Written in clear and accessible prose and framed with personal narratives, this book is a wonderful addition to the collections of anyone interested in colonialism, tourism, and/or the anthropology of space. Rich in historic, ethnographic, and analytical material, the book serves two purposes: it provides valuable documentation and insight into an area that has garnered very little scholarly attention, and it contributes to tourism discourse, providing a new approach in understanding the construction of space for tourist venues.

Anthropologist Miriam Kahn engages with the concept of place through examining the construction of the tourist imagery of French Polynesia, with a primary focus on the islands of Tahiti and Huahine. She highlights this idealization of place by juxtaposing the advertised tourist image of pristine white sandy beaches with the grim realities of poverty and inadequate governmental infrastructure and by showing the destruction of the land through nuclear testing undertaken by the French government, which occurred on the islands of Moruroa and Fangataufa. The material she engages with was collected over several visits between 1976 and 2010, ranging from one-week stays to extended fieldwork endeavors of six months. While there, she developed intimate connections with the local population and a familiarity with the Tahitian language, accompanying her fluency in French. Kahn augments her ethnographic fieldwork by engaging with the works of Henri Hiro, who was a filmmaker, playwright, and poet from the island of Mo’orea. Her findings are interpreted though the analytical framework of French theorist Henry Lefebvre. He saw reality as taking place between the perceived space, l’espace perçu, the conceived space, l’espace conçu, and the lived space, l’espace vécu, which encompasses the prior two: both physical and imagined. By bringing her fieldwork and the philosophical understandings of Hiro into dialogue with Lefebvre’s theory on place, Kahn creates a foundation to introduce her own concept for interpreting tourist spaces, the idea of tourist “cocoons.”

In engaging deeply with the way Tahiti is perceived by tourists, politicians, and locals, Kahn creates a perfect platform to show the validity of her theory of tourist cocoons--a metaphor that highlights the fact that constructed tourist spaces are always in the process of being spun; whereas the more common imagery of the bubble expands, shrinks, and bursts but does not inherently change. She sees these cocoons as being carefully managed heterotopic spaces of illusion that are constantly adapting in never-ending fashion to provide the ideal tourist imaginary, ripe with recognizable markers of landscape and expressive traditions to fall in line with touristic expectations. In doing so, cocoons are settings of total control, venues of power, managed to impose a type of coherence on an area that is fraught with disjunctures. In the case of Tahiti, white sand is imported to cover the natural black sand beaches, and the environmental devastation caused by nuclear testing is masked by sparkling hotels, overwater bungalows, and smiling Tahitian hotel staff.

The book is divided into seven chapters, accompanied by an introduction and interspersed with black and white images featuring postcards, maps, diagrams, and pictures taken during fieldwork. The introduction familiarizes the reader with relevant background information on the author, namely, how she approaches the concept of space in light of her childhood experiences and anthropological interests. The introduction also delineates her approach to how space is understood within an anthropological and Polynesian framework. In the subsequent chapters, Kahn brings the reader through a colonial history of French Polynesia, explicating how the islands were first perceived by the world and moving on to engage with how France continues to interact with them, focusing primarily on French nuclear testing. She moves on to discuss how the disparities between the foreign perception of the islands and the reality of the nuclear testing are resolved for both the tourists and the locals, opening up a space for her to explicate her theory of the tourist cocoon. The transformation of the Fare Pote’e building on the island of Huahine from a community museum to a government-sponsored tourist destination serves as her case study to further grapple with the concepts presented earlier. Kahn ends her book with an examination of how, in the wake of these issues, locals create “their own counter-spaces through creative uses of music, dance, language, food, and humor” (28). She then beckons the reader to understand the way the complexities of place, as seen through the multiple perspectives she presents, are crucial in how we approach the overlapping cultures of today’s world.

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[Review length: 739 words • Review posted on March 12, 2012]