Ginger and Exoticism

    My mom is a big fan of the Paul Mitchell haircare company, and has been my entire life. Their flagship product, the one she still uses to this day, is the Awapuhi line. It's got lots of different stuff: shampoo, conditioner, creams and treatments and sprays. Then I asked myself a question: wait, what the heck is Awapuhi?

This video is from the official YouTube channel. I don't know what he's doing either.

    Awapuhi, scientific name Zingiber Zerumbet and known by a bunch of other names, is a species of ginger native to Asia and Austronesia. We have evidence of it existing at least 10,000 years ago, and it's been used in the region up to the present day. In 1983 or 1985, depending on what source you believe , Scottish-American hairstylist Paul Mitchell established an awapuhi farm in Hawaii. The company blog then says "[Paul Mitchell] went on to discover that Native Hawaiians had used the fragrant juice of the ʻawapuhi plant, also known as "shampoo ginger," to soften and condition their skin and hair for centuries."

    This is all pretty basic stuff, I found it on Wikipedia with a handful of Google searches, but I feel comfortable saying that the local ginger was not, in fact, a secret of any sort. It was a thing that indigenous Hawaiian people had been doing for centuries, and folks had been aware of for millenia, and then this guy came in, found out about this type of ginger, and industrialized it for use in his haircare company. Now, almost forty years after his death, well after that shampoo and other projects made the other founder of the company into a multibillionaire, it is still trading on the "exoticism" of Hawaii, selling a vision of vistas of "untamed" nature. 

    In my opinion, this sucks. 

    To be clear, I'm not accusing the company of any sort of unique impropriety. History abounds with white people "discovering" something, using its non-English names to make it seem more exotic, and trading on that with folks who don't know better. Even though the world is a much smaller place than it was a century ago, you still see health and food professionals try this all the time (see the "superfood" trend). And, of course, in the RPG scene, this sort of thing is...common, though thankfully not as much as it once was. 

From "What Makes a Night Arabian?" by Wolfgang Baur, via the Complete Kobold Guide to Game Design. Originally written in 2007, Kobold Press retracted the essay and apologized for it in 2022.

    If, like me and most people reading this blog, you're American, the whole pioneering spirit and fantasy of the untamed frontier was something instilled in you from a young age. While I don't claim to have any special insight into the zeitgeists of other countries, I'd put money down that holds true for most colonial and imperialist nations today. That fantasy is baked into the core of our hobby: the original loop of Dungeons and Dragons involved venturing into unknown territories, extracting wealth, and using it to erect a massive fuck-off castle. 

    If you're deep enough into the weeds to be reading this blog, you already know all of this. I'm preaching to the choir. D&D as Western is pretty well-known ground, and it opens up all sorts of things that I as a white American am not necessarily the best equipped to handle. Questions of what that means are better left to smarter people than me.

    But I do think that how we frame things at the table matters. What we as players consider "normal" and what we consider "exotic" or "novel" matters. It's a game, obviously, but entertainment can and does change how folks see the world. 

    At least we're not releasing books called "Oriental Adventures" anymore. That's a sign of progress, right?