Why I am uncomfortable with "ethnic tourism"

Today while in Hoedspruit I stopped at the tourism center for lunch. This place has a good deli but it is depressingly cheesy. The buildings are sided by faux wood poles and topped by faux straw thatch roofs. The complex has many shops, some of which purport to sell "African" goods, and others, like a jewelry store, that have no direct connection to a place or time, just to tourists' wallets.

When I pulled in I could see some sort of entertainment happening on a patio. It turned out to be 8-10 black men and women dressed in "traditional" African clothing, playing handdrums, singing and dancing. Upon slightly closer inspection it became clear their clothes were not really the animal furs they were meant to imitate, but some cheap faux material. The drums could have come from any music shop. I couldn't tell for sure if the songs were traditional, but I had a strong impression they were not.

I reflected on my aversion to these things. The scene reminded me of the Mayan tourism center Jess and I saw in Mexico and the huge tepees on the sides of roads in some states. My reactions are always mixed. I am embarrassed by the (usually white) audience eating it up. I think of who hires the dancers and, in this case, if that person makes applicants remove their shirts to judge their musculature before offering a job. I wonder how the dancers feel about their jobs and how closely they identify with any local or ethnic traditions. After all, this dance could be done anywhere in Africa to the pleasure of tourists. It was almost like a Bugs Bunny cartoon. The finale may as well have included a big black cauldron for a cannibal bit. (I exaggerate...)

But isn't it true that these people are just making a living? That maybe they are not being exploited, but are exploiting the tourists, selling a silly caricature to people who want their preconceptions confirmed? If you can do a song and dance to make some money and live your life, what is wrong with that? To cast the performers as victims of modernity would be to ignore their agency--all the legitimate reasons they have to do what they do.

The reason I'm uncomfortable with these displays is that the entire scene seems to dehumanize the performers and devalue whatever authentic ethnic culture may exist. But I also recognize the "hey, it's a living" aspect.

\end sociology 101 essay

And the picture at the right is kind of pretty but I posted it because it is totally typical of what I've seen here. The place is somewhat poor and sure, traditions and history matter> But a romanticized savage place frozen in time is simply not to be found here.

A poor photo of an elephant

Today I drove to Hoedspruit, about 25km north, for groceries and to get out of the house a bit. The road to Hoedspruit is bordered by private game reserves the entire way. Along that road is where I saw 5 or 6 giraffes on my way to Acornhoek from the airport. Today on my way home I saw some cars pulled over and knew they must be looking at an animal. I slowed down and looked over to see a pack of elephants at a watering hole. By the time I pulled over and got a picture, only one was left, and she/he quickly turned and left. Here is the evidence.

EDIT: Make that a herd or a parade of elephants, not a pack. These distinctions are important, as I believe there is a Jeopardy! category related to this issue.

Happy Birthday!

To my brother Michael (27) and my my brother from another mother, Evan (28).

What the heck am I doing?

Since my blog has gone viral (thanks Mom) and millions of people stream to this site to read my eloquent words, a few have asked what I'm doing and why. Here's a quick overview.

Parts of the developing world, especially sub-Saharan Africa, have very poor systems of vital registration (birth certificates, death certificates, and the government records created by those). Governments, NGOs and other planners need good estimates of vital rates to figure out how to spend limited resources. For example, where will you build the next school? What sort of public health intervention would give you the most bang for the buck and where should you put it? So in the absence of death registration they have turned to national censuses and representative surveys to give them an idea of mortality rates. Examples include the Demographic Health Surveys (DHS) that are run throughout the world and many national censuses, including the one run by StatsSA. In these questionnaires they ask people dates of birth and death for their parents, siblings, children, and other household members. This is called an indirect method of mortality estimation because you do not observe deaths per se, you observe living people's memories of deaths. The answers people give are then more likely to have errors than a database of death certificates would have. And you can get biased results because the chances of dying for any individual are likely correlated to their family members' chances of dying, especially during an AIDS epidemic. It is possible your survey could miss entire households who have died or their survivors have moved somewhere else. So there are some sources of error and bias in these standard questions.

Furthermore, demographers (like me) use these data to estimate mortality rates with special techniques that have been developed in the past 30 years. How well do these techniques work? We are not exactly sure.

So we are conducting a survey using the same types of questions to households located in a demographic surveillance site called Agincourt. (Is your mother alive? When was she born? When did she die? etc.) The Agincourt DSS has tracked the migration, fertility and mortality of a bounded population since 1993. They have unusually high-quality data. We use their data as the "gold standard" of mortality estimates in this place. We will compare our results to their results and see just how much error or bias could be expected from a census or survey in this region.

As for my part in all this? I'm the project site manager for the project. As you probably read below, I am here to coordinate the data collection that is actually carried out by my teams of field workers. The questions are asked in Shangaan, so I am not of any use as far as interviewing. I do provide them with the maps, questionnaires, etc. that they need and I coordinate all the logistical issues that must be coordinated if our study is to have any scientific validity.

This work is related to my dissertation research, so I hope that this data collection will be useful as I try to get a PhD in the next few years. It's also a really interesting professional and personal experience.

I think I can say I would love living around here, actually, if not for the fact that my lovely wife, annoying but sweet dog and all my family were back in the states. So, come for a visit and I'll show you around this place. You have until September 5 to get here. Just don't all come at once, since I can't host the entire Internet in my half of a rented house.

Scenery, plus an outhouse

First day in the field

Today was the long-awaited first day in the field. Here is my friend Erroll, looking quite cheerful while getting ready to ask people about their dead family members.

We had some annoying problems coordinating the transportation for my two teams, so we got into the field around 11 instead of 8 and I drove hundreds of kilometers on dusty, bumpy dirt roads. Here are a few more photos from the day.







































































The thatch-roof hut neighbors my field office. It is probably pretty typical of the houses in this rural area. The rough-looking interior of a house is my field office. And the bull---well, let's just say I had my fair share of dealing with bovines and their leavings today.