Andrew Potter on the complexities of preserving culture

“Just about every place worth visiting makes a point of promoting a preserved form of its supposedly pure and undiluted cultural past to tourists. Often it involves aboriginal groups: singing and drumming by the Cowichan people on Vancouver Island, for instance, or Maori dancing in body paint and traditional clothes in New Zealand. But you can also go to resorts in the Caribbean where they all dance around with fruit on their head even though you know darn well that no one carries fruit on their head in the city. Or you can visit the Jewish quarter in Krakow to drink kosher vodka and listen to Klezmer music played by university students from Toronto. The accusation against this sort of cultural preservationism is that it comes at the cost of turning a living tradition into a museum piece. As a Pacific Island dancer replied when asked about his culture: “Culture? That’s what we do for tourists.””
–Andrew Potter, “Cultural immersion or imitation?” New Zealand Herald, May 4, 2010