“Not an Empty Cheating Echo”: Playing Frontiersman at Tourist-Hunting Destinations”
Lindsay Adamson Livingston
City University of New York
In this paper, I propose to explore the carefully constructed role-play undertaken by those who participate in guided hunting expeditions in the western United States and Alaska. I argue that, during these excursions, participants are constructed as frontiersmen (and, more rarely, frontierswomen) conquering a real and possibly treacherous frontier, as romanticized by popular depictions of the Wild West. In enacting this role, participants tap into a rich cultural and historical narrative of hunting as a way to dominate nature, perpetuate an imperialist cultural legacy, and perform a “cowboy” alter ego.
In order to elucidate this narrative, I plan to trace the genealogical connection between the tourist-hunter of today and Buffalo Bill’s self-fashioning as perhaps the most prolific single hunter of all time. It is my assertion that a constructed narrative of the West, as perpetuated by Buffalo Bill in dime novels and his performance spectacular, and extending through other popular representations such as film and advertising, continues to exert a palpable influence over those who participate in such playful encounters on “the last frontier,”[1] allowing them to insert themselves into that cultural narrative as an actors in, rather than merely observers or receivers of, that narrative.
Additionally, I will examine the role of space and place in the construction of the hunter’s experience. As Stuart D. Rockefeller argues, “places…are not in the landscape, but simultaneously in the land, people’s minds, customs, and bodily practices.”[2] The imagined spatial relations of a romanticized history of the American West indelibly impacted the cultural memory of a nation enchanted with the idea of “empty” space, and continue to shape tourist-hunters’ expectations of and relationship with the nature they encounter at their destination. Ultimately, the efficacy of such encounters is their very phenomenological and spatial reality: the tourist-hunter performs “not an empty cheating echo, but daring deeds incarnate,”[3] and thus constructs him or herself as part of the cultural narrative of the West.
Filed under Playful Destination, Working Sessions 1. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
