The Lure of the Exotic

Sometimes I try to see myself as some of you must see me. I try to explain my behavior the way some of you must…the way I in fact often explain the behavior of many friends who are far more adventurous than I, and this exercise often leaves me considering the term “exotic”. It is easy to believe that when people go off to live somewhere new or to learn about other people and other places, they have gone off in search of the exotic. We tell ourselves, they are looking for something new, exciting, perhaps even undiscovered in a place or a people we describe as exotic. We, as Americans, (or as Westerners as the literature would call us) have a strong sense of the exotic. There are the things we know; the shopping malls, the parking lots, the churches, the bowling alleys, and then somewhere, over there, there’s the exotic. Sometimes, that word calls to mind beaches and palm trees, but despite the images, for most of us, it has a much broader general meaning.

As anthropologists, we are trained to look more deeply at this type of “othering”, and called to ask ourselves and others what we’re really saying when we mark something as exotic. In a sense, it’s similar to the way some feminists deconstruct terms like “mankind” in order to find the unsaid or unacknowledged in those terms. And like the term “mankind”, exotic is in fact a very loaded word. When we claim something is exotic on a very basic level we mean something that is new and different. And yet, though I’ve never visited California, people would surely look askance at me if I described it as exotic upon arriving there. So at this point, let’s extend our definition to mean “not American” or better yet, “not European or American”, as I’m certain England generally doesn’t qualify as exotic either.



But let me throw a wrench in the works at this point, and ask about that little state of Hawaii. I think that many people would in fact describe Hawaii as exotic, particularly those who have yet to visit there. My first explanation of that description would go back to beaches, palm trees, and luscious weather, but I think that misses the mark. After all, there are plenty of dreamy vacation spots on the US mainland. So exotic can’t simply mean nice place to visit. But the answer does lie once again in our shared imagination of Hawaii. Hawaii is not just a place of beaches, and palm trees, and it’s not just a place that, at least in our minds, is free from strip malls and traffic jams. It is also the home of grass skirts. Of course, grass skirts are in and of themselves, really just a symbol of a whole slew of other cultural practices; dances, food, language, ect, but they are a potent symbol indeed. In one simple skirt, mainland Americans are able to contain the entire Hawaiian archipelago. And more to the point for this discussion, by recognizing that skirt as “exotic”, they label all of the islands of Hawaii and all of their inhabitants as exotic as well.

So now what do we mean when we say “exotic”? I think in some senses, we mean “tribal” or perhaps, “uncivilized”. And now the problem with the term, the hidden negativity, comes to light. Though I’ll allow a certain amount of glamour to the term exotic, in that it tends to carry with it some admiration of what we imagine to be a freer and more spiritual way of “tribal” life, I think above all else, “exotic” is really an unconscious judgment call based on a hierarchy of civilization that is firmly biased towards the “West”. Exotic is the word we use when we want to describe the pull of the “primitive” on civilized beings like ourselves. And in doing so, we place ourselves above those exotic peoples and places which we know little or nothing about, but which we imagine ourselves to understand quite well.

But why this long rant on a particular word? Nepal, for me, has never been exotic. I’ve never looked at it with the romanticism or criticism necessary to apply that term. But yet, today, for a moment, I caught myself mentally criticizing another’s adventure for its lack of exoticism as if exoticism were a necessary ingredient of all good adventures. In that moment, I bought into the stories I’d been told, and I relied on the symbols I’d been given by American culture without thinking. And so, as an act of atonement, and an exercise in careful critical thinking, I’ve written this small piece. I decided to share it with all of you because I know that at least a few of you will never cease to believe that it is not a yearning to experience the exotic that has brought me here. I doubt this post will be enough to convince you otherwise, but all the same, I challenge you to think about your preconceptions about Nepal, about Hawaii, and about any other place that strikes you as different enough to be exotic. At the very least, I challenge you to use the word, the image, and the symbol cautiously. Perhaps, you may find yourself, as I did, discovering more about yourself and the way you see the world, than you will about an exotic other.