Bookmarking this article here for discussion and extension. I’ve read a few pieces in recent years about cultural misappropriation, but most have been weak. This one felt a little stronger. To my knowledge, nobody has attempted a deep dive on this topic.
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There’s nothing quite so deflating as a super-serious-minded tiki think piece.
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Yep. But minstrel shows were just good fun, right?
On one hand, I’m sympathetic toward many of the underlying complaints. On the other hand, I would not like to see the exotic drinks genre steamrolled by overreaching political correctness. Exotic drinks may offer useful examples for learning, but I don’t think they’re a particularly good target for seeking redress.
Of course, the drinks themselves aren’t really the problem, right? It’s more that some fraction of the trappings are misappropriated. But then I read, say, the complaint about words from indigenous languages in this article (e.g., aloha) and I’m asking whether this person understands anything at all about languages and how they evolve?
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I think the question is one of intent. I find it hard to believe that the inventors of tiki culture–and the new generation that has revived the tradition–came to their visions and passions and business plans from a place of imperialistic malevolence and cultural disrespect. If there are people who are indeed hurt and offended by these bars, there’s no denying their reaction, and I’m all for any efforts toward cultural sensitivity. But I’m not sure I buy the argument behind the perceived controversy.
@RobertSimonson I agree with your thoughts regarding intent, but I do think that there needs to be some reckoning for much of the more aggressive or heretical symbolism of the movement, whether or not it was born of malevolence. Coming from the Judeo-Christian tradition, I can’t imagine the offense many I know would take if they walked into a restaurant serving jaunty drinks in a crucifix mug, much less their reactions if others told them to take it easy, it’s just a mug.
I do think that the tiki community has done a good job of eliminating much of the overt racism (drawings of natives with huge lips, or slanted, closed eyes as was common in old menus) and moved past some of the misogyny in its costuming and representation of island life. But I can certainly understand the frustration of people seeing an idealized and bastardized version of their own culture on display, especially when their culture is still suffering under the consequences of the colonialism that tiki nostalgia is reaching back to.
I think the community would be better served by those who are offended in such a manner using their platforms to inform the tiki community about the problems facing their cultures due to militarized colonialism, rather than simply decrying the appropriation.
And @martin I agree completely with your point on language, but wonder if it is a matter of representation. I’m of Irish stock, another culture whose language was destroyed and punished by colonial overseers. And every other bar in NYC has “sláinte” posted over its door or bar. Which is fine here, as half the bar staff are from Dublin anyway, and it seems not to bother them terribly. But in bars across America, the word and its pronunciation are butchered on the regular (there is a bar called Sláinte in Fort Lauderdale Florida that is regularly called “Slay-on-tee” by locals). It irks me but doesn’t offend, but I can never know how much that is informed by the fact that Ireland is (mostly) beyond its imperial shackles, and the people mispronouncing and misusing the word all look like me. I simply don’t know how upsetting it would be to me to hear a drunken tourist mispronounce my language or order an Irish car bomb if I had grown up during The Troubles.
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This. And where there are examples drawn from the “Tiki” subculture that reinforce stereotypes, prejudices, white supremacy, and cultural hegemony, I think it’s useful to point those out and discuss them.
Meanwhile, I do feel we must allow considerable latitude for bad taste. Coming from the Judeo-Christian tradition—indeed, a particularly WASPy up-tight element of it—I am more than OK with a little sacrilege.
Whether someone is offended may be beside the point. People are offended all the time by all sorts of things, but sometimes it’s the least that they deserve.
Yeah, all this…And not to downplay their complaints, but the list of cultures that have been “appropriated” is pretty long and the line starts over there. Not that we shouldn’t be constantly looking for things might be inappropriate no matter what the culture (the Irish Car Bomb is another of my favorite examples). Also, the tiki folks are some of the biggest cheerleaders for all Polynesian cultures and it seems to me that these are the last folks that should be taken to task. I live in Florida and we have literally hundreds of “tiki” bars that should give these folks a lot more heartburn than the few “real” tiki bars that are trying to get it right. And don’t even get me started on Party City!
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A parallel discussion elsewhere relating to professional sports franchises led me to the following casual breakdown:
racist: Washington Redskins, the erstwhile logo/mascot of the Cleveland Indians
(Rascism is categorically unacceptable.)
misappropriation: Atlanta Braves, Cleveland Indians, Kansas City Chiefs, Chicago Blackhawks
Misappropriation is still generally unacceptable. There are probably some context-dependent exceptions where misappropriation is defensible, but I doubt any would ever apply to professional sports franchises.
appropriation: Seattle Seahawks and Arizona Diamondbacks logos inspired by indigenous styles
Appropriation is acceptable, depending on what you do with it.
I believe this same breakdown can be applied to sift through examples from Tiki culture, but first I feel I need to round up some really solid definitions.
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Ok, it’s been pointed out—correctly, I believe—that “cultural appropriation” and “cultural misappropriation” actually mean the same thing (like flammable and inflammable) so I’m going to need a new term that avoids appropriation.
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Well, this is an inconvenient development, but based on some of my encounters with members of the Tiki subculture, sadly not that great a leap.
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First they gave tiki torches a bad rep. Now this.
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Just adding some article links for the record:
Oct 7, 2019
Nov 27, 2019
Mar 6, 2020
Aug 13, 2020
Dec 23, 2020
Oct 6, 2021
Sorry to necropost, but I want to make sure to add this five-year-old article from Critiki News for the record, which was written before the more-recent flare-up of appropriation concerns.
Reading this conversation makes me grateful that this particular cultural inflammation seems to be slightly less acute now than it was a year or two ago, but I doubt that it’s gone for good. The legacies of colonialism are very much with us, and I am emphatically in favor of conversations about how to better understand both our own histories and the histories of cultures that have been exoticized or caricaturized. But I don’t trust many of the loudest voices that drove this conversation a couple years ago, as they pushed principles that I think need to be questioned, including most concerningly the idea that being “problematic” (able to criticized or viewed as a problem by anyone, even a hypothetical someone) is the same thing as to be a problem.
If being problematic is the same as being a problem, then being questionable is the same thing as being bad, at which point we’re all engaged in mob rushes from one tainted thing to another, leaving waste in our wake. We desperately need to be able to ask questions about problems, to be able to understand them in context, and maybe to be able to hold them in one hand while holding good things about something in the other.
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Excellent. Thank you for this.
Regarding the dynamics (flare-ups) of this topic, it’s always easy to poke holes in things, and it’s often easy to get attention for doing so. Self-righteous indignation is strong spice.
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Humuhumu Trott just summarily pulled the plug on her Crikiti web site, which was a crowd-sourced database of existing and lost tiki bars. Critiki ran from 2002–2022, and was one of the more important web resources for the Tiki subculture. Trott posted the following:
In 1991, I read a biography of Queen Liliʻuokalani, the last sovereign monarch of Hawaiʻi. Despite always having had an interest in Hawaiʻi (thanks largely to briefly living there as a child), I learned far more reading that book than I ever had before about the beauty and depth of Native Hawaiian culture.
That book was also where I learned about the history of Hawaiʻi. How outsiders, especially those from the United States, caused breathtaking damage, culminating in the theft of Hawaiʻi by the United States on behalf of the American businessmen that had overrun the island. It was eye-opening. Disgusting. I refused to buy Dole products for years. I knew it was a hundred years too late, but my taste had soured. It is a history that has been glossed over, by design.
The Hawaiian culture is just one in a literal ocean full of misunderstood Pacific cultures. It is difficult for these cultures—and when we say culture, let’s be clear, we’re talking about people—to be visible, and honored, over the loud noise and suffocating weight of the other cultures they are forced to share space with, both in the islands and here on the mainland.
Critiki has played a role in taking up some of that space, and making it harder—not easier—for people to understand the cultures of the Pacific. I regret that.
The history of Polynesia-themed restaurants and other “Polynesian pop” culture in mainland America remains utterly fascinating to me. For many years, it was the only way some bit of Island culture could be experienced—but it was very much powered by a non-Islander lens, for consumption by a non-Islander audience. There is incredible beauty in that melding, but it is deeply, deeply lopsided. And while that may have been relatively progressive in 1950, we can and should do better in this century.
Because I have spent literal decades studying mainland-flavored faux-Polynesian theming, and the historic context it came from, I am roughly able to tease out what is real and what is fake. That level of discernment is simply not accessible to a casual audience. Many years of conversations with people have made that clear to me, and any assertion that the general public can tell the fake from the real is obtuse. It absolutely muddies the picture of these cultures, and that is profoundly unfair.
I have spent the last few years thinking on this. There has been a lot of being quiet, and a lot of listening. I have needed to step away from the comforting echo chamber of the world of “Tiki.” It’s very hard to shed biases when there is something to lose. I needed to be calm, and thoughtful, and get myself into alignment. Alignment with a wider picture, and alignment with my own values.
I have loved Critiki. I have loved immersing myself in history through it. I have loved getting to know the world a bit better through it. I have loved the many, many relationships I have made thanks to Critiki. And I can hold all that love, along with the reality that it is time for Critiki to go.
— Humuhumu Trott, September 2022
Yeah. I spent a bit of time arguing on a FB thread for her rights as an author & creator to follow her conscience, but it’s hard to get away from the truth of your statement about what a substantial and important body of work it was, and how much of that work was performed by the community. (Though all of that work was only possible due to her substantial skills as a developer and creator.)
I have been hoping that the fever pitch of the backlash against “cultural appropriation” was dying down and settling into a more considered, open, and respectful conversation, but Trott’s action shows we’re not out of the woods. I do want to emphasize that I respect her rights as a creator: you and I both know what it’s like to have created an app community. But I don’t personally agree with her decision, and it grieves me.
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Looks like I can’t edit old posts, but here’s the Wayback Machine link to the now-unavailable link I posted above from Critiki.
Thanks. It’s a bit troubling that these essays (this one too), are currently confined to the Wayback. I have made copies and will consider reproducing them here.
I’ll tack on this essay, which is more than a little interesting (if, like all this stuff, highly debatable):
There’s quite a bit of “ink” spilled on this topic over the last decade, but it’s still buried.
Also, this essay on “exotica” music:
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I hadn’t seen the Is Tiki “Cultural Appropriation”? article before: I’ll confess I find much there to agree with. I was particularly interested in the arguments that criticisms of cultural appropriation miss the way fascination with a culture is, at least in part, rooted in “a dissatisfaction within American culture rather than an assertion of supremacy.”
The complexities involved in exoticization are, of course, not trivial: I often think about the beginning of The Descendants:
My friends on the mainland think just because I live in Hawaii, I live in paradise. Like a permanent vacation. Are they insane? Do they think we are immune to life? How can they possibly think our families are less screwed up, our cancers less fatal, our heartaches less painful?
But the relationship of feeling aliennation or even just ennui and looking for joy or vitality or passion elsewhere is at the very least more complex than the theory of cultural appropriation really handles, and the quite real benefits of cultural mixing (something I feel viscerally every time I enjoy a bowl of ramen, my favorite food) are too substantial to be disregarded so easily.
The most damning line, in my opinion, comes near the beginning: “That these authors should be able to write at length about the problems of cultural appropriation and virtually nothing convincing about what constitutes healthy multiculturalism suggests that grievance-based progressive activists actually have no meaningful solutions to the problems they perceive.”
Anyway–thanks for linking the piece.
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Adding a couple non-specific references:
An intelligent, generalized exploration of the semantic problem with “cultural appropriation” and the more important questions that lie beneath:
This is sort of a flipping around of the question, but also touches on the fluidity of culture: