides so much evidence of failed or unrealized projects that investigations into potential conflicts between various parties on the Islands seems warranted, at least such questions should be addressed by the author. Some of these issues might add some grit to this presentation of culture as transaction between two individual parties in which a more or less “imagined” experience of “culture” or the “primitive” or the “authentic” occurs. Culture here is not contested, but simply glancing and vague.
The author also ignores other elephants in the room, one of which is the context of tourism itself, a context in which the interrelations between the individuals involved is fleeting and often superficial—people create “just so” stories on the spot, fictions to satisfy a customer, or to satisfy themselves or an anthropologist. This is a very particular type of “culture.” The author, while recognizing this fact, does not really take its implications into account. The ideas of Irving Goffman might have helped here, the sense in which we remain masked strangers to each other in the alienation of interaction. MacCarthy uses tired terms, such as the “other” and “difference,” to account for this alienation, yet this volume speaks to how we start strangers to each other, and remain so, quite happily; tourism as a kind of trance of commodity fetishism.
Diane Losche
University of New South Wales, Sydney, Australia
pp. 886-888