(Finally) Wrapping Up Bocas
- charlottewade2010
- Nov 24, 2022
- 6 min read
Welcome back. The time between each of these blog posts is embarrassing but life, simply is, busy.
This blog post is at least marginally more coherent if read after its predecessor which offers some socio-historical context for the following discussion. However, hopefully it is still bearable for those decontextualised souls who cannot be bothered to read more than one post. I don’t blame you. Anyway, cut to a grumpy, tired Charlotte entering Bocas del Toro, following what was a nauseating, clothes-soaking, anxiety-provoking boat ride from mainland Panama.
I dragged myself out of bed and set off on a solitary peruse of Bocas Del Toro. I traced the town’s contours, devoid of direction and purpose as beams of brilliant sunshine saturated the landscape and browned (burnt) my pale shoulders. To my foreign eyes, the scenery was a gluttonous feast. I passed through the same streets many times, recognising their previously unfamiliar aesthetic expressions. In the town’s centre there was a real deliberateness to the scene’s appearance; brightly coloured signs, chalk boards boasting an array of refreshments, shop fronts sprouting with trinkets and paraphernalia. Whilst the florescent kineticism had an undoubtable allure it simultaneously felt all too familiar. I came across signs written predominantly in English, a water sports advertisement that featured a white, blond model with a Colgate smile and then one particular restaurant caught my eye.
The benches and walls were furnished by a pastel colour pallet, contrasted by the luminescent letters on a black chalk board detailing the food and drinks on offer. Ceramic pots grappled with the weight of long, dangling plants as they lethargically drooled over the restaurants’ frontiers. There was nothing wrong with this restaurant. It was entirely appealing. However it fit almost too perfectly within the boho-soho-shabby-chic-hippy-dippy-avo-on-toast aesthetic that is splattered across the trendy corners of western metropolitan hubs. And now here it is in Bocas del toro.
The concept of neo-shamanism offers an interesting entrance into analysis. Contrary to popular belief shamanism is by no means autochthonous. It is a conceptual product of western thought, referring to some imaginary of an indigenous people with a romanticised relation to nature, mother earth, spirituality and divine healing. Accordingly, neo-shamanism, citing Jakobsen (2020, pg.xi) ‘has been created at the end of this century to re-establish a link for modern man to his spiritual roots’. Thus, upon their exhaustion with Euro-America’s relentless consumerism and enlightenment rationalities, the western subject re-occupies spaces populated by the descendants of those once colonised, whose imagined relationship with the natural world we are now envious of. We call it tourism (or, for the 18-25s, a gap yaah), rationalised through the ethos of ‘it supports the local economy.’ And sometimes, it does, but rarely enough to compensate for the influx of loud, annoying westerners and their supporting infrastructure, both of which fails to express proper respect (distinct from fetishised curiosity) for the land and its occupants.
Yes, perhaps I am sensationalising and overly generalising the tourism industry. Indeed, there is increasing evidence of diverse and collaborative energies being marshalled towards the reduction of tourism’s big fat footprint on landscapes and community livelihoods. Yet, having read transcripts from interviews with local residents, this description applied to Bocas del toro feels like one that local and indigenous groups would agree with. In this context, tourism agencies, like Red Frog, tap into the neo-shamanistic appetite I illustrated above and serve up Bocas, its bountiful natural beauty, as a playground for indulgence.
I suggest that the anthropology of happiness provides an interesting way of further dissecting this imperative and its surrounding landscape.
There is a strong rhetoric within urban, Anglo youth culture, particularly perpetuated by social media, around doing things that make you look and feel good. Looking after or treating oneself, through activities including spa breaks, ski trips, swanky gym sessions, fine dining, bubble baths and merlot, Caribbean holidays (etc etc), is culturally valorised and encouraged. If I had a penny for every time I’ve seen a social media post with the caption ‘living my best life’, my mum would be getting a much more extravagant Christmas present. I think this token phrase and the associated pursuits indicate the socio-cultural currency that self-indulgence, often in luxury and expense, has marshalled. Evidently there are some clear commercial interests bolstering such trends but I’m not getting into that here. Instead I argue that prevalent social ideologies accommodate the satisfaction of hedonistic pleasures, such as those listed above, within notions of a good and meaningful life.
So what does this mean?
Well, happiness scholars will tell us there are two main types of happiness. There is in the first instance hedonistic happiness, broadly conceived as the satisfaction of our innate desires or ‘animalistic pleasures’ (Thin, 2012: 37), whether they may be a hunger for food, sex, thrill, intoxication and so on. Thomas’ (2005) ethnography (rather brilliantly) titled ‘What Happens in Tenerife Stays in Tenerife’, explores how and why holidays are so well suited to the satisfaction of these desires and thus the cultivation of hedonistic happiness. Yet there is also that of eudemonic happiness, wherein the cultivation and expression of happiness is informed, if not constructed by pervasive cultural representations and social ideologies that dictate what is a good and meaningful life. In other words, we experience certain forms of happiness by following, and publicly representing ourselves to be following (e.g. social media, holiday pics), socio-cultural articulations of a good life. The self-indulgence paradigm outlined above is but one, fairly micro, example. University degrees, career successes, buying a new house/car, getting married etc all fit within British culturally curated modes of eudemonic happiness.
Alas, the proposition I wish to conclude with is that the pursuit of hedonistic and eudemonic happiness amongst western tourists often comes at the expense of the local communities from spaces of endemic tourism. This lens offers a meaningful tool for critical analyses of the politics of tourism expansion.
To extrapolate the scope of this proposal I highlight to the Ngäbe, one of the indigenous populations living on Bocas del Toro, and their conceptions of a ‘good life’; aka the path to eudemonic happiness. The following draws from the four sources linked below (bad academic referencing behaviour from a bad academic J).
The Ngäbe population, harbouring a history scarred by compulsive repetitions of epistemological domination, economic exploitation and brutal dispossession, invest deeply in the notion of autonomy, hard work, collaboration and egalitarianism. Each facet is bound closely within practices of agricultural cultivation and subsistence farming. These practices form the backbone of Ngäbe culture as agriculture is seen as providing both the means for livelihood and the means for the enactment of cultural customs. In this sense, finca, the land, is the essential locus of what it means to live a good life in Ngäbe culture. Whilst ethnographic evidence points towards an emphasis on household autonomy, the autonomy of the household depends on highly valued practices of subsistence farming which, when worked hard at, with the collaborative support of others when needed, facilitates the egalitarian lifestyle Ngäbe people have preference for. Heck that was a long sentence. It aimed towards a (breathless) depiction of how a good life can be at once autonomous and premised on hard work but also entirely rooted within collaborative network of egalitarian sociality.
Interestingly, one Ngäbe individual states that nobody should ‘have more or feel better than others.’ He continues, ‘if there is a little bit [of food], there is a little, little, little bit for all of us.’ It’s hard to think of how this might translate into a Euro-American, neoliberal lexicon. Perhaps something along the lines of, ‘if there is a little bit of food I must raise its price so that it each bit makes me a little, little, little bit more profit.’ A far less wholesome proposition.
Anyway, the ways in which a swelling tourism industry in Bocas diminish Ngäbe people’s means of actualising the good life are easy to imagine. With resort developments taking over increasing shares of the natural landscape, turning untouched horizons into yoga studios, rejuvenation spas, infinity pools, and ziplines, local communities are increasingly marginalised from their homes, their cultural practices, their livelihoods and their chance for happiness. And whilst they call out and mobilise resources the Panamanian government continue to prioritise economic growth over individual wellbeing. The following public notice from a spokesperson for Indigenous Ngäbe, Buglé, and Campesino communities speaks to this point;
We are deeply concerned that the Panamanian State has refused to officially recognize our lands—in violation of Article 127 of the Panamanian Constitution—and that it has failed to carry out genuine processes of consultation and consent with all of our Indigenous communities ahead of projects that would have serious impacts for our peoples. In recent years, the Panamanian authorities have not protected or respected our rights in the face of the Fourth Transmission Line project, which threatens to displace us from our lands, undermine our traditional ways of life, and jeopardize one of the last undisturbed tropical forests in Panama.
If the task of ethically minded academics is to work towards the alleviation of human suffering then might we think of stolen happiness as a form of suffering that deserves attention and action. Arguments against the troubling economic legacies of certain countries that have underscored an unequal distribution of wealth don’t seem to be gaining enough traction anymore. We are acclimatised to economic disparities. But to envision the means through which certain people gain happiness at the expense of others is a novel framework for amplifying the human affective experiences at the heart of unequal, globalised international relations.
Additional refs xx
Jakobsen, M.D. (2020) Shamanism: Traditional and Contemporary Approaches to the Mastery of Spirits and Healing. New York: Berghahn Books.
Thin, N. (2012) Social Happiness: Theory into Policy and Practice, Bristol: Policy Press.
Thomas, M. (2005) “What Happens in Tenerife Stays in Tenerife”: Understanding Women’s Sexual Behaviour on Holiday. Culture, Health & Sexuality, 7(6), 571-584.
Comments