Tourism, culture, economies, and refugee status

Via the BBC, this story about Burmese refugee Kayan women who are being denied the right to emigrate to New Zealand by Thai authorities who allegedly want to keep them in Thailand because the “long necked” Kayan women are a popular draw for tourists.  The UNHCR representative calls it “a human zoo” and urges a tourist boycott.

Copyrighting Egyptian antiquities

A couple of weeks ago I posted about the Chinese terracotta warriors on display at the Hamburg Museum of Ethnology in Germany.  Now here’s another interesting case of cultural heritage, authenticity, and profit sharing: the CBC and the BBC are both reporting that the Egyptian government is considering copyrighting pharaonic antiquities, “from the pyramids to scarab beetles, in an attempt to collect royalties from the creation of replicas.”  The money gained from copyright royalties would be used to maintain antiquities sites in Egypt.  In a rare moment of understatement, Hawass said that the Las Vegas Luxor hotel would not be affected by the proposed law “because its interior bears no resemblance to a pyramid. “

“Theme Park” Architecture in China

One of my favourite blogs is BoingBoing, not the least because a lot of the posts tickle my anthropological funnybone. A good example is a recent post on new architectural trends in China, where the emergent middle-class is being tempted to live in simulacra of historical Western cityscapes.

In Nanjing, there are Balinese retreats and Italian villas. In the southeastern city of Hangzhou, there are Venice and Zurich. In downtown Beijing, everything is about Manhattan, with Soho, Central Park and Park Avenue.

Seems that there is quite a bit of interest in producing replica of iconic structures from a usually Western “elsewhere”. Another BoingBoing article reports about the Shijingshan Amusement Park in Beijing, described as “basically a weird, Chinese clone of Disneyland”.

Perhaps more interesting than the phenomenon itself is why stories like this are so ticklish for people like me. What should “we Westerners” have a monopoly on consuming the exotic other? Various kinds of exotica have long been decorating Western homes, both inside and out, for a long time now. An example that springs to mind is the not uncommon practice of a few decades hence of placing concrete Aborigines, like indigenous garden gnomes, in front gardens. Can’t do that anymore though; the consumption of exotica these days must be done with requisite postmodern irony. And maybe that’s what’s so strange about these Chinese consumption patterns: they’re just dripping with pomo simulation, but without the ironic self-parodic attitude you’d expect in the West. Or maybe it’s the strange thrill of seeing changing power relations at work. Maybe it’s not so much the weirdness of the copying, but the fact that it’s being done to “us”. “We Westerners”, not the least anthropologists, have been accustomed to representing the other. So its strange to find “our” forms as exotic consumer items.

I’m just guessing here, of course. Good ethnographic work would provide some sense of why the Chinese middle class seem to be enjoying these kinds of consumption. Perhaps our resident China expert, Third Tone Devil, has something to say about this?

Two trends

Two trends in anthropology are becoming visible through the conference circuit. The ASA is devoting its 2007 annual meeting to “Thinking Through Tourism” (www.theasa.org/asa07). This is quite a sea change, considering five years ago hardly any anthropologists thought tourism was more than a sort of frivolous epiphenomenon of society.

The other trend is that anthropology is beginning to digest the new calls on it from government, military and intelligence (primarily in the US, and to some extent the UK and Australia) to provide “expertise” in “the War on Terror.” The first reaction to CIA recruiting was an uproar in the AAA and a committee that was organised within the organisation to deal with this concern. But now people, it seems, are beginning to reflect about this “cultural turn in the War on Terror,” as Hugh Gusterson called it at the panel organised at the AAA in San Jose last November (http://www.aaanet.org/press/an/0107/albro.html). Interestingly, this panel brought together prominent critics (including Laura Nader) with anthropologists who actually work for the US military, including Australian Montgomery McFate.