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Last week we had absolutely no time to leave town, so
Martha and I left town anyway, to attend a conference
called Seeing and Being Seen: Tourism in the American
West
on May 1 and 2, put on by the Center of the
American West, which is connected to the University of
Colorado at Boulder, which in turn is somehow connected to
Colorado.
Although certain speakers were about as exciting as watching nails rust, others were informative, even to those of us who lack any college degrees, let alone advanced ones. One such speaker was Rebecca Martinez Grandbois, director of tourism for the Jemez Pueblo in New Mexico.
She explained that the Jemez people have sacred dances which hold deep sacred meanings for the participants. The dances, in fact, are participatory rituals and are not designed to have spectators.
However, tourists visiting pueblos expect to see dances, and so to accommodate them, the Jemez people perform other tribes' dances which hold little if any meaning to the Jemez.
Well, I understand perfectly the desire to extract money from tourists, and I've seen all manner of genuine Colorado Rocky Mountain souvenirs that came from Taiwan. Industrial tourism apparently works about the same in all cultures.
Further, I wouldn't know an authentic Jemez dance from
an authentic Hopi dance, and if I just had to see some
Indians dancing to feel as though I'd acquired an authentic
New Mexico vacation experience, it really wouldn't matter
if they were doing the Mashed Potato to Louie,
Louie.
If the tour guide and my guidebook assured me
this was all authentic culture, I'd doubtless believe
it.
Then some other speaker observed, disparagingly, that perhaps the best-known Indian dancers were the Koshare, the Boy Scouts from La Junta.
That's where I started getting confused. If it's okay for the Jemez to perform some other tribe's dance, then why isn't it okay for the La Junta boys to perform some other people's dance?
Where do we determine authenticity?
And if I
happen to admire a dance for the grace and precision of the
performers, rather than as another experience to add to my
multi-cultural collection, why do I care what culture the
dance came from?
This could have been an interesting line of inquiry, although no one pursued it. But it did make me realize that, as outlanders visiting the People's Republic of Boulder, we were to some degree engaged in cultural tourism -- that is, we were visiting another culture to observe its customs and ways, and presumably becoming better-rounded, more-tolerant people in the process.
And so, I present certain observations of the Boulder culture from the perspective of the Rube & Hayseed Culture:
· When a traffic signal turns red there, it signifies that drivers should accelerate. Here drivers usually hit the brakes when they see a red light before them.
· What we call trash cans
are known as
recycling bins
there, and they're quite picky about
what goes where. I suspect this is some totemistic
behavior, instilled by a shaman shortly after birth, but I
did not have time to find out more.
· One speaker talked about how dominant cultures will appropriate items from other cultures. For generations out here, people have put rings in pigs' noses and branded and tattooed horses and cattle.
Something in the process of cultural appropriation must have slipped a gear, though, because there, instead of applying nose rings, brands and tattoos to the livestock, they apply these to themselves. Weird.
· The linguistic differences between Boulderese
and Rural Colorado English are generally quite predictable
-- our blind
is their visually challenged,
our disabled
is their differently abled,
our
brutal murder
is their tragic incident,
etc.,
with one notable exception.
They were talking about the loss of traditional jobs in
the rural West -- mining, logging, agriculture -- and
referring to those who lose such employment as
unskilled.
Now, I wouldn't use the term unskilled
for
anybody who could timber a stope, rig a choker or
field-repair a baler with baling wire. I'd say they were
skilled, but there just isn't much of a market these days
for their skills.
So I was quite surprised that in Boulder, my neighbors
here would be stigmatized as unskilled
rather than
more respectfully described as differently skilled
or economically challenged.
I guess that's the value of cultural tourism -- just when you think you've got these bizarre native customs figured out, they find a way to surprise you.
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