Of course, it's both: quality nostalgia guaranteed. During a recent trip to Cuba I walked through Old Havana and heard the song "Chan Chan" three times in a during a walk, one version fading from a cafe while another one, at a different point in the song, swelled up in volume.
BBC
Buena Vista: Cuban band or brand?
By Michael Voss
BBC News, Havana
Sunday night in Old Havana and dozens of tourists pack into a club on a corner of the colonial Plaza Vieja to hear the sounds of the Buena Vista Social Club.
Leading the night's entertainment is 67-year-old "sonero" Felix Baloy and his big band. Looking dapper in his white suit and white fedora hat, he produces a pulsating evening of traditional rhythms and songs.
Felix Baloy sang on several of the early Buena Vista albums and can now use the name on his billboards. The original band has turned into a brand.
"Buena Vista Social Club has transformed into several bands, including mine," he said.
"I play traditional Cuban music and will continue doing so until the day I die."
'Sound of Cuba'
For many around the world, Buena Vista is the sound that defines Cuban music.
“ Members of the band may change because some have passed away, but the spirit lives on ”
Omara Portuondo Original Buena Vista singer
You can hear songs like Chan Chan played on almost every street corner in the tourist centre of Old Havana.
Yet in Cuba, these are considered "golden oldies". At home, Buena Vista must compete with everything from salsa to reggaeton and the folk ballads of revolutionary idols like Silvio Rodriguez.
"This is such a musical country with so many different rhythms; young people have gone their own way," Mr Baloy says.
"You still hear it here, but for the rest of the world, Buena Vista remains the sound of Cuba."
The original Buena Vista Social Club was a loose collective of ageing musicians brought together by the American guitarist Ry Cooder in 1997, in a bid to re-discover the music of Cuba's pre-revolutionary past.
Since then many of those who shot to stardom in the award-winning film have died, including pianist Ruben Gonzalez and the singer Ibrahim Ferrer.
New generation
It is Ibrahim Ferrer's former band which has taken over the official mantle and today tours the world with a mix of old and new faces, under the name Orquestra Buena Vista Social Club.
Apart from an occasional concert in the beachfront hotel resort of Varadero, the band almost never performs at home.
......
'Trade mark'
Buena Vista has turned into a project rather than a band.
"It's been converted into a trade mark. A lot of the well-known figures who were in Buena Vista have developed their own bands; that's where the spirit of Buena Vista lies," said Mr Valdes.
Today, this 63-year-old drummer still lives in the same modest Havana apartment in which he grew up.
On the walls of his tiny living room are framed gold disks, along with a fading black-and-white photograph of his father - a clarinettist in an early Cuban big band.
There is also a glamorous colour photo of his daughter, Idania, who has taken over as the lead female singer touring the world with the Orquestra Buena Vista Social Club. She was just 20 when she joined it.
"It was a little unnerving at first, especially stepping in for such a famous name," she admits.
Cuban diva
Omara Portuondo is one of the only original Buena Vista superstars who remains hugely popular at home.
The 79-year-old diva is regularly invited to perform at major cultural and political events.
At a recent Alba summit of left-wing Latin American leaders, the closing ceremony saw Omara singing her way across the platform; Venezuela's Hugo Chavez blew her kisses, Cuba's President Raul Castro reached out and kissed her hand.
She was also the first Cuban musician to be granted a visa to perform in the United States after President Barack Obama ended restrictions on cultural exchanges.
Her most recent album won a Latin Grammy, which she was able to collect in person at the award ceremony in Las Vegas.
Her repertoire has expanded beyond the classic Buena Vista sounds but the band and the music, she believes, will always live on.
"This type of music will always be with us. It's still the Buena Vista sound; members of the band may change because some have passed away but the spirit lives on."
Read the complete story HERE.
Showing posts with label tourism. Show all posts
Showing posts with label tourism. Show all posts
Thursday, February 25, 2010
Monday, May 19, 2008
NYT Travel: Does the ‘Real’ Ireland Still Exist?
New York Times Travel
May 18, 2008
Does the ‘Real’ Ireland Still Exist?
By DAN BARRY
AN August night in the sea-scented village of Kinvara finds us at Connolly’s, a pub so permanent that if some codger were to tell you it was here before Galway Bay, lapping now just outside the door, you’d nod and buy him a pint. My wife and I are hunched at a small table with friends when a smiling woman in a peasant skirt sits beside us, carrying a perfectly appropriate accessory in this corner of Ireland — a button accordion.
She is Mary Staunton, a musician known throughout the Irish west. When the inevitable call goes out, she obliges, her fingers skipping across the buttons like children playing frantic but sure-footed hopscotch. Then a white-haired man mentions an old song from his childhood. Does she know it? Why yes, she does, and when her fingers finish their dance, leaving the man smiling, there suddenly rises from across the room the hesitant but clear voice of a young woman who has summoned the nerve to sing. (“And I said let grief be a fallen leaf/At the dawning of the day.”) As she sings, all talking stops: an entire pub, transported. And I think to myself, now this would never happen where I’m from.
Was this the real Ireland? Or was it a rare dash of magic, sprinkled into Connolly’s to validate an antiquated sense of Ireland — a sense rooted in the days when economic inequity between two countries allowed American tourists to spend as though Ireland were one sprawling duty-free shop? Though the country is now experiencing some economic uneasiness, you still cannot help but think: How times have changed.
Over the years, I have spent a lot of time in the western counties of Galway and Clare, and if nothing else, this is what I have gleaned: Ireland can be that place you missed as you traveled around Ireland, looking for Ireland.
Yes, you can find a thatched cottage here and there, if you try. Yes, you may even encounter a white clot of sheep blocking your rented car’s path, raising from musty memory some postcard caption about Irish Rush Hour. But to wander about, looking to bag with a digital camera some approximation of a time-faded Irish postcard, is to miss the complexities of a country that is thoroughly enjoying its wealth and adapting to its European Union membership while at the same time trying to preserve its dreamlike landscape and proud cultural heritage.
You may indeed hear a young Irish woman suddenly break into song in Kinvara. But you may also walk around the corner and be served dinner by a young man with an Eastern European accent instead of a brogue. Travel 10 miles up the road to Gort and you might wade into a celebration of Brazilian culture, staged by a transplanted community that is now an integral part of that old market town.
There you have it: delightful, post-millennial Ireland.
Well versed by now in the lesson that to search for Ireland is to miss it, my family and I once again settled into a self-catered apartment in Kinvara, a village cleaved to Galway Bay near the Clare-Galway border. A generation ago, even a decade ago, you might have called it an unhurried place; now Kinvara captures the transformation of Ireland in so many ways.
The village has a few narrow streets, some shops and pubs, and a stone-walled pier more than 200 years old, from which the distant lights of Galway City can be seen at night and the inhalations and exhalations of the sea can be measured. Across from the pier there looms Dunguaire Castle, which for nearly five centuries has stood on grounds near the ancient fort of Guaire, seventh-century King of Connaught.
The castle’s topmost open windows offer a panoramic view of a Kinvara in flux. Much of the surrounding farmland is being subdivided for new homes, some of them being offered for the equivalent of $1 million and more; they appeal to young professionals looking for an easy commute into Galway, and to affluent Dubliners seeking a second-home getaway. It all leaves one wondering whether the village’s aesthetics are at risk; whether these new developments, and the taxing of the fragile infrastructure they represent, will make Kinvara less — Kinvara-like.
But for now, Kinvara presents curious juxtapositions of the old and the new. Here, for example, an inviting place called the Burren Beo Café occupies an old stone storefront where wireless access is available and where tombstones from a long-gone churchyard adorn the patio. You can sip your caffè latte and imagine the life led by one Bryan Daly, who departed this life at the age of 33, in 1816, and whose headstone lies flat at your feet.
THOUGH Kinvara is perfectly situated for day trips to other points of the Irish west, I often struggle with whether to stay or to go, lulled as I am by the mundane daily rhythms of a village I have come to know in all seasons.
In the mornings, I watch the same white-bearded fisherman — said to be Kinvara’s last — park his old black bicycle by the pier, row a skiff to his rusty-green vessel, and disappear into the bay. Sometime later I see him rowing back to shore, where he mounts his bicycle and vanishes down a narrow lane, leaving me to wonder whether I had actually seen him or simply imagined him.
In the afternoons, I sometimes see the beer truck pull up to Connolly’s, and I watch the deliveryman throw a seat cushion on the ground, bounce the beer kegs precisely onto the cushion, then spin them like squat and silvery dance partners toward the pub door.
And in the evenings, I take walks with my wife and two young daughters along a worn path that meanders along the shoreline and through pastures where cows, horses and donkeys approach, as if seeking the latest gossip from Connolly’s. At the stony pier we watch the bobbing of moored Galway hookers, traditional wooden sailing boats with single masts and glorious billowing sails. Once used to import turf from rocky Connemara, the hookers are now the star attraction of a mid-August festival called Cruinniu na mBad, or Gathering of the Boats.
The sun drops, and somewhere voices are raised in song, seducing you to stay snug in Kinvara. But other places beckon, places dotted through the west that represent the old, the new, the real Ireland. If you were to climb again up those stone steps of Dunguaire Castle and peer again through one of those narrow windows, you would see beyond the village a limestone moonscape of hills and crevices, of wild goats and wildflowers, that stretches for more than 100 square miles across North Clare. This is the Burren.
Take any crooked Burren road, whether to Kilfenora or to Lisdoonvarna, to Tubber or to Cassidy’s Pub, and something ancient — a solitary Celtic cross, a crumbled farmhouse, one of the megalithic tombs of stone called dolmens — presents itself. One rain-swept afternoon, friends led us to a Burren mountain called Slieve Carron, which stretches across the horizon like a giant in repose. We donned slickers and walked a mile across cow-pocked fields, through some brush, up a muddy hill, to a tree-canopied pocket as lush as any hobbit’s grotto. Here was an altar made of rock slab beside a spring. And here, deeper in, was a cave where St. Colman MacDuagh is said to have lived and meditated. No beeping of backhoes clearing way for another luxury home; just the beating of rain against leaves.
This sense of exposure, even oneness, with sky, rock and water continues through the short, winding drive from Slieve Carron to New Quay. Found there is a semi-secret place called the Flaggy Shore, a stony stretch along Galway Bay that is alive with lime-green seaweed and bruised-purple algae, with tidal pools and breath-catching winds, with — well, best to step aside and let the unmatchable Seamus Heaney describe the Flaggy Shore experience in his poem “Postscript”:
... You are neither here nor there,
A hurry through which known and strange things pass
As big soft buffetings come at the car sideways
And catch the heart off guard and blow it open.
Half a mile away, at the back door of Linnane’s Lobster Bar, fishing boats rock in the impatient tide; at its front door, two rumpled regulars sit on upturned kegs, offering nods and how-are-ye’s. Between these portals, fine fish and chowder are served. But on this day, and on a patch of pasture just outside Linnane’s and beyond a stone wall, there sit two sleek private helicopters, so out of place in these simple surroundings — and yet very much in their proper place in the Ireland of today. The very rich in Ireland think nothing of zipping by helicopter the 130 miles from Dublin to Galway or Clare for a leisurely lunch of oysters and then back again, thus avoiding the off chance of traffic congestion caused by sheep on some secondary road.
In the Ireland of today, even the famous Cliffs of Moher are different. Not long ago the amenities included a small parking lot, a modest cafeteria and a gift shop. But with the completion early last year of a multimillion-dollar renovation, the country’s most popular tourist attraction now includes the Cliffs of Moher Visitor Experience, a multimedia center cleverly built into the hillside. It could have been cheesy; instead, it is mesmerizing, with audio-visual presentations that celebrate the intertwined stories of rock, water and humankind.
But the real always trumps the virtual. The cliffs remain a pulse-racing place where a four-mile stretch of improbable green land suddenly stops, and walls of shale and flagstone drop several hundred feet to receive the angry white-foam crashes of the Atlantic.
A change in infrastructure is one thing; a change in culture is quite another. And nowhere is this change more strongly felt than in Gort, about 40 miles northeast of the cliffs and just a dozen miles from Kinvara. My mother grew up on a farm near there, and I’ve been visiting Gort since the 1970s. I have watched it gradually grow from an aged and insular town to a bedroom community for Galway City, some 20 miles away. Farms I remember are now Levittown-like subdivisions.
The real change, though, is in Gort’s new and sizable Brazilian community, attracted in part by job opportunities at a local meat-processing plant. The impact has been extraordinary: Brazilian music nights in one of the pubs, Brazilian necessities — from maracuja to mandioca — in the shops, and a Sunday Mass said in Portuguese. There has been the usual awkwardness in this marriage of two distinct cultures, but for the most part the newcomers have been warmly accepted; for example, when carbon monoxide from a faulty oil burner killed two Brazilian men nearly three years ago, townspeople banded together to raise money to help the families.
And every June, Gort serves as host to a traditional Brazilian festival called the Quadrilha. The town center comes alive with folk dances and passionate sambas that could never be confused with an Irish step dance, while the air fills with the aroma of Brazilian cuisine that could never be confused with brown bread and tea.
You will see the Irish at the Quadrilha, some of them wearing the soccer jerseys of Brazil’s national team, just as you will see Brazilians two months later at the Gort Show, an annual agricultural fair, where inside the community center, locals compete for best mince pie and handsomest heads of garden cabbage, while in the fields outside, judges in bowler hats ponder before selecting the best-colored colt, filly or gelding. The new Gort is reflected in the flags of Ireland and Brazil that sometimes hang in shop windows, the green in both nearly blending.
Any day trip through the west of Ireland will lead to some new discovery, some new reflection of the steady departure from a twee past that was never quite as twee as tourists might imagine. Yes, there are still places like Cong, the adorable little village in County Mayo whose economy even now hinges on its serendipitous role as the setting for “The Quiet Man,” a movie from 1952 that starred John Wayne and Maureen O’Hara. But a short drive from Cong into the Connemara wildness, where there are often stretches of nothing more than rock, craggy hills and the occasional car, you can find beside an abandoned stone farmhouse a recently built summer getaway, and another backhoe carving into the scenery to make way for another second home. Remote Connemara is no longer remote, and no longer cheap.
There is so much to experience in Connemara, from the ruggedness of its Twelve Bens mountain range to the refined comfort at its old Renvyle House Hotel, that it can seem almost too much at times. And so I return to that place I know a little, Kinvara.
I know that when the evening tide rises at the pier in nearby Parkmore, the sprat-chasing mackerel nearly leap into your pail. I know that on the short ride back to town, in a stamp-size spot called Nogra, there’s a century-old pub and store called Fahy’s Travellers Inn; you drink your pint, hear the murmur of local chatter, then toss your spare change into the can for the African Mission that sits on the bar.
And I know that music tends to break out.
Another August night finds us with 20 others, talking and drinking under an awning outside the Pier Head, a bar and restaurant across the quay from Connolly’s. Those majestic boats called hookers rock gently in the bay. Dunguaire Castle, set aglow by floodlights, watches over Kinvara, as always. It is raining.
Then a man I know starts singing, as is his habit at moments like these. With eyes closed, he sings an old song written by a Kinvara poet long gone, about the cuckoos calling from the woods within, and his love beside him and the tide full in. People fall quiet, many with heads bowed, creating a sense that in all of Ireland there are only these sounds: seawater lapping, rainwater tapping, and one man’s song.
May 18, 2008
Does the ‘Real’ Ireland Still Exist?
By DAN BARRY
AN August night in the sea-scented village of Kinvara finds us at Connolly’s, a pub so permanent that if some codger were to tell you it was here before Galway Bay, lapping now just outside the door, you’d nod and buy him a pint. My wife and I are hunched at a small table with friends when a smiling woman in a peasant skirt sits beside us, carrying a perfectly appropriate accessory in this corner of Ireland — a button accordion.
She is Mary Staunton, a musician known throughout the Irish west. When the inevitable call goes out, she obliges, her fingers skipping across the buttons like children playing frantic but sure-footed hopscotch. Then a white-haired man mentions an old song from his childhood. Does she know it? Why yes, she does, and when her fingers finish their dance, leaving the man smiling, there suddenly rises from across the room the hesitant but clear voice of a young woman who has summoned the nerve to sing. (“And I said let grief be a fallen leaf/At the dawning of the day.”) As she sings, all talking stops: an entire pub, transported. And I think to myself, now this would never happen where I’m from.
Was this the real Ireland? Or was it a rare dash of magic, sprinkled into Connolly’s to validate an antiquated sense of Ireland — a sense rooted in the days when economic inequity between two countries allowed American tourists to spend as though Ireland were one sprawling duty-free shop? Though the country is now experiencing some economic uneasiness, you still cannot help but think: How times have changed.
Over the years, I have spent a lot of time in the western counties of Galway and Clare, and if nothing else, this is what I have gleaned: Ireland can be that place you missed as you traveled around Ireland, looking for Ireland.
Yes, you can find a thatched cottage here and there, if you try. Yes, you may even encounter a white clot of sheep blocking your rented car’s path, raising from musty memory some postcard caption about Irish Rush Hour. But to wander about, looking to bag with a digital camera some approximation of a time-faded Irish postcard, is to miss the complexities of a country that is thoroughly enjoying its wealth and adapting to its European Union membership while at the same time trying to preserve its dreamlike landscape and proud cultural heritage.
You may indeed hear a young Irish woman suddenly break into song in Kinvara. But you may also walk around the corner and be served dinner by a young man with an Eastern European accent instead of a brogue. Travel 10 miles up the road to Gort and you might wade into a celebration of Brazilian culture, staged by a transplanted community that is now an integral part of that old market town.
There you have it: delightful, post-millennial Ireland.
Well versed by now in the lesson that to search for Ireland is to miss it, my family and I once again settled into a self-catered apartment in Kinvara, a village cleaved to Galway Bay near the Clare-Galway border. A generation ago, even a decade ago, you might have called it an unhurried place; now Kinvara captures the transformation of Ireland in so many ways.
The village has a few narrow streets, some shops and pubs, and a stone-walled pier more than 200 years old, from which the distant lights of Galway City can be seen at night and the inhalations and exhalations of the sea can be measured. Across from the pier there looms Dunguaire Castle, which for nearly five centuries has stood on grounds near the ancient fort of Guaire, seventh-century King of Connaught.
The castle’s topmost open windows offer a panoramic view of a Kinvara in flux. Much of the surrounding farmland is being subdivided for new homes, some of them being offered for the equivalent of $1 million and more; they appeal to young professionals looking for an easy commute into Galway, and to affluent Dubliners seeking a second-home getaway. It all leaves one wondering whether the village’s aesthetics are at risk; whether these new developments, and the taxing of the fragile infrastructure they represent, will make Kinvara less — Kinvara-like.
But for now, Kinvara presents curious juxtapositions of the old and the new. Here, for example, an inviting place called the Burren Beo Café occupies an old stone storefront where wireless access is available and where tombstones from a long-gone churchyard adorn the patio. You can sip your caffè latte and imagine the life led by one Bryan Daly, who departed this life at the age of 33, in 1816, and whose headstone lies flat at your feet.
THOUGH Kinvara is perfectly situated for day trips to other points of the Irish west, I often struggle with whether to stay or to go, lulled as I am by the mundane daily rhythms of a village I have come to know in all seasons.
In the mornings, I watch the same white-bearded fisherman — said to be Kinvara’s last — park his old black bicycle by the pier, row a skiff to his rusty-green vessel, and disappear into the bay. Sometime later I see him rowing back to shore, where he mounts his bicycle and vanishes down a narrow lane, leaving me to wonder whether I had actually seen him or simply imagined him.
In the afternoons, I sometimes see the beer truck pull up to Connolly’s, and I watch the deliveryman throw a seat cushion on the ground, bounce the beer kegs precisely onto the cushion, then spin them like squat and silvery dance partners toward the pub door.
And in the evenings, I take walks with my wife and two young daughters along a worn path that meanders along the shoreline and through pastures where cows, horses and donkeys approach, as if seeking the latest gossip from Connolly’s. At the stony pier we watch the bobbing of moored Galway hookers, traditional wooden sailing boats with single masts and glorious billowing sails. Once used to import turf from rocky Connemara, the hookers are now the star attraction of a mid-August festival called Cruinniu na mBad, or Gathering of the Boats.
The sun drops, and somewhere voices are raised in song, seducing you to stay snug in Kinvara. But other places beckon, places dotted through the west that represent the old, the new, the real Ireland. If you were to climb again up those stone steps of Dunguaire Castle and peer again through one of those narrow windows, you would see beyond the village a limestone moonscape of hills and crevices, of wild goats and wildflowers, that stretches for more than 100 square miles across North Clare. This is the Burren.
Take any crooked Burren road, whether to Kilfenora or to Lisdoonvarna, to Tubber or to Cassidy’s Pub, and something ancient — a solitary Celtic cross, a crumbled farmhouse, one of the megalithic tombs of stone called dolmens — presents itself. One rain-swept afternoon, friends led us to a Burren mountain called Slieve Carron, which stretches across the horizon like a giant in repose. We donned slickers and walked a mile across cow-pocked fields, through some brush, up a muddy hill, to a tree-canopied pocket as lush as any hobbit’s grotto. Here was an altar made of rock slab beside a spring. And here, deeper in, was a cave where St. Colman MacDuagh is said to have lived and meditated. No beeping of backhoes clearing way for another luxury home; just the beating of rain against leaves.
This sense of exposure, even oneness, with sky, rock and water continues through the short, winding drive from Slieve Carron to New Quay. Found there is a semi-secret place called the Flaggy Shore, a stony stretch along Galway Bay that is alive with lime-green seaweed and bruised-purple algae, with tidal pools and breath-catching winds, with — well, best to step aside and let the unmatchable Seamus Heaney describe the Flaggy Shore experience in his poem “Postscript”:
... You are neither here nor there,
A hurry through which known and strange things pass
As big soft buffetings come at the car sideways
And catch the heart off guard and blow it open.
Half a mile away, at the back door of Linnane’s Lobster Bar, fishing boats rock in the impatient tide; at its front door, two rumpled regulars sit on upturned kegs, offering nods and how-are-ye’s. Between these portals, fine fish and chowder are served. But on this day, and on a patch of pasture just outside Linnane’s and beyond a stone wall, there sit two sleek private helicopters, so out of place in these simple surroundings — and yet very much in their proper place in the Ireland of today. The very rich in Ireland think nothing of zipping by helicopter the 130 miles from Dublin to Galway or Clare for a leisurely lunch of oysters and then back again, thus avoiding the off chance of traffic congestion caused by sheep on some secondary road.
In the Ireland of today, even the famous Cliffs of Moher are different. Not long ago the amenities included a small parking lot, a modest cafeteria and a gift shop. But with the completion early last year of a multimillion-dollar renovation, the country’s most popular tourist attraction now includes the Cliffs of Moher Visitor Experience, a multimedia center cleverly built into the hillside. It could have been cheesy; instead, it is mesmerizing, with audio-visual presentations that celebrate the intertwined stories of rock, water and humankind.
But the real always trumps the virtual. The cliffs remain a pulse-racing place where a four-mile stretch of improbable green land suddenly stops, and walls of shale and flagstone drop several hundred feet to receive the angry white-foam crashes of the Atlantic.
A change in infrastructure is one thing; a change in culture is quite another. And nowhere is this change more strongly felt than in Gort, about 40 miles northeast of the cliffs and just a dozen miles from Kinvara. My mother grew up on a farm near there, and I’ve been visiting Gort since the 1970s. I have watched it gradually grow from an aged and insular town to a bedroom community for Galway City, some 20 miles away. Farms I remember are now Levittown-like subdivisions.
The real change, though, is in Gort’s new and sizable Brazilian community, attracted in part by job opportunities at a local meat-processing plant. The impact has been extraordinary: Brazilian music nights in one of the pubs, Brazilian necessities — from maracuja to mandioca — in the shops, and a Sunday Mass said in Portuguese. There has been the usual awkwardness in this marriage of two distinct cultures, but for the most part the newcomers have been warmly accepted; for example, when carbon monoxide from a faulty oil burner killed two Brazilian men nearly three years ago, townspeople banded together to raise money to help the families.
And every June, Gort serves as host to a traditional Brazilian festival called the Quadrilha. The town center comes alive with folk dances and passionate sambas that could never be confused with an Irish step dance, while the air fills with the aroma of Brazilian cuisine that could never be confused with brown bread and tea.
You will see the Irish at the Quadrilha, some of them wearing the soccer jerseys of Brazil’s national team, just as you will see Brazilians two months later at the Gort Show, an annual agricultural fair, where inside the community center, locals compete for best mince pie and handsomest heads of garden cabbage, while in the fields outside, judges in bowler hats ponder before selecting the best-colored colt, filly or gelding. The new Gort is reflected in the flags of Ireland and Brazil that sometimes hang in shop windows, the green in both nearly blending.
Any day trip through the west of Ireland will lead to some new discovery, some new reflection of the steady departure from a twee past that was never quite as twee as tourists might imagine. Yes, there are still places like Cong, the adorable little village in County Mayo whose economy even now hinges on its serendipitous role as the setting for “The Quiet Man,” a movie from 1952 that starred John Wayne and Maureen O’Hara. But a short drive from Cong into the Connemara wildness, where there are often stretches of nothing more than rock, craggy hills and the occasional car, you can find beside an abandoned stone farmhouse a recently built summer getaway, and another backhoe carving into the scenery to make way for another second home. Remote Connemara is no longer remote, and no longer cheap.
There is so much to experience in Connemara, from the ruggedness of its Twelve Bens mountain range to the refined comfort at its old Renvyle House Hotel, that it can seem almost too much at times. And so I return to that place I know a little, Kinvara.
I know that when the evening tide rises at the pier in nearby Parkmore, the sprat-chasing mackerel nearly leap into your pail. I know that on the short ride back to town, in a stamp-size spot called Nogra, there’s a century-old pub and store called Fahy’s Travellers Inn; you drink your pint, hear the murmur of local chatter, then toss your spare change into the can for the African Mission that sits on the bar.
And I know that music tends to break out.
Another August night finds us with 20 others, talking and drinking under an awning outside the Pier Head, a bar and restaurant across the quay from Connolly’s. Those majestic boats called hookers rock gently in the bay. Dunguaire Castle, set aglow by floodlights, watches over Kinvara, as always. It is raining.
Then a man I know starts singing, as is his habit at moments like these. With eyes closed, he sings an old song written by a Kinvara poet long gone, about the cuckoos calling from the woods within, and his love beside him and the tide full in. People fall quiet, many with heads bowed, creating a sense that in all of Ireland there are only these sounds: seawater lapping, rainwater tapping, and one man’s song.
Wednesday, August 01, 2007
Jazz, Tourism, Tradition, and Market in New Orleans
An excellent interview with musician and director for Dillard University’s Institute of Jazz Culture Edward Anderson. Anderson is part of a duo called Bleu Orleans. Large excerpts below; read the entire article here:
OFFBEAT
BackTalk with Edward Anderson
By Alex Rawls
Between semesters, there are few places as relaxing as building on a university campus. No students, no drama and easy parking—it’s a good environment for thinking. With no students, you can keep it casual, and Edward Anderson is doing just that, sitting behind his desk in a dark blue golf shirt and olive cargo shorts. Anderson is the director for Dillard University’s Institute of Jazz Culture, and it’s a program in transition. Irvin Mayfield started the Institute of Jazz Culture in 2003, when he made Dillard the home for the New Orleans Jazz Orchestra. In January 2006, Mayfield and the NOJO moved to Tulane and the nature of the program changed. “Irvin’s focus was more external to try to create the NOJO and things like that,” Anderson says. “That’s part of my plan too, to create a smaller combo to do some touring. For the main part, as far as the curriculum, we want to create a program here that will be nationally recognized and marketed as such.” Anderson plans on having the Institute of Jazz Culture fully operational by 2008.
...
What’s happening with Bleu Orleans?
Actually, we’re pretty happy where we are now as sort of an experimental group. When we started the group, one of our influences was Steely Dan because the two gentlemen started this group and they bring in these high-level musicians to work with them, but compositionally the concept is theirs. That is how I am with Darrell Lavigne who, to me, is one of the most underrated musicians in New Orleans. The jazz community knows of his immense talents, but I don’t think he has received what he should have based on those talents. As a composer or as a player. As a composer, it blows my mind what he comes up with.
One of the things about Bleu Orleans that I’m proud of is the fact that we try to really stay in touch with what is artistically emotional. Right now, everyone is trying to tap into the emotional ride of Katrina. We’re no different. I was in Los Angeles; he is now living in Houston, just the challenges of that. It’s just so much to tap into, and we’re trying to build upon that right now.
One thing I find fascinating about Bleu Orleans is that you are trying to make genuinely contemporary jazz.
I don’t really know where to begin with that. You get so much doublespeak with that. People say, “We really want the jazz to be contemporary,” but when you really hit them with something that you feel is representative of today sometimes, the people aren’t ready for it or the critics aren’t ready for it. The people we call the jazz police, the club owners and what not, they are, like, “This isn’t really what we cater to.”
The problem we run into in New Orleans is that so much of the jazz is defined by tourism. That’s the reality that no one wants to deal with. People want to keep it safe and regulation so that it is something that will easily market to tourism. When you come up with something that is confrontational or something that is controversial in a sense, then you have to deal with that. We understand that at this point. We’re not so naive to understand that we’re not going to run up against that. At this point in time, it’s a beautiful thing that happens when you reach close to middle age, you stop caring. You understand that you can’t let some body else’s ignorance justify your direction. You have to do what is true to you artistically.
The irony is that contemporary jazz...
...it’s already 40 years old. That’s the point. There’s no way I’m going to out-Coltrane John Coltrane. There’s no way I’m going to out-Miles Davis Miles Davis. That is something Max Roach said when I was 20 years old taking a jazz camp. He said there’s no way you’re going to out-Dizzy Gillespie Dizzy Gillespie. At the time I thought it was kind of cute, but 15 or 20 years later it makes a lot more sense to me.
The whole circumstance of what inspired him is totally different than what inspires us as artists today. He didn’t have to deal with Katrina. He dealt with racism and the issues of his day. He dealt segregation and stuff, and those sorts of issues are what inspired his music to sound the way it sounded. That’s what inspired bebop—the musicians were trying to prove that they had the same intellectual prowess as classical musicians.
They started checking out Stravinsky and all that stuff, and started to incorporating theory and playing breakneck tempos just to show that they could do it.
When Rahsaan Roland Kirk spoke of jazz as Black classical music it was a progressive thought; today, when musicians like Wynton Marsalis treat jazz as Black classical music, it seems conservative.
We all owe Wynton a heck of a lot. You can’t question, you listen to those records, and he is playing his trumpet at a phenomenal level. It’s a mastery of that instrument, but music is immense and there are a lot of different angles to approach it.
There are a lot for different perspectives that take on art. It’s huge. It runs the gamut from classical to popular music. It goes on and on. For us to sit here and recreate what Wynton did in 1985, once again that’s 20 years ago, really isn’t creative. You have to go through that to get to something because that is part of the study process. You have to check all that stuff out and try to emulate it and try to understand what was going on so you can build on it. You have to understand some of the rules, in a sense.
People think that certain musicians’ personalities only come through in the way they sound or the way they play, but it is the whole perspective. It’s why Thelonious Monk sounds different from Bud Powell, but they were from the same generation. Although they are connected in a sense, from a sound standpoint they have such independent personalities.
In New Orleans, that monkey of tourism is like a monkey on the back of musicians. The musicians are being used to fill up hotel rooms and the convention center. In order to eat, they have to shape their music a certain way. Entertainment becomes such a crucial part of that formula. If you go to New York or the east coast and even parts of the west coast, the entertainment is the art value. Not the fact that the artist is smiling and cajoling with the audience. There is a whole other level of involvement that the audience can tap into. I’m not saying our music is sub par, what I’m suggesting is that there are other things we can do to strengthen the artistic content of our music.
Is it possible for jazz to reach a broad audience again?
The problem becomes how much are you willing to become a martyr. That really became the reality for us. How much are we willing to lie down and just take the sword for this? I’m not saying we’ve totally washed our hands of that because we haven’t. We’re just checking out different things. That was a rough period because I don’t know how deep you want to get, but we can go as far as the Jazz Fest frowning upon the music and saying, “This is not really what we like to promote.” Clarence Johnson III, Darrell Lavigne, Donald Ramsey, and myself, we can play and the audience is digging it. What’s the problem?
There is a whole sector that really wants to see that music in a nice safe jar. Let’s sing, “Do You Know What It Means to Miss New Orleans.” Shit, I’ve been there and done that and got the T-shirt. Believe me every time I hear Nicholas Payton play, I’m inspired. Some of those musicians are really searching, and you can tell.
There’s a phenomenon I see in most popular music and certainly in jazz; it’s the tendency for fans to isolate a certain sound or style and declare that it is the real thing, and everything else is second rate. Really, what they want is music and artists they can claim some measure of ownership of.
It is elitist. That is what is so unfortunate. That’s why jazz only gravitates certain people, and those who have a certain level of education. New Orleans is unique because we have the whole tradition of second line thing; it’s the music of everyday people, celebratory music.
When you talk about modern jazz, it’s become so elitist. I cannot even listen to it all the time; half the time, I’ve heard it, I hear a new recording, and I’m like, “Okay, that’s what Coltrane did.” It’s a different melody, but he is playing a Coltrane solo. It can’t inspire me because I just don’t hear any vision. Once again, there are musicians who want to deal with it, but they’re being crucified. Nick is a perfect example, I’m not here to speak for Nick, but I witnessed it. He came out with Sonic Trance, and Nicholas was the one who was, to me, being groomed to be the ambassador of New Orleans. When he came out with Sonic Trance and he started doing Bitches Brew type stuff, people just shut down on him. He has been kind of outcast ever since, and all the focus turned to Irvin. Then with Katrina, he just headed up and got the hell out of time, so we lost one of our finest musicians that we should have been embracing and begging to come back and help get this music started. I think he is in Arizona; what the hell is he going to do in Arizona? Watch the cactuses grow or some shit?
...
To change subjects, what do you know about the bill to put music education back in high schools? Do you what that will mean?
Specifically, no, but I’ve been asked to be on a board with a group of people. There was a study put together by an outside consulting group that Mitch Landrieu’s organization hired. There are about 20 of us on the board talking about ideas to bring back the cultural economy. Education was a part of the discussion, although I would have liked it top be a larger component of that discussion. My understanding is that there is an initiative to bring back music education in all the schools. I think that is a great idea and it would bring so much positivity to our young folks today. I just hope if that initiative does take place, that they remove some of the politics from it. I know that is wishful thinking, but I hope they let the experts do what the experts do. I hope that they find the money to do it and they hire some director that is qualified and open-minded and let him set it up so that is it is really what it’s supposed to be. If so, I think it will have an amazing impact on the city culturally.
Studying music is something that creates independent thinkers. Which is usually why kids get caught up in stuff, because they are submitting to peer pressures in the wrong way. The movement today at least in jazz is anti-drugs. You don’t see jazz musicians walking around with their pants hanging off. They don’t carry guns and don’t do drugs for the most part. So it can only be positive.
It seems to me that jazz is a music that benefits from an audience with a musical background.
I don’t know if everybody had a musical background when they were listening to Coltrane. My father’s generation was really locking into that sound when they were dealing with the Civil Rights movement. It was a special era in time, but those artists were inspired by what was going on. Just like they connected to Coltrane, they connected to Marvin Gaye, and just like they connected to Marvin Gaye, they connected to Stevie Wonder.
The problem today is that the musicians are so busy trying to validate themselves by showing that they can do what Trane did or what Miles did that they’re not connecting to the current stream of the world today. That is kind of where we started. We really wanted to identify with culture today. You can’t get mad at kids who are listening to Beyoncé and whoever they are listening to on the top 40 radio station when they get confused when you play some Coltrane. They aren’t going to get it. It’s not connecting with them. When they listen to Norah Jones, even though she’s not singing swing tunes, she is taking some of the influence from those earlier artists and she is injecting it into that alternative-pop sound today that is so popular. She is bringing some of that to the table, and kids can hear that. She sounds good, but it is deeper than what they are listening to on pop and top 40 radio. That is the approach that is missing now. You study your horn, but at the same time you have to be tuned into what is happening now. That is why Miles was so hip. People criticized him, what was he going to do—keep playing Kind of Blue for 40 years?
So the real challenge for a musician is to find a context for his or her art?
Think about this. Today we have a war going, we’re in the most turbulent time since Vietnam. What is coming out of it in jazz? Nothing. What kind of statement is that for art? Today in art in general, you just don’t see it. Life may imitate art, but as far as these musicians today. I’ve not seen a record today that is really protesting a political statement, or making a socio-political statement of any sort, or speaking up for the common man so to speak.
...
OFFBEAT
BackTalk with Edward Anderson
By Alex Rawls
Between semesters, there are few places as relaxing as building on a university campus. No students, no drama and easy parking—it’s a good environment for thinking. With no students, you can keep it casual, and Edward Anderson is doing just that, sitting behind his desk in a dark blue golf shirt and olive cargo shorts. Anderson is the director for Dillard University’s Institute of Jazz Culture, and it’s a program in transition. Irvin Mayfield started the Institute of Jazz Culture in 2003, when he made Dillard the home for the New Orleans Jazz Orchestra. In January 2006, Mayfield and the NOJO moved to Tulane and the nature of the program changed. “Irvin’s focus was more external to try to create the NOJO and things like that,” Anderson says. “That’s part of my plan too, to create a smaller combo to do some touring. For the main part, as far as the curriculum, we want to create a program here that will be nationally recognized and marketed as such.” Anderson plans on having the Institute of Jazz Culture fully operational by 2008.
...
What’s happening with Bleu Orleans?
Actually, we’re pretty happy where we are now as sort of an experimental group. When we started the group, one of our influences was Steely Dan because the two gentlemen started this group and they bring in these high-level musicians to work with them, but compositionally the concept is theirs. That is how I am with Darrell Lavigne who, to me, is one of the most underrated musicians in New Orleans. The jazz community knows of his immense talents, but I don’t think he has received what he should have based on those talents. As a composer or as a player. As a composer, it blows my mind what he comes up with.
One of the things about Bleu Orleans that I’m proud of is the fact that we try to really stay in touch with what is artistically emotional. Right now, everyone is trying to tap into the emotional ride of Katrina. We’re no different. I was in Los Angeles; he is now living in Houston, just the challenges of that. It’s just so much to tap into, and we’re trying to build upon that right now.
One thing I find fascinating about Bleu Orleans is that you are trying to make genuinely contemporary jazz.
I don’t really know where to begin with that. You get so much doublespeak with that. People say, “We really want the jazz to be contemporary,” but when you really hit them with something that you feel is representative of today sometimes, the people aren’t ready for it or the critics aren’t ready for it. The people we call the jazz police, the club owners and what not, they are, like, “This isn’t really what we cater to.”
The problem we run into in New Orleans is that so much of the jazz is defined by tourism. That’s the reality that no one wants to deal with. People want to keep it safe and regulation so that it is something that will easily market to tourism. When you come up with something that is confrontational or something that is controversial in a sense, then you have to deal with that. We understand that at this point. We’re not so naive to understand that we’re not going to run up against that. At this point in time, it’s a beautiful thing that happens when you reach close to middle age, you stop caring. You understand that you can’t let some body else’s ignorance justify your direction. You have to do what is true to you artistically.
The irony is that contemporary jazz...
...it’s already 40 years old. That’s the point. There’s no way I’m going to out-Coltrane John Coltrane. There’s no way I’m going to out-Miles Davis Miles Davis. That is something Max Roach said when I was 20 years old taking a jazz camp. He said there’s no way you’re going to out-Dizzy Gillespie Dizzy Gillespie. At the time I thought it was kind of cute, but 15 or 20 years later it makes a lot more sense to me.
The whole circumstance of what inspired him is totally different than what inspires us as artists today. He didn’t have to deal with Katrina. He dealt with racism and the issues of his day. He dealt segregation and stuff, and those sorts of issues are what inspired his music to sound the way it sounded. That’s what inspired bebop—the musicians were trying to prove that they had the same intellectual prowess as classical musicians.
They started checking out Stravinsky and all that stuff, and started to incorporating theory and playing breakneck tempos just to show that they could do it.
When Rahsaan Roland Kirk spoke of jazz as Black classical music it was a progressive thought; today, when musicians like Wynton Marsalis treat jazz as Black classical music, it seems conservative.
We all owe Wynton a heck of a lot. You can’t question, you listen to those records, and he is playing his trumpet at a phenomenal level. It’s a mastery of that instrument, but music is immense and there are a lot of different angles to approach it.
There are a lot for different perspectives that take on art. It’s huge. It runs the gamut from classical to popular music. It goes on and on. For us to sit here and recreate what Wynton did in 1985, once again that’s 20 years ago, really isn’t creative. You have to go through that to get to something because that is part of the study process. You have to check all that stuff out and try to emulate it and try to understand what was going on so you can build on it. You have to understand some of the rules, in a sense.
People think that certain musicians’ personalities only come through in the way they sound or the way they play, but it is the whole perspective. It’s why Thelonious Monk sounds different from Bud Powell, but they were from the same generation. Although they are connected in a sense, from a sound standpoint they have such independent personalities.
In New Orleans, that monkey of tourism is like a monkey on the back of musicians. The musicians are being used to fill up hotel rooms and the convention center. In order to eat, they have to shape their music a certain way. Entertainment becomes such a crucial part of that formula. If you go to New York or the east coast and even parts of the west coast, the entertainment is the art value. Not the fact that the artist is smiling and cajoling with the audience. There is a whole other level of involvement that the audience can tap into. I’m not saying our music is sub par, what I’m suggesting is that there are other things we can do to strengthen the artistic content of our music.
Is it possible for jazz to reach a broad audience again?
The problem becomes how much are you willing to become a martyr. That really became the reality for us. How much are we willing to lie down and just take the sword for this? I’m not saying we’ve totally washed our hands of that because we haven’t. We’re just checking out different things. That was a rough period because I don’t know how deep you want to get, but we can go as far as the Jazz Fest frowning upon the music and saying, “This is not really what we like to promote.” Clarence Johnson III, Darrell Lavigne, Donald Ramsey, and myself, we can play and the audience is digging it. What’s the problem?
There is a whole sector that really wants to see that music in a nice safe jar. Let’s sing, “Do You Know What It Means to Miss New Orleans.” Shit, I’ve been there and done that and got the T-shirt. Believe me every time I hear Nicholas Payton play, I’m inspired. Some of those musicians are really searching, and you can tell.
There’s a phenomenon I see in most popular music and certainly in jazz; it’s the tendency for fans to isolate a certain sound or style and declare that it is the real thing, and everything else is second rate. Really, what they want is music and artists they can claim some measure of ownership of.
It is elitist. That is what is so unfortunate. That’s why jazz only gravitates certain people, and those who have a certain level of education. New Orleans is unique because we have the whole tradition of second line thing; it’s the music of everyday people, celebratory music.
When you talk about modern jazz, it’s become so elitist. I cannot even listen to it all the time; half the time, I’ve heard it, I hear a new recording, and I’m like, “Okay, that’s what Coltrane did.” It’s a different melody, but he is playing a Coltrane solo. It can’t inspire me because I just don’t hear any vision. Once again, there are musicians who want to deal with it, but they’re being crucified. Nick is a perfect example, I’m not here to speak for Nick, but I witnessed it. He came out with Sonic Trance, and Nicholas was the one who was, to me, being groomed to be the ambassador of New Orleans. When he came out with Sonic Trance and he started doing Bitches Brew type stuff, people just shut down on him. He has been kind of outcast ever since, and all the focus turned to Irvin. Then with Katrina, he just headed up and got the hell out of time, so we lost one of our finest musicians that we should have been embracing and begging to come back and help get this music started. I think he is in Arizona; what the hell is he going to do in Arizona? Watch the cactuses grow or some shit?
...
To change subjects, what do you know about the bill to put music education back in high schools? Do you what that will mean?
Specifically, no, but I’ve been asked to be on a board with a group of people. There was a study put together by an outside consulting group that Mitch Landrieu’s organization hired. There are about 20 of us on the board talking about ideas to bring back the cultural economy. Education was a part of the discussion, although I would have liked it top be a larger component of that discussion. My understanding is that there is an initiative to bring back music education in all the schools. I think that is a great idea and it would bring so much positivity to our young folks today. I just hope if that initiative does take place, that they remove some of the politics from it. I know that is wishful thinking, but I hope they let the experts do what the experts do. I hope that they find the money to do it and they hire some director that is qualified and open-minded and let him set it up so that is it is really what it’s supposed to be. If so, I think it will have an amazing impact on the city culturally.
Studying music is something that creates independent thinkers. Which is usually why kids get caught up in stuff, because they are submitting to peer pressures in the wrong way. The movement today at least in jazz is anti-drugs. You don’t see jazz musicians walking around with their pants hanging off. They don’t carry guns and don’t do drugs for the most part. So it can only be positive.
It seems to me that jazz is a music that benefits from an audience with a musical background.
I don’t know if everybody had a musical background when they were listening to Coltrane. My father’s generation was really locking into that sound when they were dealing with the Civil Rights movement. It was a special era in time, but those artists were inspired by what was going on. Just like they connected to Coltrane, they connected to Marvin Gaye, and just like they connected to Marvin Gaye, they connected to Stevie Wonder.
The problem today is that the musicians are so busy trying to validate themselves by showing that they can do what Trane did or what Miles did that they’re not connecting to the current stream of the world today. That is kind of where we started. We really wanted to identify with culture today. You can’t get mad at kids who are listening to Beyoncé and whoever they are listening to on the top 40 radio station when they get confused when you play some Coltrane. They aren’t going to get it. It’s not connecting with them. When they listen to Norah Jones, even though she’s not singing swing tunes, she is taking some of the influence from those earlier artists and she is injecting it into that alternative-pop sound today that is so popular. She is bringing some of that to the table, and kids can hear that. She sounds good, but it is deeper than what they are listening to on pop and top 40 radio. That is the approach that is missing now. You study your horn, but at the same time you have to be tuned into what is happening now. That is why Miles was so hip. People criticized him, what was he going to do—keep playing Kind of Blue for 40 years?
So the real challenge for a musician is to find a context for his or her art?
Think about this. Today we have a war going, we’re in the most turbulent time since Vietnam. What is coming out of it in jazz? Nothing. What kind of statement is that for art? Today in art in general, you just don’t see it. Life may imitate art, but as far as these musicians today. I’ve not seen a record today that is really protesting a political statement, or making a socio-political statement of any sort, or speaking up for the common man so to speak.
...
Thursday, June 28, 2007
Indigenous Mexican Seri versus National Tourism
Ancient Tribe at a Crossroads
Mexico's Reclusive Seri Confront the Inevitable March of Development
By Manuel Roig-Franzia
Washington Post Foreign Service
Thursday, June 28, 2007; A18
PUNTA CHUECA, Mexico -- Gloria Sesma clamps tough stems of desert limberbush between her front teeth, shredding the plant into the floppy strands she needs to weave graceful baskets.
Sesma's lifelong work has worn her top teeth down to tiny stubs, much like the teeth of other women in this remote Gulf of California village, home to Mexico's most reclusive indigenous people, the Seri Indians. She and her daughters adhere to traditional techniques, so it can take 10 months of shredding and weaving to make a single basket.
But Sesma's family also reflects new realities for the Seri, a tribe at a crossroads. While eight of her children married within the tribe, a ninth -- her son, Ezekiel -- piqued the family by breaking with tradition and moving away last year to marry a non-Seri woman.
Now, the Seri desire for insularity is being tested on a larger scale. The inevitable march of development is forcing the Seri to confront fundamental questions about their future, questions that will help determine whether one of the last truly autonomous tribes in Mexico melds into the greater society or stays walled off from the world.
"The community is really at this huge crux point," said Jay Roberts, a professor at Earlham College in Indiana who studies the Seri. "They're a case study for what's happening to indigenous people around the world."
The tribe's two villages -- Punta Chueca and Desemboque -- lie directly in the path of the largest Mexican tourist development in a quarter-century. Under a still-evolving plan, hotels and condominiums will sprout along the coastline in much the same way that another generation of Mexicans transformed Cancun and Acapulco from sleepy outposts to resort havens. Change seems inevitable here, whether the development pierces the Seri's land or merely spreads up to its borders.
The Seri hold dominion over more than 450 square miles of heavenly coastline, where for centuries they have scooped crabs, prowled the desert for medicinal plants and fought to keep away outsiders. They once lived nomadically, moving between fishing encampments on the mainland and their main settlement on Isla Tiburon, Mexico's largest island, which is separated from Punta Chueca by a narrow but treacherous waterway known as Little Hell Channel.
In the 1960s, the Mexican government declared Isla Tiburon a nature preserve and forced the Seri off the island, resettling the tribe in squat cinder-block homes in Punta Chueca and Desemboque. The tribe, which now numbers less than 1,000, lives in harsh desert conditions -- fresh water has to be trucked in, and there is very little modern plumbing.
The Seri make money off the scallops and crabs they take from Little Hell Channel, as well as their baskets and ironwood carvings. Under an agreement with the government, the tribe also receives income from the sale of permits to U.S. hunters, who pay $50,000 or more annually for the right to kill bighorn sheep on Isla Tiburon. The money doesn't go far, though, leaving the Seri in garbage-strewn villages.
Punta Chueca, a four-hour drive from Tucson, is a place of unexplained contradictions. Shiny new cars -- some allegedly stolen -- sit in front of ramshackle homes where the occupants sleep on dirt floors. Stray dogs roam about, while children with dirt-smudged faces go days without soap or water for bathing. Some youngsters return to homes outfitted with satellite television dishes and watch Mexican soap operas.
Though their territory is in Mexico, the Seri don't consider themselves Mexicans -- Mexicans, they say, are people who live outside Seri lands. There have been occasional gunfights between the tribe and authorities from the state of Sonora entering Seri territory to investigate crimes. Sonora's governor, Eduardo Bours Castelo, has complained about "the backwardness of the Seris."
"We're hardheaded," Sesma's husband, Ernesto Molina, 58, said one recent afternoon. "We don't even want visitors. We don't have much contact with the people of Mexico. Mexicans are not welcome here."
Molina, who ekes out a living from fishing and guiding the few tourists who can find his village, shuffles between Spanish, which he learned from Mexican fishermen, and the obscure Seri dialect, which Roberts estimates is understood by as few as five non-Seris. The dialect is said to be at its most lyrical when a leatherback turtle beaches and the Seri sing ancient melodies to coax it back to the sea.
Molina considers such traditions sacrosanct and is bothered by the intrusions of outsiders and their ideas. That's why it was so hard for him to swallow what happened a few years ago during another Seri rite, the New Year's celebration on June 30, the end of the tribe's calendar year. A young Mexican visitor caught the eye of his son, Ezekiel, during the festivities.
A romance flowered, and not long afterward, Ezekiel announced he wanted to wed. A few other Seri had married outside the tribe, but Molina never thought it would happen in his own family.
"I was sad," he said.
Ezekiel, though, could not be dissuaded.
"For me, she was a person, even if she wasn't Seri," Ezekiel Molina, now 33, recalled recently. "I don't think that way -- I'm not racist. I reject discrimination."
He left Punta Chueca, crossing the 20 miles of rutted desert path that connects the village to the small beach town of Bahia de Kino. But life outside the village has unfolded badly. He can't adapt to regular work schedules and struggles to raise his daughter with the few pesos he earns from occasional work as a tattoo artist. He says he feels uncomfortable in a society where drug use is common, though in the years since he left his home village, illegal drug use has become a major problem among the Seri.
He has thought about moving back, but he isn't sure. Outside the village, he and his family use modern medicine when they get sick. When he returns to the village, he sees his father at the medicine woman's hut, picking up remedies derived from desert plants. His daughter doesn't understand his brothers and sisters -- she speaks only Spanish.
Ezekiel's departure from this village is part of a trickle of Seri, most of whom migrate between Punta Chueca and Bahia de Kino so that their children can attend better schools. Pedro Torres, 41, the only Seri to earn a doctorate, relocates his family at the beginning of each school year to Bahia de Kino. There, his children discovered Power Rangers cartoons and have become fluent in Spanish.
His wife, Blanca Lidia Monroy -- Seri women do not take their husband's last name -- sat in a side yard of her home one recent afternoon weaving baskets while one of her sons flipped through a recently published Seri-Spanish dictionary, the first of its kind. Monroy smiled, flashing the dentures she got to cover the damage done to her teeth by stripping limberbush stems.
At the end of each school year, when she returns to Punta Chueca, her neighbors give her funny looks, she said. Some shun her.
"Things never change there," she said. "They don't understand why I would leave Punta Chueca for my children's education. They don't understand that I want something more for my children."
Torres, who works an hour's drive away in the city of Hermosillo as a state indigenous education specialist, calls the retirement developments sprouting north of Seri territory a "red alarm" for his people. He shivers when he hears the village elders urging his people to insulate themselves further.
"We have to face reality," Torres said. "Sooner or later, we're going to have this conflict with all this development. They're going to come down here and want to build hotels and we're not going to be prepared to stop them."
The only way to save Seri culture, Torres said, is for young people to leave the villages, get an education, then return empowered by new ideas. Other indigenous peoples in Mexico have done the same, he said, salting local governments and businesses with young professionals while retaining their sense of tribal identity.
But the Seri, he said, are mostly content to wall themselves off. Even the road into their village seems unwelcoming, he said. One recent afternoon, an SUV full of non-Seris rolled toward Punta Chueca. Three young boys waited at the entrance. When they saw the vehicle, they launched a hail of rocks.
Tuesday, March 06, 2007
Aboriginal Australian Culture & Tourism
Slate
Well-traveled
Going Native in the Australian Outback
The tricky task of balancing visitors' expectations of aboriginal culture with the real thing.
By Rolf Potts
Updated Tuesday, March 6, 2007, at 11:22 AM ET
From: Rolf Potts
Subject: The Pitjantjatjara Word for Tourists and Ants Is One and the Same
Posted Monday, March 5, 2007, at 1:07 PM ET
Here's some advice for anyone hoping to capture the contradictions of Australian outback tourism within a single snapshot: Bring your camera to the base of Uluru—the massive orange-red monolith smack in the center of the Australian continent—and aim the lower half of your viewfinder at the large sign near the hiking trailhead. This sign, which was erected by the local Pitjantjatjara people, solemnly requests that you don't climb up the face of a rock that they consider sacred. Aim your camera at a certain angle, however, and the top half of your viewfinder will capture the knots of tourists who've decided to climb the rock anyway (aided by a safety chain designated by the Australian National Park Service for that very purpose).
The Pitjantjatjara euphemism for tourists in their homeland is minga tjuta—"ants"—and from this angle you can see why: Looking up from the base of Uluru, the tidy lines of people inching up the climbing trail look like insects on a mound.
I, too, have come to central Australia as a minga tjuta, though I'm not here to scale the slopes of Uluru. Rather, I have resolved to spend the next week looking for a meaningful experience of Australian aboriginal culture. My guide for today, a Pitjantjatjara man named Wally Jacob, is late—so I've been killing time by taking photos of central Australia's iconic sandstone landmark and the dusty, red desert that surrounds it.
I've always prided myself on traveling independently in unfamiliar cultures, but joining a guided tour of aboriginal Uluru is something of a necessity: Indigenous people in this part of Australia are famously averse to the notion of random backpackers wandering onto tribal land without a formal welcome, and anthropologists have noted that Aborigines generally prefer busloads of superficial tourists (who buy a lot of souvenirs and are quickly gone) to more earnest seekers, who unwittingly traipse through ceremonial lands, make themselves at home, and ask a lot of intrusive questions. This cultural distaste for drop-in visitors goes back to the earliest interactions with Europeans in Australia. The first aboriginal phrase recorded by 18th-century British convict-settlers was warra-warra ("go away"), and Capt. James Cook noted in his 1770 expedition journal that, in spite of his attempts to interact with indigenous Australians, "all they seemed to want was for us to be gone."
Since it has become unrealistic for outsiders to "be gone" from this Australian landscape, local Aborigines have used organized tours as a way of retaining control over how visitors see their ancestral homeland. Besides competition from nonaboriginal tours—including camel treks and helicopter flyovers—local control is certainly not all-encompassing: Because of functional compromises in regaining legal ownership of Uluru from the Australian government in the 1980s, climbing the rock was never formally outlawed. And, given that 250,000 or so tourists ascend the sacred site each year in defiance of Pitjantjatjara wishes, it's safe to assume that many visitors are more interested in the scenic pleasures of the monolith than the aboriginal culture that surrounds it. During the tourist high season, the nearby hotel complex swells to become the fourth-most-populous settlement in Australia's Northern Territory—and more people pass by Uluru in a single week than Pitjantjatjara people of previous generations saw in a lifetime.
When Wally arrives—dressed in flip-flop sandals, dirty brown pants, and a crisp blue oxford shirt that reads "Anangu Tours"—he barely notices the crowds of tourists. Instead, he grins and points to a spot 20 feet away from us. "Ngintaka," he says.
I look to Keiran Lusk, the tall, salt-and-pepper bearded Australian who serves as Wally's interpreter. "Perentie lizard," he says. A couple of seconds pass before I see the wrinkly, long-necked reptile—a 4-foot-long creature that has probably been sitting there since I first arrived. "No worries," Keiran confides. "I didn't see him, either."
Now that the ngintaka has been spotted, a knot of tourists gathers. Several cameras flash at once, and the lizard flees. Wally shrugs, tugs a brown Billabong ball cap onto his head, and leads us down the hiking trail.
As we skirt the base of Uluru, I chat indirectly with the gray-haired Pitjantjatjara guide, asking my questions via Keiran. Wally tells me that he was born in the bush 53 years ago, then taken by his mother to a Lutheran mission, where he was given his European name. He tells me that he's tired today, because he was busy collecting spear-wood the night before. He tells me about his efforts to teach old traditions to Pitjantjatjara teenagers, who often prefer video games or hip-hop music to spear-hunting and bushcraft. These young people, he says with a weary giggle, are like tourists: It's hard to hold their attention for very long.
Keiran adds details and clarifications as he translates for Wally. "Modern improvements have had mixed results in aboriginal Australia," he says. "The younger generation is living on TV and junk food. They're losing a part of themselves because they've lost their connection to the land. Some of them are dying before their parents because of alcoholism or diabetes."
As he says this, Keiran keeps an eye on people in other tour groups, and he casually steps into the line of sight whenever someone tries to take Wally's picture. When I ask him why he does this, Keiran tells me it's not just an issue of respect, but also business integrity. "Tourists love to have aboriginals in their pictures of Uluru. It makes the photos seem more authentic. But if we let every random person take Wally's picture, people would lose an incentive for taking our tours. Plus, we'd never get anything done."
Wally leads us to a cave at the base of Uluru that is associated with the mala tjurukpa, or "hare wallaby dreaming," which describes an event in Pitjantjatjara prehistory. Such mythic stories of "dreamtime"—epic tales wherein snakes walk, wallabies throw spears, and mulga seeds seek revenge—are central to aboriginal religious and ethical beliefs, describing in detail the creation of the world and humankind's role in it. Celebrated in classic travel books like Bruce Chatwin's The Songlines, these dreamtime stories are one of the most intriguing aspects of indigenous Australian culture.
The stories are also one of the most misunderstood aspects of indigenous culture. One hundred years ago, for example, European anthropologists believed that a central dreamtime story for the Pitjantjatjara involved the pungkalungu—giant, flesh-eating ogres who exacted revenge for misdeeds. As it turned out, pungkalungu stories were merely informal Pitjantjatjara folk tales—a local variation of the bogeyman, used to scare naughty children.
" 'Dreamtime' is an imperfect translation," Keiran tells me. "Tjurukpa, as the Pitjantjatjara understand it, is no dream. There's no good equivalent word in English; it's a kind of traditional law, which describes history, geography, and morality. Researchers estimate humans have lived near Uluru for 22,000 years, but the Pitjantjatjara believe that they have always been here, that tjurukpa is part of an ongoing condition, not a mythic past. This oral tradition is accumulated through years of ceremonial initiation and life experience, and it's one of the most technically and legally complex religious systems in the world."
Keiran goes on to relate the dreamtime story of mythic hare-wallabies who visited Uluru and unwittingly found themselves in a feud with the mulga-seed men, the wintalka. The vengeful wintalka created a dog monster to destroy the ceremonial camp of the hare-wallaby men, and signs of the struggle are evident in the lumps and notches of Uluru's furrowed red slopes.
As stories go, the mala tjurukpa isn't particularly spellbinding, but Keiran tells me the purpose of tjurukpa is not to entertain but to teach lessons about respecting ceremonial rules or finding food. "Besides," he says, "you're only getting a small fragment of the story, which itself is connected with other stories. To fully understand the tjurukpa, you'd have to live close to the land for many years. Even then, tradition dictates what you can and cannot know. Wally may be a male elder, but that doesn't mean he has access to female stories and ceremonies."
I notice Wally has wandered off and is now rolling a cigarette under a tree near the Kantju Gorge water hole. "Piiwi," he says, as Keiran and I approach him. He points up at the tree, but it's several moments before I spot a pair of owllike tawny frogmouths—mother and hatchling—perched on a branch. Their coloring is so similar to the tree bark that I can just barely make them out. "She's moved," Wally says to Keiran. "She used to live in a different place. I've never seen her here before. And I never knew she'd had babies."
As Wally puffs on his cigarette and grins up at the piiwi, I realize that his very strength as a tour guide is that he doesn't really give a crap about tourists. Instead of trying to deliver standardized cultural information, the Pitjantjatjara elder is merely offering me the chance to tag along as he enjoys a stroll in his homeland. And, while a morning tour of Uluru can hardly do aboriginal heritage justice, Wally's keen eye for the land hints at a richer cultural story. His story is, in fact, the tale of the oldest continuous culture in the world—stretching well into the Pleistocene Age, when people lived with no permanent possessions, no food preservation, and no distinction between labor and leisure. It's a tale of the first continent in human history to be settled by sea travel, 60,000 years ago—and the intimate knowledge of climate, animal habits, plant cycles, and insect life necessary to subsist in a harsh land.
It's also a story that gets muddled by the noise of the modern world—though modernity seems to be popularizing Pitjantjatjara culture as much as it compromises it. Indeed, even though resort restaurants, camel treks, and tour buses would seem to diminish the aboriginal presence here, the constant stream of visitors creates an inevitable market of fascination in the local culture. Among the hundreds of historically distinctive indigenous societies within Australia, mass tourism has transformed the Pitjantjatjara into an antipodean equivalent of the Navajo—a culture that is celebrated and romanticized by the same public consciousness that threatens to dilute it.
When our morning trek concludes, Keiran mentions that I can buy into a more in-depth Pitjantjatjara tour tomorrow, where I'll be able to dine on witchety grubs, identify bush fruits, and learn how to throw a spear.
I decline—not because I don't want to do these things, but because of that old tourist irony: To get a proper taste of aboriginal culture, I feel I need to find a landscape that isn't so overrun by other tourists.
Bidding my Uluru guides farewell, I fire up my rental car and head east on the Lasseter Highway.
From: Rolf Potts
Subject: If It's Tuesday, This Must Be Arrernte Country
Posted Tuesday, March 6, 2007, at 11:22 AM ET
Travelers wanting to catch a glimpse of an aboriginal dance performance near the tidy Australian outback town of Alice Springs are usually pointed to the Red Centre Dreaming show, which includes a three-course buffet dinner and all the sparkling wine you can drink. Since the local Arrernte Aborigines don't feel comfortable sharing their ceremonial dances in front of a paying audience, the Red Centre Dreaming performers are brought in from the state of Queensland, hundreds of miles away. In cultural terms, watching Queensland aboriginal dances in Alice Springs is kind of like going to Denmark to watch a flamenco performance—but the tourists here don't seem to mind.
Though I'm trying my best to understand the cultural intricacies of indigenous Australian society, at times it can be hard to keep up with all the new information. Yesterday, while visiting Uluru National Park, I managed to learn a number of Pitjantjatjara aboriginal words, such as kapi, which means "water," and tjala, which means "honey ant." Today, having driven five hours to Alice Springs—a small increment on any map of Australia—I've discovered that these words are now useless. Here, in the local Arrernte language, "water" is kwatye; "honey ant" is yerrampe. For travelers hoping to learn about aboriginal culture while seeing the sights of central Australia, this can be somewhat befuddling—kind of like the "If it's Tuesday, this must be Belgium" phenomenon of Western European package tourism, but without any easily identifiable frontiers.
Before the arrival of European interlopers, indigenous Australian societies spoke around 250 languages and 700 dialects. Though all these aboriginal subcultures shared a land-based nomadic lifestyle, similar religious practices, and some forms of intertribal trade, they never developed a collective sense of "aboriginal" identity, and broad cultural variations existed across relatively short distances. British settlers in the late 18th century, for example, noted that Aborigines on the north side of Sydney Harbor spoke a different language from those living on the south side. To this day, most indigenous Australians identify more with their historical kinship group than a general "aboriginal" identity, and the closest thing to a cultural lingua franca is English (which is usually pidginized, since its vocabulary isn't well suited to expressing the nature-based indigenous worldview).
Thus, a visit to Alice Springs can be confusing, since the town functions as an administrative center that attracts people from all parts of central Australia. Tourists browsing the souvenir shops and indigenous-art galleries along the Todd Street Mall might assume that the groups of aboriginal people dozing along the walkway are all hard-luck locals—an outback variation of the urban homeless—when, in fact, there's a good chance those aboriginal folks are themselves tourists to Alice Springs. One group lounging along Todd Mall, for example, might be a family of Pintupi speakers in town for a daughter's softball tournament; another might be Kaytetye women who've hitched in for land-rights hearings; a third group might be young Alyawarr men indulging in a one-week bender, since their elders don't allow alcohol on indigenous land. And, since more than 20 percent of Alice Springs' 30,000 permanent residents are of aboriginal heritage, all these visitors might have trouble relating to indigenous locals, who are known to drive Land Cruisers, live in suburban bungalows, and feel more comfortable speaking English than their traditional languages.
My guide here in Alice Springs, a handsome, 46-year-old Arrernte man named Bob Taylor, speaks almost no Arrernte. This is because, at age 8, he was forcibly taken from his Arrernte mother and—with the approval of the Australian government—sent to a home for "half-caste" aboriginal children in South Australia, where, for the next nine years, he was allowed to speak only English. More than 100,000 indigenous children, collectively called the "Stolen Generation," suffered this practice of enforced assimilation between 1910 and 1970. Unhappily trapped between cultures as a young man, Bob eventually found his calling as a chef and wandered his way to Europe, where he landed work at various five-star hotel restaurants in Holland. Ask him about this experience, and he'll tell you about the idiosyncrasies of his Dutch ex-girlfriends with the same affection and enthusiasm he uses to describe his Arrernte cousins.
Bob started his tour operation two years ago, as a way of embracing his heritage and taking a break from the boozy trappings of restaurant culture. His business, RT Tours, has a fleet of one 12-person bus; he is the only employee. Since this is low season for tourists, I am his lone client. Today we are driving 50 miles out of Alice Springs to West MacDonnell National Park, where Bob plans to grill kangaroo filets and teach me how to find bush food. I notice he's packed a didgeridoo—a long, wooden, tubelike aboriginal instrument famous for its growling, ethereal sound. From my research, I know that the Arrernte people didn't historically use the didgeridoo, but I don't mention this to Bob.
As we drive, the landscape outside our bus is spectacular: prickly yellow spinifex grass clumped in the dark orange soil; furrowed ridges of dusty purple rock; broad blue horizons. Twice the size of California, Northern Territory is home to just over 200,000 people (most of whom live in Darwin, on the northern coast), and the sense of dry, sprawling emptiness is visceral and humbling. Leathery kangaroo carcasses—roadkill, from the looks of it—fringe the roadside.
I ask Bob how it feels to be a child of the Stolen Generation, but he doesn't seem to want to dwell on it. Instead, he steers the conversation to his business and how he feels he's in a unique position to bridge two cultures. "Tourism is a great opportunity for aboriginal people to share their culture and create economic opportunities," he says. "The biggest problem is that we're not really driven by the dollar. Most aboriginal businesspeople are more interested in living close to the land, getting off welfare, and preserving traditions for future generations. I like to think that my business is an example of the opportunities that are out there."
"What kinds of people usually come on your tours?"
"Europeans. A lot of Germans, plus some Italians and French. For some reason, these people are interested in indigenous cultures from all over the world. That means my main competition isn't Sydney or the Great Barrier Reef, but places like Nepal and Peru. Aboriginal tour operators are trying to get the word out, trying to convince people that our culture is as old and interesting as you'll find anywhere. I just wish we could get more of you Americans to come out."
"You don't get many Americans?"
"American tourists out here tend to be older folks, who don't like hiking around and getting dirty. They're happy to see a dance or listen to a didgeridoo at their hotel, then fly back to Sydney. But if you want to understand aboriginal Australia, you have to come here for the land itself. If you don't experience the flies and the heat and the long distances, you're going to miss the point."
When we arrive at MacDonnell National Park, Bob dons a broad-brimmed felt hat and leads me on a two-hour hike along the steep, red-rock chasms. Here, we spot rock wallabies along the cliffs, examine the sandy foxholes made by kangaroos digging for water, and scan the landscape for bush food. Since plants don't grow much in the searing heat of the Australian summer, Bob breaks out a Tupperware jar containing fruits he's collected on other journeys. I can't keep up with the Arrernte words for all the food, but Bob points out that each fruit has an English nickname: bush fig, bush cucumber, bush banana, bush orange. As I sample the foods, I find that these names are somewhat arbitrary: The bush coconut, for example, is sweet and fleshy, but it resembles a tree gall; the bush tomato has an acidic, raisiny taste. Bob tells me that over 30 edible bush fruits are known to aboriginals in central Australia and that the European explorers who famously starved to death here in the 19th century died in a land where indigenous people had prospered for 20,000 years.
Leading me back out of the canyons, Bob sets up kitchen gear at a picnic area and cooks me a tasty lunch of seared kangaroo filets and bread dipped in bush spices. As I eat, he takes out the didgeridoo and begins to play, showing me how he circulates air through his nose to make a continuous breath. As much as I enjoy the spooky, reverberating music, I can't contain my curiosity. "I've read that the didgeridoo doesn't come from central Australia," I say when he's finished.
"You're right," he says. "It comes from the north, in Arnhem Land. But I've found that tourists want to hear aboriginals play the didgeridoo, regardless of where it comes from. When you run a business like mine, that's the trick: balancing people's expectations of aboriginal culture with the real thing. That's why a town like Alice Springs has galleries full of paintings from a culture that never had houses to hang them in."
"You mean all that aboriginal art isn't authentic?"
"It depends on what you mean by authentic. But yeah: If you want to see how tourist demand changes local traditions, look at the aboriginal art business."
The following day, I head into Alice Springs to do just that.
Rolf Potts is the author of Vagabonding: An Uncommon Guide to the Art of Long-Term World Travel. His travel-themed blog can be found at Vagablogging.net.
Article URL: http://www.slate.com/id/2161053/
Copyright 2006 Washingtonpost.Newsweek Interactive Co. LLC
Well-traveled
Going Native in the Australian Outback
The tricky task of balancing visitors' expectations of aboriginal culture with the real thing.
By Rolf Potts
Updated Tuesday, March 6, 2007, at 11:22 AM ET
From: Rolf Potts
Subject: The Pitjantjatjara Word for Tourists and Ants Is One and the Same
Posted Monday, March 5, 2007, at 1:07 PM ET
Here's some advice for anyone hoping to capture the contradictions of Australian outback tourism within a single snapshot: Bring your camera to the base of Uluru—the massive orange-red monolith smack in the center of the Australian continent—and aim the lower half of your viewfinder at the large sign near the hiking trailhead. This sign, which was erected by the local Pitjantjatjara people, solemnly requests that you don't climb up the face of a rock that they consider sacred. Aim your camera at a certain angle, however, and the top half of your viewfinder will capture the knots of tourists who've decided to climb the rock anyway (aided by a safety chain designated by the Australian National Park Service for that very purpose).
The Pitjantjatjara euphemism for tourists in their homeland is minga tjuta—"ants"—and from this angle you can see why: Looking up from the base of Uluru, the tidy lines of people inching up the climbing trail look like insects on a mound.
I, too, have come to central Australia as a minga tjuta, though I'm not here to scale the slopes of Uluru. Rather, I have resolved to spend the next week looking for a meaningful experience of Australian aboriginal culture. My guide for today, a Pitjantjatjara man named Wally Jacob, is late—so I've been killing time by taking photos of central Australia's iconic sandstone landmark and the dusty, red desert that surrounds it.
I've always prided myself on traveling independently in unfamiliar cultures, but joining a guided tour of aboriginal Uluru is something of a necessity: Indigenous people in this part of Australia are famously averse to the notion of random backpackers wandering onto tribal land without a formal welcome, and anthropologists have noted that Aborigines generally prefer busloads of superficial tourists (who buy a lot of souvenirs and are quickly gone) to more earnest seekers, who unwittingly traipse through ceremonial lands, make themselves at home, and ask a lot of intrusive questions. This cultural distaste for drop-in visitors goes back to the earliest interactions with Europeans in Australia. The first aboriginal phrase recorded by 18th-century British convict-settlers was warra-warra ("go away"), and Capt. James Cook noted in his 1770 expedition journal that, in spite of his attempts to interact with indigenous Australians, "all they seemed to want was for us to be gone."
Since it has become unrealistic for outsiders to "be gone" from this Australian landscape, local Aborigines have used organized tours as a way of retaining control over how visitors see their ancestral homeland. Besides competition from nonaboriginal tours—including camel treks and helicopter flyovers—local control is certainly not all-encompassing: Because of functional compromises in regaining legal ownership of Uluru from the Australian government in the 1980s, climbing the rock was never formally outlawed. And, given that 250,000 or so tourists ascend the sacred site each year in defiance of Pitjantjatjara wishes, it's safe to assume that many visitors are more interested in the scenic pleasures of the monolith than the aboriginal culture that surrounds it. During the tourist high season, the nearby hotel complex swells to become the fourth-most-populous settlement in Australia's Northern Territory—and more people pass by Uluru in a single week than Pitjantjatjara people of previous generations saw in a lifetime.
When Wally arrives—dressed in flip-flop sandals, dirty brown pants, and a crisp blue oxford shirt that reads "Anangu Tours"—he barely notices the crowds of tourists. Instead, he grins and points to a spot 20 feet away from us. "Ngintaka," he says.
I look to Keiran Lusk, the tall, salt-and-pepper bearded Australian who serves as Wally's interpreter. "Perentie lizard," he says. A couple of seconds pass before I see the wrinkly, long-necked reptile—a 4-foot-long creature that has probably been sitting there since I first arrived. "No worries," Keiran confides. "I didn't see him, either."
Now that the ngintaka has been spotted, a knot of tourists gathers. Several cameras flash at once, and the lizard flees. Wally shrugs, tugs a brown Billabong ball cap onto his head, and leads us down the hiking trail.
As we skirt the base of Uluru, I chat indirectly with the gray-haired Pitjantjatjara guide, asking my questions via Keiran. Wally tells me that he was born in the bush 53 years ago, then taken by his mother to a Lutheran mission, where he was given his European name. He tells me that he's tired today, because he was busy collecting spear-wood the night before. He tells me about his efforts to teach old traditions to Pitjantjatjara teenagers, who often prefer video games or hip-hop music to spear-hunting and bushcraft. These young people, he says with a weary giggle, are like tourists: It's hard to hold their attention for very long.
Keiran adds details and clarifications as he translates for Wally. "Modern improvements have had mixed results in aboriginal Australia," he says. "The younger generation is living on TV and junk food. They're losing a part of themselves because they've lost their connection to the land. Some of them are dying before their parents because of alcoholism or diabetes."
As he says this, Keiran keeps an eye on people in other tour groups, and he casually steps into the line of sight whenever someone tries to take Wally's picture. When I ask him why he does this, Keiran tells me it's not just an issue of respect, but also business integrity. "Tourists love to have aboriginals in their pictures of Uluru. It makes the photos seem more authentic. But if we let every random person take Wally's picture, people would lose an incentive for taking our tours. Plus, we'd never get anything done."
Wally leads us to a cave at the base of Uluru that is associated with the mala tjurukpa, or "hare wallaby dreaming," which describes an event in Pitjantjatjara prehistory. Such mythic stories of "dreamtime"—epic tales wherein snakes walk, wallabies throw spears, and mulga seeds seek revenge—are central to aboriginal religious and ethical beliefs, describing in detail the creation of the world and humankind's role in it. Celebrated in classic travel books like Bruce Chatwin's The Songlines, these dreamtime stories are one of the most intriguing aspects of indigenous Australian culture.
The stories are also one of the most misunderstood aspects of indigenous culture. One hundred years ago, for example, European anthropologists believed that a central dreamtime story for the Pitjantjatjara involved the pungkalungu—giant, flesh-eating ogres who exacted revenge for misdeeds. As it turned out, pungkalungu stories were merely informal Pitjantjatjara folk tales—a local variation of the bogeyman, used to scare naughty children.
" 'Dreamtime' is an imperfect translation," Keiran tells me. "Tjurukpa, as the Pitjantjatjara understand it, is no dream. There's no good equivalent word in English; it's a kind of traditional law, which describes history, geography, and morality. Researchers estimate humans have lived near Uluru for 22,000 years, but the Pitjantjatjara believe that they have always been here, that tjurukpa is part of an ongoing condition, not a mythic past. This oral tradition is accumulated through years of ceremonial initiation and life experience, and it's one of the most technically and legally complex religious systems in the world."
Keiran goes on to relate the dreamtime story of mythic hare-wallabies who visited Uluru and unwittingly found themselves in a feud with the mulga-seed men, the wintalka. The vengeful wintalka created a dog monster to destroy the ceremonial camp of the hare-wallaby men, and signs of the struggle are evident in the lumps and notches of Uluru's furrowed red slopes.
As stories go, the mala tjurukpa isn't particularly spellbinding, but Keiran tells me the purpose of tjurukpa is not to entertain but to teach lessons about respecting ceremonial rules or finding food. "Besides," he says, "you're only getting a small fragment of the story, which itself is connected with other stories. To fully understand the tjurukpa, you'd have to live close to the land for many years. Even then, tradition dictates what you can and cannot know. Wally may be a male elder, but that doesn't mean he has access to female stories and ceremonies."
I notice Wally has wandered off and is now rolling a cigarette under a tree near the Kantju Gorge water hole. "Piiwi," he says, as Keiran and I approach him. He points up at the tree, but it's several moments before I spot a pair of owllike tawny frogmouths—mother and hatchling—perched on a branch. Their coloring is so similar to the tree bark that I can just barely make them out. "She's moved," Wally says to Keiran. "She used to live in a different place. I've never seen her here before. And I never knew she'd had babies."
As Wally puffs on his cigarette and grins up at the piiwi, I realize that his very strength as a tour guide is that he doesn't really give a crap about tourists. Instead of trying to deliver standardized cultural information, the Pitjantjatjara elder is merely offering me the chance to tag along as he enjoys a stroll in his homeland. And, while a morning tour of Uluru can hardly do aboriginal heritage justice, Wally's keen eye for the land hints at a richer cultural story. His story is, in fact, the tale of the oldest continuous culture in the world—stretching well into the Pleistocene Age, when people lived with no permanent possessions, no food preservation, and no distinction between labor and leisure. It's a tale of the first continent in human history to be settled by sea travel, 60,000 years ago—and the intimate knowledge of climate, animal habits, plant cycles, and insect life necessary to subsist in a harsh land.
It's also a story that gets muddled by the noise of the modern world—though modernity seems to be popularizing Pitjantjatjara culture as much as it compromises it. Indeed, even though resort restaurants, camel treks, and tour buses would seem to diminish the aboriginal presence here, the constant stream of visitors creates an inevitable market of fascination in the local culture. Among the hundreds of historically distinctive indigenous societies within Australia, mass tourism has transformed the Pitjantjatjara into an antipodean equivalent of the Navajo—a culture that is celebrated and romanticized by the same public consciousness that threatens to dilute it.
When our morning trek concludes, Keiran mentions that I can buy into a more in-depth Pitjantjatjara tour tomorrow, where I'll be able to dine on witchety grubs, identify bush fruits, and learn how to throw a spear.
I decline—not because I don't want to do these things, but because of that old tourist irony: To get a proper taste of aboriginal culture, I feel I need to find a landscape that isn't so overrun by other tourists.
Bidding my Uluru guides farewell, I fire up my rental car and head east on the Lasseter Highway.
From: Rolf Potts
Subject: If It's Tuesday, This Must Be Arrernte Country
Posted Tuesday, March 6, 2007, at 11:22 AM ET
Travelers wanting to catch a glimpse of an aboriginal dance performance near the tidy Australian outback town of Alice Springs are usually pointed to the Red Centre Dreaming show, which includes a three-course buffet dinner and all the sparkling wine you can drink. Since the local Arrernte Aborigines don't feel comfortable sharing their ceremonial dances in front of a paying audience, the Red Centre Dreaming performers are brought in from the state of Queensland, hundreds of miles away. In cultural terms, watching Queensland aboriginal dances in Alice Springs is kind of like going to Denmark to watch a flamenco performance—but the tourists here don't seem to mind.
Though I'm trying my best to understand the cultural intricacies of indigenous Australian society, at times it can be hard to keep up with all the new information. Yesterday, while visiting Uluru National Park, I managed to learn a number of Pitjantjatjara aboriginal words, such as kapi, which means "water," and tjala, which means "honey ant." Today, having driven five hours to Alice Springs—a small increment on any map of Australia—I've discovered that these words are now useless. Here, in the local Arrernte language, "water" is kwatye; "honey ant" is yerrampe. For travelers hoping to learn about aboriginal culture while seeing the sights of central Australia, this can be somewhat befuddling—kind of like the "If it's Tuesday, this must be Belgium" phenomenon of Western European package tourism, but without any easily identifiable frontiers.
Before the arrival of European interlopers, indigenous Australian societies spoke around 250 languages and 700 dialects. Though all these aboriginal subcultures shared a land-based nomadic lifestyle, similar religious practices, and some forms of intertribal trade, they never developed a collective sense of "aboriginal" identity, and broad cultural variations existed across relatively short distances. British settlers in the late 18th century, for example, noted that Aborigines on the north side of Sydney Harbor spoke a different language from those living on the south side. To this day, most indigenous Australians identify more with their historical kinship group than a general "aboriginal" identity, and the closest thing to a cultural lingua franca is English (which is usually pidginized, since its vocabulary isn't well suited to expressing the nature-based indigenous worldview).
Thus, a visit to Alice Springs can be confusing, since the town functions as an administrative center that attracts people from all parts of central Australia. Tourists browsing the souvenir shops and indigenous-art galleries along the Todd Street Mall might assume that the groups of aboriginal people dozing along the walkway are all hard-luck locals—an outback variation of the urban homeless—when, in fact, there's a good chance those aboriginal folks are themselves tourists to Alice Springs. One group lounging along Todd Mall, for example, might be a family of Pintupi speakers in town for a daughter's softball tournament; another might be Kaytetye women who've hitched in for land-rights hearings; a third group might be young Alyawarr men indulging in a one-week bender, since their elders don't allow alcohol on indigenous land. And, since more than 20 percent of Alice Springs' 30,000 permanent residents are of aboriginal heritage, all these visitors might have trouble relating to indigenous locals, who are known to drive Land Cruisers, live in suburban bungalows, and feel more comfortable speaking English than their traditional languages.
My guide here in Alice Springs, a handsome, 46-year-old Arrernte man named Bob Taylor, speaks almost no Arrernte. This is because, at age 8, he was forcibly taken from his Arrernte mother and—with the approval of the Australian government—sent to a home for "half-caste" aboriginal children in South Australia, where, for the next nine years, he was allowed to speak only English. More than 100,000 indigenous children, collectively called the "Stolen Generation," suffered this practice of enforced assimilation between 1910 and 1970. Unhappily trapped between cultures as a young man, Bob eventually found his calling as a chef and wandered his way to Europe, where he landed work at various five-star hotel restaurants in Holland. Ask him about this experience, and he'll tell you about the idiosyncrasies of his Dutch ex-girlfriends with the same affection and enthusiasm he uses to describe his Arrernte cousins.
Bob started his tour operation two years ago, as a way of embracing his heritage and taking a break from the boozy trappings of restaurant culture. His business, RT Tours, has a fleet of one 12-person bus; he is the only employee. Since this is low season for tourists, I am his lone client. Today we are driving 50 miles out of Alice Springs to West MacDonnell National Park, where Bob plans to grill kangaroo filets and teach me how to find bush food. I notice he's packed a didgeridoo—a long, wooden, tubelike aboriginal instrument famous for its growling, ethereal sound. From my research, I know that the Arrernte people didn't historically use the didgeridoo, but I don't mention this to Bob.
As we drive, the landscape outside our bus is spectacular: prickly yellow spinifex grass clumped in the dark orange soil; furrowed ridges of dusty purple rock; broad blue horizons. Twice the size of California, Northern Territory is home to just over 200,000 people (most of whom live in Darwin, on the northern coast), and the sense of dry, sprawling emptiness is visceral and humbling. Leathery kangaroo carcasses—roadkill, from the looks of it—fringe the roadside.
I ask Bob how it feels to be a child of the Stolen Generation, but he doesn't seem to want to dwell on it. Instead, he steers the conversation to his business and how he feels he's in a unique position to bridge two cultures. "Tourism is a great opportunity for aboriginal people to share their culture and create economic opportunities," he says. "The biggest problem is that we're not really driven by the dollar. Most aboriginal businesspeople are more interested in living close to the land, getting off welfare, and preserving traditions for future generations. I like to think that my business is an example of the opportunities that are out there."
"What kinds of people usually come on your tours?"
"Europeans. A lot of Germans, plus some Italians and French. For some reason, these people are interested in indigenous cultures from all over the world. That means my main competition isn't Sydney or the Great Barrier Reef, but places like Nepal and Peru. Aboriginal tour operators are trying to get the word out, trying to convince people that our culture is as old and interesting as you'll find anywhere. I just wish we could get more of you Americans to come out."
"You don't get many Americans?"
"American tourists out here tend to be older folks, who don't like hiking around and getting dirty. They're happy to see a dance or listen to a didgeridoo at their hotel, then fly back to Sydney. But if you want to understand aboriginal Australia, you have to come here for the land itself. If you don't experience the flies and the heat and the long distances, you're going to miss the point."
When we arrive at MacDonnell National Park, Bob dons a broad-brimmed felt hat and leads me on a two-hour hike along the steep, red-rock chasms. Here, we spot rock wallabies along the cliffs, examine the sandy foxholes made by kangaroos digging for water, and scan the landscape for bush food. Since plants don't grow much in the searing heat of the Australian summer, Bob breaks out a Tupperware jar containing fruits he's collected on other journeys. I can't keep up with the Arrernte words for all the food, but Bob points out that each fruit has an English nickname: bush fig, bush cucumber, bush banana, bush orange. As I sample the foods, I find that these names are somewhat arbitrary: The bush coconut, for example, is sweet and fleshy, but it resembles a tree gall; the bush tomato has an acidic, raisiny taste. Bob tells me that over 30 edible bush fruits are known to aboriginals in central Australia and that the European explorers who famously starved to death here in the 19th century died in a land where indigenous people had prospered for 20,000 years.
Leading me back out of the canyons, Bob sets up kitchen gear at a picnic area and cooks me a tasty lunch of seared kangaroo filets and bread dipped in bush spices. As I eat, he takes out the didgeridoo and begins to play, showing me how he circulates air through his nose to make a continuous breath. As much as I enjoy the spooky, reverberating music, I can't contain my curiosity. "I've read that the didgeridoo doesn't come from central Australia," I say when he's finished.
"You're right," he says. "It comes from the north, in Arnhem Land. But I've found that tourists want to hear aboriginals play the didgeridoo, regardless of where it comes from. When you run a business like mine, that's the trick: balancing people's expectations of aboriginal culture with the real thing. That's why a town like Alice Springs has galleries full of paintings from a culture that never had houses to hang them in."
"You mean all that aboriginal art isn't authentic?"
"It depends on what you mean by authentic. But yeah: If you want to see how tourist demand changes local traditions, look at the aboriginal art business."
The following day, I head into Alice Springs to do just that.
Rolf Potts is the author of Vagabonding: An Uncommon Guide to the Art of Long-Term World Travel. His travel-themed blog can be found at Vagablogging.net.
Article URL: http://www.slate.com/id/2161053/
Copyright 2006 Washingtonpost.Newsweek Interactive Co. LLC
Friday, February 09, 2007
Slum Tourism in Kenya
Reuters
"Slum tourism" stirs controversy in Kenya
By Andrew CawthorneFri Feb 9, 7:51 AM ET
It's the de rigueur stop off for caring foreign dignitaries. It reached a worldwide audience as a backdrop to the British blockbuster "The Constant Gardener."
Any journalist wanting a quick Africa poverty story can find it there in half an hour. And now at least one travel agency offers tours round Kenya's Kibera slum, one of Africa's largest.
"People are getting tired of the Maasai Mara and wildlife. No one is enlightening us about other issues. So I've come up with a new thing -- slum tours," enthused James Asudi, general manager of Kenyan-based Victoria Safaris.
But not everyone in Kenya is waxing so lyrical about the trail of one-day visitors treading the rubbish-strewn paths, sampling the sewage smell, and photographing the tin-roof shacks that house 800,000 of the nation's poorest in a Nairobi valley.
Indeed, the recent well-meaning visit of U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon -- coming hard on the heels of other foreign celebrities including even U.S. comedian Chris Rock -- drew a stern editorial from Kenya's leading newspaper.
"What is this fascination with Kibera among people who do not know what real poverty means?" asked the Daily Nation.
"More to the point, how do Kenyans themselves feel about this back-handed compliment as the custodians of backwardness, filth, misery and absolute deprivation?"
Answer: Not a lot, at least according to an informal, random survey by this correspondent in Kibera itself.
While all recognize the potential for good from such attention, plus the pressure it puts on the government and others to help slum-dwellers, most said tangible benefits so far were few, while the embarrassment factor was growing every day.
"They see us like puppets, they want to come and take pictures, have a little walk, tell their friends they've been to the worst slum in Africa," said car-wash worker David Kabala.
"But nothing changes for us. If someone comes, let him do something for us. Or if they really want to know how we think and feel, come and spend a night, or walk round when it's pouring with rain here and the paths are like rivers."
"PITY TOURS"
Even groups working day-in, day-out in Kibera -- and dependent on foreign funding -- are getting weary.
Salim Mohamed, project director for the Carolina for Kibera charity, said the stream of high-profile visits to the 3 km-long (1.8 mile) corridor was raising expectations among residents which, when not quickly fulfilled, fueled frustration with the appalling living conditions.
Visits by tourists, which reached a crescendo during the recent anti-capitalist World Social Forum in Nairobi, were testing the local hospitality culture to the limit, he added.
"It's getting out of control. And if it's not done in a way the community appreciates, it's insulting to them," said Mohamed, who was born in another major Nairobi slum, Mathare.
"I think this concept started in Soweto (in South Africa). ... Kibera does not need pity tours, it needs action."
Echoing a constant complaint by Africans of Western media, office administrator Christine Ochieng, 20, said the image of unmitigated misery in Kibera was not fair to her community.
"I can see how visiting the largest slum in Africa is very attractive to people, but there are so many untold stories here," she said, rattling off ideas she and friends would like to include in a local magazine they want to start.
Firstly, there is Kibera's hidden middle-class -- the people who have enough money to move out, but choose to stay because they can't bear the relative solitude of posher neighbors.
Then there's the plethora of self-help, art, dance, drama, and sports projects going on in Kibera. "But people just want to talk about poverty, poverty, poverty all the time," she said.
Victoria Safaris' manager Asudi, from the same Luo tribe which constitutes the majority of Kibera residents, insists the tour he offers of Kibera and other slums in Nairobi and Kisumu in west Kenya, are beneficial to locals.
"RAVE SPOT"
They raise awareness, and he hands his tourists back a percentage of their payment to donate to a cause they have seen on their walkabout, he says, such as a health or school project.
His publicity, however, has ruffled feathers. "After lunch, proceed to the Korokocho slum where you will be amazed with the number of roaming children," reads a typical paragraph.
Nairobi's chattering-classes are not amused.
"Kibera is the rave spot in Kenya," wrote one columnist sarcastically. "For where else can one see it all in one simple stop? The AIDS victims dying slowly on a cold, cardboard bed. The breastless teenager. ... Plastic-eating goats fighting small children ... and -- ah yes -- the famous 'shit-rolls-downhill-flying-toilets'. It is unbeatable."
Government spokesman Alfred Mutua has led a campaign to promote the bright side of Kenya and clean up its cities. He shakes his head when asked about the Kibera phenomenon.
"It is very sad that when dignitaries come here, the first place they run to is Kibera, the residents are getting tired of people coming and giving lip-service," he told Reuters.
"Kibera is the 'in' place everybody wants be associated with, whether they are doing anything about it or not. ... People look at others who are poor and destitute and get a 'feel good' attitude about themselves, that they are above that."
(Additional reporting by Wangui Kanina)
"Slum tourism" stirs controversy in Kenya
By Andrew CawthorneFri Feb 9, 7:51 AM ET
It's the de rigueur stop off for caring foreign dignitaries. It reached a worldwide audience as a backdrop to the British blockbuster "The Constant Gardener."
Any journalist wanting a quick Africa poverty story can find it there in half an hour. And now at least one travel agency offers tours round Kenya's Kibera slum, one of Africa's largest.
"People are getting tired of the Maasai Mara and wildlife. No one is enlightening us about other issues. So I've come up with a new thing -- slum tours," enthused James Asudi, general manager of Kenyan-based Victoria Safaris.
But not everyone in Kenya is waxing so lyrical about the trail of one-day visitors treading the rubbish-strewn paths, sampling the sewage smell, and photographing the tin-roof shacks that house 800,000 of the nation's poorest in a Nairobi valley.
Indeed, the recent well-meaning visit of U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon -- coming hard on the heels of other foreign celebrities including even U.S. comedian Chris Rock -- drew a stern editorial from Kenya's leading newspaper.
"What is this fascination with Kibera among people who do not know what real poverty means?" asked the Daily Nation.
"More to the point, how do Kenyans themselves feel about this back-handed compliment as the custodians of backwardness, filth, misery and absolute deprivation?"
Answer: Not a lot, at least according to an informal, random survey by this correspondent in Kibera itself.
While all recognize the potential for good from such attention, plus the pressure it puts on the government and others to help slum-dwellers, most said tangible benefits so far were few, while the embarrassment factor was growing every day.
"They see us like puppets, they want to come and take pictures, have a little walk, tell their friends they've been to the worst slum in Africa," said car-wash worker David Kabala.
"But nothing changes for us. If someone comes, let him do something for us. Or if they really want to know how we think and feel, come and spend a night, or walk round when it's pouring with rain here and the paths are like rivers."
"PITY TOURS"
Even groups working day-in, day-out in Kibera -- and dependent on foreign funding -- are getting weary.
Salim Mohamed, project director for the Carolina for Kibera charity, said the stream of high-profile visits to the 3 km-long (1.8 mile) corridor was raising expectations among residents which, when not quickly fulfilled, fueled frustration with the appalling living conditions.
Visits by tourists, which reached a crescendo during the recent anti-capitalist World Social Forum in Nairobi, were testing the local hospitality culture to the limit, he added.
"It's getting out of control. And if it's not done in a way the community appreciates, it's insulting to them," said Mohamed, who was born in another major Nairobi slum, Mathare.
"I think this concept started in Soweto (in South Africa). ... Kibera does not need pity tours, it needs action."
Echoing a constant complaint by Africans of Western media, office administrator Christine Ochieng, 20, said the image of unmitigated misery in Kibera was not fair to her community.
"I can see how visiting the largest slum in Africa is very attractive to people, but there are so many untold stories here," she said, rattling off ideas she and friends would like to include in a local magazine they want to start.
Firstly, there is Kibera's hidden middle-class -- the people who have enough money to move out, but choose to stay because they can't bear the relative solitude of posher neighbors.
Then there's the plethora of self-help, art, dance, drama, and sports projects going on in Kibera. "But people just want to talk about poverty, poverty, poverty all the time," she said.
Victoria Safaris' manager Asudi, from the same Luo tribe which constitutes the majority of Kibera residents, insists the tour he offers of Kibera and other slums in Nairobi and Kisumu in west Kenya, are beneficial to locals.
"RAVE SPOT"
They raise awareness, and he hands his tourists back a percentage of their payment to donate to a cause they have seen on their walkabout, he says, such as a health or school project.
His publicity, however, has ruffled feathers. "After lunch, proceed to the Korokocho slum where you will be amazed with the number of roaming children," reads a typical paragraph.
Nairobi's chattering-classes are not amused.
"Kibera is the rave spot in Kenya," wrote one columnist sarcastically. "For where else can one see it all in one simple stop? The AIDS victims dying slowly on a cold, cardboard bed. The breastless teenager. ... Plastic-eating goats fighting small children ... and -- ah yes -- the famous 'shit-rolls-downhill-flying-toilets'. It is unbeatable."
Government spokesman Alfred Mutua has led a campaign to promote the bright side of Kenya and clean up its cities. He shakes his head when asked about the Kibera phenomenon.
"It is very sad that when dignitaries come here, the first place they run to is Kibera, the residents are getting tired of people coming and giving lip-service," he told Reuters.
"Kibera is the 'in' place everybody wants be associated with, whether they are doing anything about it or not. ... People look at others who are poor and destitute and get a 'feel good' attitude about themselves, that they are above that."
(Additional reporting by Wangui Kanina)
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
