NHC`s complexes as catalysts in organic synthesis

Values are beliefs that relate to desirable end states or behaviours that transcend specific situations and by which behaviour and events are selected, evaluated and ordered in relative importance (Schwartz & Bilsky, 1990). Cultural values are part of what comprises habitus, our finely tuned understanding of how to behave appropriately within all of the fields that make up the culture of our society.

In terms of the forces and factors which influence the retention or loss of cultural values within the conduct of enterprise and tourism ventures in the Pacific, values are in large part kept intact by pressure from the group or community. For example, indigenous New Zealand Maori values are derived from Polynesian ancestry. In this case, community values/norms come from traditional/fundamental values that are rooted in the whanau (family) and include whakapono (trust), tika (integrity), pono (truth), manaaki (nurturing), tautoko (support) and hapai (uplift). Others are ‗Place‘

which identifies who you are, how you relate to others and where you belong and

‗Informal association‘ which creates connectedness. For Maori, networks are

‗holistic‘ in nature so that relationships are of primary importance and functional activity is secondary. So that whanua, iwi (tribal) and community networks take priority over functional contracts in the business realm (Robinson & Williams, 2001).

Similar sets of shared values within enterprises established by cultural communities in order to benefit Pacific communities are noted by Hailey (1987) and Tanoi (1993).

The Mucunabitu Iron Works Cooperative Society, established by the Mucunabitu family integrates the Fijian concept of the ‗good life‘ with modern management practices to create a ‗global épistème‘. This is an example of ‗dual excellence‘ in cultural and global values. The company has chosen values which allow it to function upon global business principles as well as local cultural practice, indicating that Fijian values are not antithetical to development (Huffer & Qalo, 2004; Qalo, 1997). The concept of vakiviti (the Fijian Way) contains genuine concern for one another, caring and expressing concern for the well-being of others, placing others ahead of oneself, supporting or looking up to them, as well as honouring, respecting, and upholding someone (Huffer & Qalo, 2004). Another example of an indigenous Pacific development philosophy is the TuVanuatu Kominiti which has developed its own bank (dealing in pigs, kava, shell money or currency) and an educational Institute (teaching self-reliance, animal husbandry, crop growing, fish, build houses, etc). The bank issues small loans to start up businesses and pay school fees, etc.

(Huffer & Qalo, 2004). Its intent is to strengthen the community at all levels by giving people a sense of purpose based on values they understand and respect.

Principles that organise the reciprocal exchanges of gifts at all levels of Tongan society are said to be: ‘ofa (love and generosity), faka‘apa‘apa (respect), and fetokoni‘aki (mutual assistance). All kin and kin-like relationships are expressed in some combination of these principles. Further, potential social relationships are actualised and maintained by mutual exchange and some degree of reciprocity is expected in all relationships (Evans, 2000). In the trans-national context it includes also the cultural value of tauhivä, that is, caring for socio-spatial relations (Kaili, 2005). Further, the Samoan expression teu le va means to cherish, nurse, and care for the va, the relationship ('Anae, 2007).

Exposure to western education and values has influenced choices of clothing, housing and food but the traditional system of language, extended family (aiga), elected chiefs (matai) and communal land tenure system (Freeman, 1964) endure to a large extent in American Samoa and is reflected in attitudes towards tourism. A village for example is paid for performance not the individuals. Land can be leased by an incumbent matai to foreign interests but it cannot be owned. Coastline is actually public land and villages control access to the beaches. Community obligations such as village or church projects take precedence over paid employment.

Thus tourism, if developed in Samoa, should be small-scale, locally managed and use local products. It should be supported by infrastructure e.g. rest rooms and be cognisant that the attractions of interest to tourists are located in residents‘ backyards and so should not be intrusive (Choy, 1984).

It can happen that in a cultural enterprise setting, if a value associated with economic innovation or individual success is not consistent with the conventional culture, then an entrepreneur can be frowned upon or even hated by others of the group (Lipset, 2000). The incompatibility of cultural values and touristic/commercial values have been emphasised (Allon, 2004; Wherry, 2006) and noted in a discussion of the importance of the values of mana (power, authority, social standing) and aroa in the social hierarchy and in perceptions, expectations and responses to tourists by hosts in Cook Island society (Berno, 1999). Power relationships in tourism are constantly changing and works in many directions and at many levels, occurring as micro-interactions between players in the tourism system (locals, tourists and brokers).

Tourists wield relatively little power in terms of the success or failure of sustainable (appropriate) tourism, rather, it lies in the hands of brokers and locals (Cheong &

Miller, 2000).

In the United States, minority group entrepreneurs were found to have received a smaller share of government contracts than their non-minority counterparts. They

earned less from their businesses than expected given their qualification levels, and were less likely to obtain bank credit (Young, 2002). A popular way to reduce the dependency of low income people on government welfare is the use of peer group oriented micro-enterprise loan funds similar to the Grameen Bank. The peer group model is based on four central principles: mutual support, eventual financial independence, personal growth and responsibility (more middle class) and skill growth (Taub, 1998).

Other issues for minority entrepreneurs are barriers to e-commerce, including start-up costs, security, and skilled personnel to maintain a website. Commonly, minority entrepreneurs need business information and assistance that encompasses accounting, legal, business planning, start-up information and guidance in ongoing operations (Young, 2002). Research with Black American business owners in the USA showed that the majority of business failures were amongst young, untrained people who lacked maturity, motivation, and persistence and had rushed to start their own businesses. Seventy five percent of these had received no business training, and 33%

had not completed high school. Yet the same study said 100% of all blacks who had family and personal role models in business circles were successful (Singer & Nosiri, 1988), showing the importance of mentoring.

In the formal tourism industry context, indigenous community enterprises are known to succeed in environments where the indigenous culture is the mainstream environment. Customers of these ventures accept the logic of commodification of inhabitant cultures in traditional environs. But does this hold when the context of culture is shifted to a minority position, far from diasporan homelands?

In the Pacific, research into the attitudes of indigenous and non-indigenous entrepreneurs to success in business found an above average education level and that good management, access to finance and level of financial investment, personal qualities and traits, and satisfactory government support were important (Yusuf, 1995). Ray (1999) cautions that traditional values and customs continue to exert considerable influence and power in shaping social, government and administrative structures in the Pacific context, so that imposition of a single governance model is inappropriate. Values and customs should be given due consideration in reform measures to ensure that they are acceptable to the community and are practical.

Many policy initiatives and programmes have failed to achieve the desired objectives of lifting the performance of Pacific Island economies or improving government functioning because essential features of these societies were not factored into new policies and programmes.

A review of best practice in the Pacific was undertaken by the PBCC Project Team, including this author, in 2001. The team visited seven indigenous culture facilities in

the South Pacific (Arrow International, 2002). They concluded that best practice characteristics for indigenous cultural tourism entrepreneurship were: explicit statements of traditional and commercial values, expectations of community as well as individual outcomes and sharing of cultural expertise in the public domain alongside preservation. The need for community control was also important as was the desire to retain authority within the community and encouragement of contemporary adaptations. The study noted that factors for a tourism attraction to succeed included: goodwill, determination and careful planning, assured financing and capitalisation, innovative and high quality design as well as a high profile location. Commitment and belief of the entrepreneurs in the venture, and willingness to become a mass tourism product were also identified. Those venture that were viable tools for community wealth-creation were heavily capitalized and able to balance the dual goals of community longevity against commercial success.

Generally speaking however, tourism is not a concept that has positive impacts or is well understood in Polynesian societies because of its focus on individual entrepreneurship and wealth accumulation, which are contrary to the traditional collectively oriented, sharing ethic of Pacific Island societies (Berno, 1999; Rajotte &

Crocombe, 1980).

The key concepts that emerge from a review of the tourism literature are that humans create social worlds and make meaning within them. Social worlds are no longer bounded by geography, nationality or culture but cross boundaries to create diaspora, complexity and marginalisation. Also, interactions in and between social worlds are time, space, culture and place-specific as well as virtual and capitalism, consumption and cultural identities are not always compatible. Further, where visitor/host interactions take place – dependant upon duration – definition occurs on both sides, but is eventually constituted as re-definition, based on reflection and stimulated by external events or change from social to commercial operands.

At the nexus of formal tourism product and visitor/host interactions cultural perception, enterprise goals, heterogeneity and autopoesis, expressed as self-referent marginality, are implied as theoretical underpinnings.

The effects of tourist visits on the visited community are greatest when the host communities are small, unsophisticated and isolated and least when the affluence gap is narrower and the host community is technologically advanced (Pearce, 1982). The picture is clear when communities and cultures are isolated and very different for each other, but as noted earlier in the chapter globalisation, mass media, cross-boundary social worlds and the ubiquitousness of tourism increasingly are creating conditions of marginalisation rather than isolation and under such conditions sharp distinctions can no longer be drawn nor can the effects of respective cultures be

easily identified. It is this murky, complex, multidimensional context in which this dissertation attempts to unravel. This dissertation also asks whether the known experiences and research findings of the formal tourism industry are translatable to informal versions of tourism, or to formal product developed in the context of informally constituted social worlds? Further, what are the challenges and opportunities that arise when that cultural setting is not one of homeland ethnicity?

These questions are central to the thesis that societal marginality can be a positive position from which to develop and manage community-initiated tourism enterprise and product.

The next section discusses the theory behind the themes identified of social worlds, encounters, community initiated tourism and ethnic enterprise but also the importance of cultural values, power and tensions engendered at the interface of mainstream with informal economies. Or perhaps we are really talking of the interface of western with non-western épistèmes or world views?

Theory

Theoretical concepts which relate to and integrate these themes are Marginality (underpinned by the concept of autopoesis), Otherness theory (utopia, heterotopia, dystopia), Enterprise theory (the concepts of habitus and forms of capital), and Interaction (concept of hybridity). These will be examined in turn and then integrated into a model of encounters and transactions between potential communities and visitors.

Methodologically speaking there are inherent dangers in characterising cultural behaviour on binary dimensions used as shorthand reference points or categories.

While these begin to describe a range of circumstances, many examples can be found which do not fit those reference points exactly (Bird et al., 1999) and tends to cleave theoretical perspectives into two distinct and incommensurable parts (Bramwell &

Meyer, 2007). Similarly, such categories might be considered over-generalisations and constructs of European meta-narrative, creating implicit hierarchies wherein one term is artificially privileged over the other since typically, the terms used to define conceptual dimensions are chosen for semantic opposition. Further, opposites automatically exclude nuance and difference or at best produce weak generalisation.

Derrida however offers an alternative to the traditional oppositional ‗either/or‘ binary by suggesting that perpetual duality exists within the opposition (Derrida, 1981).

Each needs the other and so there is not division but a pivot point around which meaning turns. One term needs the other to form a whole, like ying and yang and therefore carries the sense of negation within both (Cooper, 1989). Bramwell and Meyer (2007) comment that an holistic, relational approach is preferable which

‗re-imagines‘ the complex whole of a social system and its system of relations, examining them and their inherent oppositions or contradictions.

Marginality

In a cultural sense, marginality can occur through experiencing life at the fringes of mainstream society, whether indigenous, migrant or a sub-culture of mainstream society. Communities and groups such as these can lack access to basic services and suffer impediments or disadvantage in many forms (Helu-Thaman, 2002).

Marginalised groups rarely have the capacity to mobilise policy, scientific, technological and social or market networks or access the mainstream knowledge system, yet their own knowledge systems are exploited for others‘ benefit. Capacity gaps mean exclusion from the knowledge economy and from technology, technological innovations and social democracy (MacLeod et al., 1997).

Indigenous cultures for example, have experienced cultural dilution, reduction in population through disease, violence and intermarriage, as well as homogenisation and relegation to marginalised positions in the modern world. This has occurred because of forces such as the spread of the languages and cultures of Europe (especially English), technology (especially mass media), the values of individualism, self-gratification and consumerism and the ascendancy of the market model over other politico-economic models (Helu-Thaman, 2002). Further, even in remote locations such as Alor, a small mountainous island in Indonesia, where tourism is barely incipient, the nascent processes of ideas and fantasies about tourism can colour local politics, flavour discussions of identity and channel local actions (Adams, 2004).

Peoples who are already marginalised in an indigenous environment often seek economic prosperity and to gain advantage by migration to another nation. Yet the experience in the new environment can be to find themselves further marginalised, depending upon homeland education levels, knowledge of the new country‘s language and unfamiliarity with the western market economy, i.e. cultural distance.

This can slow integration, inhibit employment at desirable levels and lead to dependency on state aid and despondency, dissatisfaction and anti-social behaviours and formation of social world cultures such as ethnic gangs.

In many cases marginalised communities are self-defined. De Beauvoir (1963/1968) suggests that intentional communities simultaneously marginalise and strengthen themselves through their symbiotic relationship to the mainstream, silences and other human dynamics such as violence ‗ since it is only in violence that the oppressed can obtain their human status‘. Academic literature supports the position that alternative ways of knowing are seen in the ordering and meaning of ‗group life‘ (Lichterman, 1998). Examples of religious épistèmes in terms of intentional communities of faith

are multitudinous – Amish, Buddhist, Hare Krisha, Jonesville Guyana, Waco and many more such as communes or religious communities. These are often defined by the attitudes and perceptions of mainstream populations, by lack of access to society‘s benefits, by simply choosing to live in isolated areas for lifestyle reasons, be marginalised by politics, religion or lifestyle choice or by positive strategies to strengthen ethnic hegemony. They do however often share utopian ideals and coalesce around charismatic individuals and self-assured ‗special‘ characteristics.

Otherness and attributes of difference are often associated with marginalised communities - primitive, exotic, post-colonial societies that are distant somehow from mainstream western thought and have been influenced by the development of relations between colonizer and colonized (Lester, 1998).

Some have been characterised as ‗identity movements‘ because they affirm difference along identity lines in terms of sexuality, gender, race or ethnicity. They include activist settings and self-defined community groups who utilise and share

‗practices‘ (Bourdieu, 1977, 1990a), engage in ‗civic practices‘ (Eliasoph, 1996) and share ‗cultures of commitment‘ (Lichterman, 1998) or perspectives that serve to maintain cohesion and distinctiveness from the mainstream, as well as become divisors between them. For example, while the contemporary women‘s movement is identifiable in terms of ‗difference‘ from mainstream, nonetheless, liberal, socialist, and radical feminist agendas create divisions within it (Ferree & Hess, 2000;

Freeman, 1964). In this setting, Wuthnow and Witten (1988) emphasise the existence of ‗implicit culture‘, or implicit meanings that its members tend to take for granted since their focus is upon explicit ideologies, identities and rituals performed

‗against‘ a loosely defined mainstream as ‗Other‘. Nonetheless, implicit meanings both enable and constrain what can be done together, or even imagine doing together (Hart, 1996). These implicit meanings might correspond to the ‗dilemmas‘ identified in Chapter 5, but may also resonate with the idea of ‗complicit cultures‘ seen at the Pasifika Festival (Chapter 6) where festival attendees believed that ‗authenticity‘ is attached to all of the tangible and intangible experiences by virtue of their presence at the event.

However, the ‗excluded middle‘, the ‗liminal sub-altern figures who slip between two dominant antithetical categories‘ as described by Hegel, cited in Young (2001) also should not be forgotten while we talk of communities at the margins. Nor, should the agency of the tourism industry that celebrates and encourages marginality be forgotten, since tourism is the business of otherness par excellence (Hollinshead, 1998).

Physical marginalisation of communities can result from distances between centres, natural landscape isolation or catastrophic events (Parminter & Perkins, 1996).

Ecological marginalisation occurs as eco-systems are transformed from a

self-sustaining natural resource base to unproductive damaged environments as by-products of industrial or agricultural processes (Kousis, 1998). In rural areas economic marginalisation results from changing global demands for natural resources, out-migration from rural to urban areas, as well as political and technological change.

Marginalisation is applied to many groups at the edges of mainstream society such as artists, children, gays and feminists (Hetherington, 1993, 1996a; Hetherington, 1998;

Kelly, 1999; Little, 1999; Lupton, 1998; Lynn, 1995; Pels, 2002; Rodrigues, 1997;

Sachs, 2003; Schaker-Mill, 2000) as well as to indigenous people, ethnic migrants, religious affiliates, and many others.

Remedies to marginalisation can take the form of participative ‗third sector‘

interventions by not-for-profit organisations, public sector policy and social programmes or perhaps community enterprise, or even knowledge-based innovation parks supported by universities (MacLeod et al., 1997).

This dissertation explores the lived experience of a particular community marginalised by the forces described above, whose characteristics and circumstances will be described in the next section. In common with many indigenous and other marginalised communities around the world, this community aspires to achieve economic sustainability via tourism enterprise based upon access to and control of cultural knowledge and resources. The research is allied to issues of wealth creation and adds to the work of Ryan, Pike and others on cultural tourism in aboriginal and Maori contexts (Pike, 2002; Ryan & Huyton, 2002).

Yet marginality as a positive force may contain inherent contradictions and paradox.

The aspiration to establish competitive position based on control of cultural resource

The aspiration to establish competitive position based on control of cultural resource