AS A TOURIST IN TAHITI

Abstract

This article evolved from a disappointing holiday I had in Tahiti. First, I present my Tahitian experience in a storied form. Then, after condemning Tahiti as an unworthy leisure resort, I examine my own expectations as a Western woman and trained ethnographer. I discuss how I longed for an exotic, unspoiled, Pacific pleasure paradise in a distant periphery and how I searched for something in Tahiti that I defined as authentic. I discuss how these expectations reflect a stereotypical Western cultural bias toward a binary, hierarchical understanding of the world—a worldview that as an ethnographer, I was consciously trying to avoid. Because I am mainly concerned with issues of self-reflexivity in ethnographic research, this article focuses on the relationship between researcher's Westernness and tourism.