Staging Primitive Bodies: A Critical Reflection on Polynesian Performance

The Polynesian Cultural Center in La’ie on Oahu’s north shore is the top paid Hawaiian attraction. Seven native villages give visitors the rare chance to participate in the daily adventures of Hawaiian and other South Pacific cultures and to experience all of Polynesia, meet, learn about and interact with the people of Hawaii, Samoa, Maori New Zealand (Aotearoa), Fiji, Tahiti, the Marquesas and Tonga, watch Hawaii's only canoe pageant, experience an authentic Hawaiian luau, a dinner-show feast fit for an ali'i (royal chief), enjoy the world-famous evening show, Horizons: Where the Sea Meets the Sky and family activities from all of Polynesia.

In my lecture I will show how this attraction incorporates the carefully orchestrated display and performance of primitivism [so-called “traditional” Polynesian cultures] for entertainment. Even though the PCC is at least partially also framed in the rhetoric of education, cultural preservation, educational and economic opportunities (for the student performers, for the people who live and work in the community of La’ie, etc.), beneficial multi-cultural living arrangements, etc., this facade assures PCC’s non-profit tax status vis a vis the IRS. Just like no intelligent adult would confuse the performers at Plimoth Plantation (the European-Americans who play the pilgrims on the Mayflower as well as the members of the Wampanoag tribe) with actual pilgrims and actual historical Indians at the time the Mayflower arrived on the shore of Massachussetts.

The literature that questions the ideological framework of the Center points us in the direction of the need to highlight the concept of performativity that is at its core, a position that cuts right through the rhetoric of opportunity and preservation and leads us straight to focusing on the issues that are at stake for a discussion of cultural performance and its applicability for a rethinking of the concept of nature. The PCC is but one parcel in the larger machinery of ethnographic tourism, an industry that depends on First World development (roads, transportation, snack bars, shopping centers, sewage plants, etc.) in the guise of Forth World spectacle (see Ross 28). The business of selling staged versions of primitive culture is what the PCC is all about, not about education, or about charity, or cultural preservation, but about continuing the patterns of colonialism by other means (reinforcing economic dependency of the community, exchanging the performance of traditional culture for cash, etc.). The PCC utilizes a modernized infrastructure for a pre-modern superstructure and presents a spectacle of undeveloped pre-contact life as modified neocolonial principle of new world order (see Ross 88-89). Juidth Butler turns to the theatrical example of drag performance in order to explain the concept of performativity. Performativity rests on the process of (re)iteration but nothing guarantees that these reiterations actually result in exactly the same product. All theatergoers know that performances of the same show differ from night to night and that they depend on a lot of different circumstances. There is always the potential that the process of reiteration (the performance) results in a slightly (or not so slightly) different mode of subjectivity than the performance before this one and the performance before that. Staged authenticity is nevertheless a staged performance and as such a potentially subversive process by virtue of the ineluctable slippage between script and realization and between perception and object. In this lecture, I work through these concepts and arrive at a basic understanding of the staged nature of the aesthetic dramaturgy offered at the PCC.