Hernandez, Jo Farb

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San Jose State UniversitySJSU ScholarWorksFaculty Publications Art and Art History & Design Departments4-1-2010Book Review. Diamond, Heather A. AmericanAloha: Cultural Tourism and the Negotiation ofTraditionJo Farb HernandezSan Jose State University, Jo.Hernandez@sjsu.eduFollow this and additional works at: https://scholarworks.sjsu.edu/artdesign_pubPart of the Art and Design CommonsThis Article is brought to you for free and open access by the Art and Art History & Design Departments at SJSU ScholarWorks. It has been acceptedfor inclusion in Faculty Publications by an authorized administrator of SJSU ScholarWorks. For more information, please contactscholarworks@sjsu.edu.Recommended CitationJo Farb Hernandez. "Book Review. Diamond, Heather A. American Aloha: Cultural Tourism and the Negotiation of Tradition" WesternFolklore (2010): 267-269.Beyond the Good Death 26 7 which provides the reader with a good sense of those traditions. He follows that with an interesting section on the now defunct Society for Mutual Autopsy, which included in its membership Emile Zola, Arthur Conan Doyle and Bram Stoker; members donated their corpses to the society for autopsy to further knowledge about the human body. The Society, started in the latter half of the nineteenth century, finally closed up shop in 1930. One of the standout sections of the books is on children's literature related to death. Green states that the need for explaining death to children is fairly recent. Death used to be much more present in our lives: it was a home based event until the rise of the middle class saw a shift from handling death and dying at home toward hospitals and funeral homes. We didn't need to explain death to children because they experienced death in their everyday lives. Now there is a whole body of literature, both fiction and non fiction, to try and explain it. Beyond the Good Death will hold few surprises for those familiar with the topic of death. However, for people new to the subject, it is a good overview and will pique curiosity for further investigation. Green's notes and bibliography will aid the interested reader in where to look next. As a college instructor who teaches the anthropology of death, I would certainly use this book as the primary text the next time I offer the course. It will be an interesting and compelling read for undergraduates. Elinor Levy Fairleigh Dickinson University Madison, New jersey American Aloha: Cultural Tourism and the Negotiation of Tradition. By Heather A. Diamond. (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2008. Pp. xv + 261, preface, note on names, acknowledgments, abbreviations, photographs, notes, bibli­ography, index. $55.00 cloth.) This volume is a thoroughly researched investigation of the Hawaiian compo­nent of the 1989 Folklife Festival presented by the Smithsonian Institution. The author, at the time of writing a lecturer in the departments of English and American Studies at the University of Hawai'i, used her status as a "relative outsider" to investigate the issues raised by the representation of the folklife of Hawaiian residents as "negotiated" by national Smithsonian staff. Through numerous interviews as well as exhaustive reviews of internal Smithsonian and Hawai'i State Foundation for Culture and the Arts documents, she explores the underlying mission of the Festival staff-and, more broadly, of its parent organi­zation, the Office of Folklore Programs-to enact American democratic ideals of banishing cultural intolerance through by promoting models of harmonious multicultural diversity. Diamond has created an ethnographic history of the "poetics and politics" of the Hawai'i program, studying those who study as well as those who are studied. Acknowledging that the Folklife Festival is fundamentally a scholarly undertaking informed by fieldwork research by professional folklorists, she also emphasizes the rather "subversive" nature of this work, through which the creative efforts 268 BOOK REVIEWS of traditional arts practitioners-those who rarely have enjoyed the privileges of power-are vaunted by politicians and mainstream society. The mostly Caucasian Smithsonian staff do not obscure their interest in promoting cultural advocacy for those who have historically not enjoyed such support; however, to do this, they background social and economic disparities and de-politicize, integrate, and seek to unify disparate and often opposing cultural narratives. Hawai'i served as the perfect focus for the 1989 Festival spotlight on cultural democracy and pluralism, partly because it is the only state purported to be without a majority ethnic group but partly, as Diamond dryly notes, because it allowed the Smithsonian staff to expiate for the "sins" of emphasizing Anglo­Saxon and social Darwinist ideologies in earlier Festivals. Given the Islands' multiculturalism, mid-Pacific location, disputed legacy of colonialism, continu­ous and disparate immigration from a variety of nations, and environmental and cultural destructiveness of its main agricultural and tourist industries, the politics of tradition and the issue of who has the right to "ethnographic author­ity" collided. This was exacerbated by the decades-old romantic representation of Hawaiians as erotic and primitive, combined with the public expurgation of the other ethnic groups who also populate the Islands, resulting in the "soft savagery" of detached, aestheticized, and hybridized versions of culture promoted by the tourist industry. Smithsonian staff was intent that their narrative about Hawai'i would be radically different. Diamond leads the reader through all aspects of the development of this new cultural narrative. She describes the dissensions of certain players and how the Smithsonian culture brokers led the participants towards a rosier version of a "rainbow multiculturalism" in which the participants would "put their best foot forward," down playing ethnic conflict. This was exacerbated by practical consid­erations; primary among these was how to select traditional artists to travel to Washington to perform at the Festival. They limited performers to those who had been born in Hawai'i, those linked by the shared history of the plantation sys­tem, and those who had provided a major contribution to Hawai'i through their folklife. The "ethnoscape" that emerged from these parameters was both ironic and inaccurate: Hawai'i became "a utopian place where the colonizers were invis­ible, the immigrants were equal, and the natives were concurrently untainted and enriched by the cultural contributions of others" (88). Diamond also includes anecdotes that reveal the myriad of bureaucratic restrictions that constrained Festival elements. For example, she discusses the roasting of whole pigs as emblematic of the foodways presentations: to do so, first a hole is dug-something strictly prohibited on Washington's National Mall by National Park Service rules. Mter this and other hurdles had been cleared, the visitors could see the process and smell the delicious food being roasted, but could not taste it, as Health Department regulations prohibited "demonstration food" from being served to the public. The result was that tourists had to buy and eat tasteless replications prepared at nearby concession stands. The goal of Festival staff was to present an apparently seamless representa­tion that would promote dialogue and a deeper understanding of the diversity of Hawaiian culture, yet all components of the program were contested and negotiated. Because the Festival was seen as a tool of public education-sup­ported by state and national government agencies-the cultural preservation models and narratives that were created were perhaps naturally conceived in harmony with those institutional imperatives rather than with Hawai'i's actual 269 American Aloha cultural, historical, and social imperatives. The nuanced detail in which Diamond explores the 1989 Folklife Festival's conception, implementation, and aftermath raises questions about how both bearers and brokers interpret cultures, and con­firms that the politics of representation can never be separated from even the best-intentioned programming. Heather Diamond's prose is eminently readable, and she effortlessly weaves together the more arcane elements of the "negotiation of tradition" with per­sonal anecdotes from Festival participants as well as Smithsonian staff. Despite a few editing glitches-the spelling of one coordinator's name appeared as both Sara and Sarah-and the dearth of photographs for what must have been a com­pellingly photogenic series of events, American Aloha is an important text, and should be required reading for all folklorists, museum staff, and other culture brokers involved in public folklore programming with ethnic groups that are not their own. Jo Farb Hermindez San jose State University, San jose, CA and SPACES- Saving and Preserving Arts and Cultural Environments, Aptos, CA 

Book Review. Diamond, Heather A. American Aloha: Cultural Tourism and the Negotiation of Tradition

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Book Review. Diamond, Heather A. American Aloha: Cultural Tourism and the Negotiation of Tradition

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