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This chapter examines the legacy of the Smithsonian Folklife Festival (SFF) in its restaging, national and local offshoots, and memory as well as the local impact of national cultural intervention. It considers the various forms in which the SFF was transported back into a local context—performance, film, follow-up projects, and memory. It also raises a number of questions about Festival aftereffects, such as the impact of the Festival on cultural preservation programs and policy in Hawaiʻi, or the larger implications of institutional attention to tradition. The chapter argues that beyond its time-bound performance, the Hawaiʻi program provided an ongoing means of production and reproduction, but that its aftereffects were blunted by local politics and socioeconomic factors. It also explains how the Festival legitimized and made cultural celebrities of participants, albeit mostly on a small scale. Finally, it shows how the Festival and its 1990 restaging reinforced the notion that geniality, hospitality, reciprocity, and inclusivity are qualities inherent in Hawaiʻi lifestyles.

The volume editors frame and contextualize Smithsonian Folklife Festival history with attention to the role of curatorial practice in mediating and negotiating the concerns and interests of the event’s varied publics and stakeholders. The editors address how the articles create a step towards systematically examining institutional Festival principles and the particular curatorial process of the Festival, unpacking the challenges, responsibilities, and forms of conversation that cultural representation entails; the ideals upon which the Festival is based; and places of friction and contestation that arise among the many parties involved in producing it.

This chapter examines how performance became a site of contestation and negotiation once performers inhabited the carefully crafted site and narrative of the Hawaiʻi program. Focusing on performers' experiences in and perceptions of the Hawaiʻi program, it shows how the dynamics of resistance, complicity, and collaboration play out in institutionally backed ethnographic display. It describes how the planning through production phases of the Smithsonian Folklife Festival (SFF) influenced its casting, staging, and choreography and culminated in the performance phase. It argues that much of what performers and staff found memorable about the SFF transpired out of the public eye, mainly backstage and behind the scenes. That is, spontaneity arose at the Festival, instigated by participants, more in the program's seams than onstage.

This chapter describes the visionary role of Ralph Rinzler, who is considered the primary impresario of the Festival of American Folklife and the individual who orchestrated its establishment as a presence on the National Mall. Although Rinzler never curated a program himself, he modelled the Festival curator’s sensibilities and shaped the Festival’s occupational culture. The author examines how Rinzler would become the personification of the intersections of academic and applied folkloristics, of idealism and pragmatism, of traditional and groundbreaking conceptions of what folklore and folklife were and how–and why–they should be represented in the national museum and presented to the public. It delineates the principles put into presentational practice; his concepts of the “folk,” of democratic populism, and of social justice in the context of the Folklife Programs, 1975–1983.

This chapter traces the influence of certain programmatic priorities, philosophies, and strategies on shaping the vision of the Smithsonian Folklife Festival and the ways in which certain Festival notions of art and cultural equity have since suffused American culture. Tracing the impact of the Festival from a personal vantage point, the author explores the Festival's history, suggesting the under-acknowledged contribution of folklorists to American culture and the way the Festival has become a model for other nationally acclaimed organizations such as City Lore in New York City and Story Corps, events such as the annual Cowboy Poetry Gathering in Elko, Nevada, and for media productions such as the Moth Radio Hour.

This chapter examines how “authenticity” was mediated through the rhetorical and spatial constructions of the production process leading up to the frenzy of activity at the National Mall for the annual Smithsonian Folklife Festival (SFF). More specifically, it considers how the construction of the Hawaiʻi program's “sense of place” made it possible to manipulate space to disrupt the island's tourist tropes as well as contextualize and narrate its multiculturalism. The chapter shows how the production phase of the Hawaiʻi program manifests in the highly visible end products of site design, signage, and the Festival book that create the visual and textual support for performance. It discusses the ways in which the Hawaiʻi program's production phase is caught up in the construction of authenticity through skillful crafting of the SFF over a rhetorical and spatial framework.

This book explores the poetics and politics of festival making as seen through an ethnographic history of the 1989 Hawaiʻi program at the annual Smithsonian Folklife Festival (SFF), the largest national tourist event in the United States. The SFF is an idealistic, innovative, populist-based experiment in cultural democracy that celebrates cultural diversity and advocates cultural preservation through fieldwork-based research that identifies culture bearers and offers public presentations and interpretations of their cultural contributions. The SFF blurs the boundaries of both museum and tourism presentations that rely on clear demarcations between viewers and viewed. This book examines how the themes of public sector folklore culture brokering, cultural tourism, ideas about multiculturalism, the role of tradition in national image making, and the impact of cultural intervention on local communities converge in the SFF. It also raises important questions about the stakes surrounding the politics of tradition and multiculturalism while highlighting the importance of looking critically at the ways peoples and places are represented through cultural agencies.

This conclusion reflects on a number of issues related to the 1989 Hawaiʻi program at the Smithsonian Folklife Festival (SFF). It first considers questions about the intent of folklife festivals in general before discussing how the Hawaiʻi program successfully re-imaged Hawaiʻi in relation to the rest of the nation, made ethnic groups that had been effectively erased both visible and storied, and most importantly, celebrated Hawaiʻi folklife and people. It then shows how the Hawaiʻi program was used to foreground a national narrative of cultural diversity as a counter-narrative to cultural homogeneity. It also explains how the Festival and the restaging reinforced the notion that geniality, hospitality, reciprocity, and inclusivity are qualities inherent in Hawaiʻi lifestyles. Finally, it describes the Hawaiʻi program as an interactive performance zone in which ideologies of power were encoded and decoded between its frames, staff, and participants.