The Prostitution of Hawai’i and Regenerative Tourism

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“Just five hours away by plane from California, Hawai’i is a thousand light years away in fantasy. Mostly a state of mind, Hawai’i is the image of escape from the rawness and violence of daily American life” (Trask 1999: 136)

Haunani-Kay Trask’s essay, “‘Lovely Hula Hands:’ Corporate Tourism and the Prostitution of Hawaiian Culture” gives me, as a traveler, a lot to think about. Hawai’i and Hawaiian culture, Trask writes, has become a prostitute ruled by it’s pimp, the United States.

“Prostitution in this context refers to the entire institution that defines a woman (and by extension the female) as an object of degraded and victimized sexual value for use and exchange through the medium of money. The prostitute is a woman who sells her sexual capacities and is seen, thereby, to possess and reproduce them at will, that is, by her very ‘nature.’ The prostitute and the institution that creates and maintains her are, of course, of patriarchal origin. The pimp is the conduit of exchange, managing the commodity that is the prostitute while acting as the guard at the entry and exit gates, making sure the prostitute behaves as a prostitute by fulfilling her sexual-economic functions. The victims participate in their victimization with enormous ranges of feeling, from resistance to complicity, but the force and continuity of the institution are shaped by men” (Trask 1999: 140).

I too have been a tourist in Hawai’i. I like to think of my traveling a type tourism informed by cultural exchange. I lived with a couple during my time on the island, a Hawaiian woman and Filipino woman, working on their farm as part of a work exchange. However, despite my own concepts of responsible tourism and trying to mitigate any unintentional harm, the power dynamics of haole and Native Hawaiian persist. The fact is, that tourism is inundating Hawai’i, and while I was not staying at an expensive resort, I too had fallen into the mindset of Hawai’i as paradise, place to relax, gentle crashing waves and happy music.

The question I ask now is will tourism in Hawai’i ever be morally acceptable, and what steps need to be taken to get to that point? A new tourism concept has surfaced recently, called regenerative tourism. Going one step further than sustainable tourism – which basically just aims to not cause harm to the host country and people – regenerative tourism aims to give back to the countries and communities that foreigners visit. Read about regenerative tourism in this New York Times Article by Elaine Glusac, or visit Regenerative Travel’s website. Tourist companies that practice regenerative tourism pledge to be integral parts of local communities, and tourists are able to use the power of money to help bolster communities while getting authentic tourist experiences.

Of course, there is more to be done than simply fixing the method of tourism. Trask calls for sovereignty and the right to self-determination for Native Hawaiians. Until Western culture, ideals, and money stop appropriating Hawaiian land, culture, language, and values for use in Western fantasies, tourism in these islands has a shadow of immorality, no matter how you do it. Trask writes, “The point, of course, is that everything in Hawai’i can be yours, that is, you the tourists’, the non-Natives’, the visitors’. The place, the people, the culture, even our identity as a ‘Native’ people is for sale” (Trask 1999: 144). The message Trask sends out in her essay is that the US, Japan, and all other non-Native settlers must give back what they have taken, prostituted, and distorted before tourism can continue in an ethical manner.

“If you are thinking of visiting my homeland, please do not. We do not want or need any more tourists, and we certainly do not like them. If you want to help our cause, pass this message on to your friends” (Trask 1999: 146).

References:
Glusac, E. 2020, Aug 27. “Move Over, Sustainable Travel. Regenerative Travel Has Arrived.” New York Times. https://nyti.ms/2D2nuSG
Trask, H. 1993 [1999]. “Lovely Hula Hands:” Corporate Tourism and the Prostitution of Hawaiian Culture. In From a Native Daughter: Colonialsim and Sovereignty in Hawai’i pp. 136-147. Honolulu, HI: University of Hawai’i Press.

Fisherwomen of the Comoros

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“Fishing is an important social activity which facilitates the sharing of knowledge and experiences, and reinforces women’s collective bond and connection to the sea. Fishing is part of their cultural identity and their role within communities…. To take away their fishery altogether would be a great loss of knowledge, history, culture, and future potential. Thus a balance must be sought between ensuring cultural and livelihood rights, and improving marine conservation” (Hauzer & Murray 2013: 34).

If you were to take every anthropological account related to fishing, the majority would focus on men. It may be true that in many cultures, men have dominated the world of fishing both historically and in modern times. But this is not true worldwide and in cases like the Haenyo or Ama pearl divers in Korea and Japan, respectively, as well as these women-run fishing collectives in the Comoros, women lead and manage important biological and cultural fisheries. For a close look at the importance of women’s participation in fisheries for food security, the article quoted above, Hauzer and Murray’s (2013) “The Fisherwoman of Ngazidja Island: Fisheries Livelihoods, impacts and implications,” is a good read.

References:
Hauzer, M. and Murray, G. 2013. The Fisherwomen of Ngazidja Island, Comoros: Fisheries Livelihoods, impacts and implications for management. Fisheries Research 140, 28-35

Unsettling Anthropology

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“Where might we find Mino-bimaadiziwin, the Good Life, in the midst of chicken nuggets, fries, a text message, and a large pop that just slid around on the tray and spilled sticky liquid on the floor? In our existence of contemporary choices, convenience, and complications, it is not always easy to maintain and continue Anishinaabe knowledge and traditions” (Grover 2017: 72).

What do you think when you read this quote? Depending on what point of view you’re coming from, you might contemplate it differently. Oftentimes, anthropologists and journalists from western countries are too quick to market this as a sign of a disappearing culture. They are reaching for what I call a sort of appropriated nostalgia for a time that wasn’t even their own but that they believe Native cultures should still occupy. Modern day amenities in this way are seen to contradict tradition, as if the two cannot exist in the same time frame.

There is a huge problem with this mindset. Not only does it freeze cultures in an imaginary and romanticized past, but it also assists in the agenda of disappearing Native cultures from the contemporary world. Tuck and Yang (2012) state this as such, “Everything within a settler colonial society strains to destroy or assimilate the Native in order to disappear them from the land – this is how a society can have multiple simultaneous and conflicting messages about Indigenous peoples, such as all Indians are dead, located in faraway reservations, that contemporary Indigenous people are less indigenous than prior generations, and that all Americans are a ‘little bit Indian’” (pg. 9).

This, of course, is not where Grover, an Ojibwe woman from Minnesota, was going with this paragraph in her book Onigamiising. Her book is full of short essays on contemporary, every day lives of Anishinaabeg. She explains,

“I believe that we live in Mino-bimaadiziwin in ways similar to those of our ancestors: in everyday lives that are given to us by the Creator. The beginning of each day is an unopened gift, and as the day goes by, we acknowledge that by doing our best to live the values that have been passed down to use for generations: gratitude, modesty, generosity, and a consideration for others and the world around us. Living a good life is our gift back to the Creator; our daily contributions, big and small (this would include mopping up spilled pop), continue the tradition of Mino-bimaadziwin” (pgs. 72-73).

For western anthropologists (and journalists as well): how can we stop defining others and instead let them define themselves? How can we ‘unsettle’ anthropology and can it ever be used as a tool to assist projects of decolonization? (Unfamiliar with settler colonialism and/or decolonization? Check out these Tuck & Yang’s article, listed in references or read this article by Kyle Powys Whyte). I do believe anthropology has come a long way since the times of Malinowski or Mead but it must continue to change so that it doesn’t continue to perpetuate oppressive colonial agendas. I find myself often asking, is anthropology salvageable? Is this really the path I want to continue to take? What will a future equitable and ethical anthropology look like?

PS. I’m sure there are many anthropologists that are working towards a better, more moral anthropology. I hope to read more of their work in the future and continue posting about this topic! As a white anthropologist, I must continuously recognize my place in the dynamics of power within this academic field and within the societies/cultures I inhabit, and do my best to work against oppressive institutions that I undoubtedly benefit from.

References:
Grover, L.L. 2017. Onigamiising: Season of an Ojibwe Year. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Tuck, E. & Yang, K.W. 2012. Decolonization is not a metaphor. Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education & Society 1(1), pp. 1-40.
Whyte, K.P. 2018, April 3. White Allies, Let’s Be Honest About Decolonization. Yes Magazine. https://www.yesmagazine.org/issue/decolonize/2018/04/03/white-allies-lets-be-honest-about-decolonization/

Haunani-Kay Trask on the Interdependence of Cultural and Biological Diversity

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“Unremittingly, the history of the modern period is the history of increasing conformity, paid for in genocide and ecocide. The more we are made to be the same, the more the environment we inhabit becomes the same: ‘backward’ people forced into a ‘modern’ (read ‘industrial’) context can no longer care for their environment. As the people are transformed, or more likely, exterminated, their environment is progressively degraded, parts of it destroyed forever. Physical despoliation is reflected in cultural degradation. A dead land is preceded by a dying people. As an example, indigenous languages replaced by ‘universal’ (read ‘colonial’) languages result in the creation of ‘dead languages.’ But what is ‘dead’ or ‘lost’ is not the language but the people who once spoke it and transmitted their mother tongue to succeeding generations. Lost, too, is the relationship between words and their physical referents. In Hawai’i, English is the dominant language, but it cannot begin to encompass the physical beauty of our islands in the unparalleled detail of the Hawaiian language. Nor can English reveal how we knew animals to be our family; how we harnessed the ocean’s rhythms, creating massive fishponds; how we came to know the migrations of deep-ocean fish and golden plovers from the Arctic; how we sailed from hemisphere to hemisphere with nothing but the stars to guide us. English is foreign to Hawai’i; it reveals nothing of our place where we were born, where our ancestors created knowledge now ‘lost’ to the past” (Trask 1993/1999: 59-60).

From Huanani-Kay Trask’s book From a Native Daughter: Colonialism and Sovereignty in Hawai’i. Beautifully written, heart wrenching, and informative, it addresses indigenous struggles in the Pacific and worldwide. Although written in 1993, sadly, 27 years later, it is still very much applicable today. How can make the world hear Trask’s words? How can we heed her warnings?

“The choice is clear. As indigenous peoples, we must fight for Papahānaumoku, even as she–and we–are dying. But where do people in the industrial countries draw their battle lines? On the side of mother earth? On the side of consumption? On the side of First World Nationalism? If human beings, Native and non-Native alike, are to create an alternative to the planned New World Order, then those who live in the First World must change their culture, not only their leaders. Who, then, bears the primary responsibility? Who carries the burden of obligation? Who will protect mother earth?” (Trask 1993/1999: 62).

References:
Trask, H. 1999 [1993]. From a Native Daughter: Colonialism and Sovereignty in Hawai’i. Revised Edition. Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press.

Sinjajevina, Montenegro PhD Opportunity

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“Sinjajevina’s rich ecology and outstanding landscapes is not only a product of nature. It is also the inherited and cumulated work of pastoralist activities over millennia. Indeed, this area represents an increasingly rare symbiosis between human societies and the environment, and it stands as a marvelous example of sustainable development and cultural resilience for Europe and the world as a whole.” – https://sinjajevina.org/38-2/

Sinjajevina is located in Montenegro’s UNESCO Tara River Basin Biosphere Reserve and is the summer grazing location for pastoralists’ cattle and sheep herds. This alpine landscape is unique because of the indigenous cultures that have shaped it throughout time with traditional practices of transhumance. However, despite it’s UNESCO, EMERALD and IPA (Important Plant Area) designations, the government plans to create a military training ground and weapons testing area. For obvious reasons, the locals who use this land are against this project, but they were never asked to be a part of the planning meetings and policy agreements.

If this sounds interesting to you, there is a current call for PhD’s to study the traditional transhumance practices in order to help inform policy and to document the cultural and biological importance of this area. DM me for the word document describing the PhD. Applications due by August 31st 2020.

Injustice in Death (Death and Mourning 5/5)

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“Each year burial waste includes the use of 77,000 trees, 1.6 million tons of reinforced concrete for vaults, and enough embalming fluid (4.3 million gallons) to fill over six Olympic-sized swimming pools, according to GBC. Then there’s the chemical leachate of heavy metals, like arsenic from sealants and lead, copper, and zinc from caskets, and atrazine (‘banned in Europe, and one of the most widely used herbicides in cemeteries’). The effects of contemporary burial practices refract out, degrading the integrity of the body, wounding those who care for our outsourced dead, imperiling the land meant to receive us, and, as ecosystemic violence will, wrecking the integrity of relationships among all while obscuring the existence of those relationships entirely” (Purpura 2019: 260).

Purpura calls US death practices a “resistance to direct return,” where human bodies even after life build fences, walls, caskets around them in order to separate from nature. “Only humans are foolish enough to believe we should or even can launder our energy into crypts or caskets that will preserve us,” a friend of Purpura’s writes (ibid.). What is striking about Purpura’s piece on death is that it shows that practices of waste, indirect violence (“13 percent higher death rate for embalmers” (ibid.)), and human exceptionalism are so entrenched and accepted within American culture that even in death, our most vulnerable time, these problems are rampant. Is there any part of Western societies that remains untouched by these human centered-trends?

For this final piece on the series of death and mourning I ask readers only to use these posts as thought experiments on how we want to define our reactions to death. Death and our responses to it are full of cultural nuance. Of course, we must be respectful of everybody’s personal practices upon the death of loved ones and community members, but that doesn’t mean we can’t think about our own reactions to death in a critical sense. As we see in this post, death is environmental and medical. We have also seen that it is social, religious, and political, but most of all it is inevitable. Death is inevitable and sad and if handled poorly can be truly destructive in both mental and physical ways. So the question is, then, how would you like to handle death?

References:
Purpura, L. 2019. Imagining Burial. Emergence Magazine 1, pp. 257-261.

 

Growing Up with Death (Death and Mourning 4/5)

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“To them [Samoans], birth and sex and death are the natural, inevitable structure of existence, of an existence in which they expect their youngest children to share. Our so often repeated comment that, ‘it’s not natural’ for children to be permitted to encounter death would seem as incongruous to them as if we were to say it was not natural for children to see other people eat or sleep. And this calm, matter-of-fact acceptance of their children’s presence envelops the children in a protective atmosphere, saves them from shock and binds them closer to the common emotion which is so dignified permitted to them” (Mead 1961/1928: 220).

Margaret Mead’s classic Coming of Age in Samoa is so powerful because it clearly knows its core audience: American parents, teachers, and anybody else that is part of the child rearing process. By comparing and contrasting practices in the US versus Samoa (remember, however, that this research took place in the early 1920’s), Mead asks adults to rethink the ways children – especially girls in this case – are led to understand the world around them. One such topic she briefly discusses is death. For Mead, American children are maladjusted to the situation of death. “Our children, confined within one family circle […] often owe their only experience with birth or death to the birth of a younger brother or sister or the death of a parent or grandparent” (Mead 1961/1928: 217). This, Mead explains, can lead to placing heavy emotional understanding on a singular experience. Whereas in Samoa, where children are enveloped in a larger community “in a civilization which suspects privacy” (Mead 1961/1928: 219), children have multiple experiences with death which help inform them how to behave. “One impression corrects an earlier one until they are able, as adolescents, to think about life and death and emotion without undue preoccupation with the purely physical details” (Mead 1961/1928: 220). In Mead’s analysis (pertinent to the time she was writing it, but also still holding relevance today in some aspects) Samoan children were socialized to see death as a natural occurring process in which they are included, whereas American children were sequestered away from the happening, shielded, and only brought to encounter death a few times in their young lives.

Mead’s book is a classic read that illustrates the multitude of possibilities in which people live. People in Samoa today may or may not continue along these same lines of practice (if anybody has any modern day sources on this topic, articles, or books, feel free to post in comments), but what is important is understanding that there are plenty of ways to approach death, and as humans and as societies we must make sure we are approaching it in healthy and beneficial ways for everybody.

References:
Mead, M. 1961 [1928]. Coming of Age in Samoa. New York, NY: Morrow Quill Paperbacks.

Ritual Weeping (Death and Mourning 3/5)

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“Women who come to deliver condolences (y’azzun) approach the house or camp wailing (y’ayṭun), and then each squats before those family members to whom they are closest and ‘cries’ (yatabākun) with them. This ritualized crying is more than simple weeping; it is a heart-rending chant bemoaning the woman’s own loss of her closest deceased family member, usually a father. When I asked about this unusual behavior, one woman explained, ‘Do you think you cry over the dead person? No, you cry for yourself, for those who have died in your life.’ The woman closest to the person whose death is being mourned then answers with a chant in which she bemoans her loss. Women speak of going to ‘cry with’ somebody, suggesting that they perceive it as sharing an experience. What they share is grief, not just by sympathizing, but also be actually reexperiencing, in the company of the person currently grieving, their own grief over the death of a loved one. Not only may such shared emotional experiences enhance the sense of identification that underpins social bonds, but participation in the rituals that express sentiments might also generate feelings like those the person directly affected is experiencing, thus creating an identification between people where it did not spontaneously exist” (Abu-Lughod 1999: 68-69).

Ritual crying practice from the Awlad ‘Ali Bedouins of Egypt. What can we learn from the rituals of death and mourning in other cultures that might be helpful to our own? How can shared feelings of grief solidify community with strangers in our increasingly individualized world? Could bringing a practice like this into your life help you identify with others, creating bonds that are weakened by our inability to share in the most basic of human emotions? (Speaking from my own experiences here and my own difficulties of sharing emotion in death, funeral, and mourning practices.) If practices of grief within your own culture leave you wanting then re-evaluating, looking to other examples of ways of being, and trying to imagine new practices might lead to a healthier understanding of grief and mourning for your own self, your community, and maybe eventually your culture at large.

References: 
Abu-Lughod, L. 1999 [1986]. Veiled Sentiments: Honor and Poetry in a Bedouin Society. Berkeley, CA: Univ. of California Press.

Juneteenth

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(will return to grief and mourning with the next post)

“Ships at a distance have every man’s wish on board. For some they come in with the tide. For others they sail forever on the horizon, never out of sight, never landing until the Watcher turns his eyes away in resignation, his dreams mocked to death by Time. That is the life of men.

Now, women forget all those things they don’t want to remember, and remember everything they don’t want to forget. The dream is the truth. Then they act and do things accordingly.” – Zora Neale Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God.

Today is Juneteenth, the official holiday celebrating the end of slavery. Although the emancipation proclamation was on January 1st, 1863 it took two and a half years, June 19th 1865, for enslaved African Americans to be freed in Galveston, Texas. Since then, this holiday, June 19th, or Juneteenth, has been celebrated beginning first in Texas and then spreading across the US. While the holiday is recognized in most US states, it is still not federally recognized (sign this petition to change this!).

Across the US today individuals, families, and communities are celebrating this important day of liberation. For me personally, I am beginning Zora Neal Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God. Hurston was an anthropologist, novelist, and folklorist and I can’t wait to explore more of her work in the future. Other books by Black anthropologists/sociologists/activists on my list include Trace: Memory, History, Race and the American Landscape by Lauret Savoy, The Rise of the American Conservation Movement: Power, Privilege, and Environmental Protection by Dorceta E. Taylor, The Torture Letters: Reckoning with Police Violence by Laurence Ralph, and Emergent Strategy: Shaping Change, Changing Worlds by adrienne maree brown, so look for quotes from them in the future.

I hope that everybody is finding a meaningful and intentional way to celebrate this holiday. Whether that is through rest and rejuvenation, or education and activism, let’s do it all in the name of continuing the fight against racial injustice across the world!

References:
Hurston, Z.N. 1937. Their Eyes Were Watching God. New York: Harper & Row, Publishers.

Grief Practices for 2020 (Death and Mourning 2/5)

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“I think a lot of it is rooted in the absence of rituals to practice grief, and to me decolonization is a death ritual. That’s what we’re talking about. We’re talking about letting go and releasing from what we thought, either for some people is what we thought we wanted and then for others what was imposed upon us and told made us citizens or worthy beings or valued beings, or declared that we were in fact alive. And I think we’re at a time in this concept of The Great Turning, that it will require pain, it will require grieving. It will invoke sadness. Because everything we thought was true, everything we were striving for is no longer, or now we know the impacts of what that old dream will impose upon the earth and other living beings. I think the growing pains of decolonization are valid. I think to be better organizers will require patience, and I think the problem is that the work is so urgent. So how do we metabolize that grieving process? What do we need to do to instigate that grieving process so that we can show up to the earth and to one another, urgently, and slowly, and how to find that quantum space to be here. And I think a lot of it can come through being transparent about the pain that we are in. And being witness in the grief that it is to shift.” – brontë velez in interivew with For the Wild

I wasn’t originally going to post this in my series on grief, but it is so applicable to this moment in time and so important. brontë velez speaks passionately about what it means to let go and grieve harmful living practices. They ask us to open ourselves up to grief, to recognize the need to create rituals that allow us to move into new spaces, and to welcome everybody into these spaces. Their interview titled ‘Embodying the Revolution’ with For the Wild speaks to many topics, one being the practices of grief competition, a.k.a., how even grief has become competitive in our society ruled by white supremacy. They ask us to consider how we can create grief practices that are inclusive and humble instead of divisive. They ask us to consider where and when your need for healing can be tended to:

“To me this work around grief competition can be grounded when we practice humility. This is a big thing I’ve seen a lot of spaces where people aren’t willing to be humble, aren’t willing to listen, aren’t willing to say, ‘Hey what are the other spaces where I can get the tending that I need to, and in this space maybe it’s not my voice that needs to be heard right now.’ And how to be in that wisdom and discernment.”

How can we move forward in our world? How can we enact a death ritual that lets us move away from oppressive institutions? How can we be okay with the unknown? How can we dismantle old structures and reimagine new futures?

“This is why I’m really interested in decomposition as rebellion, as was mentioned. Because decomposition as rebellion is saying, ‘I don’t know what is coming, I don’t know what’s happening, I don’t know what is next. All I know is that I need to die. All I know is that these things need to be laid to rest, that part I’m sure of.’ And how to just be committed to that is a powerful practice.”

Our world is changing, moving into a new phase (see this article by Nefeez Ahmed which talks about a global phase shift), and we must learn how to leave our old cultural practices behind. To me, as a white woman of privilege, grief in this form is acknowledgment, grief allows me to accept the fact that the white supremacist culture I was raised in is destructive and needs to end. I am grieving my late arrival in this space, but my grief opens me up to new possibilities and new understandings as I start shedding the skin of my old culture.

I highly recommend listening to all of brontë velez’s interview, because much more than just grief is covered. They are one of the many black leaders that are working on bringing our world into a better future.

Follow brontë velez on instagram at @littlenows, follow/donate to her organization Lead to Life.

References:
Ahmed, N. (2020, June 5). White Supremacy and the Earth System. Medium. https://medium.com/insurge-intelligence/white-supremacism-and-the-earth-system-fa14e0ea6147
Young, A. (Director). (2018, Feb 15). brontë velez on Embodying the Revolution [Audio Podcast]. Retrieved from https://forthewild.world/listen/bront-velez-on-embodying-the-revolution.