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Cultur al T our ism in the PacificLamont Lindstrom＊

Abstr act

As intensifying global communication and tr anspor tation systems under mine the autonomy and par ticular ity of wor ld cultur es, ‘‘cultur e’’ itself has par adoxically emer ged as a dominant way of r epr esenting thedistinctive identities of individuals and gr oups. At the same instant that the wor ld system fr agments the
localism on which cultur es once gr ew, it har dens and hyper -values whatever cultur al differ ences r emain.
Incr eased concer n about identity, and how this is to be delineated, animates gr owing inter est in ‘‘cultur altour ism’’ (also called indigenous or ethnic tour ism). Many Pacific states hope to pr ofit fr om lar ger number s of tour ists, but cultur al tour ism affor ds both oppor tunities and danger s. The wider tour istic mar ketplace sets the exchange value of local cultur es. In the Pacific, these ar e most fr equently packaged aseither savage or noble pr imitivism. Mor eover , tour ism may r einfor ce or challenge local power str uctur es,
and lead to disputes within host communities. Cultur al tour ism pr omotes a doubled identity as people’s
gaze tur ns back on themselves as a tour ist spectacle. Doubled identity, however , is a per vasive aspect oflate moder nity and cultur al tour ism is its symptom and not its cause.
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Keywor ds: tour ism, cultur e, identity, pr imitivism, wor ld system

Recently something str ange has been happening with the wor d ‘‘cultur e.’’ Not ver y long ago,few people at all had much inter est in cultur e, aside fr om scatter ed anthr opologists and eccentr ic folklor ists. But nowadays, talk about cultur e, tr adition, custom, and ethnic differ ence isincr easingly common. Business people have discover ed cultur e as a mar keting device. Doctor s
and psychologists stumble over cultur ally differ ent disease etiologies and ther apies. Language
instr uctor s teach cultur e so that students better under stand a for eign tongue. Philosopher scalculate the r ationality of cr oss-cultur al r elativity. Politicians, in the United States, pr eachtoler ance of cultur al differ ence and the benefits of the multicultur al ‘‘tossed salad’’ r ather
than that old fier y melting pot of nationalist stew. And the tour ist industr y for some time hastaken special note of the cr oss-cultur al exper ience as one of its r ationales. ‘‘Cultur al tour ism’’(also sometimes called ‘‘indigenous’’ (Hinch and Butler 1996:9) or ‘‘ethnic’’ tour ism) is a hot
mar ket item. But within all of this noisy, gr owing discussion, the concept of cultur e at once
appear s to be getting both easier and har der to gr asp.
I believe ther e ar e connections between this ballooning inter est in cultur al differ ence, including cultur al tour ism, and the emer gence of power ful global communicative and tr anspor tation technologies. Devices such as the telephone, the fax, the computer -linking wor ld-＊

D epartment of A nthropology, U niversity of Tulsa, Tulsa, O K 74104 U SA

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South Pacific Study Vol. 18, No. 1, 199734

wide web, spinning satellites, and super sonic jets quickly move ideas, pr oducts, and people
fr om place to place all over the wor ld. We have by now often hear d that we ar e witnessing
the emer gence of a global system in which no neighbor hood is independent, no locality isolated. We all live in communities that ar e both local and global. We hear voices that comefr om all sides; we eat food and consume pr oducts that or iginate fr om near and far ; and wer egular ly encounter both neighbor s and str anger s.
This is the incr easingly common human exper ience of today, and pr obably of tomor r ow as
well, and it is r aising difficult pr oblems of identity and allegiance. We ar e who? And who ar e
our fr iends and fellow citizens? People tur n to their cultur e (including r eligion, language, andtr aditions) to seek answer s to these questions. They, sometimes nostalgically, hyper value andover -define home cultur e, wor r ying over their identities. Or , mor e positively, they develop inter ests in different cultures that can also tell them who they are and what they are like, by
informing them of what they are unlike (MacCannell 1989; A scher 1985:70; Nash 1996:53).
What are some of the prospects and constraints on cultural tourism in the Pacific thatemerge from the cultural, economic, and political structures of what looks to be an increasingly integrated global system- that infamous ‘‘new world order?’’ A s an anthropologist, I start with a review of what has been happening to the concept of ‘‘culture’’ itself, andalso that of ‘‘tourism.’’ The ways in which these concepts recently have become unsettled
help us understand, on a different level, what people confront- and not only in the Pacificwhen they entertain visitors ‘‘culturally.’’ I start with a quick history of the idea of ‘‘cul・・・・

ture.’’CULTURE
Culture has been a powerful 20th century rhetoric that understands human difference.
(See Kroeber and Kluckhohn, 1952, who trace the emergence of ‘‘culture’’ as an anthropological category; see, e.g., D ominguez 1992 for a contemporary view of the further uses,and dangers, of the term.) Culture is not the only rhetoric of comprehending difference. It
still competes with older, also forceful, languages that explain human difference as a matterof race, of nature, or psychology, or geography, of evolutionary stage, and so forth. Fundamentally, the cultural argument accounts for human difference in terms of more-or-lessshared systems of local knowledge, rather than in terms of the facts of nature or genetic
essences. The key claim of a culturalist explanation of human difference is that difference isa matter of learning rather than of nature. People and their lives are therefore ultimately
malleable. This rhetoric of changeable human difference sometimes has led to an arrogant
cultural imperialism- the powerful send out cultural missionaries who insist that those living
differently must alter their lives to come closer to the ruling norms of Christianity, modernity, capitalism, or what have you. But a cultural logic also, especially when turned to understand one’s own society, can lead to a liberal, optimistic and dynamic faith in human improvement- that my children don’t need to live as I live, or suffer as I suffer, if only they

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Lindstrom: Cultural Tourism in the Pacific35

might somehow change their culture.
The cultural rhetoric of learnable and changeable human difference also sometimes leads
to fear of cultural decay, and a nostalgia for so-called disappearing worlds. Some feel thatthey can ‘‘lose’’ their culture, particularly when global tourism invades once isolated communities. Since culture is shared knowledge of how to live, it is of course impossible to bewithout- although one’s stock of cultural knowledge can change, shrinking in one area as
people forget or do not learn from their parents, while expanding in other areas. A nytime
strangers interact, they have to invent new cultural rules and regularities to understandtheir interaction, so by definition local culture changes as tourists come into the picture andpeople have to learn how to deal with each other. A n important question here is who must
learn the most about the other? Local people, or the tourists?
The notion of culture, thus developed at the beginning of this century, presumed
localism- a group of people living together in one space over time, learning a shared tradition. A lthough few if any human communities were in fact entirely isolated, slow technologies of communication and transportation ensured the maintenance of strong local culturalcores. A sense of ‘‘home’’ was rarely in question. Today, however, given new technologies
that ‘‘deterritorialize’’ or ‘‘decenter’’ ideas, goods, and people, the question ‘‘where is myhome?’’ is for more and more people impossible easily to answer. A nthropologists recently
are seeking new terms to replace ‘‘culture’’ and ‘‘society’’ since these words were invented
to describe a way of localized living that increasingly no longer exists within a unitary global
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system. A lthough anthropology as a discipline developed and cultivated categories of culture and society to explain human behavior and difference, many anthropologists today
would like to think beyond ‘‘culture’’ since the term no longer adequately captures the contemporary human condition (see, e.g., A ppadurai 1991; R osaldo 1989).
Paradoxically, as anthropologists are now seeking new terms, and are attempting to erase‘‘culture’’ as old-fashioned and inadequate, many others at this point in history are fixatingon culture as an immediate problem- just because, I think, they sense this nervous loss of‘‘home’’ and today’s insecurities and uncertainties about their personal identity. A nymore,
our sense of home is variable and fading and the global system huge, indiscriminate, andconfusing. We fear that our culture is disappearing, which of course it cannot do, but rather
just change. We indulge in a nostalgic search for the truer, naturally better culture of ourparents and grandparents. We overvalue certain parts of everyday life as authentic and real,
while dismissing others as fake or tawdry inventions. These emotions also charge cultural
tourism, as host localities fear loss of control of home culture, while tourists may be seeking
experience of some remnant, seemingly still ‘‘authentic’’ human existence, feeling themselves estranged from their own eroded homes (MacCannell 1989:3). A ll culture, since human, is authentic- but the nostalgic urge for so-called real tradition and the desire to experience cultural difference that drives cultural tourism emerge from our modern condition
where we face the difficult task of constructing personal identities while stuck in between
the local and the global, the community and the world.

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South Pacific Study Vol. 18, No. 1, 199736

TOURISMO ne popular technique of identity construction is to tour. Why else do people travel if
not, somehow, to work on their selves? To relax, learn, discover, encounter, enjoy,
experience- we all know those experiential verbs in which the tourist industry revels. There
are all sorts of tourism- leisure, ecological, sexual, religious pilgrimage (see Smith 1989:46)- but as the global system interlinks my home and your home, and as strangers more andmore have to be dealt with, it is no surprise that cultural tourism is increasingly popular. It
is no longer possible to be truly strange, to be entirely outside the global system.
Tourists search out cultural difference in order to work on their understandings of themselves: To locate common humanity beneath cultural variations and, conversely, to shore up
remaining identity distinctions between self and other. The author of a recent handbook on
cultural tourism notes:
Culture is very much tourism’s main attraction. Without culture to make the difference, every place would seem blandly the same. Without a belief in new or different
sensations and benefits at journey’s end, what incentive would there by for any of us tomake a visit that is discretionary in type (Boniface 1995:vii)?
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A t the end of cultural touring, you go home- and that home may now have renewed firmness and meaning; you know yourself better again by knowing who you are not. Like
homecoming Muslim pilgrims from Mecca who take on the new social identity haji, cultural
tourists return home with altered identities. The photographs, bricabrac, and souvenirs decorating their living rooms testify to the remade self. People consume travel and crosscultural experiences to make claims about who they are when they go back home.
The tourist industry caters to these desires by packaging up the experience of cultural difference- custom dances in hotel bars and airports; tours of villages; suitcase-sized carvingsin gift shops; local foods, or tame versions of these at least, in restaurants; and so on.
Where difference is hard to come by, it must be manufactured. E very Japanese prefecture,for example, has created a slate of differences to feed to tourists. O ne may be known forcarved fish, another for gaudy glassware; one is famous for pork cooked in sake; anotherfor wood marqueterie. These cultural differences are both real and manufactured, in thesense that they are protected and nourished because they can be sold to tourists hungry forthe sensation of difference that feeds the self.
It is in this sense that tourism can promote culture since people are careful to husband
and manage their cultural resources, whether these are dance, local language or dialect, artstyle, or a cuisine (A scher 1985:13). They manage culture both because it now can be sold,and because these aspects of culture are what have now come to define them and theirhome within the global community. People in Kagoshima (where I was fortunate to live in
1995-1996), are known to make and drink sweet potato brandy, or satsum a im o shochu, andso they are careful actually to drink this- and they of course also sell it to tourists in

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Lindstrom: Cultural Tourism in the Pacific37

Kagoshima airports and train stations. This is not simple-minded or greedy touristic capitalism, however. Kagoshima people truly do define themselves, and map their identity, as
sweet potato brandy rather than Japanese sake drinkers. The relationship between tourism
and identity works both ways. When people come to gaze at us, we learn something about
who we are as well. A nd which cultural difference in particular tourists look at becomespart of out identity, like it or not.

PACIFICThis brings us to the Pacific. If cultural difference is now a global commodity that people
package and sell to one another, feeding difficult and challenging processes and desires ofindividual identity construction within an obscurely complicated global system, then Pacificislanders may well cash in. The novelist G ertrude Stein once made a famous remark about
the city where I was born- O akland, California- that there is no ‘‘there there.’’ E verythingis bland and tasteless, no culture, no difference. The Pacific, on the other hand, andMelanesia in particular, has plenty of ‘‘there’’- fulap k astom , in Melanesian Pidgin E nglish.
A t a symposium on the concept ‘‘culture area’’ at the 1995 A merican A nthropological
A ssociation meetings, participants concluded that Melanesia has a sterling future in the・・・・

global cultural marketplace because of the richness and the depth of its cultural and linguistic differences. (For recent discussions of Pacific tourism, see H all and Page 1996; D ouglas
1996b; see also Nash 1996.)
A nd it is true that islanders have great skills at creating and maintaining difference, distinguishing family from family, village from village, valley from valley, and island from island. It takes much energy to produce and maintain through time the fantastic range of language difference, for example, that exists today in Melanesia. People clearly have brilliant
techniques for creating distinctions and discriminations for purposes of identity construction
at the local level. Such devices include traditional systems of copyright and patent that protect rights to cultural and linguistic forms, traditional systems of apprenticeship and education that transmit these forms from one generation to the next, and recognized techniques
for the production of novelty, including dreaming and other avenues of inspiration (seeLindstrom 1990).
Culture, particularly in its most easily packaged forms of dance, carved, painted, andwoven artwork, food, and architecture, is readily available in Melanesia. U nlike O akland,or perhaps even Kagoshima, one does not have to work very hard to locate some striking
culture to display. O akland faces great difficulty attracting cultural tourists; Melanesia andthe Pacific perhaps have the opposite problem. There is too much culture- so just whose
culture should be packaged and sold in the global tourist market?
It is painfully obviously that this touristic marketplace, as I will note in a moment, is nota level playing field. People come to it with preconceptions and desires that give various
cultures different exchange values. O utside the tourist marketplace cultures may set their

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own values. But within the marketplace, a culture’s exchange value and its basic market
meanings or significance, are set by ruling global currencies. A nd these ruling exchange
values and currencies of meaning, at least at the moment, flow strongly out of E uropean
ways of understanding.
In particular, they emerge from E uropean notions of social and natural evolution- a 19th
century rhetoric for explaining human difference that 20th century rhetorics of culture neverfully succeeded in silencing. Whereas the culturalist rhetoric explains human difference interms of local history and a multiplicity of historical events and contacts, the earlier evolutionary rhetoric accounted for human difference by stacking this up on a single ladder ofprogress. Some people are more complex, others are simple; some people are cultured,
others more natural; some people are civilized, others more savage or, as say the French,sauvage, wild.
A s Michel-R olph Trouillot (1991) has noted, E uropean identity construction during thelast several centuries came to depend on the existence of what he calls the ‘‘savage
slot’’- E uropeans could only understand themselves as real, civilized humans by contrasting
their lifeways with those of seemingly less civilized, although in many ways freer, peoples.
Needless to say, the savage as imagined in E urope mostly reflected internal E uropean classand gender politics and was very distant from the reality of non-E uropean lives. Still, theevolutionist paradigm remains very strong, as perhaps can be seen in a Bizarro sketch- thisa popular cartoon that appears in many U .S. newspapers (drawn by an artist who went to・・・・

school in Tulsa, O klahoma, my current hometown). The sketch depicts a group of savages,
dressed in feathers and bone, sitting around their campfire. O ne says:
A ll those in favor of building an airport and a luxury hotel, advertising for tourists on aworldwide basis, then eating anyone who shows up, say ‘‘A ye.’’
The joke plays ironically with E uropean evolutionist presumptions and desire to tour cultures. The canny savages, who are cannibals of course, exploit this cultural tourism to stock
their cooking pots.
A nd it is certain that many cultural tourists coming into the Pacific arrive with evolutionist dogma still haunting their minds and, perhaps, similar cannibal jokes tripping from their
tongues. A nthropology has not been all that successful in spreading the word of its culturalist logic of human difference. Many people continue to listen to evolutionary storylines instead that inform their own identity construction. In these myths, as it is impossible for us
now not to know, there are two kinds of uncivilized savagery- the ignoble and the noble.
A nd since Bougainville, R ousseau, and John Williams, the Pacific has furnished both sortsof savage to the E uropean imagination. Still today, significant numbers of cultural tourists
in the Pacific will be seeking the dangerous thrill of the primitive, while others will be on
pilgrimage to experience the noble wisdom of human ancestors. Both these sentiments, forexample, were particularly notable in D ennis O ’R orke’s documentary film, Cannibal T ours,that captured the cultural sensitivities, and also the cultural appetites, of E uropean andA merican tourists who sail up the Sepik R iver of Papua New G uinea on a small cruise ship

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ＢＩＺＡＲＲＯ
By Dan Piraro▲▲▲・R eprinted by permission of the artists.

(see MacCannell 1992:25-26).
People construct their lives in different ways and various desires drive them to spend
their money to go on a cultural tour. Some of us, happy in our modernity, seek occasional
dallies into what we hope to be savage wildness and unrestrained freedom before we return
refreshed to our comfortable, orderly suburbs with a new Sepik mask for our living roomwall. O thers of us, not happy in our modernity, seek through touring to rediscover a truer,

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South Pacific Study Vol. 18, No. 1, 1997

more human past when man lived in harmony with nature, uncorrupted by the pollutants ofmodern civilization. The Pacific has long provided cultural material to serve both these desires. Pacific cultural goods brought to the global tourism marketplace have great difficulty
not being read as signs of either primitive paradise, or primitive adventureland. These currencies of meaning now circulate universally and they set the global market value of Pacificcultural differences, however these may be valued locally.
It is of course possible to change the system of global values and one’s particular location
within ruling currencies of understanding, although it is probably not easy to do so. O klahoma, where I ordinarily live, has hardly any value at all within the global touristic system.
R ecently, though, it has attempted to reposition itself as ‘‘Native A merica,’’ drawing on its
history as Indian Territory within the U nited States. It aims to capture a larger tourist market share by stressing the native noble savagery of its inhabitants- including me. Tourists,presumably, will be induced to visit O klahoma to experience the thrills and the harmony of
our natural state. It remains to be seen, however, whether this campaign will have mucheffect on the wider market, which continues to devalue O klahoma as a culture-less place.
E ven if the advertising campaign should succeed, O klahoma is still trapped within an
evolutionist rhetoric that only permits one to be either a noble or an ignoble savage. E achof these values has its own benefits and drawbacks. In the first case your culture gets respected as natural and ancient wisdom, but all your cultural products have to be environmentally friendly and some tourists will get upset when they discover your televisions and・・・・

the kids’ Nintendo machines. In the second case, you have to put up with tourists in searchof how ‘‘humans used to live’’ while figuring that you may break down and eat them at any
moment. The situation of the Pacific, and O klahoma, within the global marketplace’s currencies of value limits each’s range of market options, until global measures of value can bein some way changed. It also warns us to pay attention to how the touristic marketplace differently empowers its participants.

POWER
We can think about touristic power effects and relations on two levels- the global andthe local. G lobally, the system assigns different cultures a value depending on how they fit
within dominant rhetorics of human difference. O klahoma is worth so much; Kagoshima
worth so much; Madang worth so much. Just as the developed world now produces the majority of consumer goods, so does it produce today’s ruling ideas and cultural values, atleast those that rule tourism. O ne can deny the validity of those currencies, but one has touse them if the goal is to sell yourself to tourists. It makes sense in these terms that Pacifictourist venues advertise their scenery and opportunities for relaxation, but also the touristic
pleasures of experiencing happy, friendly people- not yet corrupted by modernity- and thethrills of sensuous dance and vibrantly primitive art. A brochure advertising a small hotelon Tanna, Vanuatu- my own favorite Pacific place- promises that tourists can experience

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an ‘‘active volcano, custom villages, potent kava, cargo cultists, strong traditions, exciting
festivals, gigantic banyan trees, magnificent wild horses, long black and white beaches, velvet nights, and much more.’’O ne’s cultural offerings and products, no matter how these are taken at home, are thus
always rewritten and transformed by the demands of the global system, and it is increasingly difficult if not impossible to opt out of that system. E ven if one bans tourists altogether,
all of us now live lives conjoined by global communicative and economic flows. Ideas andgoods constantly invade our communities, even if we can manage to chase outsiders away.
O f the three, people are the easiest to manage and control; we can close our borders to humans, but goods and information leak through our walls. A nd the argument that touristic
contact increases human understanding of cultural difference is a good, if not always accurate, thesis. (Some tourists perhaps leave more ignorant than when they arrived, presuming
their cross-cultural experience merely to have confirmed their prejudices.) If our societies
and economies welcome or at least put up with foreign goods and imported ideas, we may
as well meet the people who produce those goods and ideas. If our children are watching
R ambo tapes, meeting Sylvester Stallone up the Sepik R iver can’t hurt; if they rent T rue
L ies on video, let them shake A rnold Swartzneger’s hand in person; if they listen to Boyz
to Men, an encounter with A frican-A mericans would be informative; if they buy a Toyota
Landcruiser, let them talk with some of the Japanese autoworkers who built that vehicle.
E ven passing contact with tourists could help place incoming goods and ideas in different,・・・・

hopefully clearer, perspective (H inch and Butler 1996:5; but see A scher 1985:13).
G iven the global economy at the moment, however, these encounters are not equivalentor balanced. Pacific islanders are brilliant travelers but far fewer of them tour North A merica, E urope, Japan and A ustralasia than the numbers of tourists from those regions thatcome into the Pacific (see Mone 1980). Today, most touristic encounters in which islanders
participate take place within the Pacific- outsiders are guests, and islanders hosts. In a
more equal marketplace, these roles would more readily reverse and more traveling PacificIslanders would encounter E uropeans and A sians on their own home grounds.
Cultural tourism, however, need not be international. G eneral Motors Corporation once
tried to hawk its cars with the jingle ‘‘See the U SA in your Chevrolet’’; and Japanese tourists dutifully visit and purchase the om iyage, or local goods, that by design distinguish eachof Japan’s 47 prefectures, as well as their cities and towns. This sort of travel informs
nationalist identity-building, as people tour their country discovering both shared lifeways
and local distinctiveness with fellow citizens. D omestic cultural tourism in the Pacific is lessdeveloped than international, although traditionally many people traveled extensively insearch of knowledge, new lands, and new interpersonal connections. When I lived in Papua
New G uinea in 1988-1989, the newspapers carried stories of youth groups trekking, sometimes fecklessly, from distant villages into the cities. This is an incipient form of cultural
tourism, when people hit the road to experience the city and also life in villages and towns
along the way (but see D ouglas 1996a:262).
D omestic cultural tourism brings together strangers who share the important identity offellow citizen. Such nationalist tourism should be encouraged and not just to raise revenues.

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Many international tourists in Japan, for example, share facilities with Japanese tourists andthis weakens the pernicious duality where outsiders do all the looking, and insiders do all
the being looked at. If tourists from Sydney and tourists from Simbu Province together
share the dinner table to watch a Madang dance show, or share the same bus to tour a village cultural center, this changes the overall touristic power equation.
A t the local level, cultural tourism challenges power structures, in ways judged good orbad, depending on a person’s position within those local power regimes. Tourism brings
people, money, goods, ideas, and sometimes disease into a locality and all these imports
can be seized upon as resources, or denounced as dangers, again depending on their various
political effects (see Lewis 1989). Cultural tourism can empower one village versus its
neighbors if that village captures most of the revenue from passing tourists. It can empower
one artist or school of artists versus others if a particular art style comes to be known ascharacteristic of a place (see discussions of tourist art in R ajotte and Crocombe 1980). It
can empower the more cosmopolitan young versus their elders who then may complain bitterly about cultural erosion. It can empower men versus woman, or sometimes women versus men, depending on the access of each gender to the touristic economy. It can empower
rural areas versus national centers- as tourism brings in money and ideas to the hinterlands
that potentially unsettle political systems. Leaders in more than one country have expressedfears of tourism that stem, at least in part, from concern that uncontrolled outside access tovillages could disturb their elite positions. But, more commonly, tourism also sustains ex・・

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isting political structures. Many political elites have proven eager enough to get into bed
with international tourist developers, profiting from land sales and rents and from ownership of the touristic infrastructure.
The recent history of Pacific tourism is full of conflict, not surprisingly so given the resources and the political and economic danger that tourism offers. Tourist entrepreneurs
and local people fight over land, beaches, and water. Landowners on A nuha Island (Solomon Islands), for example, fought among themselves throughout the 1980s over plans todevelop the island as a tourist resort- local conflict that ultimately killed that project(Sofield 1996). People also argue over the right to perform particular dance styles or ceremonies for tourists to watch. People on Pentecost Island (Vanuatu) continue to struggle
over rights to perform the ‘‘land dive’’ ceremony that celebrates the first fruits of theirannual yam crop, but also attracts considerable tourist interest (de Burlo 1996). E lsewhere,
as on Tanna, Islanders dispute who should receive tourist fees for climbing neighborhood
volcanoes. R itual organizers debate whether tourists should be allowed to attend religiously
important ceremonies and, if they do, whether they should pay for this privilege. A nd governments try to prevent art dealers from selling and exporting the nation’s cultural heritage(Lindstrom and White 1994).
Tourism is politics insofar as it requires constant decision-making about access to resources, the packaging of culture, and the distribution of revenue. A s tourist numbers increase one can expect political dispute and argument to likewise increase. Tourism affects
people differently, depending on their local political position and economic interest. Tourist
purchasing-power may imbalance a local economy so that, for example, the lobster catch

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once enjoyed by everyone now all goes into tourist bellies. But lobster catchers profit.
Tourists in search of sex threaten existing social relations. But young men and women may
profit, experientially if not also monetarily. Tourist requirements may unsettle the timing
and staging of local festivals and ceremonies. But hotels, guest houses, and tour guides profit from these rearrangements however troublesome. Cultural tourism unavoidably impacts
people politically, no matter how well it may be planned and managed.
It is difficult, however, to divert cultural tourists- to repel them from one’s home, particularly if one lives in a place, such as the Pacific, which enjoys high exchange value within
the touristic marketplace. A s the global economy now thoroughly encompasses the local,
issues of identity and the desire to find this through touring will become even more pressing. A t the same instant that the world system diffuses, fragments, and decenters the localism on which cultures once grew, it hardens and hyper-values whatever cultural difference
remains. Increasingly deterritorialized individuals are motivated to tour and to seek out
packaged cultural differences in order to work on their identities and life stories. A nd if
many people are interested, through travel and other means, to consume cultural difference, others are interested to sell this. In this tourist marketplace, certain selected forms ofculture congeal so that they can be more easily displayed, photographed, sold, and transported. Culture, and the people who display this, become commodities in the touristic marketplace, as A scher has argued:
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D riven by a variety of needs to attempt to earn a living from tourism, communities sell
not only their labour but themselves, offering themselves as merchandise; as a result,they are to some extent converted into a fetish, a spectacle, and reduced both to serving the function expected of them by tourists and to accepting what the tour operators
offer them in exchange (1985:13).
Still, localities- although invaded and commoditized by the global- do continue to exist.
People are not all the same; lifeways remain distinct in significant ways. It is important toprotect one’s sense of home, and not just for local identity purposes but also so that the
tourists will continue to come. If your cultural location looks just like the one across the island, or worse yet like a suburb of Sydney, Tokyo, or Los A ngeles, you are out of business. A gain, in this way tourism ‘‘protects’’ culture as people try to maintain their distinctive value within the tourist marketplace. But these attempts, of course, change the feel ofthat culture. You no longer just live in your own way, but rather live in your way so thatyou can be watched, and can sell the opportunity for others to come and participate withyou.
This is the most striking existential effect of cultural tourism- when people gaze at you
then you can no longer think of yourself independently. When tourists gaze at us, we too
look along with them back at ourselves and we thus become doubled- someone who looks
and someone who gets looked at. O ur culture no longer is a lifeway; it is also a commodity.
A dance is no longer just a dance, but rather becomes a spectacle. Pots become art; axes
become artifacts; yams become local delicacies on hotel menus; and houses become typical

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examples of local style. O ur identity becomes in this way doubled. We live and we watch
ourselves live. We cannot escape having both a self, and representations of that self- or
packaged stories about who we are and how we are different that we offer to stranger tourists and also back to ourselves. But this doubled identity is a pervasive aspect of late 20th
century life everywhere- Kagoshima, O klahoma, and Madang alike- and cultural tourism
is just its symptom and not its cause. These, then, on the cultural level, are some of theconstraints and prospects of cultural tourism in the Pacific today.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I prepared an initial version of this paper while I was a Visiting Foreign R esearcher at
Kagoshima U niversity R esearch Center for the South Pacific. That paper was presented as
an invited lecture in D ecember, 1995, at a seminar on cultural tourism (The Co-E xistenceof Culture and Tourism in the Pacific) that met in Madang, Papua New G uinea. This wassponsored by the Papua New G uinea National Cultural Commission and U NE SCO . I
would like to thank D r. Jacob Simet and the staff of Papua New G uinea’s National Cultural
Commission, and also my colleagues and the staff of the Kagoshima U niversity R esearchCenter for the South Pacific.
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(Accepted 30 July 1997)＋＋｜｜