Culture and Value

Tourism, Heritage, and Property

Regina F. Bendix

• Publisher: Indiana University Press
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9780253035691
• Topic: Scienze sociali
• Subtopic: Antropologia culturale e sociale

An "eminently readable" collection of essays exploring what happens when cultural heritage meets commerce ( Asian Ethnology ). When heritage becomes a commodity, when culture is instrumental in driving tourism, and when individuals assert ownership over either, social, ideological, political, and economic motivations intertwine. Bestowing value on "culture" is itself a culturally rooted act, and the essays gathered in Culture and Value focus on the motivations and value regimes people in particular times and contexts have generated to enhance the visibility and prestige of cultural practices, narratives, and artifacts. This collection of essays by noted folklorist Regina F. Bendix offers a personal record of the unfolding scholarly debate regarding value in the studies of tourism, heritage, and cultural property. Written over the course of several decades, Bendix's case studies and theoretical contributions chronicle the growing and transforming ways in which ethnographic scholarship has observed social actors generating value when carrying culture to market, enhancing value in inventing protective and restorative regimes for culture, and securing the potential for both in devising property rights. Bendix's work makes a case for a reflexive awareness of the changing scholarly paradigms that inform scholars' research contributions. "A significant contribution to the study of cultural resources... a must read for scholars particularly interested in politics and the allocation of funding and personal rights over tangible and intangible culture." — Western Folklore

1

Tourism and Cultural Displays: Inventing Traditions for Whom?

In 1805, the village of Interlaken in the Swiss Alps experienced its first grandiose folklore display event. The occasion was called the Unspunnenfest. The emphasis at this event was the display of customs and costumes of the cowherds from the surrounding area. The audience, composed of dignitaries and many foreign guests, was treated to a display of dance, music, and song by costumed natives, and sports competitions unique to the area such as open-air wrestling (called Schwingen) and heaving heavy boulders as far as possible (Steinstossen). Madame de Staël, one of the invited guests, enthusiastically described this first “Swiss Cowherders’ Festival” as an affair “pulsating with native life.” She was particularly taken with the bonfires lit on the surrounding hilltops, commemorating the fires of liberty of the original Swiss confederation, and she expressed her hopes for more such display events (de Stael 1958, 287, 295). Her wish was fulfilled three years later: a second Unspunnen festival was held in 1808.

In the twentieth century, the Unspunnenfest has been commemorated and restaged five times (1905, 1946, 1955, 1976, 1981), but Interlaken has created three other events of similar magnitude: springtime processions held at the time when the cows would be herded up to the Alps (now discontinued), an open-air production of the William Tell play (staged since 1912 and still performed every summer), and a winter custom called Harder-Potschete, featuring supposed fertility demons and forest spirits (created in 1956 and still performed).¹

Interlaken has a two hundred-year history of tourist development, thus providing an ideal case for examining the long-term impact of a tourist economy on a host society. The last two hundred years have also seen the emergence of numerous display events, and it is tempting to see a direct, economically motivated connection between tourism and displays.² This article will argue, however, that appeal to a touristic audience constitutes only a surface rationale for inventing traditions. Economic motivations are one part of the story and they constitute an important argument in the process of creating display events. But wished-for economic benefits do not sufficiently explain why such events continue for decades or even centuries. A close examination of the motivations and choices of originators, performers, and audiences of new, traditionalized displays also points toward an affirmation of local and national cultural identity in the face of seasonal mass foreign invasion.

A historically informed consideration of the case of Interlaken sheds light on the process of invention as well as on tourism’s impact on expressive culture. Coined by historians, the “invention of tradition” (Hobsbawm and Ranger 1983) has fueled the older debates over “folklorismus,” “fakelore,” and “authenticity” in European and American folklore studies and anthropology (Bausinger 1966; Bendix 1988; Bodemann 1983; Dundes 1985; Evans-Pritchard 1987; Handler and Linnekin 1984; Kirshenblatt-Gimblett 1988; Moser 1964). While the concept of tradition received extensive treatment in light of the tradition and modernity discourse (Shils 1981), until recently “tradition has been,” in Dan Ben-Amos’s historiographic perception, “a term to think with, not to think about” (1984, 87).³ But in the process of rethinking the “folk” versus “fake” and the academic versus applied dichotomy (Kirshenblatt-Gimblett 1988), folklorists have also begun to deconstruct the scholarly concept of tradition. In this context, the idea of created, negotiable tradition has been profoundly liberating. It allows for a view of cultural productions where what was previously categorized as impure and anomalous can suddenly belong to the realm of expressive culture. Furthermore, the idea of invention brings with it questions about the inventors and thus shifts the analytic focus from the event to the agency of those involved in its creation and maintenance (Giddens 1979, 49–95).

Richard Handler and Jocelyn Linnekin (1984) have also argued along those lines. Despite the long Western history of thought that sees tradition as a stable passing on of traits within a cultural system, Handler and Linnekin arrive at the conclusion that the idea of tradition is rather influenced by ideology, and thus continued reinterpretation and change (288–90). Traditions are always defined in the present, and the actors doing the defining are not concerned whether scholars will perceive a given festival or piece of art as genuine or spurious, but whether the manifestation will accomplish what they intend it to accomplish. “Inventing traditions” is thus not an anomaly but rather the rule, and it can be particularly well-studied in industrial and postindustrial nation-states exposed to extensive intercultural contact. Economists have, for obvious reasons, studied tourism extensively for over a century (e.g., Cohn 1882; Gölden 1939). Within fields of social and cultural research, touristic subjects have been regarded as worthy of serious social scientific research only since the early 1970s (Nash 1981).⁴ As Davydd Greenwood noted in 1977, “a few years ago, we could lament the lack of serious research on tourism, but now, like the tourists themselves, social researchers are flocking to tourist centers” (1977, 129). Among the reasons for the delay in accepting tourism as a pervasive, intercultural phenomenon rather than scorning it as an intrusive agent destroying cultures, was the (maybe unconscious) desire to study the pristine and untouched, a desire that has its roots in the history of anthropological and folkloristic study of native peoples as well as in nineteenth-century notions of other cultures.

While tourism research has begun to flourish, the number of studies dealing with tourism and expressive culture—specifically displays of the kind discussed here—are relatively sparse. Benetta Jules-Rosette has noted that the anthropology of tourism and semiotics “overemphasize the role of image consumers [tourists] at the expense of the process of image creation that is a by-product of the tourist industry” (1984, 3). In other words, while host societies have been studied, it is not frequently in terms of their own expressive culture but more often in terms of their response to tourist pressures (see Cohen 1984). In her work with tourist art, Jules-Rosette found that the longer an artisan was in the business of producing “tourist art,” the more he developed an aesthetic that satisfied his own cultural identity—a dimension acknowledged also in Nelson Graburn’s (1976) seminal collection on tourist art. In the complex interplay of market, audience, and performers, the artisans eventually appropriated an externally imposed notion of authenticity, and a similar process will be illustrated with the case of Interlaken. The first staging of the Unspunnen festival in 1805 spoke directly to the romantic cravings of foreign visitors for unspoiled, “authentic” peasant and cowherder traditions; the later inventions demonstrate more and more the search on the part of natives for what they perceive to be authentic manifestations of their own culture.

INTERLAKEN AND TOURISM

The tourist, according to Dean MacCannell, is continually in search of authentic experience (1976, 14, 91–107; see also Krippendorf 1984). The tourist industry is responding to this craving in evermore ingenious ways to let the tourist gaze at life as it is really lived in the host society. Yet no matter how far into the everyday domain a tourist is allowed to peek, the authenticity remains staged by the very fact that the tourist is looking at it.

But if authenticity in the realm of culture is difficult for the tourist to find, what kind of experience is possible? In Interlaken, in the Bernese Oberland, it is the grandiose physical environment of the Alps (Studer 1947; Winkler 1944). The landscape—unlike culture—cannot be staged, and most tourists prefer not to think about the numerous human intrusions—the carefully tended fields, the rebuilt streams, the many ski lifts and cog railways—for it is only with the aid of some of these that they can get close enough to experience the grandeur. The natural beauty is too large to spoil the impression of an authentic experience, and there would probably be no tourists in Interlaken if it were not for the village’s unique geographic location between lakes and peaks.

The first tourists arrived in the Interlaken area in the second half of the eighteenth century (Kroner 1968, 22), and while an interest in native culture appeared in their travel notes, it was the Alps and nature that attracted them most (Bernard 1978; Weiss 1933). Nature was no longer the threatening antithesis to civilization, but had instead become the inspiration for cultural revitalization. The Unspunnen festivals helped to spread Interlaken’s name internationally, and the number of visitors increased steadily. Interlaken responded by building housing and opening up better streets and waterways to allow the tourists to see nature up close (Gallati 1977; Spreng 1956).

A secondary interest of the early tourist was health. To satisfy this desire for health-related activities, an enterprising local artist organized the local dairy farmers to offer goat whey cures as early as the 1810s (Bourquin 1963). Survey statistics indicate that scenic beauty and personal health concerns remain the major reasons for tourists visiting Interlaken even now. Most modern tourists seek health through sports, such as skiing, hiking, tennis, swimming, horseback riding, golfing, or sailing, rather than through the goat whey cures of one hundred seventy years ago. Countless rail- and cableways allow hikers and skiers to get as close to high-altitude nature as technologically possible, and indoor saunas and hot tubs in most of the luxury hotels built around the turn of the twentieth century allow for the tourist’s healthy return to civilization.

Outsiders referred to the area as Interlaken, but until the Reformation in the sixteenth century, Interlaken was only a monastery surrounded by three villages and one town. It was only in the late nineteenth century that the hotels, guesthouses, and businesses around the old monastery secured for themselves the name Interlaken (Latin for “between the lakes”). Town and village rights among the five communities remain carefully separated, with each village maintaining its own political leadership and administration. Until the advent of tourism, dairy farming was the main occupation. The number of farmers has steadily declined, following the general trend in Switzerland, and today service occupations outnumber farming and industry (Schweizerischer Alpkataster 1978). Interlaken has two thousand three hundred inhabitants (as of the 1980 census), a population swamped by the two thousand six hundred commuters who arrive there every day for work.⁵ The total population of the five villages is nine thousand, and at peak tourist season, close to that many tourists can be accommodated.

INTERLAKEN’S FOLKLORISTIC DISPLAYS

Besides relishing nature and health benefits, tourists also wish to be entertained. The foreign tourists in the nineteenth century belonged to the social elite—members of various European royal families were regular guests, and in response, classical music evenings and gambling in a specially built casino were made available (Schärli 1984). Today, for a different clientele, bars and international guest star performances are common; but as in the early days, a superb classical orchestra plays during the summer months.

Throughout the last one hundred years, however, locals, and in particular those professionals not directly involved with tourism—teachers, doctors, merchants, and lawyers—have felt that tourists should be offered representations of the local culture as well. This sentiment was repeatedly voiced in local newspapers, with the memory of Unspunnen convincing them that it was authentic cowherders’ and peasant culture, which enticed visitors to come. Even though an ever-increasing proportion of area residents made their living in the tourist industry, locals nonetheless felt that Interlaken and the surrounding area did represent authentic cowherders’ culture and, furthermore, that it was possible to stage, perform, or parade this emblematic culture.

UNSPUNNEN

In 1805, the year of the first Unspunnen festival, tourism hardly existed as a concept. Travelers were inspired by the romantic notions expressed in Rousseau’s and possibly Herder’s writings, as well as the early literary travel reflections of Goethe and others. The turmoil of the French Revolution, and the drastic governmental changes brought about by Napoleon’s occupation of most of Europe—including Switzerland—provided the backdrop. Napoleon’s army stayed in Switzerland until 1802, and under his reign, the valleys surrounding Interlaken received unprecedented autonomy (Jorin 1913).

For more than six hundred years, those valleys had fought for independence from the city of Bern, and Napoleon finally granted them a separate cantonal status (Robé 1972). When Napoleon left, Interlaken and its surroundings once again fell under the government of Bern, a state which the locals did not approve of. In this situation of potential rebellion and internal war, the Bern government came up with the idea of the Cowherder’s Festival in Unspunnen. Thus, the festival was anything but an innocent celebration of folk culture, but rather was instead intended as an occasion for reconciliation between the fo...