Two things stood out to me this weekend when I attended the Tucson Meet Yourself Folklife Festival (TMY), in notable contrast to the Smithsonian Folklife Festival as presented in Cantwell and the “6 Reasons” reading for this week. I think that part of these differences lie in the scale of the festival put on here in Tucson, and a festival that is meant to represent folk groups from around the country and the world on a much larger scale. At the heart of these differences, I felt that this festival was geared toward presenting “authentic” Tucsonans rather than some kind of imaginary archetype of any one folk group.
Along this line, I felt that Camp and Lloyds assertion that what folklife festivals present is “substantially exotic culture” (1980:4). While “exotic” may be fitting for some of the food, crafts, dance, song, and other presentations at the festival, it definitely is not appropriate for all performances. TMY represents the cultures that are around us everyday in Tucson, some we are more aware of than others. I would hardly qualify the Bill Ganz Western Band as exotic to the Tucsonans in attendance, nor would I the Palo Verde High School Culture Step Club performance which was happening simultaneous just yards away. What is interesting about TMY is the way these things are brought together, and in their amalgamation become something that is uniquely Tucson in an experience that could not be duplicated in any other place but here. Even those demonstrations with a more “exotic” air to them, such as the Arizona Kyudo Japanese Archery Demonstration, display a local touch while still retaining many elements of the traditional Japanese form.
Practitioners were dressed in the appropriate Japanese regalia for kyudo (according to my extensive research on youtube and wikipedia), including the humungous bow (yumi), arrow shafts (ya), a distinctive three-fingered glove (mitsugake), and costume (hakama). I have no way of knowing how “authentic” the materials used are, but I imagine they are fairly conscientious reproductions of the styles traditionally practiced by Japanese archers. What was interesting to be about this demo, however, was the participants. The kyudo group is actually a combination of two clubs here at the U of A that practices kyudo, and the performers, or “culture-bearers” as Cantwell and the Smithsonian Folklife website call them, are actually students here. Only one of them was visually identifiable as Asian, and the group represented both men and women of a wide age range. These participants were probably not understood by the audience as “exotic” except in their practice of a unique cultural form. Cantwell talks about how the stereotype is almost necessary in folk festivals in order to communicate quickly what the festival attendants are seeing as they walk through the festival. For me, however, at TMY I didn’t as much see the stereotypes of living culture as much as Tucson’s interpretation of different groups that have come together here.
Further, and I’m not sure if this was a function of needing sponsors for the festival and ergo the representation of sponsors in the booths around the festival, but I interpreted the presence of booths for such groups as the County Attorney’s Office, the American Heart Association, the Office of Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords, and Southern Arizona Center Against Sexual Assault, as an opportunity for the festival to be a great resource to the visitors and the festival participants themselves. Beyond presenting Tucson’s culture to its inhabitants, I thought that the festival also functioned well as bringing together many of the city’s political, social, and environmental resources into one place where Tucsonans could really “meet” Tucson as a town and a diverse cultural arena. I’m not sure that this is something that the Smithsonian’s festival offers, and that is probably a function of scale. On the homepage of the Smithsonian’s Folklife Festive, it says that at the festival, “you will find many exemplary practitioners of diverse, authentic, living traditions—both old and new.” The same is true for TMY, however its operation on a local level was most successful in communicating authentic Tucsonan experiences and resources.
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