by Madeleine Sheffield

Stereotypes
 

A widely-held racial stereotype in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was that black people (especially females) were pathologically predisposed to sexual immorality [Beets 1997:30]. The scientific conclusions of Social Darwinism helped to firmly establish these stereotypes in the popular mind. For instance, Saartje Baartman, the so-called Hottentot Venus, was toured throughout Europe as a living example of racial sexual anomaly and, after her death, her autopsied genitals and famous protruding buttocks were displayed at Pariss Musee de Homme [Gilman 1986:41]. In this context, the erotic/exotic native savage becomes the comic savage, demeaned and mocked; another variation on the essentialist sexual/racial classification discourses of Social Darwinism. In an historical context these theories grew more popular and spread world-wide through the increased movement of colonial powers around the globe in search of resources to fuel the capitalist coffers of Europe. The anthropologists, adventurers and explorers who went overseas, brought back tales and evidence of wondrous lands peopled with native savages; these savages were then classified on Darwin's sliding scale of classification from primitive to civilised. Thus, various stereotypical tropes were represented as being based in scientific fact. One fact is clear, though, and that is that the exotic native savage, noble or not, was soon to be a cultural phenomenon of the past due to the "civilising" mission of European powers. 

The dictionary definition of exotic is a useful starting point to gain an understanding of this cultural phenomenon (or craze, as it would be called today) in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Exotic is described as synonymous with the following words and phrases: "outside"; "foreign"; "strange or different in a way that is striking or fascinating"; "strangely beautiful, enticing" [Suaalii 1997:77]. These terms and concepts have been applied to the islands of the Pacific and the people that dwell therein since the first western contact. The other enduring stereotype is that of the "Noble Savage". The contradictory imagery of the exotic beauty of the Pacific Islands and their inhabitants as both actively savage and passively sensual is manifested, commodified, and sold by the West to the West, particularly through images of the exotic female beauty of these islands [Suaalii 1997:77]. Such images are created and controlled by the West and maintained in the stereotypes perpetuated in advertising, tourism, television and film today. From this commodification and objectification, Pacific Island and Maori women are located as the sensual, sexual and savage other of Western society and she is available for your consumption and desire. Here she is simultaneously both outside, foreign, strange, and different in a way that is both contradictorily savage on the one hand and noble on the other. These seemingly contradictory images of the exotic female beauty as passively sensual, and actively savage, are selectively re/constructed by the white describer, to fit his orientalised perceptions of the Pacific [Suaalii 1997:78]. The image of the female beauty of the Pacific Islands and Maori women as different and other to constructions of Westernised female beauty is captured in the label "exotic". This label denotes the double marginalisation of women of colour such as Pacific Island and Maori women in a different way to the arguments made by white women against/about Western patriarchy. The label exotic is, in this sense, a label which recognises the double othering of Pacific Island women as other to both white males and white females and denotes the subordinate duality of the indigenous female within the fixed and lived contexts of their lives [Suaalii 1997:79]. 
 

Personification as the exotic other in Tourism
 

The personification of Pacific Island and Maori women as the exotic other, both sensual and savage, by the contradictory images and representations of various past and present forms of media, is, and has been, a process controlled and maintained by white men. Their target audience is the men of the power/knowledge economy; other white men. Therefore, in understanding constructions of the exotic as a product of colonisation, commodified and objectified and labelled for sale, the exotic may be read as demeaning and exploitative of that which it labels. This is exemplified in the marketing strategies employed over time by the tourism industry who have used this imagery of the savage/sensual to titillate and feed the western tourists curiosity/desire/perversity since the first Western contact. 

Tourism and the exotic
 

Tourism plays a central role in the persistent imagery of the exotic. Tourism, argues Tongan writer Konai Helu Thaman, was and continues to be 

"a major contributor to, as well as manifestation of, a process of cultural invasion that began in earnest with the spread of Christianity and Western colonial interests in the nineteenth century and has continued more recently, thanks to modern Western technological advancement, to the universalisation of Western - mainly Anglo-American market-oriented, capitalist, monetised - culture" [Suaalii 1997:79]. 

This quote from an indigene of the Pacific Islands, reflects the cultural invasion instigated by the capitalist institution of tourism, that manifests itself in the label exotic. The exotic is produced and reproduced by the white corporate institution of tourism and trade to feed off the desires of white males. Conceptualised and embodied in the persistent imagery of picturesque postcards advertising the Pacific in nineteenth century Europe, the commodification of Pacific women as a resource to be exploited, penetrated and claimed began, and has been perpetuated through the stereotypical imagery of tourism through to the twenty-first century. For example, the postcard genre produced in the early 1900s bears a remarkable similarity to the tourism images we see today in brochures, films, television advertising/programmes and magazines depicting the people and places of Oceania.