Around the world, increasing private and public resources are being devoted to cultural and eco-tourism as a development strategy designed to generate revenues while preserving local environments and cultures. Marginalized regions have sought to balance development with preservation of their distinctiveness, all within a post-industrial economy that paradoxically values difference while facilitating homogenization. This research suggests that while negotiating these conflicting goals and values, both residents of a region and tourists from outside engage in complex performances of "social spatialization" whereby they give particular meanings to place. In Louisiana's Acadiana region attempts to preserve the region's culture and environment through cultural and eco-tourism have been accompanied by considerable political contestation. Though historically this region was socially and environmentally marginalized, the last forty years have seen a resurgence of ethnic recognition and a growing interest in protecting the local wetland environment. Today, the Atchafalaya River Basin is characterized in a variety of ways as a space of natural resources, wilderness, tourism and ethnic heritage. These imagined attributes of place are constructed through a melding of representations about a place and subjective experiences in a place. In order to assess these conjectures, the research will compare qualitative findings from three major sources: literature and popular media; public scoping and interviews; and the experience of a variety of swamp tours.
The study will give insight into how Cajun ethnicity is negotiated in the swamp for visitors and how this notion of the Atchafalaya compares to local and representational knowledges. Results will inform contribute to the literature that investigates the increased prominence of place-marketing as an economic development strategy in historically marginalized regions. This study also hopes to reinvigorate interest in Cajun culture so that researchers can better address issues such as language loss, disinvestment, and cultural commodification in the region. Analysis will reveal the ways in which individuals involved in tourism construct and articulate the place myths that undergird this economy. The findings will inform guides, planners, and anyone interested in environmental and cultural preservation in Acadiana or elsewhere. The award will enable a promising student to improve his dissertation research and to establish a strong independent research career.
This research sought to understand the dynamics of the process by which broader understandings of the history, ecology, and culture of places are translated for outsiders in the context of tourism. The project initially took place in Louisiana’s Atchafalaya Basin where "America’s Largest River Basin Swamp" provides the environmental backdrop for educating outsiders about wetlands in general, about local environmental threats, and about the local Cajun culture. The research involved working directly with boat tours which are positioned as a "stage" on which culture and nature are performed in a "live" manner by guides who are experienced as navigators of the swamp, with knowledge of its flora and fauna, and who often are themselves Cajun. Most of the tours were marketed as Cajun swamp tours, and during their performances guides positioned the ethnic group as having a history of swamp subsistence and preservation. The tours addressed both the common expectations of outsiders, such as the behavior and roles of alligators in the swamp, as well as information that outsiders did not come expecting such as the impact of oil pipelines on swamp ecology. Tourists (who were also vital contributors to the project) absorbed this ecological/historical information to varying degrees but in general were found to be both educated and entertained by the experience. Promoters of tourism claim that the emergence of this type of tourism that is more than simply entertainment is a sustainable way to save the environment by selling it. The same is said about the relationship between tourism and ethnicity such that here, tourism can preserve culture by selling a Cajun experience. This research has found that the Atchafalaya swamp itself and Cajun cultures more generally are promoted by guided boat tourism, but that this type of development is not always benign. Specifically, the ethnic aspects of Cajun swamp tours are rejected by some guides who feel that promoting one’s ethnicity as a marketing angle is denigrating. For them, just being themselves allowed them to create a meaningful experience for outsiders without catering to the tourists’ expectations of what Cajun was supposed to be- often a poor, uneducated, and otherwise marginalized stereotype. As a type of environmentally sustainable development, swamp tourism generally did provide a means by which locals could earn a living off of the experience of the swamp rather than working in a swamp-extraction industry such as cypress logging or oil pipeline construction. However, the market for swamp tours is saturated, competition is fierce, and this specific type of development cannot compete with more environmentally damaging industries in the Atchafalaya as a source of local jobs. To compare how the Atchafalaya is given meaning on tours (the "social spatialization") to other similar environments, the project was taken to two other swamps, the Okefenokee in South Georgia and Caddo Lake on the Texas-Louisiana border. In these places, the Cajun ethnic aspect of tourism was absent and this made a difference in both the guide’s performances and tourists’ experiences. Most of the information on the Georgia and Texas tours was about the ecology and environmental threats to the swamps, in addition to some basic history. Tourists were presented with a swamp that was in a sense free of human culture. Also in contrast to the Atchafalaya, these swamps are not privately owned but public property and this part of their respective "stories" played an important part on tours. Unlike the Atchafalaya, where size and private landowners limited the ability for scientists and managers to "control" the ecology, the other two swamps were presented as systems where government agencies could respond to the needs of the environment through flood and drought response, invasive species control, and wildlife management among other strategies. Thus, while the Atchafalaya was threatened yet full of culture, the Okefenokee and Caddo Lake were presented to tourists more as cultureless yet paradoxically "controlled" spaces. The intellectual merit of this research lay in its theoretical perspective which treated tourism as a revealing moment where structure and agency come together to craft understanding of a place. Further, the findings illustrated broadly how tourism is used as a source of regional development and more specifically how swamp tourism contributed to both the local economy and outside understanding of these three swamps. The impacts of this work have been felt in several arenas. First, the research aided the completion of the co-PIs doctoral dissertation which has led him to academic employment in this field. The research findings have been contracted to be published in one volume with several other pieces in review with major geography journals. The findings were also disseminated through reports to the study participants and to local tourism planning agencies. Finally, the results have been communicated as a part of several presentations both at academic conferences and as a part of lectures in university classes.
