TOURISM IN THE BALINESE BORDERZONE Edward M. Bruner University of Illinois To be published in Displacement, Diaspora, and Geographies of Identity, Smadar Lavie and Ted Swedenburg, editors, Duke University Press. Please consult published version, as footnotes do not transmit in DOS text file posted here, with author's permission. Introduction In this paper, I use the concept of borderzones to better understand and conceptualize Western tourism to the less developed regions of the Third World. Although many tourist destinations are in First World countries, this paper focuses on travel to the Third World. International tourism is an exchange system of vast proportions, one characterized by a transfer of images, signs, symbols, power, money, goods, people, and services (Lanfant 1989, Smith 1989). The tourism industry is aggressive in ever seeking new attractions for their clients, so there are tours not only to Bali, which has been a tourist destination for over 70 years, but to places that formerly were difficult to access, such as Kalimantan, New Guinea, the Amazon, and even the South Pole. Tourism has no respect for national boundaries, except in those few countries that for one reason or another restrict tourism, e.g. Burma, Albania, Bhutan. Wherever ethnographers go or have gone, tourists have already been there or are sure to follow. And where tourism establishes itself, our traditional anthropological subject matter, the peoples and cultures of the world, become commercialized, marketed and sold to an eager audience of international tourists. International mass tourism has precipitated one of the largest population movements in this contemporary world, in which literally millions of temporary travelers from the industrialized nations seek in the margins of the Third World a figment of their imagination - the exotic, erotic, primitive, the happy savage. Bali, for example, is depicted in the tourist literature as a tropical paradise of haunting beauty, an unspoiled beach, an isle of mystery and enchantment, an exotic South Seas Island of Dreams, where the people live untouched by civilization, close to nature, with a culture that is artistic, static, harmonious, and well integrated. We recognize the trope of the vanishing primitive, the pastoral allegory, the quest for origins (Clifford 1986, Bruner 1993). This romantic characterization not only suppresses the true conditions of Balinese life, but it depicts a culture which never existed (Boon 1977, 1990, Picard 1990, Vickers 1989). The excesses of the descriptions of Bali and many other Third World tourist sites echo Orientalist discourse and anthropological monographs based on a hypothetical ethnographic present. Indeed, the happy primitive image was a means of colonial control, one that was in part constructed by ethnography itself. It is ironic, however, that tourists are now chasing the ethnographer's discarded discourse, in pursuit of an ahistorical vision that anthropologists have long abandoned. Tourism occurs in a zone physically located in an ever shifting strip or border on the edges of Third World destination countries. This border is not natural, just there, waiting for the tourists to discover it, for all touristic borderzones are constructed. The parties involved are the tourists who travel from the industrialized nations with already formed images in their head of the primitive peoples they will see; the "natives," or indigenous population in their exotic setting; and finally the multinational travel companies, airlines, hotels, tour agencies, and the government bureaucracies who construct and profit from building the touristic infrastructure. The concept of borderzones used in this paper differs from the usage by Gloria Anzaldua (1987), Guillermo Gomez-Pena, Emily Hicks, and Coco Fusco (1989), who theorize based upon the U. S.- Mexican border, which is essentially a site of migration between two states. In touristic borderzones there are no immigrant tourists, almost by definition, but rather a recurring wave of temporary travelers, an ever changing moving population. The tourists are always present and are always "there", but are always in motion, and the personnel changes constantly. The category and presence of tourists is permanent but the actual individuals come and go, as they flow through the border, like each new freshman class in college, an ever renewing source. The native or the resident population is more or less permanent, but as I visualize the touristic border, the natives have to break out of their normal routines to meet the tourists, either to dance for them, to sell them souvenirs, or to display themselves and their cultures for the tourist gaze and for sale. The touristic borderzone is like empty space, an empty stage waiting for performance time, for the audience of tourists and for the native performers. The natives too, then, move in and out of the touristic borderzone. But the perceptions of the two groups are not the same, because what for the tourists is a zone of leisure and exoticization, for the natives is a site of work and cash income. What is advertised as unspoiled and undiscovered in the touristic borderzone has been carefully manufactured and sold. The Balinese and other Third World peoples recognize the touristic thirst for the exotic and the unpolluted, so they present themselves and their cultures to conform to the tourist image. Tourists come from the outside to see the primitives; from the inside, paradoxically, from the native perspective, tourism is a route to economic development and a means of livelihood (Allcock, Bruner, and Lanfant nd). The predicament is that the more modern the locals, the less interesting they are to the Occidental tourist, and the less their income is derived from tourism. Intellectuals and artists like Anzaldua and Gomez-Pena theorize about the U. S.-Mexican border, but the situation is so different for those who are the object of the tourist gaze in the underdeveloped Third World, for peoples like the Balinese, for if they step out of their assigned roles in exotica they may lose their only source of income. What most native peoples do in this situation is to collaborate in a touristic co-production. Professional anthropologists have had until recently a very ambivalent attitude toward tourism (see Crick ms). As intellectuals, anthropologists have denigrated tourism as commercial, inauthentic, and tacky. Touristic culture, anthropologists felt, was simply a truncated version of a fuller more authentic native culture located elsewhere. For ethnography, tourism was an embarrassment, an impostor. The stuff of ethnography, what we studied and wrote about in our monographs, was the real culture. Even with the questioning of ethnographic authority (Clifford 1983), anthropology as a profession has still not been entirely clear what stance to take toward tourism and touristic culture. Renato Rosaldo (1989: 208) provides a theoretical key, "borderlands should be regarded not as analytically empty transitional zones but as sites of creative cultural production," and I would add, as sites of struggle. The touristic borderzone is a creative space, a site for the invention of culture on a massive scale, a festive liberated zone, one that anthropology should investigate, not denigrate. To ask how the culture presented for tourists compares with culture we ethnographers have traditionally studied is just the wrong question, one that leads to a theoretical dead end in the never-never land of essentialized nostalgia. The tourists are the ones who desire the uncontaminated precolonial past, the so-called pure culture, so versions of that hypothetical past are invented and presented for tourist consumption. As scholars, anthropologists should study the recent construction of "authentic" culture for a tourist audience, not intellectualize it or judge it or criticize it as yet another Derridian instance of lost origins. Tourists do not travel to experience the new postcolonial subject, the emerging nation in process of economic development, but yearn for their image of a precolonial past. From the perspective of the geographies of identity, the Western elite travel to the margins of the Third World, to the ends of Empire, to the borderzone between their civilized selves and the exotic Other, to explore a fantasyland of the Western imaginary. Curiously, the Other, the postcolonial subject has herself already traveled in the opposite direction for the Jamaican, the Pakistani, the Malay, the Algerian, is already established in the centers of Western power (Buck-Morss 1987). Paradoxically then, the Western elite spend thousands of dollars and travel thousands of miles to find what they already have. Many Western peoples, of all social classes, make a desperate effort not to "see" the Third World presence in their midst, for they segregate themselves in safe and exclusive neighborhoods, or move to the suburbs if they can afford to do so, or insulate themselves by alternate means. When they do see the Third World peoples that surround them, it is with a very selective vision emphasizing poverty, drugs, crime, and gangs, or alternately, the Other may be performers, entertainers, athletes, or servants. Western peoples enjoy ethnic restaurants and performances as long as they are in their proper "space/place." Although the elite try to avoid the Other in First World cities, making a conscious attempt not to see, to overlook, an absence of sight, when they go to the touristic borderzones they do so with the specific objective of looking, for in tourism there is a voyeurism, an overabundance of seeing, a cornucopia of visualization, almost a pathology, a scopophilia. The Other in our geography is a sight of disgust; the Other in their geography is a source of pleasure. In our place, the Other is a pollution, in their place, the Other is romantic, beautiful, exotic. In our geography, the elite pay not to see the Other, keeping them distant or hidden, whereas in their geography, the Western elite pay for the privilege of viewing and photographing. There is a racialization at home and a primitivization over there, in exotica. I have consciously exaggerated the differences for emphasis, but I do understand that First and Third World peoples intermingle and circulate in each others' spaces. For a large segment of the Western elite, however, the essential paradox remains - in First World cities the Other is a social problem, in Third World places the other is an object of desire. At home the industrialized peoples of the First World avoid the very same peoples that they pay enormous sums to see and photograph in Africa or Indonesia. This is actually a very old phenomenon, at least a century old in the United States, where Native Americans on their reservations become exoticized and romanticized whereas the very same peoples as urban neighbors are considered drunks, lower class, and undesirables. The industrialized First World splits the Other into two spaces. Their space is made safe by the military, the government, and eventually by the tourist industry, and the Other becomes domesticated, reworked for the tourists, frozen in time, or out of time, in past time or no time, performing a Western version of their culture, essentially as entertainers. In First World space the Other is dangerous, associated with pathology and violence, with bad neighborhoods and crime. Western peoples fail to see the joy and beauty of the Other in First World space, just as they fail to see the poverty and suffering of the Other in Third World space. For the Western tourist, the Orientalist stereotype is dominant in Third World space, and tourists go there to collect souvenirs and photographs to show to their friends at home. They go for adventure, for experience, for status, for education, to explore and collect the image of the exotic Other. But the Other is already here at home, in the flesh, outside on the street, in a neighborhood across town, waiting for us. Tourists bring back a disembodied, decontextualized, sanitized, hypothetical Other, one that they can possess and control through the stories they tell about how the souvenirs were acquired and the photographs taken. Tourists place the postcolonial subject in a new narrative frame, in stories in which the tourists become the traveling heroes and the Other the objects of their search. Narrative mastery is the means to fix meaning, encapsulate and control the Other, stop motion and time, and exert power. Methodology My project, in this paper, is to explore cultural production in the touristic borderzone, to learn how the Balinese and other Indonesian peoples respond to tourism, and to study how American tourists experience Indonesia. Jim Clifford (1989:183) asks the right questions, for we need to know, "How do different populations, classes, and genders travel? What kinds of knowledges, stories, and theories do they produce? A crucial research agenda opens up." In order to investigate these matters, I decided to become a tour guide to Indonesia, primarily for methodological reasons (Cohen 1985a). Tour groups assemble in their area of origin, in say San Francisco or London, travel together, see the sights together, eat their meals together, become a tightly knit unit, and disband at the end of the trip. It is difficult to penetrate the tour group from the outside at mid-point in their voyage. As the tour group is a traveling social unit I felt that the best way to study tourism was to travel with the group and to share the adventures of a common journey. As a guide, I would be an insider and would be there to observe and record the tourists' own reactions, behavior, and interpretations. I wanted to learn if tourists buy into the hyperbole of tourist advertising, or if tourists are really on a quest for authenticity, as MacCannell (1976) claims, or if they have given up the quest and have become post-tourists (Urry 1990), or if tourists play at reality (Cohen 1985b). The approach is ethnographic. Standard ethnographic practice tells us to study cultural content in the social context of its reception, which in this case is the tour group, although as a guide/ethnographer my subject position was not that of a classical ethnographer. As there are many different forms of tourism, it would be appropriate to describe my particular tours to Indonesia. Briefly, the tours were an upscale version of what has been called cultural or educational tourism (see Graburn and Jafari 1991, Nash and Smith 1991). The agency advertised that their tours were led by "noted scholars," a reading list had been distributed in advance, and the front page of the tourist brochure for Indonesia presented a biographical sketch of my academic qualifications stressing that I was an anthropology professor, had conducted three years of field work in Indonesia, and spoke the language. One way to put it was that the tour agency was not only selling Indonesia, they were selling me, at least in my capacity as a scholar. Another way to put it was that tourism had co-opted ethnography. I was relatively straightforward with the tourists and told them that I was an anthropology professor interested in Indonesia and also in tourism, but I must admit that I did not tell the tourists I was studying them. This was a tour with a tour guide professor and tourist students, ostensibly there to learn. University alumni associations and museums often organize such tours with faculty lecturers, and indeed the frequency of alumni tours is growing. Many anthropologists have led such tours but few mention it and even fewer write about it or incorporate the experience into their academic discourse, which poses the question, why the silence? I suggest that tourism as a subject matter is perceived as somehow tainted, too popular, too commercial, and not worthy of serious scholarship. To become involved in the touristic enterprise is considered by the discipline to be in some sense unprofessional. A sociological profile of those on the Indonesia tours shows that they were clearly older and more affluent than most tourists. The average age was about 50. Almost one-half were retired, about one-third were divorced or widowed women who were traveling alone, all of the tourists except one had received a college education, everyone had taken previous tours, and most were business or professional persons. There were physicians, executives, a lawyer, an engineer, and two professors. If, as MacCannell (1976) says, tourists are alienated beings who lead such shallow lives that they have to seek authenticity elsewhere, one would never know it from these tourists. These were successful and affluent persons, quite secure about their identity, and they were traveling at a stage in their lives when they had the leisure time and the income to do so. Tourism for them was consumption, and a tour to Indonesia was an expensive status marker (Bourdieu 1984). I turn now to the analysis of several encounters between the members of the tour group with various Indonesians, as well as with the story of the confrontation of the tourists with Hildred Geertz in Bali in 1986. My point is to demonstrate innovation and creativity in the touristic borderzone. An Incident in Bali In addition to the standard barong and kecak dances which are on all the tourist itineraries, I had arranged to take the tour group to an odalan or temple festival, a ceremony that the Balinese enact for themselves. These events are not ordinarily on the tour schedule as one is never entirely sure when they will begin, and the local tour agencies are reluctant to include them. I, however, had lived near the temple in the village of Batuan a few years previously and knew the area. We arrived at the temple about 4 pm. The tourists, dressed in the appropriate ceremonial sash, sat together in a group along the temple wall and observed the scene, as I had instructed them to do. The Balinese do not appear to object to the presence of tourists at their temple ceremonies as long as they are respectfully attired and well behaved. We seemed to be the only tourists there except for one couple dressed like hippies who stood off by themselves. As the crystal sounds of the gamelan music pervaded the early evening glow, I looked across the temple compound and saw Hildred Geertz, the personification of Balinese ethnography, resplendent in full Balinese ceremonial dress. I knew that Geertz was doing research in Batuan for I had written to her in advance informing her that after my work with the tour group was completed I intended to return to Bali, and I looked forward to visiting with her at that time. Although I realized that Geertz was working in the area, I was nevertheless somewhat surprised to see her at this Batuan festival. I crossed the compound to say hello to Geertz, who I have known for over 30 years, and her response was an astonished, "I didn't expect you until next month." I replied that indeed I was returning next month, and I offered to introduce her to the tour group. She responded, "Don't introduce me to those tourists, but after your tour is over be sure to come to my house." As Geertz later recalled the incident, she was "rather busy and didn't want to get involved in polite conversation with people (she) didn't know (letter August 5, 1991)." As I interpreted the event, Geertz welcomed Ed Bruner, ethnographer, but chose to keep her distance from Ed Bruner, tour guide. After an awkward moment I went back across the compound to sit with the tour group. To ethnography, tourism is indeed like a poor country cousin, or an illegitimate child that one chooses not to recognize. Unexpectedly, after a brief interval, Geertz come over to our group and asked if we would like to visit the studio of a nearby Balinese artist. I introduced everyone and the tourists readily agreed. On the way to the artist's house I asked Geertz why she had changed her mind. She replied that she was working on the life history of Ida Bagus Made Togog, a Balinese painter, then an old man, since deceased, who had been an artistic consultant for Gregory Bateson in the 1930s. Possibly Togog could sell one of his paintings to the tourists, she explained, and her reason for escorting us was to help the painter, not the tourists. The tourists didn't buy any of his paintings but I did, a picture of the barong dance, which I have on the wall in my bedroom. It was Togog who suggested to Geertz that she should bring her "friends" to buy his pictures. She writes, "I had already brought a California artist friend, a New York psychiatrist, several anthropologists, an Australian historian, an American composer, and a whole bunch of Harvard students, just to mention a few (letter August 5, 1991)." As we walked to Togog's house, I could not help reflect that here was I, ethnographer qua tour guide, with a group of tourists, and all of us being guided by Hildred Geertz, tour guides guiding tour guides, to the home of a Balinese artist who in his youth had himself been involved with tourism, with Gregory Bateson and the production of tourist art, and who now in his adult years was even more involved with tourism. Togog was Bateson's research consultant, but in a sense, Bateson was Togog's tourist. While walking to the painter's studio, Geertz pointed to the house that Gregory Bateson and Margaret Mead had occupied during their research in Batuan in the 1930s, and all of us, the tourists and I, stopped to take pictures. This scene, I said to myself, is paradigmatic, Ed Bruner's version of a Balinese cockfight, a scene to be commemorated, a postmodern pastiche, a meeting of the First and the Third World in the postcolonial borderzone, a site of in-between-ness, of seepage along the borders. In this event, how does one distinguish between ethnography and tourism, between the center and the periphery, between the authentic and the inauthentic? These faded binaries seem so dated, no longer relevant to the work that ethnographers are actually doing in the field. What arises in ethnography enters into tourism, but the reverse is also true, that what arises in tourism enters into and is legitimated by ethnography (Picard 1990, Vickers 1989). Balinese do paint and dance for tourists, but at a later date many of these creative expressions enter into Balinese social and cultural life. In Batuan in the 1970s, for example, a cultural performance called a frog dance was devised for tourists. At the time of its creation, there was no "authentic" counterpart of the dance located elsewhere in Balinese culture, as the dance was a commercial invention specifically designed for a tourist audience. It was not a simulation of an original, as there was no original (Baudrillard 1983). It was an example of cultural production in the borderzone. Over a decade later, in the 1980s, however, while I was living in Batuan, the organizers of a Balinese wedding asked a dance troupe to perform the frog dance at their wedding. What began in tourism entered Balinese ritual, and might eventually be included in an ethnographic description of the culture. Further, dance dramas and other art forms constructed by Westerners have been adopted by the Balinese as their own and have been incorporated into their artistic repertoire. When President Ronald Reagan visited Bali in 1986, a kecak dance, one created by the German artist Walter Spies and some Balinese dancers in the 1930s, was selected as emblematic of Bali and was performed in Reagan's honor. Balinese culture is performed worldwide, not just on the island of Bali. Balinese dance dramas are exported to the concert halls of Sydney, Paris, and New York and have become part of the international art world. As early as 1931, a barong dance was performed at the Colonial Exhibition in Paris and was probably seen by Antonin Artaud (Picard 1990:58). If the Balinese perform at a temple, it is traditional culture and is described in ethnography; at a hotel, it is tourism; and on a concert stage, it is art, according to our Western categories, but from the Balinese perspective these are not closed systems. The Balinese, of course, know if they are performing for tourists, for themselves, or for the gods; they are very aware of the differences between audiences; and indeed they have public debates about the impact of tourism on their culture. The Balinese try to keep some sacred performances exclusively for themselves, but nevertheless, their language does not distinguish between sacred and profane, and in practice, over time, there is slippage. Ethnography, tourism, and art as discourse and practice are porous at the borders, and cultural content flows from one arena to the other, sometimes in profound yet subtle ways. Cultural innovation that arises in the borderzone as a creative production for tourists, what anthropologists formerly called "inauthentic" culture, eventually becomes part of Balinese ritual and may subsequently be studied by ethnographers as "authentic" culture. For example, the barong and rangda performances involving trance fascinated early Western visitors and residents more than any other Balinese dance form (Bandem and de Boer 1981:148). Baum in her novel, A Tale From Bali, explicitly documents this Western infatuation with the barong (1937: 282). The gifted group of intellectuals and artists who lived in Bali in the 1930s, including Spies, Covarrubias, Belo, McPhee, Bateson, and Mead, were not only captivated with the barong but in collaboration with the Balinese, they commissioned new forms of the barong dance. The famous Bateson-Mead 1937 film, Trance and Dance in Bali, which is usually regarded as an early photographic record of a Balinese ritual, was actually a film of a tourist performance for foreigners commissioned and paid for by Bateson and Mead. As Jacknis (1988:167-8) and Belo (1960: 97-98, 124- 127) document, the barong ritual filmed by Bateson and Mead was not ancient but had been recently created during the period of their fieldwork, and the story performed had been changed from the Calonarang to the Kunti Sraya, a less dangerous form. The Kunti Sraya barong dance, after various transformations since the 1930s, is still being performed for tourists to this day. Further, for the film, Bateson and Mead changed the dance by having women rather than men hold the krisses, and they commissioned the dance during the day, when the light was good for photography, rather than having the performance in the evening. The interest of these influential foreigners enhanced the prominence of the barong performances in Balinese life to such an extent that the barong has become the preeminent tourist performance, and is now paradigmatic of Bali in Western discourse (Vickers 1989). The dance is so popular that it is performed for tourists by three different troupes simultaneously every day in the village of Batubulan and occasionally by other dance troupes as well, e.g. at Singapadu. The barong performance shaped by foreign fascination in the 1930s entered ethnographic discourse most prominently in the 1960s in Clifford Geertz's (1966) influential "Religion as a Cultural System," which takes the barong and rangda as illustrative of his generalizations about religion. Balinese culture, after all, has been shaped for 70 years by performances for foreigners, so it is not unexpected that the barong dance that an earlier generation of ethnographers helped to construct is described by a more recent ethnographer as the incarnation of "the Balinese version of the comic spirit" (Geertz 1973: 118), and as emblematic of Balinese religion. Even the Balinese themselves are not entirely sure what is "authentic" and what is touristic, and such scholars as Picard (1984) doubt if such a distinction makes any sense to the Balinese. To overstate the case for emphasis, the Balinese became what ethnographers studied, in that Western interest in the barong led the Balinese to modify their culture so that the barong became more prominent in their performances. The Tourist Response To return to the to the meeting between the tour group and Hildred Geertz, we ask, how did the tourists react to this incident in Bali? One woman said it was "thrilling", and another that it was the high point of the Indonesia trip. I eventually saw color slide shows presented at home in America by two tourist families, and both included photographs of the Bateson-Mead house, which in itself is not very striking. Slide shows become an occasion for a narrative summary of the tour, a means to personalize a group experience, and an opportunity to tell stories of travel and adventure. From the perspective of these tourists, the presence of Gregory Bateson and Margaret Mead, and of Ed Bruner and Hildred Geertz, to them the pinnacle of scientific authority, gave them the validation that they, although mere tourists, were in the presence of those professors who knew the "real" Bali. In a sense, the decision of the tour agency to include an academic lecturer is a marketing ploy, to have a built in authenticator, so that I, and also Geertz, had become, like the Balinese, tourist objects (Morris nd). Complexity is multiplied in a many layered reflexive voyeurism, in a thick touristic description; the tourists were looking at the Balinese, the ethnographers were looking at the Balinese, as well as the tourists, but the tourists were also looking at the ethnographers, and of course the Balinese were looking at everyone. One ethnographer, Bruner, was studying the other ethnographer, Geertz, who after she had read a draft of this paper stated, "this is the first time I've ever been an ethnographic object." The tourists were also looking at the other tourists, as the tour group for them was their basic social unit, the group that they traveled with and discussed the sights with on a daily basis. What I want to emphasize here is not just the voyeurism, the tourist gaze, but also that all parties, the painter Togog, the ethnographer Geertz, the tour guide Bruner, and the tourists were not just passive beings, looking or being looked at, but were active selves interpreting their worlds. As I later learned, Geertz had selected Batuan as the site of her research precisely because the Balinese craft of painting for tourists began in Batuan in the 1930s. She was as much involved in the study of tourism and the borderzone as I was and had a similar postmodern perspective. As Geertz wrote to me in her letter of August 5, 1991, "I was by no means 'embarrassed' by the entry of your tourists into my Balinese world, for they were, and had been for some years, a common part of it. There was hardly a day in Batuan when foreigners had not been around. I had long ago clarified to myself the presence of 'other tourists' as a part of my own research or, at least, had learned to live with it. The Balinese never let me forget that I was just one more tourist among the others... " Geertz graciously gave me permission to write about our meeting in Bali, although she felt uncomfortable that she did not have more of an active voice in the presentation of her own views. Between Tourism and Ethnography As described elsewhere (Bruner nd), I found aspects of the tour guide role uncomfortable and ambiguous. As ethnographer my aim was to study how the tourists experienced the sites, but as guide my assignment was to structure that experience through my commentary. My talk mediated their experience, so that in a sense I found myself studying myself. Like the Kaluli shaman who create the meaning they discover, I created the meaning of Indonesian sites for the tourists, and then I studied that meaning as if I had discovered it. This is not, however, especially unique in ethnographic research (Bruner 1986). "Tourist" or "ethnographer" are roles that one plays, and manipulates. At times, when our tour group approached a new site, the Indonesians would behave toward me as if I were another tourist, and I could rupture that attribution by speaking the Indonesian language, which said in effect, don't confuse me with these tourists, or I could choose to remain silent and to accept the designation. At other times, by emphasizing my role as a working tour guide, I could identify with the Indonesian performers and locals, saying in effect, as guide and native, we are in the same situation, catering to tourists, who are our source of income. I stressed to the Indonesians that we were on the same side, as it were, in opposition to the tourists, but I was never sure if the Indonesians accepted this alignment. More disturbing was that during the journey I would slip back and forth between the touristic and the ethnographic, for I could not always keep them straight. I truly enjoyed these hardy tourists who were, like me, older, college educated, and either of a professional or business class. At times I felt myself becoming a tourist, gaping in awe at Borobudur, rushing from the bus to take photographs, enthralled by breathtaking scenery in Sulawesi, luxuriating in the hot showers but complaining about the meals at the hotel in the evening. At other times I felt myself as straight ethnographer, making detailed observations of tourist behavior, dissecting their conversations, and writing my field notes late into the night. Balinese barong performers wear masks but so do ethnographers. As a tour guide, I felt that what tourism needed was not another sojourn to the exotic savages of the mysterious East, not more cliches and stereotypes, so I tried to demystify traditional tourism, to deconstruct the romantic images of the Indonesians, to reveal the mechanisms of production of tourist performances. But the more I did so, paradoxically, the more I contributed to traditional touristic romanticism. For the tourists, I became the heroic ethnographer, a regular Indiana Jones, the "true" interpreter of the sites and enactments on the tourist itinerary. The tourists were proud that they had their own "authentic" ethnographer as tour guide compared to those other more touristy tours, the superficial ones that didn't even have their own professor as lecturer. I found myself in the position of "authenticating" the experience for the tourists at the same time as I was deconstructing the Balinese cultural performances. The tourists saw me as providing the ultimate backstage, despite my protestations to the contrary. Authenticity and Verisimilitude In Yogyakarta, the heart of central Javanese culture, the tour agent scheduled a supper and performance at the home of "Princess" Hadinegoro, a relative of the Sultan. We arrived in the early evening, were the only tourists there, and were served drinks in the living room of the home. We then moved to the dining room, were seated at tables, and enjoyed a buffet supper. It was a gracious experience, as we could hear the gamelan orchestra playing in the courtyard. After supper, we moved to the courtyard and watched a Ramayana ballet, a performance of the old Hindu epic. The performers were in colorful costume, their bodily movements slow and controlled, and the presence of Javanese children peering over the courtyard wall added to the ambiance of the evening. Afterwards, when asked how they enjoyed the event the tourists replied that it was absolutely lovely. I then explained that the invitation to the "home" of a Javanese princess was a gimmick, because it created the impression that they were "guests," which disguised the commercial nature of the attraction, whereas actually they were paying customers, who had in effect gone to a restaurant. The princess ran a business to produce income and had tour groups to her home an average of 20 days a month! Further, I explained, that although the Ramayana ballet was presented as if it were an ancient classical dance, this was not the case. The ballet is not a Javanese genre, and the Ramayana ballet was created in 1961 as a performance for tourists (Laporan 1970), with support from the Indonesian central government of President Sukarno. The Javanese Ramayana like the Balinese frog dance, was an example of new cultural production in the borderzone. At the time of its construction it was somewhat of a theatrical event in Java as it brought together the best of the performing artists from Solo and Yogya, two distinct court traditions, and the ballet was performed at the Prambanan temple. Since that time the artistic standards have declined and the ballet has been shortened and adopted in a number of tourist settings. The Ramayana, as a dance for tourists, could not use the Javanese language because the foreigners could not understand it, the pace was made fast and the length was kept short to hold interest, and the gestures were exaggerated to communicate a story line across wide cultural chasms. Relative to other Javanese dances, the Ramayana was reduced and simplified so that it could be incorporated more readily into a Western system of meaning. In a sense, I told the tourists, the Ramayana is a caricature of a Javanese dance, a postmodern construction in the borderzone, an ancient Hindu epic reworked for foreign consumption. Well, I asked the tourists, what do you think of the evening now, knowing that the setting and the dance were not as authentic as you had assumed? The response of the tourists, all of them, was that nothing that I said had detracted from their enjoyment of the evening, that it was still absolutely lovely! What did you like, I asked? They replied that it was a good show, that they were the only persons present, that it was stimulating being in an Indonesian home and seeing all the old Dutch and Javanese pictures and memorabilia, that the food was fine, and that the performers were superb. After this discussion the performers, dressed in their street clothes, came out to meet the tourists, as I had requested. We found that the male lead was a history major at Gajah Mada University, who had joined the troupe as a part time job, while his wife of six months was a student at the Dance Academy of the university, and she hoped to become a professional dancer. The tourists asked questions about the dance and contemporary life, I translated, and the session ended with the taking of group photographs. My idea was to remove the performers from roles in the timeless Hindu past, and to show them as modern Indonesians who could interact with the tourists on a more direct and personal basis. After leaving Java we flew to Bali, to stay at the Bali Hyatt Hotel, a large resort complex on the beach in Sanur that caters primarily to tour groups. The next evening the hotel advertised a rijstaffel dinner with a performance of the Ramayana ballet, at a cost of $20 per person plus service fees. I suggested that our group attend, as it was an opportunity to see the same performance in two settings on two different islands. Following the creation of the Ramayana ballet, the Balinese copied the dance drama in 1962 and adapted it to their own culture. After the dance, I asked the tourists how they enjoyed the evening, and one replied that it was too much like Honolulu, another corrected her and said it was more like Miami Beach. Everyone shared this negative view, and I inquired why? The answer was that they were in a room with 300-400 other tourists, one Hyatt hotel is like any other, it was too crowded, the lines were too long, there was no feeling of intimacy, and they were too far from the performers to take good photographs. But, I protested, this is a Balinese version of the same Ramayana that you enjoyed so much in Yogya. The performers are a diverse group put together by a local producer, I continued, but they are good dancers, and the gamelan orchestra is hired as a troupe from one of the villages, so it is the same group that you might hear performing in a temple festival. Despite my arguments, they did not like the performance of the Ramayana ballet at the Bali Hyatt. The next day in Bali was Nyepi, the one day in the calendrical cycle when all activity stops on the island, and the tourists could not leave the hotel. I felt it was an appropriate time for some extended discussion with the tourists, so I booked a seminar room at the hotel for our meeting. Our topic was authenticity, and I rather liked the idea of holding a seminar on authenticity at the Bali Hyatt Hotel, a world class hotbed of international tourism. When I probed further into the differences between the Javanese and the Balinese versions of the Ramayana, it was apparent that the context was the crucial variable, the atmosphere of a home for just our group as opposed to a tourist hotel, with its many groups. In Java the audience, the gamelan orchestra, and the performers were on the same level, whereas in Bali there was an elaborate raised stage for the performers, and another separate area for the gamelan. There was even a designated raised platform labeled "photo point," where the tourists could come to take pictures. Both the performances in Java and in Bali were commercial, but in the first the mercantile dimension was disguised whereas in the second it was transparent. These upscale tourists did not object to a performance constructed for tourists but they demanded that it be a good performance, and they had their aesthetic standards. They were not romantics and were concerned with the artfulness of staged theatricality, not disguised issues of authenticity. What they wanted was a good show. Authenticity, they said, might be an issue in the literature on tourism but it was not an important issue for them. They pointed out that the Ramayana ballet might be recent but it was still Indonesian. They recognized that they might be responding to the "authenticity" of the setting, for the differences in context between the performances in a Javanese home and in a Balinese beach hotel were striking. They acknowledged that the Java version was more exclusive, more high class, held in the home of Javanese royalty, and these tourists were after all trying to secure an exclusive tourist experience, of which I was a part. But the Java version was also a better show. The tourists did appreciate my historical perspective on the dance and my data on the processes of its production, but my information did not detract from their enjoyment of the evening. I understood their position, and believe they accurately characterized the views of many other tourists. We had seen a Balinese barong performance by the Denjalan group at Batubulan the previous day, and one woman volunteered that she immediately recognized it as the "sacred tourist dance," which she has come to expect on all her tours. Her comment elicited smiles of acknowledgment from the others. After all, if a dance performance begins at precisely 9 am each morning, if there are only tourists and no Balinese in the audience, if they charge admission and sell souvenirs, if it lasts for precisely one hour after which everyone returns to their tour bus, it doesn't take much to figure out that this is a dance staged for tourists and not for Balinese. I said to the tourists, however, that the Denjalan group had two barongs, one of which was a consecrated barong, with sakti (power); that the man in white sprinkling holy water on the stage playing the part of a Balinese priest was a Balinese priest, not an actor, and the water he sprinkled was holy; that they sacrificed a chicken on stage as an offering; that the performers recited mantras before the performance; and that the dancers reported that sometimes they did go into trance. For the Balinese the gods are ever present, but I agreed with the tour group, this was a dance staged for tourists. The tourists, in turn, accepted what was presented to them and had no inclination to look elsewhere beyond the "staged authenticity" of the Denjalan performance for the "real" barong. The seminar convinced me that the basic metaphor of tourism is theater, and the tourists enter into a willing suspension of disbelief. The key issue for students of tourism then becomes, what are the mechanisms by which a tourist production is made convincing and believable to the tourists, which in effect collapses the problem of authenticity into the problem of verisimilitude (Cohen 1988). What makes a theatrical or tourist production credible? This is the old anthropological question, how do people come to believe in their culture (Crapanzano 1986). It is not just that the Ramayana in Java had fewer tourists and the Ramayana in Bali had more tourists, and was more touristy, which is the dimension that the tourism literature has emphasized. When there are fewer tourists it is easier to suspend disbelief, to get "into" the event or site, or to imagine oneself as an adventurer or explorer in a distant land. The performance becomes more believable. Nor is it a question of the authenticity of a performance, which implies the presence of another performance which more genuine or truer to life. The Ramayana ballet is not a simulacrum as it has no counterpart elsewhere in the culture, and there is no original. Even if there were an original, it would not be of primary concern to the tourists. The problem of focusing so narrowly on the quest for authenticity is that one is always looking elsewhere, over your shoulder or around the bend, which prevents one from taking the Ramayana and the barong as serious performances in themselves, ones that deserve to be studied in their own right. Clearly, what MacCannell wrote in 1976 in his classic book about touristic authenticity did not seem relevant for the tour groups I took to Indonesia, but his comments in 1990 on the ex- primitives and the postmodern tourists staging the touristic enterprise as a co-production, as a kind of contract, seems very provocative, as does Cohen's 1985 view of tourist playful self- deception, as well as Urry's (1990) notion of the post-tourist, although I have never known any other kind of tourist than the one Urry describes. The question emerges, does what MacCannell, Cohen and Urry now write seem relevant because the world has changed or because we are for the first time beginning to understand touristic phenomena? The results of my studies of Indonesian tourism suggest that the issue of authenticity in the tourism literature has been overdone, that tourists themselves are not primarily concerned with authenticity, and that it would be more productive to pursue the metaphors of theater and of borders to study touristic verisimilitude. Conclusion This paper has tried to throw some light on what Taussig has called the epistemic murk of the anthropological predicament, what Hildred Geertz calls the great semiological swamp that we all live within. Postmodern complexities occur not only in the centers of Western power but also in postcolonial borderzone on the periphery, in what used to be the pure authentic preserve of ethnographic science. Indeed, the border between ethnography and tourism is clouded, porous, and political. Tourism not only shapes Balinese culture, but tourism is now part of Balinese culture, or it could even be said that tourism is Balinese culture (Errington and Gewertz 1989, Picard 1990). Balinese born since the 1930s have lived their entire lives as tourist objects, and in some areas, such as Batuan, any adequate ethnographic account of Balinese economy or ritual would have to take account of tourism. Balinese performances are exported to the centers of Western power and they are also enacted everyday in a shifting touristic borderzone on the edge of the Third World, a zone of interaction between natives, tourists, and ethnographers. Tour agents are always looking for new product to present to their clients, for new temples or new islands to discover and to touristify. The Balinese, the Javanese and other Indonesian peoples in the tourist zone are themselves ever experimenting, creating, and playing with new expressive ritual, constantly devising new performances for the tourists. But the new Indonesian culture does not necessarily remain forever fixed in the zone in which it was created. Old ceremonial forms are reworked for tourists, culture produced for tourists enters Balinese ritual, what arises in tourism or ritual may be exported to the concert stages of the West for an international audience, and what was at one historical period "touristic" becomes at a later period "ethnographic." Anthropology has always recognized that peoples and cultures move, for concepts such as diffusion and migration have had deep roots in the discipline from the beginning, but we may not yet have taken account of the particular nature and the full extent of the movement of peoples and cultures in this postmodern world. The old anthropological metaphor of place, where one culture belongs to one people who are situated in one locality is being challenged by the new metaphors of diaspora, travel, tourism, and borderzones (Appadurai 1988, Clifford 1989). 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