Post #13

Tourism and Identity
Reading

Devil's Bargains: Tourism in the Twentieth-Century American West by Hal K. Rothman

In this weeks reading, Rothman deals with the realities of tourism in the American West. Just as the very real effects of tourism are often overlooked by communities, this is a cultural issue that is often overlooked by those, such as myself, who participate as the outside consumer of "imagined communities" that tourism creates.

Rothman traces the development of tourism in American society through the stages of heritage, recreational, and entertainment based tourism. By itself, this analysis of tourism was particularly interesting. Yet, the strength of this work is its depiction of the effects of tourism on the communities that embrace it as a form of economic growth. To Rothman, the embrace of tourism represents the last desperate attempts of communities in the West to hold onto economic prosperity. Inevitably, in Rothman's analysis, this attempt leads to the death of native community as tourists come seeking their self-perceived experience of the place that was once a community defined on its own terms.

Thus, this work maneuvers itself into the interpretation of the West as a "colony". In the view of Rothman, the West is succumbing to the "most colonial of colonial economies..." (Rothman 12) In Rothman's analysis, this is a colonialism that is built around re-defining the identity of a place and those who are attempting to save that place through tourism. Unlike other forms of colonialism, which seek to control resources and in the process control the society of the native people, the resource that it brought into submission with tourism is that society itself. As communities bring in the capital for the development of tourism, they inevitably bring corporate dominance, neonative residents, and eventually the tourists that they so desired. In the process, the community is re-defined and re-interpreted (imagined) by the all of these agents.

As one who has been involved in the work of museums and as a native in an unlikely community of tourism, I found Rothman's analysis to be particularly interesting and challenging. I have lived as a native in the small town of Fairmount, Indiana. A small town that once every year is "colonized" by hundreds of bikers and foreign tourists seeking to experience life in the home town of the Fairmount native and actor James Dean. As a native, the effects of tourism, though limited to a single weekend during the James Dean Festival, are very clear. Fairmount is re-imagined as numbers of people walk to streets in their red leather jackets and greased hair, an anomaly that is culminated with the annual James Dean Look Alike Contest. This is a far cry from the flannel shirts of the farmers that normally grace the streets. Countless others drive their rebuilt 1950's era automobiles to the annual car show. Again, a mode of transportation that is rather different than the fleets of pick-up trucks that normally drive the streets of Fairmount.

Furthermore, this weekend of cultural colonialism is gradually beginning to sink deeper roots as the town run Fairmount Museum is often overshadowed by the James Dean Gallery or the James Dean Museum. In fact, the newly constructed James Dean Museum has even been built outside of Fairmount, along Interstate 69 to allow for a more convenient tourist experience as it is located closer to the hotels and farther from Dean's birthplace.

As a member of the museum business I found Rothman's analysis to be challenging, and to some extent disturbing. Given that museums are, for better or for worse, to a greater or lesser extent, tied to the tourist industry, I find that Rothman's argument deserves further analysis. I have worked as, what one might call, a neonative from the future as an interpreter at living history museums. While I hope and believe that, as institutions built upon historical method, museums do not pose the same threat of re-interpretation to native communities, their link to tourism means that greater attention should be paid to this issue. Perhaps, in their most glowing sense, museum's can be viewed as institutions that stand in the gap between cultural re-imagination and the past. I have seen history used in both ways. One one end of the spectrum you can find what I would term tourist history, the historians worst nightmare, "historic" ghost tours. On the other end of the spectrum, one finds museums, such as the living history museums I have worked with, that take their role as public educators (particularly as educators for the many school groups that visit them on field trips) very seriously. With that said, the I find the idea that history, as presented by a museum not grounded in sound historical practice, can contribute to the re-imagination and eclipse of an historic community very real and very disturbing.

Rothman's work provided a very challenging analysis of the impact of tourism upon the West. His portrayal of the transformation of communities effected by tourism is a very real issue that deserves further attention. As historians, it is this type of re-imagination of history that we must be wary of as scholars and as tourists ourselves.