BENTE WOLFF: The Local Organisation and Understanding of Tourism on Nias Island.

Treating tourism as something different from other aspects of local lifemay seem to be in accordance with local classifications when these express a distinction between (commercial) areas where tourists are allowed to take part and (authentic) areas where they are kept out (see Picard's discussion p. 109-115 and 161-2, 198). Seen from the outside local life may seem divided up in spheres of tradition, spheres of modern economy, spheres of government, spheres of tourism, and so on. However, for the local individual these are all integrated aspects of his life, and we must analyze them as such, in order to understand the individual's social strategies and cultural cosmologies. An approach that treats tourism as one factor separated from others will at the same time underestimate and overestimate the influence of tourism locally. Underestimate, because it limits the local phenomena of tourism to where tourists come, ignoring how the structures of tourism may well be deeply integrated into local understanding of life and world in general, and not only regarding the interaction between locals and foreigners. And overestimating the influence of tourism, because a to narrow approach does not acknowledge how tourism is integrated in long-existing local social and economic processes. Tourism is part of a structural transformation of these long-term local structures, and not an entirely new and foreign factor in local society, or in the cosmological categories of this society. In short, tourism may be part of life where no tourists come, and the tourism industry may be organized according to life strategies that exist in the life of locals themselves.

I will here try to outline how tourism in South Nias is both highly influential on local structures of practice and meaning, and, at the same time, integrated into to these local structures.

Before going into the local side of the matter, I'll just mention a few facts to give an idea of the size of the tourism industry in the area. International tourism in south Nias has existed on a very limited scale since around the 1930s  (anon. 1935?, but cf. Bryn 1985 and van Vorden 1940), at first in the form of  cruise ships visiting one village only. Since the early or mid-seventies there has been an increasing number of western tourists staying on the beach on the south coast. These are mainly surfers and increasingly backpackers, too, and it is in this area that my study was carried out. In the 1990s there has been an increasing number of domestic tourists, government officials or city people staying on the beach in shorter periods of time. The number of foreign tourists visiting the area was around 10.000 (10.019 ) in 1995 (Nias Regency 1996?). The number of domestic tourists is more difficult to figure out since only a limited number of Indonesians registered as visitors on Nias go to the southcoast, since most of these are government officials and others on duty only going to the regional capital, or to others areas of the island.

Nias island has a population of almost 700.000 and, taken as a whole, tourism makes up a very small part of the local economy. But in the areas that host tourists even small earnings from tourism make a vast difference in a household's income level compared to other households. Nias is the poorest region (kabupaten) of North Sumatra Province and many people share the (wildly unrealistic) hope that Nias will become the Bali of North Sumatra and that the tourists will bring wealth and development/progress (perkembangan/kemajuan). Although tourism in this area is a relatively new thing, it is a crucial element in the local understanding of the world and history as  will become clear.

I will now turn to the local situation described on three different levels. First I'll take up the way tourists are treated in the hotels where they live, and compare this to other local practices. Second, I will turn to the cultural groups that perform for the tourists, something that may look like a new and invented tradition, but at closer inspection shows connections with long-existing practices and logics, and are a very prominent part of village politics, also when the tourists are not present. Third, I will go to the level of cosmology and local  history to show how tourism is part of the understanding of self and world in the broadest sense.

Keeping and feeding the guest in the house

My village has around 2000 inhabitants in around 500 households of which some forty families have opened small hotels (losmen) on the beach. These hotels are households and  they have remained normal members of the village in terms of government, church, family obligations and so on.

A certain peculiarity to tourism in Nias is the great importance of tourists eating at the hotel where they stay. The most common reason for a guest to be kicked out of a hotel is that he does not take his meals at the hotel, or that he does not eat enough. As one American tourist was told when she was thrown out of a hotel: "We don't want people who don't eat here, but only shit here!"

There is a perfectly straight forward economic reason for this: There is a vast overcapacity of rooms on the beach and competition between hotel owners is very tough. Room prices are down to an absolute minimum. Most commonly you pay less than 50 cents per night, and some even let the guests stay for free. So in order to get a profit from one's guests it is necessary that they take their meals at the hotel.

However, settling for this simple explanation of profit-making miss the way eating in the house is understood locally. Food is the central medium of socialization in Nias. The agent is not the eating person himself, but the person "feeding" him, that is the one who is responsible for producing as well as preparing the food. The person being fed is expected to give in return his loyalty and affection to the feeding one, and in order to be a person to be reckoned with, he has to share his own wealth with the family. On a general level this means that giving is what makes you powerful and influential over other people.

Nearly all local practices are centered around the sharing of food. For example, the practices in connection with a marriage is one long chain of food sharings between the two families, starting at the engagement and being continued for several generations after both marriage partners are dead. The food sharings create the two partners and their family network as one substantial community by transforming outsiders to become insiders.

Food is shared according to complicated rules according to kin relations and a person's position in the age and status hierarchy. All ceremonial meals are organized so that the eldest in the family and the eldest of the village leaders (kepala desa, siulu, siila) get the largest shares of food, which they again share with those standing just below themselves in the social structure. Thus, food is literally flowing downwards and outwards in the social relations. The smallest pieces of pork may be only of 10 grams, but they have to be there, otherwise it would mean that the relation was severed. In general terms, this means that being related to people is to regularly share the same substance and the greater the amount of shared food, the closer the family relation.

The people you share food with are the people you are one with. This is not to be understood only in metaphorical terms, but in a concrete physical sense. Eating with people is to become part of the same community of shared substance as they are. Eating in a family house means that you are gradually transformed to become part of this substantial community, ie. becoming one of the family. (making the group's enemies your own enemies). In this understanding relatives is not something that you just have, but something you make by sharing food with them.

So when tourists are asked to eat in the hotel, it means that they are in the process of being transformed from outsiders to insiders. It is hoped that they will become part of the family, that is, the same substantial community. Tourists who stay for a long time or who come back many times to the same hotel have a very high standing in the family. Their staying is interpreted as affection and loyality to the house, and raises an expectation of showing increasingly more loyality, since they have already proven themselves susceptible to becoming a part of the house.

Being loyal means not to visit "other people" (niha b`'`), a flexible term in Nias for people you don't share food with or only seldom share food with. This is partly, but not only, because the family think that they only should have access to the wealth of the tourists in return of the hospitality they show him. More than this, his loyalty to the house is a question of not putting himself and the rest of the family at risk. The closer the relation between a guest and a local family, the greater is the risk that other people would want to poison the guest, in order to hurt his host family.

Here it is important to note that these demands of loyalty and fears of other people's envy are normal everyday experiences for the family members themselves. All household members are expected to stay and eat as much as possible in the house. When forced by social obligations to eat in "other people's" houses, Niassans are themselves in constant fear of being poisoned, and they have numeral techniques of detecting poison in their food or drink. So the practices that tourists unknowingly get involved in is what happens to everyone else.

Seen from the outside, fear and accusations of the use of poison are vastly overestimated, and the reason must be sought in the cultural logic, rather than ascribed to happenings in the empirical world. I cannot here go into details with the concept of poison (hifo) in Nias, but I see it as a negative version of the food sharing system just described.  In a personalized system where food, and more generally life, is something that always comes from others in the kinship net, then the opposite - the reason for death - is also sought in the social relations, as a bad substance given to the individual from his competitors in order to terminate life for him and his whole family group. There is a long tradition in Nias for increasing your own strength by killing the other, as was a reason for the headhunting and slavetaking raids to other villages which were formerly a necessary part of establishing and maintaining your own village, until they were stopped by Dutch colonial intervention in the first third of this century (Møller 1976: 10)

Today there is a an understanding that other houses will use all means to prevent you from receiving enough guests. When a young hotel owner died, it was, fx, belived that a group of other hotel owners had had him poisoned. This was not an extraordinary case, but is generally how the competitive relation to others is experienced, as the others' common use of unfair means. As one explained to me:

If one man see that his neighbour’s hotel is going well, he will say:”Oh his business is going well, what can I do to kill him?”

Hotel owners also complained that others were placing magic substances in their hotel rooms, so that the guests would get nightmares and move to another hotel after the first night. It is of course always other people who are believed to use such methods, whereas everyone feels that he himself only use fair means of business.

I am not trying to say here that nothing has changed in Nias since the olden days, that beliefs are just the same. This is clearly not the case. But I am trying to show how tourists are treated according to the same practices and understanding of human relations as exist for every one else. This means that they are actively transformed to become part of the same substantial community by eating with the family, and thus also to become exposed to the same dangers as they are.

Many hotel owners express a strong wish to change the local ways of organizing tourism to become more commercialized and less personalized. This means that room rates should not go below the fixed minimum of around 1,5 USD, and the the tourists would therefore be less confined to one household. As one man explained to his guest:

I am not asking you to be loyal to this house, I know Europeans are very individualistic,  that's your culture, and even if we would like the tourists to be part of the family, I have told my family that this is business and we cannot do like that.

But, even if there is a wish to change the local ways, this is not easily done and it shows how tourism becomes part of the organization of the local social economy in general. One reason for the wish to change the system is clearly the indepedent and uncontrollable nature of the tourists, which forces the hotel owners to look for more formalized ways to get their profit than in a more traditional gift-and-countergift way. However, it appears that it is not only the tourists' behaviour that forces such changes. Maybe even more important is that many hotel owners themselves are becoming familiar with purely commercial relations when they travel to the city where they stay in hotels and eat in restaurants. People explained that if  you stay with family in the city they, too, try to make you stay in the house and you often have to wait long for the food to be prepared. Staying in hotels and eating in restaurants was experienced as a great freedom by locals, thus able to controle their own time and whereabouts. As opposed to the village there is little risk that people in town will poison you, since they don't know you. Therefore, they have no reason to poison you and it would just ruin their business if the guests became ill.

My point here is that the local familiarity with commercial relations actually comes before the wish to organize the hotels at the beach after the same principles. Local relations are increasingly commercialized, and this is then a more general local transformation than what is caused by the tourists' habits only.

Tourism is thus being organized according to local economic relations of which some are personalized and others commercialized, and we cannot say where tourism begins and ends in these local structures. The organization of tourism is carried out according to local principles, but local principles are changing towards increasingly commercial and decreasingly personal exchange - ie. becoming more independent of family relations than was previously the case. Thus the system as a whole is changing and becoming increasingly free of family and status networks, but the kinship organized economy is still strong and well-functioning in many ways, and social relations are still far from being as commercialized as in Europe.

Even with the most professional and business educated hotel owners there is a strong wish to get the tourists permanently involved with the family. It is a pride to have your western guests working for you when you have building projects. Many locals have found that although tourists do not like to give them cash for nothing -  cash, in the western tourists' understanding, is bad for the locals  -  they are happy to give medicin, bandages and plasters or to carry around the family's paralyzed child, etc. The giving of medicine is locally seen as a proof that the tourists are becoming part of the family. All gifts are seen as value being "planted" (tan`, Beatty, 1992: 254), meaning that they are investments into a relationship. In this logic the more you give today, the more you are expected to give in the future, why else plant your wealth in that particular relation?

We have seen now on the micro-level of the household how local practices in process of change, but still very much organized  in ways that have been practiced for long. Despite wishes for changes the prevailing practice and understanding is still one of keeping the guest in the house to turn him into a loyal family member, kept away from others. In this way tourists are dealt with in similar ways as locals are.

I will now turn to the question of tourist attractions which is also an example of how tourism is organized and understood on the village level.

Tourist Attraction

In the realm of cultural tourism, tourist attractions and identity and culture itself, are often described by students of the identity of "touristic cultures" (Picard) by terms such as "invented" or "created"; as reified "commodies" or "capital", "detached from daily life" (Lanfant 8, 11). Such terms describe how locals have taken up certain expressive traditions for the sake of the tourists and now use them with a new content, namely the commercial and strategic use of traditions. Seen from the outside it may well look like that: The tourists want the traditional so they'll get the traditional, and thus enter into the local religious field, "blurring the line between inside and outside", "us and them" (Lanfant 8, Picard 199). It is, of course true that the word culture itself has become a local category, but this must still be treated as a local and not as identical with an anthropological definition of culture, which is something more implicit and taken for granted - the things that people don't know that they know. As we have already seen tourists in Nias are subsumed to local, very flexible distinctions of outsiders and insiders, and like locals being perceived as transformable from one to the other. The borders between us and them have always existed in Nias, but have never been absolute, and can thus not be said to be "blurred" by tourism. Likewise, the terms of cultural creativity, invention and commoditification say little about the local meaning and function of such revived traditions, since the past and the cultural heritage have always been capital in the local system, although in a personalized gift-based economy rather than in a commercialized economy of alienated social relations.

By putting attractions in the  singular - attraction - I believe we come much closer to the local understanding of the matter. We have already seen how, on the level of the house, tourism is a matter of keeping the guest in the house, but, before being able to keep the guests, it is of course a matter of attracting them to one's house. This is done by persuasion, lowering the price, and sometimes magic, in the structure of competing houses as described above. Attraction of tourists to the area and village area demands a higher degree of cooperation between citizens of a village. But the basic structure of competition is repeated on this level, and most villages have two or more dancing groups that compete about being the most popular among the tourists. On inter-village levels there is likewise a great pride taken in being one of the mostly frequented villages. Finally, on inter-island level there is a, partly true, suspicion that Sumatrans warn people not to go to Nias, in order to keep the guests on Sumatra. Again, these relations of competitition can all be understood in terms of profit-making, but, again, this must be followed by an understanding of what profit and guests mean locally.

Let us take a closer look at the traditional culture groups (sanggar budaya tradisional) that dance, play and sing for the tourists. These groups were established specifically to entertain tourists, and doesn't this then make them an example of cultural invention or creativity, and culture as commodity? Well yes, if we look at the groups in isolation, because they are clearly innovations made only for the tourists, but no, if we instead look at the local function and meaning of these groups. In the history of Nias any feast of the rich and influential, whether weddings, funerals or title-taking feasts, have always presented entertainment such as war dancing, singing, reciting and stone jumping and these art forms have always been proofs of the host's inherited powers. Some of these arts have decreased together with the power of the nobility that sponsored them. But after the making of the culture groups these are increasingly performing at wedding parties together with new forms of dances and singing, such as North Nias maena songs and disco. The entertaining at parties as well as the tourist performances are both called by the Indonesian term, atraksi, referring to their function of attracting the guests, and in both cases the performers are paid for their services.

The social structure that the feasts are part of , has clearly changed from the older and more hierarchical system, but again with great continuity in the local logic of feasting.  In the local understanding entertainment at feasts means more than just making the guests happy. Being able to attract many guests to your feast means that you are so powerful a person that people feel obliged to come, and leave other important tasks of the day. The higher the rank of your guests and the more people who return from the city for the occasion, the greater is the host's power of attraction. He is somebody who cannot be neglected.

There are of course local distinctions between tourist performances and other performances, but there is no distinction in the logic behind the two. On the structural level they are both a matter of attracting as many as possible, thus proving to your own strength and influence.

This become even more clear when we look at the culture groups at everyday rather than at feasts. In my village both groups practice twice a week and the practice is done in a deadly serious atmosphere where the - often very young - dancers are drilled by furious old men over and over again. Membership in a group is a matter of political alliances of the members or their fathers. People move back and forth between the two groups according to political conflicts, and according to the number of shows of a group, which proofs to the strength of its members. Apart from the dancers, the groups have a formal organizational structure of daily leader, section leaders, secretaries and so forth. Behind is always a discrete but well-known sponsor, from amongst the village's most wealthy and influential men, and he often pays more to the group than what comes in from the shows. It is fx common that competing candidates for the election of village head each sponsor a culture group.

In other words, culture groups are clearly more than simply entertainment for tourists and a way to make a living. It is one of the core features of the village's political power play and the group's ability of attracting guests - locals as well as tourists - demonstrate the irresistible power of the group and it's leaders. We see how tourism is thus incorporated into a local understanding of power, as the ability to attract guests by and entertaining them, and feeding them, too, as we saw it acted out on the level of the house. This is not a new understanding of power, but rooted in old feasting practices. Tourism may become an element in maintaining or strengthening this understanding since tourism makes it possible to earn an income by following what is perceived as old, local ways.

So, although the tourists' demand for the traditional is the reason for the establishing of the performance groups, their function must be understood within the local power relations that they become part of. In the local understanding attraction is a matter of charming people, and entertainment is seen as the host's ability to make people amazed (cf. Beatty 1992: 237, 240) and thereby susceptible to his request for their support. In this way entertainment in Nias has always been associated with political power understood as controle of other people. This understanding is also applied to the dance shows where the audience's fascination of the show is proof of the villagers controle over them.

The songs may be old or new, in terms of both form and content. I will just briefly mention some of the new songs since these are about tourism, mentioning all the different tourist attractions in the region, and praise the land of Nias and the surfing area as the goal of all countries. Fortunately the tourists themselves do not know that they themselves are the object of the songs, since this would in their eyes mean that the songs are not authentic. (Fortunately the singers use the Indonesian word for tourism which is pariwisata and not the local term which is toris).

The History and Origin of Nias People

Let us now turn to the local view of history and world to see how tourism is part of such larger cosmological categories.

The history of the village was written down in the form of a genealogy of the first founders of the village, and related to their present day successors. This is a very common way of reckoning history in smale-scale societies like Nias. But in my village this was not only about land rights as the genealogy concluded with an application to the local government for the village to gain formal status as a "tourism area". In this view there is no logical opposition between tradition and modernity. There is certainly a qualititative difference in terms of material development, but this does not imply an idea of some absolute conceptual difference, as was expressed by many tourists who claimed that the touristic Nias was not "the real Nias".

This becomes even more clear when looking at a myth of origin which is very common in many parts of Nias: The first woman came pregnant to the island and later married her own son, the two becoming the common foremother and forefather for all Niassans. In contemporary versions of this myth the origin of the woman is said to be Europe or China, and thus establish a common origin of Niassans with the two wealthiest groups of people on the island: the western tourists and the Chinese traders and shop owners. In older versions of this myth the place of origin was said to be at Sumatra which was formerly the main source of imported gold. Without going into details this myth is an example of a long-existing idea of wealth coming from a single original source from where it flows down and out into the social network, as we saw it with the food sharing system (cf. Suzuki 1959: 1-24). (This understanding is also expressed in the name of the nobles - siulu - meaning the source of the river). Today another source of wealth and power is present in the world-view of Niassans, namely the Indonesian government. Indonesian independence is locally understood as the break-down of the slave-economy and trading monopolies of the nobles, giving everyone a chance to get access to the flow of wealth. But although the Indonesian government is an authority which is highly acknowledged locally, the origin of Nias people is seen as non-Indonesian, but shared with the wealthy outsiders.

Another example of the common origin of Niassans and outsiders is that loyal and generous tourists are not seldom believed to be lost relatives. They  are thought to be decendants of Niassans brought to Holland or Germany some generations ago by colonial administrators and missionaries, now "coming back" to visit their relatives in Nias. This gives us further understanding of how tourists are treated and conceptualized as other guests on the structural level, namely as transformable and potential insiders, that one even has old family ties with. It further shows that, in the local understanding, there is a direct, unbroken continuity between traders, missionaries and colonizers of the old days, and the present day tourists.

This is also confirmed by the many storys about Niassans cheating the European and Chinese traders in the olden days to give away their gold, but getting nothing of real value out of Nias (cf. Suzuki 1959). These stories are explicitly related to tourism today, since it is said that they should not be told to tourists who may get the idea that people would still cheat them today. Niassans now are convinced Christians and distance themselves from the days when they still "did not know the meaning of sin". The peaceful and harmonious relations to foreigners today is therefore seen as an effect of local causes, namely the Niassans' moral improvement. Thus, we see in the local understanding a continued relationship between locals and foreigners with no logical opposition between tourists and locals. The old relation to outside traders and colonizers was, although antagonistic, a basic necessity, since gold and other import articles brought by the outsiders were essential for self-reproduction in the form of bridal payments.

Conclusion: Development understood locally

To conclude this I would say that my description of tourism in Nias on the levels of house, village and world has actually reversed the order of the world and the logic of life as these are conceived of in Nias. To put it in its right order: First, wealth and life come from an original source which is outside immediate reach, but which one has access to through one's own common origin from this source. Second, the flow of wealth must be attracted by charming the outsider with spectacular atraksi. Third, the connection to the flow can be made permanent by transforming the medium of wealth to become an insider, who is planting his wealth in one's house and village.

So here we have a very local understanding of development and modernity which expresses a transformation of a long-existing system in which changes are perceived as local achievements. Local principles of the generation and acquisititon of personal wealth (and health) have been reproduced for centuries and, although far from static, it is nevertheless this world view that tourism is incorporated into, as an outside force which is controlled locally. We cannot term this  created traditions or commodified culture because the local meaning structures are much wider than what simply concerns tourists. These terms imply that we have to split the local world by calling it culture as a product when it is practiced for tourists, but not when it is practice for locals, although both are understood as the power of attraction. Tourism has great influence on the local society and its cultural categories, but is deeply integrated into the totality of the social life as the necessary outsider who has long been part of the foundation of life in Nias.

This world-view is also the understanding of development in which the role of the state plays a very important role. Time has prevented me from discussing the part of the state, but it is important to note that development not only comes directly from the tourists' money. It is an Indonesian state development strategy to provide roads, cliniques and other public facilities to tourist areas long before to non-tourist areas. In this sense tourism becomes an attractor of development on a large scale, something which is, of course, also obvious to people in other areas of Nias, who therefore share a logic of tourist attraction as a most desireable way to development. In this sense tourism becomes a very powerful factor in local world-view everywhere in Nias.

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