Paradise Paradigm
This study explores the potential of digital ethnography and visual narratives in the film Paradise Paradigm to capture the interrelationship between fashion, travel, tourism, cultural diversity, environment, sustainable development and our own spiritual development in relation to Bali, Indonesia.
Design has always played a key role in environmental and social conditions that affect human well-being. It was my aim to explore opportunity for design and ethnographic documentary-making to facilitate a more sustainable future for Bali that supports both the spiritual and the global-economic values of the island. To develop a conceptual framework to support tourism research by exploring different notions of ‘understanding’ and avoiding western-centric views. I worked with a combination of ethnographic and auto-ethnographic methods to develop an aesthetic and visual framework around the cultural model of both Melasti and Nyepi, the Day of Silence, to challenge western dominant thinking in relation to paradise and time. Ezio Manzini (2015), a leading thinker in design for sustainability, discusses innovation and design as a solution to building a resilient culture argues that it requires people being "active" to generate conditions for this; the word active implies movement. However, the underpinnings of the film capture action as a mental model which could even be a slowing down through its use of audio and visual style. Whether we call it ‘slowing down’ or ‘reconnecting’, it is clear that cultural sustainability has an important dimension related to time if we aim to create meaning from internal or community processes rather than global commerce.
The film’s storytelling seeks to gently uncover and illuminate other ways of seeing. It was my aim to strike a balance between both positive and negative and provide a moral compass for tourism and mobility research in Indonesia and elsewhere. New insights conveyed by both the evocative auto-ethnographic approach and the interviews with local Balinese depict themselves at a crossroads with different potential futures ahead. Thus identifying a value change beyond ocular and western-centric representations and to maintain an anthropologist sensibility that highlights the local people (rather than the anthropologist) are experts in their own worlds.
The interviews were shot in black and white for the purpose of giving them a more serious tone as well as demarcating and separating them from the more poetic approach to the visual narrative in the rest of the film. The participants each have their own unique vision of cultural and environmental sustainability and are taking the idea of representation, environment and ‘other’ into their own hands. Each has their own personal agenda to challenge western dominant thinking with regard to the exotic other, tourist gaze and paradise image. These are underpinned by the common denominator of a new paradigm based on the significant social and cultural narratives that can be identified by the virtues of the Balinese and their Tri Hita Karana philosophy.
This research suggests a building of these emotional geographies using the metaphor of the night sky and emerging of constellations as an interplay on cross-collaborative approaches from scholars of varying fields. It takes the approach that a sustainable futures goal is to produce analytical yet evocative narratives that “change us and the world we live in for the better” [(Holman Jones, (2005), p. 764]). The film and this study concludes with the work of Davis (2009) who asserts that people are the solution, not the problem and that through rediscovering a new appreciation for the diversity of human spirit, though one of the central challenges of our times, it is here amongst humanity that answers are to be discovered.
In the context of the film, the viewer is gently brought to understand the Indonesian term underpinning the research, Saling Menhargai, which means how to develop a mutual appreciation and respect between the tourist and the local. If international tourism stakeholders, the community, and visitors to the island truly share a common interest for cultural and environmental preservation, new ways of understanding the impact developments are having must be sought alongside building community-based tourism.
www.brittaboyer.com
Further information about this research can be read on the following journal paper:
https://www.inderscienceonline.com/doi/abs/10.1504/IJTA.2018.093298
CREDITS
Cinematographer:
www.fleurboonman.com
Music:
http://www.gamelanvoices.com
