Post #796114 by EnchantedTikiGoth on Sun, Jul 7, 2019 7:24 AM

I was involved in that shitstorm, and threw some gasoline on it with my alternative map of Tiki culture!

The problem I had with Sven's map is that it is prescriptive rather than descriptive. He's not observing Tiki culture and charting out its various influences and directions objectively. He's outlining his ideal of what Tiki should be, which is a pie chart of a limited number of things complete with percentages. So I fueled the shitstorm by providing an alternative descriptive map that simply charted all the things that modern Tiki culture is influenced by... The core "purist" mid-century Tiki aesthetic is at the centre, and then it gets less and less Tiki as it goes out to the edges, which are not Tiki. Over the course of the discussion, my map went through about 3 or 4 revisions as people suggested things to add.

And I'll add that from my perspective in the shitstorm, it wasn't the "Tiki can be anything" crowd that were pissed. It was the purists that were pissed that anyone would dare disagree with Sven. "Tiki can be anything" people by-in-large tend to be pretty chill because they tend not to judge other people's experience of Tiki as "right" or "wrong". They just react negatively to being judged. But the whole thing is dumb anyways, because it's not like it's a competition and either purists are right or "Tiki can be anything" people are right. Purists are just closer to the centre of my map than some other people who may be drifting more out to the edges. I wish some people could realize that.