Tag: intentional culture

The Work of Culture in Your Open Science Organization

“Religion is a culture of faith; science is a culture of doubt” Richard Feynman (unsourced).

“Don’t think of culture as other than accumulated learning that sits inside you as one of your layers of consciousness” (Edwin Schein, 2016 <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6wJaNKIALLw> accessed April 4, 2019).

“‘Culture’ is everything we don’t have to do” (Brian Eno, 1996; W Magazine)

“‘Culture’ is anything you can get better at” Bruce Caron, 2019.

All the culture that fits: exploring the work of culture to prepare to change it

PLEASE NOTE: This is a draft of a bit of the Open Scientist Handbook. There are references/links to other parts of this work-in-progress that do not link here in this blog. Sorry. But you can also see what the Handbook will be offering soon.

We want culture in the academy to work for us, instead of against us. The many meanings of the word “culture” — each with certain claims to capture essential aspects of this spectrum of human proclivity and activity — make the task of outlining a notion of the “work of culture” also a chore of definitions. What is it about culture that can be said to do work? And what work is important for open science?

One goal of this book is to help scholars who have little or no background in the academic study of culture to gain a sufficient purchase on this notion to become confident, productive agents of culture change for their home institutions, their professional associations and research organizations, and for the academy as a global science endeavor. Like quantum mechanics and machine intelligence, the serious study of culture is not one of these “dip your toes in the shallow end” kind of endeavor. However, with a roadmap through just enough of this contested space, even tenured chemistry professors (or pick your discipline) can become bonafide organizational culture-change agents.

Getting back to basics

Beginning anthropology classes might spend a month covering the “history of the anthropological ideas of culture.” These notions developed first through colonial excursions, and then with missionaries and colonial settlers, and finally ethnographers. Courses on “organizational culture” are now required in MBA curricula and iSchools.

A recent (2017) online book for teaching anthropology in community colleges has distilled culture down to a few pages, entitled “The Culture Concept.” <http://perspectives.americananthro.org/Chapters/Culture_Concept.pdf>. Accessed April 4, 2019.

Arjo Klamer (2017), a Dutch economist, introduces culture to his economics class by adding two meaning domains for this word: culture as the accomplishments of a society (e.g., baroque style as a form of European culture), and culture as creative activity within sectors of the economy (the arts, architecture, music, etc.). His first meaning gives us the adjective “cultured,” applied to individuals who exemplify a certain noticeable style; while his second is where you go to when you click on the “culture” link in an online magazine or newspaper.

“Culture” is a section in your newspaper/magazine/webzine

Culture as a process

Folks who want to use culture and culture change as a resource or a tool to change social groups describe culture as a process. They then offer a method to intercept and guide this process (Marcus and Conner, 2014). Organizational management researchers are full of advice on the culture of organizations, but usually fail to look at how this type of culture fits into the larger sense of culture’s role in society or in individual identity. Anthropologists describe cultures and how these change without intervention, but little advice on how to intentionally change this. Here, you will find both anthropological and organizational perspectives, just so you are fully comfortable that you’ve travelled the entire landscape of the term “culture.”

Do you own your culture, or does your culture own you?

“Culture is public because meaning is” (Geertz, 1973).

Much of the disputed territory for culture, whether as an object of study, or as a field for intentional change, is centered on how culture is carried more or less unconsciously by the individual. Sometimes it feels as though we’ve been “marinated” in cultural practices our entire lives: language, cuisine, music, art, and now online content. There is a part of culture that is tacit, embodied, unspoken, and non-conscious. Culture theories tell us this, and they are not wrong. This aspect of culture is often used to demonstrate how difficult it is to manage culture.

A vague, squishy word, indeed

Jean-Louis Gassée (not an anthropologist; but rather of Apple, BeOS, and Palm fame), in a blog about Intel’s “toxic culture” writes:

“Our powerful human emotions are bundled into something we call Culture, itself a vague, squishy word……Culture develops within us in a manner similar to our taste buds: Our gustatory education starts with Mother’s milk and accumulates over time. The trouble with our acquired tastes, particularly in the realm of ideas, is that they drop below our consciousness: Raw data are filtered, judged, and labeled before being passed to our conscious, ‘rational’ processes.”

Gassée is pointing out that parts of the repertoire of shared meanings, behaviors, and sentiments that people would label “cultural” are known without any explicit knowledge of how and when we came to know these; and even less ability to describe them.

Schein (2010) calls this a cultural “layer.” This layer is learned from birth at home, and then in school, and then in the workplace, where the same tacit layer proves the hardest part to change. When your company/university/agency is running on a tacit culture layer, instead of on a reflexive intentional culture layer, it is most vulnerable to becoming toxic (Deep Dive: Toxic Culture).

Science is a reflexive, interrogative activity

Fortunately, the main aspects of academy culture we are hoping to change can all be made explicit and available to reflexive rebooting. In fact, open science is not reinventing science as much as clearing away the extraneous cultural underbrush (such as journal impact factors) that has collected in the past half-century or so. Scientists can openly interrogate these practices, and collectively move away from perverse incentives, conflicts of interest, and culturally-supported bad behavior in the academy. The leading advice to Silican Valley CEOs today is to avoid “f*cking up your culture” (See also: Don’t F*ck Up Your Culture; Retrieved May 17, 2019). The academy might want to listen here.

You cannot really avoid culture if you want change

A good point is worth saying twice: you may be an open-science pioneer who is eager and intent to bring productive changes to the academy, and yet still be uncomfortable with the notion of culture. You might prefer to offer solutions (e.g., coercive rules enforced by governments and funding organizations, novel technology platforms, and manifestos — so many manifestos) that, you hope, would shape “social behavior” without needing to confront or even consider culture. You look at the term “culture” and see a morass of competing meanings, with tangled and complex implications for the use of the term. How do you defend a program to change culture when you can’t get any three people in a room to agree on what culture means?

Scientists are many things. Each of these things have something in common: a desire for precision. The “vague, squishy” term “culture” offers very little precision and a whole load of ambiguity and complexity. As a scientist, you already have your hands full of ambiguity and complexity; you are striving to understand the inherent, emergent complexity of the universe. You rely on instruments that achieve ever-better accuracy and precision to help you extract some level of near-certainty to observe your object of study.

Many scientists are dismayed by the sheer amount of fuzziness surrounding the notion of culture. So the project at hand is to un-fuzzy that corner of culture where the academy can work on intentional changes to promote open science. The rest can remain terra incognito. The fact is, you don’t need to be an anthropologist to put culture to work in your organization.

In short: the good news is that the cultural work of open science is centered on those aspects of culture that can be intentionally described, discussed, and refactored — even if some of these might later become routine and get framed as default expectations. It’s not a bad thing to have your active culture also inform the tacit level of culture, it’s actually a goal: norms are cultural behaviors and attitudes that have become tacit culture. A norm is when “we open scientists do things like this,” and think: why would we do anything else?

Culture: trimmed down to size for the open scientist

Here we will trim the semantic tangle of the term “culture” to a more specific notion of culture: to the point where it can serve our understanding of how this works and how this fits into the future of the academy. The word “culture” will still hold all of its diverse and multiplex meanings everywhere else, however, here we’ll just agree to use it in one specific way to cut through a lot of the semantic shrubbery it has acquired over the centuries and around the globe.

Learning from anthropology

We can start by looking at some general attributes of “culture.” In his 1993 book, Culture, Chris Jenks notes (following Ralph Parsons):

“…for present purposes three prominent keynotes of the discussion [around culture] may be picked out: first, that culture is transmitted, it constitutes a heritage or a social tradition; secondly, that it is learned, it is not a manifestation, in particular content, of man’s genetic constitution; and third, that it is shared. Culture, that is, is on the one hand the product of, on the other hand a determinant of, systems of human social interaction” (Jenks 1993: 59).

Lets put these verbs into the following order: learn (first exposure) → share (locally) → transmit (across space/time). Repeat as needed. This sounds a lot like education, something the academy already does. For the individual, this process is, or can be, a lifelong activity. What Clifford Geertz reminds us is that these cultural activities are public. Nothing is cultural until it is shared. That means these activities are available to study, and to change, and to be changed through intentional intervention (although somewhat less available when they are only tacit).

One easy way to see what Jenks is proposing here is to substitute “language” for “culture;” after all, language is a good part of any society’s cultural repertoire. Saying that language is transmitted is to acknowledge that we don’t need to invent our own language anew every generation. Saying language is learned explains that we acquire this through learning as children and then hone this learning throughout our lives. To say that language is shared points to a key concept: we need others to make this work; it’s called “conversation”. In many ways, language is primarily a type of sharing. Other skills and cultural content exhibit these same features.

The reverse is also true. If a language is not transmitted over time it “dies”. If a person doesn’t learn a language, they are left outside the conversations that happen in that language. And when a language ceases to be shared in everyday life (e.g., it becomes a “sacred” language that can only be spoken in certain places/times), other language forms will take over in daily life. Languages change all the time. Remember that. They manifest lifelong, tacit cultural practices, and they still change.

Culture comes in community boxes

“Community, therefore, is where one learns and continues to practice how to ‘be social’. At the risk of substituting one indefinable category for another, we could say it is where one acquires ‘culture’” (Cohen, 1985).

The usual container for a culture is called “community.” As an organization grows and governs its own cultural work, you can say that the group becomes a community. You can dive into “community” elsewhere in the Handbook (Deep Dive: Communities, Collectives, and Commons). Notions of community will also be threaded into many of the Handbook chapters.

Meaning, Symbols, and Memes; oh my!

Exactly what is learned, transmitted, and shared as culture is complicated. “Meaning” usually pops up here, together with “symbols” (meaning carriers). In many ways anything that can be learned (anything you can get better at by learning this), and that must be shared in order to make sense as something to do (write a song, choose a new fashion statement, enter a conversation, sports, theatre, etc.) becomes culture when the various meanings of that learned behavior are also shared. You cannot have your own private culture. That said, you can have a very small community with its own distinguished cultural behaviors.

Memes are symbols that have been reimagined as cultural-genetic replicators. The analogy to biology is intentional, and meme theorists also talk of culture change as evolution. Since the 1970s, meme theories have been proposed to explain how certain cultural content packages spread and persist.

“[Richard] Dawkin’s way of speaking was not meant to suggest that memes are conscious actors, only that they are entities with interests that can be furthered by natural selection. Their interests are not our interests. ‘A meme,’ [Daniel] Dennett says, ‘is an information packet with attitude’” (Gleick, 2011).

The notion of a meme is centered on the idea that humans as social beings are shaped by culture the same way their bodies are shaped by their DNA. If you want to explore memes a bit more, here’s a good introduction (by Dennett) and some good counter arguments (by Lanier). Here we will talk about meaning and symbols and culture change, but you are certainly free to talk about memes and evolution. You can also look into “cultural science,” where evolutionary cultural studies are being done.

Culture is a plural noun

Not grammatically, of course, but we have seen and continue to see around us how cultural notions, skills, and activities are typically multiple, contested, fragile, and liable to change. Individuals tend to privilege those notions, skills, and activities they have invested time to learn (so nobody wants to be forced to use a different language). However, since culture must be shared to be viable, individuals continually find themselves in conversation with others who have differing cultural inventories. Culture is like a life-long song we only sing once, and none of us has been handed the score for the next chorus. We just keep on singing, in multipart harmony.

Knowing is the intrinsic work of culture in your organization

Of course, culture is not only a noun. Humans are cultural beings. Humans have culture. Humans do culture. There is a lot of culture going on all the time. More recent takes on organizational culture reject this as being just some packet of ideas that gets passed around.Today, more than ever before, culture is viral, active, flowing (Appadurai, 1996). Today, culture is on the internet too.

The recent work of John Seely Brown, coming out of organizational knowledge theories in the mid 1990s (See: Boland Jr. and Tankasi, 1995), has added (or recovered) a cultural angle on knowledge management (Cook and Brown, 1999). Instead of organizations stewarding an inventory of knowledge objects, what they need to do is open up contexts and spaces for knowing: contexts for the transmitting, learning, and sharing between and among their participants (Thomas and Brown, 2011).

This concept was then picked up by David Snowden and others (Kurtz and Snowden, 2003), who mapped the contexts of knowing and “sense-making” into what they called the Cynefin Framework (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cynefin_framework, Retrieved May 20, 2019). This framework is largely about identifying types of knowing — and ways of deciding — in corporations, as a corrective to the prior knowledge management systems which only covered tacit and discursive knowledge objects (Wenger et al, 2002).

The Cynefin Framework in 2014 By Snowded — Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=33783436

“The framework sorts the issues facing leaders into five contexts defined by the nature of the relationship between cause and effect. Four of these — simple, complicated, complex, and chaotic — require leaders to diagnose situations and to act in contextually appropriate ways. The fifth — disorder — applies when it is unclear which of the other four contexts is predominant” (Snowden and Boone, 2007).

The Cynefin Framework describes several domains of knowing; the core qualities of knowing are different in each of these. Knowing is an activity, an action, not a commodity, not a thing to be managed.

Knowing, or sense-making, is an intrinsic work for organizational culture. This is particularly true in the academy, where new knowledge and learning outcomes are a chief value proposition. Scientific “knowledge” is an output of shared knowing.

The challenge is that these domains are not always fully manageable, and neither are the humans that engage in knowing with each other, most particularly in the complex domain of the infinite game. Knowing is why we might learn more in a 10 minute conversation than we can from a 1000 page book. Knowing is how scientists play the infinite game with one another. You can briefly explore the infinite game by going back to the Things about science section.

Cynefin for the Academy

For now, the main take-aways from using the Cynefin Framework for the academy are the following:

First: it helps to explain the difference between doing science, talking/writing science, and telling others about science. These occur in different domains; and,

Second: it begins to describe the complex, emergent space of the infinite game. Learning this is central to building academy governance for game play. For centuries, most scientists, or earlier, natural philosophers, and before them, philosophers, played the infinite game individually. Today, science and learning is a team sport, and the academy needs to find ways to govern team play (Deep Dive: Knowing to Play the Infinite Game).

The domains of decision-making for open-science organizations. Which domain does your organization currently use to make its decisions?

The Cynefin Framework is explored at length in Deep Dive sections on Leadership and Learning, so we will not pursue it further here, except for this: The Handbook also presents a version of the Cynefin Framework that uses three modal types of cultural activity to represent the framework’s logics (complex, complicated, simple). These modes are: festival, game, and spectacle. You will need to ask this question a lot: upon which logic does your organization base its decisions? Starting with the wrong logic will lead to bad, sometimes very bad, decisions. A lot of toxic culture in the academy is based on decisions arrived at in the wrong domain.

Festival: For those who grew up in the parts of the planet (such as most of North America) without festivals that involve actual danger, nudity, running with fire, social exposure, complex body skills, radical comedy — the various ingredients of festivity that make these events complex, emergent activities — we are not talking about the annual petunia festival here. Also note that the best intellectual conversations are like running with fire.

The Cultural Work of Social Organizations

Cultural practices and social organizations are intertwined in time and space. Social organizations are the social “appliances,” the furniture, that anchor human groups into more durable cultural contexts, which they support and are, in turn, supported by. These contexts expand our capacity for collective action, including economic and political action. Just as we do not need to—or get to—invent our own language, we don’t get to invent most of the social groups we intersect in our lives. But we can change them.

In order to pursue the intrinsic cultural work of the academy, we build communities inside organizations that use governance processes to support sharing knowing. We use can our organizations to manage other, social and economic tasks. If knowing is a dance, then community is the dance floor, and the organization is the dance hall.

In the twenty-five years since Jenks’ book, culture has seen a lot of new attention. From the portmanteau academic discipline of “cultural studies” to the cubicles of Silicon Valley start-up companies, the importance of culture for the everyday life and future prospects of societies and corporations has become a central theme. It’s high time for the academy to take a culture turn. You can help.

Now you know enough about the various aspects of culture to start rolling up your pants and wading in. You know that culture is (and must be) learned, shared, and transmitted. Most of culture is really vulnerable to intervention or substitution. Culture describes a broad range of human activities and a layer of meaning that is spread over (or under) social activities and organizations.

Knowing is an intrinsic work of culture, a primary activity for all cultural activities, but particularly for those, like science, that are involved in the infinite game. Knowing happens in more than one domain. The meanings of culture are all public. You can find them, interrogate them, and, yes, change them. That’s the next topic in the Handbook: The task: culture change.

References

Appadurai, Arjun. Modernity Al Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization. Vol. 1. U of Minnesota Press, 1996.

Boland Jr, Richard J, and Ramkrishnan V Tenkasi. “Perspective Making and Perspective Taking in Communities of Knowing.” Organization Science 6, no. 4 (1995): 350–372.

Cohen, A.P. The Symbolic Construction of Community. Chichester, Sussex: Ellis Horwood Ltd, 1985.

Cook, D.N., and John Seely Brown. “Bridging Epistemologies: The Generative Dance between Organizational Knowledge and Organizational Knowing.” Organization Science 10, no. 4 (1999): 381–400. http://www.jstor.org/stable/2640362.

Geertz, C. The Interpretation of Cultures. New York: Basic Books, 1973.

Gleick, James. The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood. 1st ed. New York: Pantheon Books, 2011.

Jenks, Chris. Culture. London And. New York: Routledge, 1993.

Klamer, A. Doing the Right Thing: A Value Based Economy. 2nd ed. London: Ubiquity Press, 2017. https://doi.org/10.5334/bbb.

Kurtz, Cynthia F, and David J Snowden. “The New Dynamics of Strategy: Sense-Making in a Complex and Complicated World.” IBM Systems Journal 42, no. 3 (2003): 462–483.

Markus, Hazel Rose, and Alana Conner. Clash!: How to Thrive in a Multicultural World. Penguin, 2014.

Schein, Edgar H. Humble Inquiry: The Gentle Art of Asking Instead of Telling. Berrett-Koehler Publishers, 2013.

Thomas, Douglas, and John Seely Brown. A New Culture of Learning: Cultivating the Imagination for a World of Constant Change. Vol. 219. CreateSpace Lexington, KY, 2011.

Wenger, E., R.A. McDermott, and W. Snyder. Cultivating Communities of Practice: A Guide to Managing Knowledge. Harvard Business Press, 2002.

Ethnic Cultural Theme Parks in China and Japan

Toward an Anthropology of Intentional Tradition

Abstract

The production of “constructed culture” as a feature of the urban landscape accelerates the consumption of such artifacts in everyday life, and prepares residents to consume similar artifacts in tourist destinations. The dream of living in a theme park is realized through intentional tradition as a model for urban planning.
Intentional traditions are not limited to theme parks and cities (such as Las Vegas) that are rebuilt as theme parks, but can be seen as the future of traditional (or post-traditional) culture.

The act of producing intentional tradition represents a mode of “detraditionalization” in Giddens’ perspective: “A detraditionalizing social order is one in which the population becomes more active and reflexive, although the meaning of ‘reflexive’ should be properly understood. Where the past has lost its hold, or becomes one ‘reason’ among others for doing what one does, pre-existing habits are only a limited guide to action; while the future, open to numerous ‘scenarios’, becomes of compelling interest (Giddens, 1994, 92-93).” Theme parks compete with each other and with other types of destination for scarce tourist cash flows. The ability of cultural theme parks to innovate traditions—to attempt to manage their future—is crucial to their competitive position. So too, the workers in these theme parks use intentional traditions to innovate their own ethnic markers and construct cultural practices that offer them a future in the tourism industry: the world’s largest industry. And these ethnic markers and cultural practices are highly competitive as valued tokens in the economy and society of ethnic minority locales around China. In Japan, foreign-themed parks reinforce the islanders’ sense of belonging to the wider world. These offer local experiences of far-away traditions, experiences that are added to their visitors’ reflexive construction of their sense of self and national identity.

Resurrected from 2010 blog… which was rescued from a Google Knol

Originally published in Japanese:

2004. “Ethnic Cultural Theme Parks in China and Japan:Toward an Anthropology of Intentional Tradition.” In Tourism as a Complex Phenomenon. Nobukiyo Eguchi, ed. Kyoto: Koyoshobo. 

The author wishes to thank Professor Eguchi for his support and insights. Prof. Tamar Gordon at RPI secured the funding for the research/video project to China and Japan, and directed the documentary video outcome: Global Villages

Photo Credits: Erich Schienke

Introduction

This essay will explore four sites: the Chinese theme parks at the Overseas China Town in Shenzhen and the Ethnic Village (minzucun) park in Kunming; and the Japanese theme parks of Huis Ten Bosch near Nagasaki, and Parque España in Mie.

The author visited these locales in 2002 while producing and filming a documentary video, Global Villages: The Globalization of Ethnic Display. 61:36 minute DVD. Bruce Caron and Tamar Gordon, Producers. 2004. Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and The New Media Studio: Troy, New York and Santa Barbara, California. The author would like to thank Professor Nobukiyo Eguchi for his guidance and assistance over the years.

Each of these parks could have an entire article devoted to an ethnographic description, so this article will not pretend to fully explore the parks as ethnographic sites. The ethnography of the parks here supports notions of value in the study of tourism as a global cultural practice. The author will propose a set of problems from the literature on the anthropology of tourism, and look to these sites as resources to explore these problems. For example, legitimacy, as this is sought by the producers and accepted by the consumers is one of the problem for ethnic cultural theme parks. Unlike amusement parks, where the experience is designed to be imaginative, ethnic cultural theme parks are representational—they claim to show the authentic cultural practices of the people who perform these, or they claim to have recreated locations that actually exist somewhere else (e.g., Huis ten Bosch). As Stanley notes: “… once the notion of ethnographic representation becomes central, there is a stress on authenticity in all aspects of enactment (Stanley 1998, 171).” Legitimacy includes issues of cultural authority and ethnic identity. The problem remains, how do the theme parks establish their cultural content as “authentic”?

The second problem is that of regionality within the parks. Here the term “regionality” does not refer to geographical region, but rather to what Erving Goffman (1974) described as the basic “frames” for activity in any social setting. The “front” region represented the area of public display and attention to public norms for behavior. The “back” region represented more private or intimate behaviors that would be shielded from viewing from the “front” region (1959, 106). Bathing, dressing, sleeping, sexuality, and certain modes of relaxation would be performed in an area outside of the attention of strangers or the need to attend to normalized behaviors. While the front region can include both social behaviors and a dramatic staging (1974, 124) of social behaviors, where there is no actual “stage,” the assumption is that front region behavior is linked to the individual’s socialized self, rather than some simulation of this.

The spatial regionality of Goffman’s does not map easily into the psychological distinctions of “honne” and “tatemae” in Japanese. However, one would suspect that back regions are areas where tatemae is not required.

One important difference between ethnic cultural theme parks and entertainment theme parks (for example, Disneyland) could once be found in the former’s attempt to represent an authentic back region for the villages they assembled, and the latter’s construction of a consumer space with only front regions. This seems to be changing, with ethnic cultural theme parks abandoning the attempt at a display of “real life” (in all its regions) in favor of staged cultural display.

The third problem is how theme park cultural production relates to cultural production back in ethnic locales. Also, how does globalized cultural production and consumption affect the experience of ethnic cultural theme parks? What does this mean for the role of ethnic cultural theme parks in the management of national cultural and local ethnic diversity?  What separates the culture generated by theme parks from either the cultural production in the ethnic homelands or cultural production and consumption in urban zones? Does this new cultural production mark a shift in how nations and ethnic groups negotiate cultural heritage management?

The parks are managed by a partnership of government and corporate interests, but are well attuned to the political role they might play. “In political terms, the Folk Culture Villages theme park embodies the essence of CCP [Chinese Communist Party] policy towards democracy, religious freedom and support for ethnic cultures, designed to demonstrate to its own population and the world the tolerance of Chinese socialism. The Tibetan lamasery and the Uighur mosque are religious buildings only in terms of their original purpose and are now displayed as a political symbol as well as for the touristic gaze. The theme park ‘showcases’ the integration of the minorities into the one happy Chinese cultural family and the unity of the Chinese peoples (Sofield and Lee, 1998).”

Sites under study in China and Japan

Today, more than 300 million persons visit one or more of China’s 3000 theme parks every year (source: US Department of Commerce). Themed destinations have become an economic force and a cultural phenomenon in China. Over the past decades, Japan has also witnessed growth in investment in its themed destination sites, with new ventures in nearly every prefecture. While most of these destinations are amusement parks built around thrill rides (See also: Brouws and Caron, 2001), other parks offer cultural experiences instead of physical thrills.

The Overseas China Town (OCT) development in Shenzhen, Guangdong offers, in one locale, a schematic model for intentional culture production and consumption.  Within a walking distance there are four theme parks—Splendid China, China Folklore Villages, Window on the World, and Happy Valley—that span the spectrum of content from static miniature replica to expansive, dynamic thrill rides (picture Tobu World Square, Tokyo Disneyland, Osaka Universal Studios, and the Akan National Park Ainu Village built side-by-side).  The common thread among three of the parks is the presence of ethnically coded (Chinese/global ethnic minority) entertainers.

Huis ten Bosch has a larger “frame” as an actual cityscape, with a housing development, a full sewage treatment plant, and other urban design infrastructure. The downturn of the Japanese economy in the 1990s reduced the market value of the real estate venture significantly. It is important to consider Huis ten Bosch as a vision of an urban utopia and not simply a themed space.

The fourth park offers 1/15th scale replicas of notable places in China (including Tibet). In Kunming, the provincial government has constructed an expansive theme park of the 25 ethnic minority groups of Yunnan. These are only a few of the ethnic cultural theme parks now open in China.

In Japan, where the number of officially recognized minority ethnic groups and the number of ethnic minority individuals are significantly fewer than those found in China, recent theme park developments have explored extra-national locales, such as Holland and Spain. The Dutch city destination resort of Huis ten Bosch in Kyushu is remarkable for its investment in full-scale verisimilitude.

Intentional tradition is a term that is derived by analogy with “intentional community” which describes communities, such as “communes” that are consciously constructed, and intentional cultures, which are discursively negotiated (See also: http://www.ic.org/). Intentional tradition also marks the production of tradition in what Anthony Giddens calls the “post-traditional” age (1992, 74). Elsewhere he notes: “…as a direct result of globalization, we can speak today of the emergence of a post-traditional social order.  A post-traditional order is not one in which tradition disappears—far from it.  It is one in which tradition changes its status. Traditions have to explain themselves, to become open to interrogation or discourse.” (1994, 5). Giddens describes (ibid., 29) modernity as a time of increasing “institutional reflexivity.” Whereas in former, “traditional,” eras, everyday life was assembled without consideration for the action of assembling this, in modernity, even “tradition” will be consciously constructed.

Actual-sized buildings built with actual, imported materials, offers the Japanese tourist a high degree of simulated Europeanness. The Spanish destination park of Parque España in Mie, not far from Ise Jingu, was originally designed as a European destination similar to Huis ten Bosch.  Large market spaces (agora) from major Spanish cities form the main park, with various entertainments woven around these. In part the original design was never completed, and more recent additions have abandoned the “Spanish” theme for amusement zones and rides (Caron, 1999). Still, the park continues to portray itself as a Spanish cultural destination.

 

Intentional Traditions

The cultural productions managed in themed destinations offer anthropologists new objects of cultural study. In particular these sites are excellent examples of what I will term “intentional tradition.” Intentional tradition marks the attempt (usually by state organizations or by corporations) to produce authentic, traditional practices and locales as consciously constructed artifacts. This process contrasts with heritage management efforts to isolate and preserve historical, traditional practices and their locales.

created because they produce new sources for what Bourdieu (1984) called “cultural capital.” Historical sites, preserved as such, are certainly important sources of cultural capital, but the amount of this they provide is fixed, determined by their historical significance. Nations and locales mine this fixed asset by developing the historical site as a unique tourist destination (See MacCannell, 44-45).

Themed destinations break with the historical logic by creating their own uniqueness outside of any history, from an invented cultural production. Disney parks are prime examples. Now cloned from the California “original” (or rather the “non-original”) to Florida, Paris, Tokyo, and soon, Hong Kong; these parks have “visioneered” an acutely ahistorical cultural artifact. This artifact is bound neither by history nor location. As an example, the Shenzhen Splendid China theme park was copied in Florida, not far from Disneyworld.

The Florida park opening was marked by demonstrations about the issue of Tibet, and it never acquired a sufficient customer numbers. The park languished financially for ten years before declaring bankruptcy and closing in December of 2003.

In part, these new locales are

What was perhaps unexpected is how ethnic cultural theme parks have managed to copy the Disney example and invent new cultural capital through the same sort of cultural alchemy.

Consuming “Constructed Culture”

The production of intentional tradition at ethnic cultural theme parks creates practices that may not, in the past, have been accepted by audiences as “traditional” practices. But today, their audiences quite readily accept these traditional artifacts, even though they represent at best a sort of “constructed culture.” In fact, this constructed cultural output is actually preferred by what Mike Featherstone (and others) have called “post-tourists;” “Here we have typical sites for what have been referred to as ‘post-tourists’, people who adopt a postmodern de-centred orientation towards tourist experiences. Post-tourists have no time for authenticity and revel in the constructed simulational nature of contemporary tourism, which they know is only a game” (Featherstone 1991, 102).

The intentional traditions of ethnic cultural theme parks are—to their producers and consumers alike—traditional enough to offer an authentic experience. The seriousness of the intentions (signaled mainly by budget and attention to high production value) is now sufficient to legitimate the authenticity of the resulting practice. This means that their content is not legitimated by historical use, but rather, by the intentions of the producer. The claim made here is that anthropologists can no longer look at the content of ethnic theme parks as either a copy of some carefully borrowed traditional practice or as merely fantasy entertainment with no legitimate claim to traditional authority. Today, these parks are building cultural traditions the way Disney builds fantasies.

Intentional tradition mines the front region cultural practices of tourist destinations world-wide to construct cultural practices that the “post-tourist” in China, Japan, and elsewhere, apparently desires and pays to consume. But do these practices inform the ethnic identities of the performers or the consumers? Is there a corresponding “intentional ethnicity?” It may be worthwhile remembering that tourism has been the largest industry in the world for some years now. State tourism organizations in nations across the globe are investing in new destinations. Ethnic groups that achieve state recognition in this arena find that their relationship to the state and their internal group dynamics may be profoundly affected (Wood 1984, 1997). Once the groups have been selected by the state to participate in ventures such as ethnic cultural theme parks, the process of intentional tradition determines which of the markers (MacCannell, 74) are selected as ethnic icons. For example, in the Wa village at Chinese Folklore Villages and the Ethnic Villages in Kunming, the bleached skulls of buffalo are prominently displayed. Dances, songs, costumes—the whole repertoire of the ethnic theme park village becomes a set of ethnic markers. These markers are not simply externally applied to the performers, but are created through a dialogic process between the cultural performers and the managers, and also between the performers and their audience. Picard (1995, 1996) has noted this effect in Bali. Oakes (1997) noted that tourism in China—in response to the official recognition that the state provides to the fifty-five ethnic minorities, and the state’s ability to open up regions for international tourism—is a primary engine for ethnic groups to acquire and manage local identities.

Professional ethnic cultural performers returning from their contracted labor in theme parks in Beijing, Shenzhen, or Kunming, bring back more than the financial savings they have earned. Having danced in the theme park village shows running every hour or so, their performances achieve a level of professionalism far beyond that available back in the ethnic locale, where a dance might occur once a year, or even once in a lifetime (for a wedding ceremonial). Their dances from the parks are sometimes recreated to attract tourists to their home villages (Kirshenblatt-Gimblet 1998, 61). And having represented local ethnic identity in front of thousands, they achieve a status as a performer of traditional culture—however, their “tradition” is now informed by the intentional tradition practices from the theme park.

Intentional traditions treat cultural production as a form of expression removed from history as their primary source of legitimation. Instead, the resulting “tradition” is presented in terms of its aesthetic quality and how it measures up with other practices, local or global. Theme parks are free to—and expected to—borrow from and innovate off of other theme parks around the world. And when the park’s theme is “traditional culture” the resulting practices often blend elements from a variety of sources, with little regard for the constraints of the historical communities that might also claim authority over the tradition.

One example of intentional tradition is the  “ethnic” dances in the Chinese Folklore Villages in Shenzhen. Each dance was choreographed by the park staff to contrast with the other village dances so that the tourist would not see dances with similar styles in neighboring village performances. Elsewhere, at the “Maori” village in Window of the World, Wa and Uighur dancers learned their performances from Maori dancers from the Polynesian Cultural Center in Hawaii, who visited Shenzhen in order to train the dancers. But there are no Maoris in the Maori village. By 2002, in Huis ten Bosch, Romanian musicians and singers had replaced Dutch entertainers as a cost-cutting measure. Most of the costumed paraders in the daily grand parade in Parque España are local Japanese employees.

Huis ten Bosch declared bankruptcy in 2004, and defaulted on its nearly US $3 billion loan to the Industrial Bank of Japan. The park remains open and attracts millions of visitors a year.

Importantly, however, intentional traditions do not claim to provide a critique of the traditions they remake, nor do they add any type of performance “frame” to these. They do not parody or satirize the historical tradition. They simply acquire this and re-present it as something they are authorized to innovate upon. While it might be easier to innovate a tradition when representing someone else’s culture (as the Wa do in the “African” village in Window on the World), there seem to be few barriers to innovating on regional ethnic cultural traditions at these parks.

Competition with other parks is only one reason why cultural theme parks innovate instead of borrowing from traditional authority. The ethnic performers are also competing with one another in their villages and with other villages in the park to gain audience approval. And, in China, the parks are viewed as national cultural centers that need to add something of value as national cultural landscape. In Shenzhen, the Chinese Folklore Villages, Window on the World, and Happy Valley theme parks each produce lavish evening performances, which combine large professional casts, theatrical lighting, and orchestral music.

In the summer of 2002 the Window on the World evening show tracked world history from the Stone Age to the modern era. Over at Happy Valley, an “Aztec Carnival” was performed on the edge of an enormous swimming pool (with the audience in the pool), while at the Chinese Folklore Villages a parade of Chinese historical periods and theatrical forms assembled into a grand finale of song and fireworks. Earlier in the evening, inside a theater, Han actors put on costume extravaganza, based partly on ethnic styles and partly on globalized dinner theater (e.g. learning from Las Vegas) models. These evening events increase the paid attendance at the parks and cater to a market for short-time tourists who are bussed in after their supper banquets elsewhere. The cultural workers from the ethnic villages are expected to also work these evening shows, and some become headline performers. This is a step toward long-term employment with the company.

The constructed aspects of cultural production in the parks means that the performers become skilled in several styles of entertainment. “… the initial design and the development of the company, this entire place, especially the nationality villages, is a result of the opening and reforming policy in China,” noted one of the managers at the Chinese Folklore Villages in Shenzhen. Formerly a dancer in one of the ethnic troupes, he had risen in the company to become a choreographer and manager.

He also explained how the various entertainments fit together into a synthetic experience: “I classify our nationality culture [productions] into three levels, because as managers in the Folklore Villages we have to imagine the point of view of the audiences. The first level consists of primitive aspects such as dance, singing, and costumes, and also includes interactive activities. The second level involves professional modifications to some aspects of these cultural productions. The third requires research in order to further [develop] creative modifications through big shows and commercial packaging to build a perfect items of Chinese culture.” These three levels are difficult to keep separate in practice, as the same employees may perform at all three levels. Career advancement is keyed to developing one’s talent for third-level performances.

This explanation of cultural production at the Chinese Folklore Villages fits entirely into the mode of intentional tradition. Notice what is missing; there is no call for the preservation of a borrowed traditional practice, no careful reproduction of an authorized performance, no link back to any actual practice from the original homeland. Instead, the resulting performance gains its effect through the improvements made using “professional modifications” to the underlying “primitive” level.

At the end of each performance in the parks, the audience is invited to join into a dance, or simply to touch the performers and pose for photographs. The performance has achieved the threshold of its audience’s sense of authentic experience, and then invites the audience to physically share this experience with the performers. This sharing resembles that moment of cultural contact that ethnologists experience when they arrive in the field. Visitors are encouraged to encounter other ethnic cultural groups as individuals, to touch them and acquire a feeling of cultural understanding.

At Huis ten Bosch, the sense of contact is created by simply arriving at the park. Checking into the Hotel Europa (or one of the other hotels) is physically like stepping into Europe (except that the staff speaks Japanese). The rooms are European in scale, far larger than most Japanese hotel rooms. Then a stroll out into the streets, over bricks imported from Holland, reinforces the feeling of being outside of Japan.

One of the few Dutch employees of Huis ten Bosch was genuinely impressed by the quality of the simulation that the manufactured cityscape offered to its visitors. “All this place lacks are drugs and hookers” he remarked with a combination of humor and respect. This comment actually touches on the main problematic for Huis ten Bosch: how to create a Dutch destination experience without experiencing Dutchpeople. There are no crowds of imported Hollanders adding human color to the shops and the streets, and only a few random European-looking people to garnish the architectural ambiance. The Australian water-ski team is notably blonde and young and adds a splash of excitement to the brick-lined canals. In 2002, the summer nights were enlivened by imported Cuban band. A small group of Dutch college students pursue their Japanese studies at an exchange program, but are not conspicuous to other visitors (and, one would suspect might be disappointed to have arrived to study in Japan only to be located in this consciously non-Japanese locale). The human interaction with the park’s staff is no different than what one might find in other Japanese internal tourist destinations, such as the hot springs at Noboribetsu. Here it is the architecture alone that serves to displace the visitor, and by doing this, offer them an experience of being somewhere else.

ASIDE: The author went night fishing on the canals of Huis Ten Bosch with members of the Australian waterski team: MIDNIGHT BASS FISHING

The visitor from Japan is surrounded by city marked by a blend of a familiar social manners and exotic settings. The visitor from outside Japan, particularly one from Europe, would face the opposite markers, as if wandering through a familiar city that has been somehow occupied by an army of strangers.  The Japanese visitor (the park’s main customer) is freed to experience the location without the social hesitation (and even trepidation) that the same tourist might feel on the streets of a European city—in Europe, that is—a mood that has been consciously constructed by the management as the basis for the destination’s appeal.

The intended appeal of the site is rather straightforward: the Tokyoite can visit “Europe” for the weekend or longer after a short domestic flight with no jet lag and no other cultural preparations. The promise of “Europe” can, in this case, be legitimated by the faithfulness of the simulation. The destination is designed to saturate the visitor’s time for a weekend holiday visit. Many visitors, we were told, rarely leave the expansive hotels, where outside the windows is a cityscape constructed brick-by-brick on a European plan.

Regionality           

Earlier versions of ethnic cultural display at world’s fairs and museums involved the recreation of village life as this was (presumably) lived. This would include the display of back-region activities. Facilities for cooking, sleeping, daily chores, and everyday activities were on display. As the guidebook for the Java Village at the 1893 Columbian Exposition in Chicago describes: “This village gives an exact reproduction of a village as found in the Preanger Regencies, the western part of the Island. There are one hundred and twenty-five natives, among which thirty-four are women; they show the life and industries of the common people in Java. These temporary, “living” exhibits were complemented in tableaus of the everyday life of tribal groups in natural history museums.

This practice has only recently been changed in major museums from the 1970s to the present. New exhibitions focus on the articles of practice, and avoid the staged tableaus of “real life.” This new form of display was pioneered by the National Museum of Ethnology in Osaka, Japan [http://www.minpaku.ac.jp/] and was seen most recently by the newly opened (2004) National Museum of the American Indian in Washington D.C. [http://www.nmai.si.edu/].

The goal of the living exhibits was to represent what Malinowski once called the “context of situation” of the daily lives of the people represented in the display. The people on display were instructed to act “normally” as though they were back in their home villages. They were encouraged to cook and eat, sleep and converse, play with their children, etc., as they would have back in their village. They would also make craft objects to sell to visitors. Nudity, as this was a feature of their everyday life, was transported as a feature of the “authentic” display.

At the 1939 New York World’s Fair, performers acting the roles of classical European painters would paint live nudes (always women) lounging on sofas in full view of the audience, establishing the frame of “art” as another frame that allowed nudity.

The hallmark of ethnic cultural display at world’s fair exhibits was the display of back-region behaviors—peeks into the real lives of other people. Historical parks, heritage sites, and then cultural theme parks, such as the Polynesian Culture Center in Hawaii, relied on their displays of back region activities to legitimate the notion that the “village” represented an authentic place, moved, but unchanged from its “roots”. Over the past two decades, this situation has changed considerably. Two reasons may explain this change. Firstly, back regions are very difficult to stage, and vulnerable to doubts an suspicions by the audience. Secondly, amusement theme parks (e.g. Disneyland) that do not stage back regions have been very successful and cultural theme parks have attempted to copy this success.

Dean MacCannell argued that the “back-region” of tourist destinations is also “staged,” and therefore not a real “back-region” in Goffman’s (1959, 128) terms.MacCannell asserted that, “a mere experience may be mystified, but a touristic experience is always mystified. The lie contained in the touristic experience, moreover, presents itself as a truthful revelation…. The idea here is that a false back is more insidious and dangerous than a false front… (1976, 102)”. MacCannell’s claim is that the display of a back region is structurally problematic for the site. It cannot easily be accepted (by the audience) as a real back region. And once the audience feels the back region is a lie, then the front region displays become vulnerable and the entire operation loses its legitimacy.

The same holds for the new “reality television” programs. These programs are vulnerable to suspicions that their “unscripted” dramas have been prearranged.

Conversely, Disney-style theme parks attempt to present a seamless front region display. Any preparation for a performance is done outside of the view of the consumer. Walls and plantings keep the outside neighborhood from being visible within the park. The daily grand parade simply appears from somewhere, runs its course and then disappears. Even the trash barrels are emptied through an underground system. The performers are “on stage” any time they are in the park. There are no “back-stage” tours allowed of Disney parks.

Disney-fied tradition

The parks under study in China and Japan represent new venues built in the past twenty years. These parks have abandoned an attempt to portray the back region, and focus on performances in a staged front region. The result is an experience of ethnic cultural display that is constructed more like a “land” in Disneyland, and less like a “village” from somewhere. In the Happy Valley theme park in Shenzhen, a Western-land townscape offers shows of gunplay and heroics by a cast of costumed cowboys (played by Russian actors from an international theatrical company, using a pre-recorded English voiceover) while across the park in an enchanted valley scene with a waterfall, ethnic minority actors dance and sing. At the end of each performance (cowboy or minority) the audience is encouraged to touch the actors and smile at the camera.

In the Wa village in Kunming, the female dancers backstage prepared for their dance by rolling up their blue jeans beneath their ethnic skirts so that their calves were bare. The skirts were “real,” but so were the jeans, and both were emblems of other places; the skirts of the village somewhere in Southwestern Yunnan and the jeans of the emerging cosmopolitan cultural influence in Kunming. The stage setting was made to recall the village not the global metropole, and so the jeans were hidden away (but not removed).The dances were from festivals and from romanticized courtship, and the audience was invited to join in on a circle dance at the end of the performance.

Intentional culture succeeds by avoiding displays of the everyday life of the “villagers”. This is a lesson that Disney learned early on, and that other theme parks have copied. At Parque España, the daily parade bursts from behind a set of gates, tours the grounds and returns to their hidden back stage. By creating and displaying only performances that can be accepted on their aesthetic merits, intentional cultural producers avoid the trap of attempting to create an authentic back region.

The back region is left back in the home village, and, of course, out in the dormitories where the cast members live. At Huis ten Bosch, the Australian water skiing team, housed in nearby dormitories for months, decided as a group to break the rules that the Japanese dormitory managers had set down for dormitory life; they set their own rules for visitations between the sexes, alcohol in the rooms, smoking, and music. They recreated the “back region” they would have experienced in Australia.

Over at Huis ten Bosch, the visitors get to stay overnight in the park, although the park concessions are mostly closed by 8 pm. The hotels then become the main source of evening entertainment. The visible confidence and ease that the park visitors display in their consumption of the front region Dutch cityscape and its commodities (there are many shopping and dining opportunities) reminds the observer that this place is also a fully managed theme park, and not an actual city. Just like Disneyland, Huis Ten Bosch sequesters away many aspects of mundane city life (not just Amsterdam’s famous vices). Poverty, crime, garbage, factories, illness, and death are not a part of this urban showcase. The visitors are not just travelers who have arrived to complete some work (unless they came to get married, and there are more than 700 weddings a year), they are here simply to be here, and to escape from their actual city back home.

 

Intentional Tradition as the future of cultural production

Huis ten Bosch was built as a model for future Japanese cities, with new technologies for sustainable development and a plan for 150,000 citizens (the park wall would be torn down, and the city would become an actual town). The juxtaposition of city center and theme park would compel the citizens to enjoy their urban lifestyle in a manner not possible in the overly crowded streets of Tokyo or Osaka. The intentions of the government (central and provincial) and the company were realized at a grand scale and enormous cost. However, the actual combination of city and theme park in Kyushu is not Huis ten Bosch, but rather the Jerde Group’s “Canal City” development in Hakata. This project rebuilds the city as a themed environment offering “non-daily events in a metropolitan environment” in the “largest privately developed project in Japan’s history” (source:http://www.jerde.com/go/place/canalcity).

The production of “constructed culture” as a feature of the urban landscape accelerates the consumption of such artifacts in everyday life, and prepares residents to consume similar artifacts in tourist destinations. The dream of living in a theme park is realized through intentional tradition as a model for urban planning.

Intentional traditions are not limited to theme parks and cities (such as Las Vegas) that are rebuilt as theme parks, but can be seen as the future of traditional (or post-traditional) culture. The act of producing intentional tradition represents a mode of “detraditionalization” in Giddens’ perspective: “A detraditionalizing social order is one in which the population becomes more active and reflexive, although the meaning of ‘reflexive’ should be properly understood. Where the past has lost its hold, or becomes one ‘reason’ among others for doing what one does, pre-existing habits are only a limited guide to action; while the future, open to numerous ‘scenarios’, becomes of compelling interest (Giddens, 1994, 92-93).” Theme parks compete with each other and with other types of destination for scarce tourist cash flows. The ability of cultural theme parks to innovate traditions—to attempt to manage their future—is crucial to their competitive position. So too, the workers in these theme parks use intentional traditions to innovate their own ethnic markers and construct cultural practices that offer them a future in the tourism industry: the world’s largest industry. And these ethnic markers and cultural practices are highly competitive as valued tokens in the economy and society of ethnic minority locales around China. In Japan, foreign-themed parks reinforce the islanders’ sense of belonging to the wider world. These offer local experiences of far-away traditions, experiences that are added to their visitors’ reflexive construction of their sense of self and national identity.

Bibliography

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Bourdieu, Pierre. 1984. Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste. R. Nice, trans. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul.

Brouws, Jeffrey and Bruce Caron. 2001. Inside the Live Reptile Tent: The Twilight World of the Carnival Midway. San Francisco: Chronical Books.

Caron, Bruce. 1993. “Magic Kingdoms: Towards a postmodern ethnography of sacred spaces.” Kyoto Journal No. 25. Pp. 125-130.

Caron, Bruce. 1999. “Shima Spain village: Japan brings Europe Back Home” Kyoto Journal No. 41. Online version available:http://www.kyotojournal.org/kjselections/spainmura.html

Featherstone, Mike. 1991. Consumer Culture and Postmodernism. London: Sage.

Giddens, Anthony. 1992. The Transformation of Intimacy: Sexuality, Love and Eroticism in Modern Societies. Stanford: Stanford University Press.

Giddens, Anthony. 1994. Beyond Left and Right: The Future of Radical Politics. Stanford: Stanford University Press.

Goffman, Erving. 1959. The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. New York: Doubleday.

Goffman, Erving, 1974.Frame Analysis. Boston: Northeastern U. Press.

Java Chicago Exhibition Syndicate. 1893. Java Village Midway Plaisance: Columbian Exposition. Chicago. [from the US Library of Congress Printed Ephemera Collection; Portfolio 18, Folder 37.].

Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, Barbara, 1998. Destination Culture: Tourism, Museums, and Heritage. Berkeley: University of California Press.

MacCannell, Dean. 1976. The Tourist: A New Theory of the Leisure Class. New York: Schocken Books.

Meyrowitz, Joshua. 1985. No Sense of Place. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Oakes, Timothy S. 1997. “Ethnic tourism in rural Guizhou: sense of place and the commerce of authenticity”. in Michel Picard and Robert E. Wood (eds). Tourism, Ethnicity and the State in Asian and Pacific Societies. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press. pp. 35–70.

Picard, Michel. 1995. “Cultural heritage and tourist capital in Bali”. In J. B. Allcock, E. M. Bruner and M. F. Lanfant (eds). International Tourism: Identity and Change. London: Sage Studies in International Sociology. pp. 44–66.

Picard, Michel. 1996. Bali: Cultural Tourism and Touristic Culture. Singapore: Archipelago Press.

Picard, Michel and Robert E. Wood, Eds. 1997 Tourism, Ethnicity and the State in Asian and Pacific Societies, Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press.

Sofield, Trevor H.B. and Fung Mei Sarah Li. 1998. “China: Tourism Development and Cultural Policies.” Annals of Tourism Research, volume 25, no. 2. pp.362-392.

Stanley, Nick. 1998. Being Ourselves for You: The Global Display of Culture. Enfield: Middlesex University Press.

Wood, Robert. E. 1984. “Ethnic tourism, the state, and cultural change in Southeast Asia.” Annals of Tourism Research. Vol. 11. pp. 353–74.

Wood, Robert. E. 1997. “Tourism and the state: ethnic options and constructions of otherness”, in Michel Picard and Robert E. Wood (eds). Tourism, Ethnicity and the State in Asian and Pacific Societies. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press. pp. 1–34.


Intentional Culture and Anthropology: ten years later

That's me with the camera
That’s me with the video camera

Ten years ago I published a paper (in Japanese) about doing an ethnography of intentional cultures and traditions. Ten years before that, I was capturing the very intentional effort of a Korean cultural community in Kyoto to build their own public festival. In the past ten years, I have been working toward an understanding of virtual communities in the arena of science research and data.

Here is a link to the English version of my 2004 paper: Ethnic Cultural Theme Parks in China and Japan: Toward an Anthropology of Intentional Tradition

Conclusion:

Intentional cultures are not limited to theme parks and cities (such as Las Vegas) that are rebuilt as theme parks, but can be seen as the future of traditional (or post-traditional) culture. The act of producing intentional tradition represents a mode of “detraditionalization” in Giddens’ perspective: “A detraditionalizing social order is one in which the population becomes more active and reflexive, although the meaning of ‘reflexive’ should be properly understood. Where the past has lost its hold, or becomes one ‘reason’ among others for doing what one does, pre-existing habits are only a limited guide to action; while the future, open to numerous ‘scenarios’, becomes of compelling interest (Giddens, 1994, 92-93).” Theme parks compete with each other and with other types of destination for scarce tourist cash flows. The ability of cultural theme parks to innovate traditions—to attempt to manage their future—is crucial to their competitive position. So too, the workers in these theme parks use intentional traditions to innovate their own ethnic markers and construct cultural practices that offer them a future in the tourism industry: the world’s largest industry. And these ethnic markers and cultural practices are highly competitive as valued tokens in the economy and society of ethnic minority locales around China. In Japan, foreign-themed parks reinforce the islanders’ sense of belonging to the wider world. These offer local experiences of far-away traditions, experiences that are added to their visitors’ reflexive construction of their sense of self and national identity.

Giddens, Anthony. 1994. Beyond Left and Right: The Future of Radical Politics. Stanford: Stanford University Press.

Photo by Erich Schienke