“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.
The Edited Jottings of an Amateur Anthropologist 