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2011 Social Spatialization in the Atchafalaya Basin Adam Keul

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COLLEGE OF SOCIAL SCIENCES

SOCIAL SPATIALIZATION IN THE ATCHAFALAYA BASIN

By

ADAM KEUL

A Dissertation submitted to the Department of Geography in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy

Degree Awarded: Fall Semester, 2011

Adam Keul defended this dissertation on July 18, 2011.

The members of the supervisory committee were:

Philip E. Steinberg Professor Directing Dissertation

Frederick R. Davis University Representative

J. Anthony Stallins Committee Member

Ronald E. Doel Committee Member

The Graduate School has verified and approved the above-named committee members, and certifies that the dissertation has been approved in accordance with university requirements.

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I must acknowledge the many people who assisted me through this project with their time, perspectives, critiques and encouragement. To begin, I would like to thank all of the guides and local participants in my fieldwork over several visits to the Atchafalaya Basin, merci bien mes amis. Without all of their insights this work would have been lifelessly stuck in literary representations. Second, I must thank my partner Esther whose loving sense of understanding and lived experience of the region preserved my sanity and rootedness. Thank you to committee members Tony Stallins, Ron Doel and Fritz Davis for providing thorough and informed critiques of my work and lots of encouragement for the future. Thank you to the National Science Foundation for seeing value in this project and giving me the freedom to pursue it. Finally, I thank Phil Steinberg who nurtured this idea from its beginnings when I had little more than a romantic fascination. Through countless iterations he was vital in honing the idea and student into a successful labor(er) in geography.

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

LIST OF FIGURES…………………………………..………………………………….vi

ABSTRACT………………………..……………………………………………………vii

1. INTRODUCTION……………………………………………………………………...1

2. THEORY AND METHODS…………………………………………………………...7

Review of Social Spatialization Literature……………………………………….9 Review of Performativity Literature………...…………………………………...15 Methods…………………………………………………………………………..23

3. PLACING THE STUDY…………………………………………………………….. 27

Landscape………………………………………………………………………..28 Place……………………………………………………………………………...30 Swamp Geographies………………………...…………………………………...31 The Ideas of Culture…………………………..……….…………………………36 Atchafalaya History and Geography………………….………..………………...41 Today’s Atchafalaya Culture Nature Economy………..………………………...53

4. WILDNESS ON THE MARGINS………..…………………………………………..64

Marginality……………………..………………………………………………...64 Rural Space…………………….………………………………………………...69 Wild Spaces…………………….………………………………………………..75 Wild Cajun Swamp………………………………….…………………………...80 Conclusion…………………………………………..…………………………...92

5. THE IDEAS OF NATURE……………………………………………………………93

Framing Nature Through Geography……….……………………………………93 Marxist Interpretations of Nature………...………………………………………97 The Production of Wetlands…………………………...…………………….....105 (Un)fixed by Performativity………….…..…………………………………….109

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Tourism as a Performance of Nature………………………………...…………113 Selling the Atchafalaya….………………………………………..…………….117 Conclusion……………….……………………………………………………..126

6. GATOR GEOGRAPHIES……….…………………………………………………..127

Social Acting upon Animals...………………………………………………….128 Atchafalaya Alligator Environmental History.…………………………………134 Animal Agency……………...………………………………………………….141 Hybrid Spaces...………………………………………………………………...149 Hybrid Human-Gator Experiences.…………………………………………….153 Conclusion……………………………………………………………………...158

7. CONCLUSION………………………………………………………………………159

Taking Performance of Spatialization Elsewhere...…………………………….159 Selling Culture……………...……………………………………..……………161 Closer to Nature……………………...…………………………………………163 The Context of Disaster…………………..…………………………………….164 Future Directions…………...…………………………………………………..166

APPENDICIES…………………………………………………………………………168

A Interview Subject Affiliations…………………………………………..168 B Letter of Consent………………………………………………….…….169 C Human Subjects Approval……………………………………….……..170

REFERENCES…………………………………………………………………………171

BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH…………………………………………………………...186

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LIST OF FIGURES

1 Study area………………………………………………………………………...6

2 Multiple cadastral regimes……………………………………………………….59

3 I-10 bridge over the Basin……………….………………………………………85

4 Nature performing labor…………….…………………………………………104

5 Everyday swamp……………………………………………………..…………111

6 Henderson levy touristscape……………………………………………………117

7 The Queen Tanya and her pilot(s)………………………………...……………120

8 Animals performing hybrid spaces of fearlessness……………………………..156

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ABSTRACT

This dissertation elucidates how tourism is a context in which people have the capacity to perform exotic spatializations by creating nature/culture hybrids in marginalized spaces. Specifically it focuses on how swamp tour guides in Louisiana’s Atchafalaya Basin negotiate between images established by place-myths and the guides’ actual experiences in the swamp in order to sell Cajun-swamp cultures to tourists without ‘selling out’. This perspective is informed by a review of relevant literatures from geographers and social theorists and by fieldwork comprised of participant-observation of thirteen tours in the study area and interviews with guides and tourists alike. The findings suggest that rather than relying on images of a ‘backwater’ culture in an equally exotic environment, guides perform hybridities-in-the-making that blend Cajuns and the swamp, wild and ‘civilized’ spaces and people and alligators. The present-tense performance of these hybridities allows for the exotic to be coded to the time-space itself rather than the particular people or landscape. This tactic creates a context where guides can perform nature through culture and not a culture from nature. This conjecture is crucial for understanding how tourism produces exoticism and particularly how ethnic groups are able to participate in tourism without creating hierarchies that rely on the continuation stereotypes.

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CHAPTER ONE

INTRODUCTION

What do people think about Louisiana swamps?

“The swamp is funky, ugly, dirty, dangerous, undesirable. Either drain it or fill it in” (Interview J 2010).

“It’s a nasty place full of mosquitoes” (Interview M 2010).

“It’s a dangerous place where you would get attacked by snakes and alligators and drowned” (Interview P 2010).

“I don't see what the big deal is about the swamps. Why are you showing people a bunch of ugly trees” (Interview J 2010).

All of these statements were what swamp tour guides saw as misconceptions about the Atchafalaya Basin, the place where they educate, entertain and earn a living throughout the year. It is no surprise then, that the undisputed ‘original’ Louisiana swamp tour guide Annie Miller wondered, “who the hell wants to see me work” when in the early 1980’s the local tourism bureau began asking her to take visitors through the swamps to check her crawfish traps (Interview T 2010). Since then, dozens of swamp tour outfits have sprung up in the area who cater to thousands of tourists each year. Some come from far away driven by romantic notions of the landscape. “I like to watch geographic documentaries and I heard about the swamps in the Mississippi and Mark Twain and it's just been a dream to go visit the South and see the swamps. Everywhere I get the chance to be close to a river I just go” (Interview C 2010). Others want to explore their own ‘backyards’. “From Baton Rouge, I frequently drive to Lafayette, and every time I see it, how beautiful it is, I want to go explore and enjoy it” (Interview I 2010). Unlike other southern swamps such as the Okeefenokee or Great Dismal, the Atchafalaya has a distinct association with a particular ethnicity, in a kitschy sense, a Cajun flavor. It is an exotic(ized) place in terms of nature and culture. The fascinating notions of place here in “America’s Foreign Country” exude expressions of spatial character through tourism that beg for geographic inquiry (Atchafalaya.org 2011). In this dissertation, I propose that through the production of tourism, hybridities of nature and culture in the Atchafalaya Basin are performed that may at times be contradictory, romanticized or reactionary to spatial ‘threats’ but are nonetheless captivating evidence of people’s capacities to create space.

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The Atchafalaya River Basin encompasses thirteen parishes that are wholly contained within the state-designated region of Acadiana (see Figure 1 at the end of this chapter). The study area is designated by the thirteen-parish Atchafalaya National Heritage Area (ANHA). The area’s population is around 1.2 million with the cities of Baton Rouge and Lafayette as the highest concentrations of people (US Census Bureau 2010). Many ethnic groups call the area home including five Native American populations, Creoles, African Americans, Cajuns, Anglo-Americans, Chinese and Vietnamese. At nearly 600,000 acres, the Atchafalaya Basin is the largest swamp in the United States (Reuss 1998). The Atchafalaya River averages 20 miles wide and is about 150 miles long. The Old River Control Structure near Simmesport, Louisiana was completed in 1963 and diverts a mandated 30% of the Mississippi River into the Atchafalaya to keep the larger river from overtaking the Atchafalaya (Reuss 1998). ‘The Basin’ (as is it referred to locally) contains large sections of bottomland hardwoods that are habitat for several threatened species including the Louisiana black bear, American alligator, and bald eagle. The Atchafalaya National Wildlife Refuge protects 15,000 acres in the heart of the Basin (Atchafalaya National Wildlife Refuge 2011). Through the efforts of the Atchafalaya Trace Commission, the ANHA was granted federal recognition in 2006. Tourism in the designated ANHA is a billion dollar industry and represents 14% of the tourism receipts for the state (Atchafalaya Trace Commission 2002). Tourism is the state’s second largest industry (after healthcare) and one-third of the tourists visit in the summertime, the most popular season (Atchafalaya Trace Commission 2002). Originally peasant-farmers from southwestern France, the Acadian people came to Louisiana around 1760 via the Acadia region of today’s Nova Scotia. They arrived in Louisiana after being forcibly removed by the British upon their usurpation of control in the province. Though many resettled elsewhere including the US mid-Atlantic coast and France, the rugged Atchafalaya River basin was sparsely inhabited and offered significant subsistence for the largest portion of the diaspora (Brasseaux 1987). After the initial flux of immigration, the region remained largely culturally isolated mostly due to its inaccessibility. With the influx of Spanish and German immigration, the Acadian culture absorbed some ‘foreign’ words and identities, and was to some extent a foreign culture to the US American outside. By the time the US Anglo-American cultures penetrated the swamps of South Louisiana, Cajun culture had evolved to include Native Americans, Anglo-Americans, Spanish, German, and Creole Afro-Caribbean peoples, all of whom shared a common space and language. Until the Second World War, Cajuns remained largely isolated from other populations due to cultural and environmental boundaries (Bernard 2003). Subsistence agriculture was the dominant mode of production although there was some interaction with commodity and labor markets that spanned beyond the local area (Reuss 1998; Conrad 1983). During the early 20th century the State of Louisiana instituted mandatory schooling and attempted to squelch the Cajun French language and Cajun culture more generally by banning the use of Cajun French in schools (Bernard 2003). The draft of GIs and consequent growth in education and material wealth that followed World War II served as a catalyst to further “Americanize” the ethnic group (Bernard 2003). This process of assimilation accelerated in the 1960’s with increased employment opportunities and extra-regional interactions made possible by the rise of oil exploration in the Atchafalaya and the adjacent Gulf of Mexico.

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By the 1980’s, the stage had been set for the complex politics of today’s Acadiana tourism economy. On the one hand, a once isolated people had been integrated into the American mainstream, a process that somewhat paradoxically led to a self-awareness and self-conscious revival of Cajun culture (Trepanier 1991). Concurrently, although oil, gas, timber and fishing remained major employers, they were becoming less lucrative (Henry & Bankston 2002). In this context, Cajun culture has blossomed in the region both as an expression of ethnic pride and as a commodity to be marketed in the interest of economic development, and issues surrounding how one can simultaneously preserve and market regional identity for tourism have been a source of considerable local conflict. As scholars of the region note, Cajun culture is contested in many arenas where cleavages are framed around perceived authenticity and the Cajun ‘brand’ is now a space for the contest of economy and identity (Stivale 2003; Henry and Bankston 2002). The ‘othering’ of Cajun culture, both by outsiders and by Cajuns themselves, has been complemented by an ‘othering’ of the region’s physical environment. Early social constructions of the nature of the space were conflicting. Reuss summarizes early 19th century attitudes when he asks, “Was the Atchafalaya Basin a primordial swampland unfit for civilized life, or the fertile land of promise? Was it a forbidding swamp or the sweet-smelling garden of Evangeline?” (1998, p. 17) Western perspectives on swamps in general have labeled them as spaces to be feared, a space of pestilence, ferocious beasts and equally nefarious people (Miller 1990; Vileisis 1997). In Louisiana’s plantation economy, the swamp stood as a bane to the expansion of capitalism, but conquering the space by draining and clear-cutting opened up fertile new sources of profit (Wilson 2006). By the time an oil market arrived in the 1950’s, the Atchafalaya had already been characterized as a space for large-scale exploitation of natural resources; in fact market hunting for alligator hides had already reduced their numbers significantly (Glasgow 1991). This remained the dominant ‘natural’ character of the Basin until the environmental movements of the 1970’s, when calls for preservation of socially constructed ‘wilderness’ highlighted the swamp’s aesthetic qualities (Reuss 1998). Today’s Atchafalaya ‘nature’ is valued primarily as a source of economic commodities and paradoxically as a space of intrinsic beauty in need of protection. By the 21st century, the historical coincidence of the environmental movement and the revival of Cajun culture had produced normative abstractions of both ‘the swamp’ and ‘Cajun’ that allowed them to be seen as inherently valuable and deserving of protection. The threat of environmental degradation of the Atchafalaya due to over- exploitation of fisheries, timber and the creation of farmland combined with the drive to establish Cajun cultural commodities set the stage for the rise of cultural and eco-tourism, with the region being labeled as a pole of both marginal cultures and natures. For those who have a stake in the meaning of the Atchafalaya and Cajun cultures, a conflict has arisen between selling the image of place and ‘selling-out’ the people who call it home. This cleavage is indicative of those that are happening around the world as historically marginalized regions seek to simultaneously preserve their cultural distinctiveness and market themselves within a post-industrial economy that paradoxically values difference while facilitating homogenization (Urry 1995). Promoting cultural and eco-tourism relies on the construction of imagined geographies of exotic spaces. Whether for a sublime encounter with nature or an ‘authentic’ experience of an(other) culture, a place must be labeled as ‘unique’ to

3 continue to attract visitors. Although every place is constituted through multiple understandings and practices, within and across its borders (Massey 2005), these multiple meanings are reduced to simplified tropes of ‘otherness’ and ‘exoticism’ when a place sells its identity on a national or global market through experience commodities. These simplified images of place are achieved, in part by grounding conceptualizations of social differentiation with idealizations of spatial differentiation, as a polarized notion of us/them is tethered to an imagined here/there. If, as Minca and Oakes note, tourism provides “a stage upon which to act out the binaries by which we make sense of and order the world" (2006, p.13), then it is imperative that we gain a better understanding of how actors on that “stage” perform those binaries, establishing a particular set of ‘place- myths’ about local culture/nature that set it aside as marginal, different, and worthy of visitation. This process of place making - the tangible realization of abstract hegemonic claims on a location - is one component of what Lefebvre refers to as the production of space (1991). Shields (1991), expanding on Lefebvre, uses the term social spatialization to describe the means by which ideas about a space are literally and figuratively concretized into the cultural landscape. The mental separation of a place from other spaces involves a degree of heirarchicalization as the place is compared to some subjective norm. A place on the margin is thus designated as a home for ‘other’ cultures, distinct natures, or unique combinations of both. Yet, as Hetherington (1997) notes, the social spatialization of a marginal place does not simply involve its construction as a space beyond order; it is also being constructed as a space of alternate order. And while this spatialization is most evidently practiced by hegemonic outsiders, it also is reproduced and transformed by the individuals who are being ‘othered’; through acts of both submission and resistance. To capture the complex ways in which social spatializations are practiced in marginal places, this dissertation will fuse the insights of social spatialization theory with that of performativity theory (Thrift 1996), which places greater emphasis on the ways in which individuals reproduce ideas of a space and its relation to other spaces through everyday social encounters. This research poses the question, “How do people create swamp spaces through experience commodities?” Specifically, I will examine the ways in which marginality is constructed as a means of domination but also as a means of “alternate ordering” and possibly even resistance, through performances that occur within the tourism economy of Louisiana’s Atchafalaya Basin. As will be detailed below, these performances of marginality make reference to a wide range of place-images that fuse specific tropes about the Basin’s swampy nature, its ‘uncivilized’ inhabitants, and its geographic isolation. Thus, to answer the research question I suggest that people produce the exotic by performing hybrid spatializations of nature through culture. Hybrid spatializations are created particularly by blending Cajuns and the swamp, civilization and wildness, and people and alligators. Guides sell the experience of hybridities-in-the-making and by depending upon performance rather than static representation, they are able to sell creative contextualized commodities rather than ethnic kitsch. The performance of marginalization through spatialization depends upon moments when one person or group of people is given the task of translating the place to ‘outsiders’ or, conversely, when those ‘outsiders’ communicate their expectations of a place’s marginality to those associated with the place. In practice, of course, these two

4 aspects of marginalization are recursive, as ‘insiders’ and ‘outsiders’ interpret (or anticipate) the others’ expectations. To analyze this recursive cycle, this study privileges moments when comparably affective performances of marginalization occur in vastly different contexts including public input by local residents engaging in a federally- sponsored regional planning and tourism development initiative (ANHA), and statements made by tour guides and tourists on the private swamp tours that constitute many outsiders’ encounters with the region. Throughout this dissertation I maintain that people have the capacity to concurrently perform and produce the spaces they inhabit. People create hybridities of nature and culture that transcend the dualisms that are so well maintained by the Western ontological paradigms of capitalism, science, and modernity in general. This indicates that though the broadly defined ‘social forces’ are a powerful palette from which people assemble their worlds, we have the capacity to fashion space to our own desires. I justify these conjectures through six chapters wherein I begin with a broad theoretical approach to the production and performance of spaces and progressively narrow the concepts of analysis to specific elements and activities within the natural/cultural landscape. To begin, in Chapter Two, I lay out the basic theoretical argument by reviewing literatures on social spatialization and performativity. I also introduce my methodology, a combination of participant/observation of swamp tours, interviews with guides and tourists, and textual analysis of the findings from interviews and from public scoping sessions conducted by the Atchafalaya National Heritage Area. Chapter Three begins by reviewing geographic perspectives on place, landscape, swamps and culture and continues with an environmental history of the Atchafalaya Basin that is intended to ‘place’ the study in the context of past academic works specific to this region. Turning to the ways places can be tagged as the ‘other’, in Chapter Four, I review works on marginality, rural geographies and wilderness. I suggest that in the Basin, a hybrid notion of the ‘semi-wild’ is used to negotiate between tropes of purity, spoiled nature and deviant behavior. In Chapter Five, I delve into the concept of nature, how it can be produced and performed in spaces, and how tourism acts as the ‘stage’ for the construction of ‘natural’ meaning. I show how the narratives of ‘loss’ and ‘change’ provide the basis for people’s perspectives on the Basin, its history and current ‘threats’ to its existence. Alligators are of particular importance on swamp tours and generally in spatial performances of nature in the Basin, and in Chapter Six I suggest a theoretically novel animal geography that I feel can address some epistemological issues in this emerging sub-field of study. I conclude with Chapter Seven by readdressing some of the most significant questions that I brought to my research and by evaluating the possibilities for using my performance of social spatialization thesis in other contexts. Taken as a whole, this dissertation comments on theories from a variety of literatures that extend throughout geography into other disciplines, particularly history, anthropology and sociology. Since only a handful of geographic works have taken the Atchafalaya Basin or Acadiana as a focus, the same breadth of disciplines was necessary when addressing regionally specific issues. Though in a sense this work is a ‘regional geography’ since it comments on nature and culture in a well-established ‘region’, I have tried to foster meaningful connections to broader social theories that extend well beyond this swampy space.

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Figure 1: Study area

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CHAPTER TWO

THEORY AND METHODS

On two different swamp tours a few miles apart in Louisiana’s Atchafalaya Basin an alligator encounter looms on any horizon. On either one of the tours, you and your fellow tourists sit alert in anticipation of this event, ready to record it with phones, cameras or just with your memory. Both guides are seasoned swamp workers, both are Cajun, and both can speak Cajun French. As the boats slide around a bend, the shape of the alligator peeks through the busy biotic landscape and the gator sees you too. Depending on which tour you happen to have chosen today, the guide says one of the following:

“Alligators will live to be 100 plus years of age and they are a cousin to the dinosaur. A lot of times those small gators won’t survive because there are a lot of predators who will eat them and gators are cannibals, so they will eat their own.” (Interview K, 2010)

“Come on now, here kitty kitty! Attencion mais, allons manger! [Hey man, lets eat!] J’ai tout les tourists ici a la bateau! I told him I have a lot of tourists on the boat.”(Interview E, 2010)

The first guide gives an informative take on the gator, based on his knowledge of its ecology, threats and diet. The second guide presents himself jokingly as a nurturing friend to the gator, here to give him his morning meal. Though they share reference to the alligator’s eating habits, they present a radically different notion of the king of the swamp. Yet both encounters share the capacity to give a meaning to this space that surrounds the uninformed visitor. With similar backgrounds and a similar task at hand (to translate the Atchafalaya swamp) the guides play a fascinating role in creating the imagined geographies of the swamp for thousands of people throughout the year. But while the influential “text” of the guide’s oration is, like any, filtered through dominant and personal ideologies, and seeks to fix the swamp as a space of ecology or resources or spiritual contact, this is no lecture. The swamp’s “unique messiness” to which Robertson (2000, p.473) refers, exudes subjective meanings to each person such that for your $25 you can listen and associate what the guide says with the plants animals and landscape that you see, or you could ignore him and let the experience speak to you on your own terms (see Szerszynski et al., 2003) The contingencies of this experience (i.e. which tour you happened to take, what animals were present, if the guide “spoke” to you) evoke a structure that reproduces

7 dominant social norms, roles, and ideologies towards the environment. If one guide were to say, “This place used to be a virgin stand of thousand year-old cypresses, and now it is a lake of stumps”, it may be difficult for you to imagine anything other than a narrative of decline. However, if another guide instead noted that cypress logging in its heyday fueled vibrant and expressive Cajun communities in the Basin, you may overlook the “loss” of the trees in favor of an appreciation of the heritage of the area. In both statements, there lies an unspoken appeal to your understanding of the effects of development on landscapes. And thus, without overtly saying it, the guides are producing your view of this space by weaving their impression with common economic “effects” on the landscape. Geographers and social theorists have conceived of this type of spatial production as a performance. On a swamp tour one can witness the commodified performance of wetlands. I argue that tour guides commodify the wetland in a performative manner that offers an equally effective point of inquiry into this process. In addition, by observing the guide’s rejection or reproduction of general or policy-level wetland values, we can not only reveal the impact of wetland values, but also witness unique expressions of wetland commodification and resistance. Robertson outlines a thorough interpretation of how commodification can usurp wetland spaces in his 2000 piece on the U.S. government’s “No Net Loss” wetland program. But what is the impact of this commodification on activities and knowledge in those wetlands, and how is it achieved through the production of certain knowledges and their incorporation into everyday and extraordinary (touristic) interactions with and understandings of the wetland environment? Within individuals, the conscious or subconscious classification of wetland spaces and elements as commodities allows for the concept to be reproduced and performed into the landscape through daily activities. The peculiar characteristics of any place are not simply ascribed onto its people and environments; rather, they are reproduced or resisted in place by people who may consciously or unconsciously appropriate it. Geographers have been faced with interpreting the interplay between social ordering, iterated practice and landscape concretization that produces a rationalized (if only momentarily) notion of a place. This act of placing, or assigning social characteristics to specific places and ordering these places hierarchically to reflect and reproduce accepted norms of social hierarchy is referred to by Shields (1991) as social spatialization. Shields focuses on the ways in which individuals reproduce, or singularly resist, place myths, the “relatively robust set[s] of core concepts or foundational metaphors which surface in everyday discourse” (1991, p.47). His examples then show how social spatializations such as the North-South divide in England can be broken down into a handful of common claims that are reproduced in many different situations. Yet the work of Shields and others (Price 2004; Hetherington 1997) give us a place conception that relies as much on openness and momentary agency as it does on structuring representations like place myths. Many post-structural geographers focus less on either the influential powers of place myths or conscious struggles for space and more on the momentary poetics of the body and its habitat. Places are created in the present tense; they are performed. Performance, as it initially was theorized by Butler (1990), allows subjects to reflect/resist their social position through embodied symbolism. The current turn in the geographic literature on performance is toward what Nash calls, “a more generic and celebratory notion of the embodied nature

8 of human existence” (2000, p. 655). In geography, many works in this genre are inspired by Nigel Thrift’s notion of performative geographies that take a critical stance in their instantaneity and allow, through their politics of moment, a subjectified, transformative power (Lorimer 2008; Rycroft 2007; Waitt and Lane 2007). Affective performance in this sense is inherently productive and “concerned with cultivating political spaces through an awareness of the openness of the present time” (Cadman 2009, p. 6). I apply this perspective to the ‘present time [and space]’ within which specific acts of the spatialization of the swamp occur.

2.1 Review of Social Spatialization Literature

The manufacture of human spaces is not socially benign. What seems to be of greatest contest is the dynamics of this process. How many entities compete for the right to create human spaces? To what degree are people removed from the organization of their local places? How influential are imagined spaces on the production of space? The themes of inquiry here are control and power. Our society is an unabashed political-economic hierarchy and as such the ability to make decisions at the top of the hierarchy that mediate day-to-day life at the bottom is a systemic reality. It is the responsibility of those at the top to maintain their dominance by structuring the space. But must every hour of every day be dedicated (at least marginally) to the production and reproduction of space? Or, how much control does the hegemon wield and through what sorts of spaces? These as well as the reproductive roles people play in spatializing the swamp are the themes that drive the following review of literature. Shields social spatialization can be summarized as “the social construction of the spatial which is a formation of both discursive and non-discursive elements, practices and processes” (1991, p.7). Shields builds primarily from Lefebvre’s 1974 La production de l'espace. First printed in English as The Production of Space in 1991, Lefebvre begins with Marx’s concrete abstraction of space and pens a more robust theory of how this process occurs. The co-constitutive aspects of social spatialization -- spatial practice, representations of space and spaces of representation -- might also be understood as the behaviors, knowledge and creative capacities of space (Lefebvre 1991). This method of understanding space puts less emphasis on the grand effects of the maintenance of social class for exploitation of labor (although Lefebvre accepts this) in favor of a more atomistic approach to experience.

2.1.1 Spatial Trialectics Though Lefebvre depends on Marxian political economy, his conception of social space is a less rigid structure. He stresses the relations of production (material) and the social relations of reproduction (biological) as the key constituents of social space. These relations create society in capitalist, non-capitalist and socialist spaces. What segregates capitalist societies, though, is the third relation, the reproduction of labor power. The creation and naturalization of the working class is the basis of exploitation and accumulation- the endemic necessities of capitalism. Lefebvre refers to these relations as both “frontal, public, overt” and concurrently “covert, clandestine and repressed” (Lefebvre 1991, p.33). The building, the street sign, the police, the price tag; all signify and code the urban landscape as the realm of production. Lefebvre labels all of

9 these elements of the spatial cornucopia as ‘representations’ that can be read from the landscape and interpreted as symbolic referents. The elements of social space then can be divided into three groups: spatial practice, which accounts for the performance of space ‘on the ground’ in a particular locale; representations of space, which account for knowledge and information that orders the space from a broader scale; and spaces of representation, insurrections to or novel uses of this imposed spatial order. Below, I delve more thoroughly into each of these elements of what Soja has named the “trialectic”.

2.1.2 Spatial Practice Spatial practice is lived space. But, more importantly under Lefebvre’s definition, it is space that hides its motivation and naturalizes its inconsistencies. Spatial practices are social reiterations of space that reify the dominant political-economic power structure but are necessarily separated from it. This notion of a disconnect is congruent to the separation between Robertson’s wetland policy and the lived-swamp such that re- iterating the swamp as a resource on a tour serves to justify its exploitation to a policy- maker. Shields adds, “[T]hese social spaces help to assure the society’s continuity in a relatively cohesive fashion and the reproduction of the social relations of production” (Shields 1991, p.52). Lefebvre places special emphasis on the fact that spatial practice is influential in structuring the geometries of the city. This entails where people and practices are allowed or disallowed. Parks are open for activity, but not at all times, and not all activities are allowed. Sleeping, drunkenness, and squirrel hunting are segregated activities not acceptable to the space of a park, and by observing and upholding these rules- even by participating in the allowable activities- the space is reproduced for its purpose. Finally, Lefebvre finds that what is most effectively produced is the association between daily reality (one’s life) and urban reality (the needs of capital). “This association is a paradoxical one because it includes the most extreme separation between the places it links together” (Lefebvre 1991, p.38). This is precisely the story of spatial practice in the swamp where, through tourism, notions of swamp ecology, use values and threats can be abstracted generally to wetlands (a much broader idea). Spatial practice is active and daily but “produces [space] slowly and surely as it masters and appropriates it” (Lefebvre 1991, p.38).

2.1.3 Representations of Space Lefebvre’s second set of spatial operatives are called representations of space. He gives explicit reference to the manufacturers of such space, ”conceptualized space, the space of scientists, urbanists, technocratic subdividers and social engineers…” (Lefebvre, 1991, p.38). Representations of space are those which “ground the rational/professional power structure of the capitalist state” (Shields 1991, p.54). Representations of space are thus supposedly symbolic of its reality, yet are produced using limited interpretations of the space. Lefebvre also stresses that the multiple representations of spaces belong to the dominant cultural hegemon or mode of production. To represent the space necessarily is a power-laden process that reproduces norms upon which the space rationally rests. This is why swamp tour guides are not just giving the Atchafalaya meaning, but necessarily positioning it within the dominant paradigm. The Atchafalaya National Heritage Area is a realization of the state’s role in manufacturing a dominant paradigm specific to the Basin.

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The ANHA was created in 2006 through an extensive management plan published in 2002. In the document’s Executive Summary, one finds a characterization of culture, nature, and region that is at best fragmented.

“The traditional Atchafalaya Heritage Area economy, much of which falls outside of standard sector definition, defies description. Many individuals piece together various pursuits to make a living, but the economy is not especially diverse and is thus vulnerable to larger economic downturns” (Atchafalaya Trace Commission 2002, p.9).

The plan laments the fragmented role of capitalism in commodifying the culture and purports a somber future for the monotonic economy. However, to counteract this melancholy it finds that, ” the entrepreneurial bent of the region’s people may offer the truest characterization of the Atchafalaya and the best hope for its future. Resourceful, resilient, adaptable, we can seek new economic development opportunities…” (Atchafalaya Trace Commission 2002, p.9). So within the Atchafalaya, capitalism seems to be a social structure that is simultaneously circumventable and crippling. The document in effect codifies the space of representation. Order has grown to structure a regionally cohesive image in the face of national and international power, but at the expense of the freedom associated with the highly symbolic spaces of representation. Considering its goal is to paint a static and particular picture of the Basin, the document is a Representation of Space that in the end reduces the needs and voices of the swamp to capitalism and domination. Representations of the swamp are thus all claims of truth. As a space coded as ‘natural’, the swamp is fastidiously constructed by science. Biology and ecology stress claims of truth using ecosystemic paradigms and positivist empirical understanding. Combined with the State’s vision of the space as a tourist attractor, these create the perceived spatial ‘realities’ that in turn affect how the spaces are treated within society.

2.1.4 Spaces of Representation The third and most dynamic of Lefebvre’s concept are spaces of representation- alternatively translated as “representational spaces”. This element of the trialectic encompasses all spaces and acts that consciously or unconsciously counteract the traditional power structure. Lefebvre notes that these spaces can be highly symbolic in its resistance (Lefebvre 1991). Shields characterizes these spaces as “transgressing the spatial conventions” and as spaces for “veiled criticism of dominant social orders and the categories of social thought often expressed in aesthetic terms as symbolic resistance” (Shields 1991, p. 54). Lefebvre also describes them as, “sometimes coded sometimes not, linked to the clandestine or underground side of social life” (Lefebvre 1991, p.33). Most significantly this category of space is linked to artists, counter cultural movements and generally to spatial insurrections- particularly to those that counter the dominant representations of space. Lefebvre develops Marx’s notion of commodity fetishization into the lust for control of space or spatial fetish. The appropriation of space becomes the primary drive of the hegemon who must make the control invisible. An underlying goal of the spaces of representation then, can be to reveal alternative realities that contrast the glass-walled dominance of nationalism, fascism, capitalism etc. In reference to “natural”

11 spaces, I argue that spaces of representation are often those that challenge notions of science and attempt to humanize a domain of nature. Shields gives Levebvrian space its project. “It is a rhetorical device which regroups fields of thought and action artificially separated at the enlightenment origins of contemporary thought” (Shields 1991, p.51). As a concrete abstraction, space is fetishized and auctioned off in both visible and intangible separations, “[b]ut the spatial is also a condensation of the social relations of production” (Shields 1991, p.51). Space can be said to be co-constituted by the hegemon and the hoi polloi. The abstractness of Lefebvrian space is what gives the hegemon its sweeping power. Representations of space occupy the minds and lives of the masses, and this gives the hegemon its breadth. In The Badlands of Modernity Hetherington addresses this interplay when he notes,” In some cases, something like a dominant ideology or hegemonic discourse of place is perceived with the possibility for resistance left open within interstitial or marginal spaces and the opportunities they leave open for counter-hegemonic representations of space”(1997, p.20). The Spaces of representation are imperfections in the blanket of power woven by the political-economy of the nation. Harvey agrees that the power of those that resist is limited. “Yet it is also the case that such resistances have not checked the overall process of place construction through capital accumulation…” (Harvey 1996a, p.299). These marginal, excluded badlands in our social spatiality must be created and separated so as a reflection of and resistance to the power of the core. Soja offers the most poignant reading of Lefebvre. Although he notes the authority Lefebvre gives to space, he still finds that, ”a socio-spatial dialectic is a productive and appropriate focus for the concrete analysis of capitalist social formations and for concerted social action”(Soja 1980, p.224). His defense amplifies the fundamental connection between Lefebvrian space and the relations and roles of production. Harvey and others find trialectics too ignorant of these keystones of capitalist domination. Soja evaluates the character of Lefebvrian space in the form of uneven development and core-periphery relations. What is most helpful for the purpose of this dissertation is Soja’s analysis of the expropriation of space in core-periphery relations. While Lefebvre writes of space and its general production, Soja’s purpose is to investigate the tenuous connection between social and spatial structure. The disconnect between the production of space socially and its physical materiality gives it the character of an objective plain rather than a created, organized structure. The space of the city is not neutral but maintains a specific set of possibilities under the umbrella of capitalist production. Once this fact is accepted, Levebvrian social space is conceivable. Lefebvre writes, “Urbanism becomes a force of production, rather like science” (Soja 1980, p.210). The tension between centers of capital (cities) and the external world are the “primary horizontal structure” of uneven development. Moreover, ”[I]t is fundamentally homologous to the vertical structure of social class in that both are rooted in the same contradiction between capital and labor that defines the capitalist mode of production itself”(Soja 1980, p.221). The hierarchy is laid on its side. A focus on ‘underdevelopment’ in the framework of competing nations has made uneven development out to be an international goliath while ignoring its effect on day-to-day realities and presented the nation as a homologous space without regional definition. Spatial hierarchies thus exist not just between ‘the West’ and ‘the third world’

12 but in real consequence on a local level. Soja also introduces Mandel’s similar conceptualization of how space is appropriated via capital

“Mandel observes that regional underdevelopment is a universal phenomenon of capitalism, its principle direct role being to furnish huge areas of labor reserves and complementary markets able to respond to the spasmodic unequal and contradictory development of capitalist production” (Soja 1980, p.220).

Through such arguments and his latter definition of Thirdspace, Soja proves that even if space is fetishized, it is done so within the framework of the social relations of production, not as an independent product (1980). This point is further expanded upon by Harvey (1990) These authors understandably use the urban as a site of analysis- this is where the effect of capital seems to be most visibly striking. Outside of the city, though, space can be organized under the same consequences but even more surreptitiously. The distinction between capital and nature is often hidden. Consider a question from an anonymous naïve student while on a field trip, ‘Why do all those pine trees grow in a line?’ Rural, wild and seemingly undifferentiated spaces are equivalently bounded by the mode of production. Teasing away the non-urban from the urban is the first step in classifying trialectic spaces.

2.1.4.1 Resistance. Lefebvrian space allows for a bricolage of resistance but what counts as resistance, resisting what, and how complete is the resistance? These questions emerge as Lefebvre’s triad is scrutinized. Arguably, littering is spatial resistance, but so is a suicide bomb, and although both can be understood as emerging from and exploiting the cracks in a system of spatial organization and representation, any theory attempting to explain spatial resistance in society must be able to account for the two activities’ rather different social impacts. Hetherington’s analysis of this problem finds that Lefebvre’s (and furthermore, Shields’) conception only allows for spaces of representation to be those of resistance and open freedom, but such an approach cannot account for order within resistance. Hetherington’s marginal place is not as well-bound or unitary as Shields’ and neither is the social order imposed on places. In a binary sense of core- margin, “[margins] are treated as separate, even if relational, sites of playful transgression which help to reveal the social order. Their own ordering and their complex engagement with centers becomes unclear” (Hetherington 1997, p.26). As Hetherington notes, because a space of representation contains its own, alternate ordering, the transgressions of some spatial norms (of capitalism for instance) can still reproduce other means of its domination. Adding the dimension of intention to resistance makes the space of representation even more convoluted. His point is that spaces of representation are themselves not homogenous but multivocal and disputable. I find this to be a worthy criticism that can be seen specifically in the construction of the swamp particularly in the promotion of the Atchafalaya National Heritage Area, a state- sponsored tourism/development entity that is an explicitly spatial production.

2.1.4.2 Natural Spaces. Lefebvrian space, though it can account for fragments and spatial hierarchies, has not been fully developed to incorporate spaces that are coded internally and externally as domains of nature. The closest relative to this concept given

13 by Lefebvre is what he calls “absolute space”. “Absolute space was made up of fragments of nature located at sites which were chosen for their intrinsic qualities (cave, mountaintop, spring, river), but whose very consecration ended up stripping them of their natural characteristics and their uniqueness” (Lefebvre 1991, p.48). In the context of ancient Greece, he goes on to note that while nature was at first deified, it would soon be a place of “sanctified inwardness” that slowly became infected with the dominance of socio-political forces. As power permeated nature, the inhabitants were concurrently exploited.

“Those who produced the space (peasants and artisans) were not the same people as managed it, as used it to organize social production and reproduction; it was the priests, warriors, scribes and princes who possessed what others had produced, who appropriated space and became its full entitled owners” (Lefebvre 1991, p.48).

Here again, stress is placed on the disconnect between those who physically manufacture the space and those who necessitate its social production. Absolute spaces are framed only in reference to urban and hegemonic spaces and are necessarily political and religious. Here, the dominant forces “smashed naturalness forever and upon its ruins established the space of accumulation” (Lefebvre 1991, p.49). What is more relevant though is Lefebvre’s acknowledgement that giving the absolute or natural space a history is what fully cements it into the hegemonic structure. Attribution of a natural space as a part of the national spatial identity contorts the physical world into the social. Absolute space is the paramount of Levebvrian treatment of the environment although many scholars who have followed him in Marxist and critical investigations of space have addressed environmental spaces more directly. Harvey’s Justice, Nature and the Geography of Difference (1996) most notably exposes the derivation of nature within the capitalist form of production. He begins by implicating money as the solitary method of valuation in an economy. Nature, therefore, can only have two values, one of monetary basis or one of inherent. However, he goes on to show that all inherent meanings of nature are constructed within socially arbitrary frameworks. Though Harvey finds issue with Lefebvre for moving away from class and labor as the dominant areas for critique, their similar roots in Marx make Harvey’s take a useful “patch” for absolute space.

2.1.4.3 Spaces of Swamp Touring. Swamp tours provide a particular forum for critical spaces of representation because they occur in what Lefebvre calls “absolute space” or the undifferentiated space of nature. The Atchafalaya is an absolute space for tourists if we make the assumption that they attend the tour to get a spatial impression. The Atchafalaya is also constructed as a wilderness to tourists which insinuates that for many it is an ambiguous place of nature. For Lefebvre, these spaces are the battlegrounds between the advancement of dominant spatial paradigms and any possible alternatives that may resist. The tour experience is often a platform for political, cultural and even economic critique for guides who are unhappy with the dominant representation of the space. Because of its locale in an absolute space, the swamp tour, which is itself spatial practice, provides the opportunity for the commodification of space through reifying the representations of space and for the resistance to such movements through spaces of representation.

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The swamp tour guides are in a unique position to represent the space around them. While wetland commodification at the hands of planners, engineers and environmental assessors is obvious, for a tour guide, who is essentially some combination of an educator and an entertainer, the motivation is less clear. Many tour guides noted that they did not do it for the money and would continue to give tours if they did not need money. For a guide, representing space is his spatial practice and he perfects this practice as an art, knowing exactly when to drop certain jokes, how to call alligators, how to meander and position the boat and how to transmit what he feels to be important information about the swamp to people who may or may not be paying attention. What the guides accomplish on the tour is referred to throughout this literature as the coding of space. Lefebvrian codes are “a part of a practical relationship, as part of an interaction between subjects and their space and surroundings” (1991, p.18). The words, lessons, and practices of space veil its codes, and to decode space highlights the transitions between spaces of representation and representations of space. Particularly applicable to this instance of representational practitioners is Lefebvre’s point that the reading of a coded space must occur after the production of that space, “in all cases except those in which space is produced especially in order to be read” (1991, p.143). Swamp tour space is exactly this type of live-produced space which Lefebvre adds “[is] the most deceptive and tricked-up imaginable” (1991, p. 143). I posit that this exceptionality lies in the fact that swamp tour guiding is an often paradoxical act of personal and social relation that is further complicated by the fact that the setting is constantly moving and in flux. The goal of this chapter is to show that some of our understanding of the processes of social spatialization can be enhanced with a perspective informed by performativity. Below, I introduce and review the performative line of thought.

2.2 Review of Performativity Literature

The above literature can be summarized by the notion that people have the ability to produce the spaces around them as a reaction to place myths that are passed along with the imagined social characteristics of places. In the process, much of this literature divides human activities into two categories: unconscious responses to one’s environment that reproduce place myths and conscious acts of resistance. In contrast to this literature, many post-structuralist geographers focus less on either the structural power of place myths or conscious struggles for space and more on the momentary poetics of the body and its habitat. Places are created in the present tense; they are performed.

2.2.1 Butlerian Performativity Performance, as it initially was theorized by Butler (1990), allows subjects to reflect/resist their social position through embodied symbolism. Butler’s introduction of the concept of performativity comes in Gender Trouble where she intentionally muddies the waters of the seemingly concrete binary of gender identity. Nash notes, ”For Butler the concept of performativity is an attempt to find a more embodied way of rethinking the relationships between determining social structures and personal agency” (Nash 2000, p.654). Although initially her analysis did implicate the power of discourse, her later reformulations focus more on the embodied performance of gender. This transformation is noted by Thrift (2007) and Mahtani (Mahtani, 2004). Rather than allowing the body to

15 be an inscribable canvas, she sees the continuation of the gender divide as a performed agency albeit often in the subconscious. “Gender is thus a construction that regularly conceals its genesis; the tacit collective agreement to perform, produce and sustain discrete and polar genders as cultural fictions is obscured by the credibility of those productions” (Butler 1990, p.178). Gender performance is embodied in the body through clothing, action, sex and the refutation of activities associated with the other gender. Butler highlights the process by which differences become cemented into our worldviews by performing roles of femininity and masculinity. Gender thereby becomes “naturalized” and is then used as an immobile structural determinant when in fact the differentiation of gender (or race, class etc.) is flexible and self-determined. While her ideas on performativity have been widely adopted, her contribution to feminist thought has been rightly been questioned. Feminism operates at a structural level similar to that of Marxism or post-colonialism and while many feminists write to reveal the power of masculinist society as it governs the place of women, Butler’s work focuses on personal agency and has been criticized for turning away from the material politics of oppression. To me, the realization of one’s ability to perform, even across the massive fissure between man and woman necessitates many possible modes of resistance that are not common or prescribed. Butler’s work was influential in constructing the idea of performance as a realm of understanding, but this perspective has since been critiqued for focusing too much on social differentiation (Nash 2000). The current turn in the geographic literature on performance is toward what Nash calls, “a more generic and celebratory notion of the embodied nature of human existence” (2000, p.655). Work in this genre is inspired by Heideggerian phenomenology, via Merleau-Ponty, Bordieu, and, in geography, by Nigel Thrift (Askins 2009; Lorimer 2008; Revill 2004; Rycroft 2007; Waitt & Lane 2007). Thriftian performative geographies take a critical stance in their instantaneity and their politics of the moment provides a subjectified, transformative power. Affective performance is inherently productive and “concerned with cultivating political spaces through an awareness of the openness of the present time” (Cadman 2009, p.6). In this research, I apply this perspective to the “present time [and space]” within which specific acts of spatialization occur in the Atchafalaya. I use the analysis of performance as a method within what Thrift calls “non-representational theory” that is both a reaction and supplement to Butler’s work. I also will use Thrift to expand performance beyond the limitations of the body that is so well-developed in Butler’s work.

2.2.2 Thriftian Performativity In Thrift’s geography, “the emphasis is on practices that cannot adequately be spoken of, that words cannot capture, that texts cannot convey – on forms of experience and movement that are not only or never cognitive” (Nash 2000, p.655). Thus, the Non- Representational Theory (NRT) espoused by Thrift directs geographers away from studying what is known about a place and towards a geography of affective states, subjective feelings, and instantaneous relations of performance. The link to the literature on spatialization can be established by the embodied, ephemeral nature of the act of representation. When spatialization is taken as a performed act, Thrift’s logic informs the analysis by allowing congruence between iterative behaviors and open reactions, between the cognitive and non-cognitive. NRT can “articulate embodied practice and yet retain its

16 inherent openness amid the flow of the world” (Cadman 2009, p.5). In performative spaces, connections are forged between abstract claims about the place and the concrete objects experienced by actors who are contextually positioned to affect imagined geographies of the margin. Non-representational theory stands as a current attempt to remove the power relationship of the scientific gaze and supplant it with a subjective/creative moment of feeling rather than watching. Thrift has articulated this approach in an entire career of scholarship and many others have followed his lead by taking non-representational theory “to the streets”. Its focus on the lived experience of everyday life situates the methodology in contrast to past geographies of the productions of landscape, anthropological studies of the constitution of culture and to deconstructions of all sorts. For some, this approach to studying culture may seem a radical break from the tomes of literature and processual guides that seek to maximize objectivity and reach an empirically grounded “good” representation of a people. This is the intention. The radical break is intended to violate the power structure posited by the scientist-native (or informant or stakeholder) relationship. Whereas representational and structural research focuses on treating people and their activities as readable and interpretable texts, non- representational theory focuses instead on performance, embodiment and becoming. Performances of space occur within specific environmental contexts, a point that Thrift makes by integrating into NRT Giddens’ concept of the locale. Locales encompass the nearness of life paths that provide spaces of human interaction, or more correctly the spaces of possible interactions. The tie to a greater structure is established through the regulation of space by the “particular pattern of production” which, although impressed upon by larger paradigms, is localized and unique as well. “These dominant locales provide the most direct link between the interaction structure of a region and objective social structure, because they are the main sites of class production and reproduction” (Thrift 1996, p.81). Locales provide a class-specific thrust for life paths. A juxtaposition of life paths in a locale necessitates not only contacts of shared yet various knowledges, but also an element of the unknown, the inquiry of which is vital to Thrift’s approach. The scale of locale must then be questioned. Here too, the overlap of Thrift with the literature on spatialization is notable as places that are constructed as marginal like the Atchafalaya (see Chapter Four) have been shown to be delimited by regional discourses as a reaction to the national ‘core’. Shields’ work on the Canadian North and the English North-South division stands together with extensive work that highlights the English countryside as an abstract yet cohesive bearer of place myths (Shields 1991; Sibley 1995; Cloke et al 1996). In a quest for an invigorated regional geography approach, Thrift wants to front a regional conception that is an “actively passive… meeting place of social structure and agency” where discourse and behavior are allowed to generate structure relative to local conditions (1996, p.79). Although he acknowledges the abstractness of regional definition, it is through this openness and active discourse on place that regions are a space lived “through, not in” (1996, p.79). The region may be more sufficiently described by the “overall institutional context of sociability” which governs through discourse, the sense of community (1996, p.79). Again, this is a meso- scale structure that reflects both the greater hegemony and the local reactions to it.

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2.2.2.1 (Non)representing nature. I turn now to Thrift’s positioning of non- representational theory as it relates to the body and nature. In a section entitled “Nature as background” he delves into the way modern Western societies have culturally rationalized the body within an objectified and commodified nature. His idea is complex but useful. “In other words, the forms of embodiment I have set out in this article constitute a biopolitical domain arising out of a heightened awareness of particular forms of embodiment which, in turn, allow for certain forms of signification to be grasped ‘instinctively’” (Thrift 2008, p.46). Thrift is saying here that our rationalization of the place of humans within nature, the “biopolitical domain”, allows us to make connections that seem ‘true’. This a useful concept in breaking the human/nature ontological divide: “Thus trees become flesh by being bound up in a practical field” (Thrift 2008, p.47). Perhaps science and the enlightenment could be implicated in the creation of natural ontological categories such as trees (though Thrift does not address this here), but the author instead castigates the role of capitalism in commodifying this experience that he calls “bare life” (via Agamben). Most importantly, capitalism creates self-serving knowledge through representations. Thrift identifies several methods of nature representation that have come about through the experience economy of high capitalism. Sport, extreme movement (think roller coasters), performance and education all serve to mediate the continuation of nature as the background subject to our experience. His most relevant exposition is through the experience of tourism. “Since the 1960’s a new kind of tourism has emerged based on the theming of spaces” (Thrift 2008, p.49). Certainly a swamp-tour could be implicated here and might even be characterized alongside hot-air ballooning, rock-climbing and whale kissing as “postcolonial forms of adventure” (Thrift 2008, p.50). Using the manufacture of natural experience, Thrift exposes the dangers of representation to be more than a false characterization of culture by social science, but a powerful and often concerted effort to restructure ‘rational’ reality.

2.2.2.2 Performing the Swamp. It would seem then an acceptable way to decipher these representations would be to deconstruct their performance at a local scale and reveal the hidden motivations of capital, science etc. But this is not the case. Performance and performativity are ways of knowing the here and now, not static events that can be translated across temporal and spatial scales To translate these theories of into my fieldwork, my analysis of performance focuses on the most abstract and ‘purest’ use of non-representational theory for seeing what Thrift calls the “micro-geographies” of habitual practice (Thrift 2004, p.67). Through participation and observation I was able to place myself in the spaces of work that are created around certain swamp actors and their performances of culture. The placing of the body in relation to the swamp and all of the objects used in the production of the swamp-space is motivated by the search for non-cognitive behavior. Thrift notes on performance, ”[m]any of them are only expressed as pre-reflexive signs, little mo(ve)ments of affect pointing toward something without being able to say what it is” (Thrift 2007, p.129). Nash looks at applications of performativity in contemporary cultural geography and finds, ”The emphasis is on practices that cannot adequately be spoken of, that words cannot capture, that texts cannot convey – on forms of experience and movement that are not only or never cognitive” (2000, p.655). My attempt to ascertain the cultural meaning of pre-cognitive behavior would seem to be classic

18 representation via observation. Latham understands this paradox but asserts that rather than “ditching” traditional methods, we should “work through how we can imbue traditional research methodologies with a sense of the creative, the practical, and being with practiceness that Thrift is seeking” (Latham 2008, p.72). But, the focus on iterative practice that is an element of both Thrift and Lefebvre leaves room for interpretation. The mundane and everyday actions in the swamp such as choosing a route are experienced and repeated, and their motivations can be confirmed by the actors themselves. If we assume there is a motivation behind all actions we may be wrong, or perhaps our failure would be assuming that the actor we are speaking to knows or can articulate why he or she did something. Everyday behaviors are “profoundly practical” and “…its logic and sense is not ordered through the discursive and, if we are to find ways of properly accounting for these we too must think beyond the discursive” (Latham 2008, p.71). Therefore the performance on a tour may or may not be interpretable through the common power structures. However, in my work, I was able to inquire about guides’ motivations and actions and, though their performance in an interview draws from a different context than on the boat, the guides were able to justify their actions. They do, after all, do it every day. The performance of the swamp on the swamp tour was a primary focus of my work. This is performance in the most concrete sense, but this fact makes understanding it all the more difficult. Geographers have long depended on representations, texts and discourse analysis using a contrived notion of objectivity. Thus, it was difficult for me to ignore the drive to de-construct the “text” of the swamp tour. Since I was investigating the production of knowledge about the swamp I could have taken a ‘script’ from the tour and unpack all of its hidden or subconscious tactics that serve to further commodify, objectify or scientize the creatures and ways of the swamp, but this would not do justice to performance in the post-structural sense. Thrift devotes considerable thought to the constancy of text and ephemerality of performance in his aptly named chapter “Afterwords” (2008). Performances happen in the here and now and taking a ‘text’ from the tour guide’s performance would be taking words out of context. Not only are performances ephemeral, but represented performances, ”gradually adopt their own styles and conventions which differ from immediate performance” and this is especially true considering the reliance on movement and on unpredictable animals that is assumed in a swamp tour (Thrift 2008, p.134). While performance certainly has the ability to be novel or politically radical, it can easily be scripted or normative as well. Thrift warns against romanticizing the performance as an act of transgression or political expression that it may not be. For example, the function of movement (both animal and boat) will produce both scripted and radically new moments in the performance of culture, though it may be the case that what appears radical to a boat passenger will be mundane for its driver. Either way, performing the swamp will be a transformation of the lived world into a world of symbolic importance and thereby is the production of culture. The thesis derived from my study is that the guides are performing nature by performing culture. This spatializing activity has emerged as an experience commodity because people will pay to have nature revealed in an innovative and exciting way. “This is the politics that arises out of the enormous efforts currently being made to foreground the background [nature] of bare life- to make it comprehensible and therefore able to be apprehended and so made more of – across a range of different interests and arenas”

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(Thrift 2000, p.49). Thus, shaping the meaning of nature has become a commodified experience that serves to maintain the networks of knowledge that uphold the economic paradigms. Capitalist business is the most advanced force in this construction of natural experiences. Since Thrift’s performativity focuses on the mundane and pre-cognitive ways we behave in reference to the world around us, it would seem as if his concept would not apply to the somewhat scripted swamp tour. A question then arises to the nature of the performance as either iterative and scripted or open and creative. What can be said about this nature performance is that the dynamic pressures of movement and unpredictable animals cause the non-cognitive reactions of the guide. However, the reaction is drawn from a specific pool of knowledge and experience that is somewhat similar for each guide. Pine and Gilmore address this dualism through the broadened concept of improvisational theatre.

“The dynamic movement of improv theatre, however, does not entail only simple acts of free association or aimless mental wandering, void of any structure or routine. Quite the opposite: Improv requires systematic and deliberate methods of originating creative ideas, fresh expressions, and new ways of addressing old problems. The script, while rarely written down (or codified) except in very broad terms, emerges from the improvisation” (1999, p.124).

In conclusion, the performance of nature in the Atchafalaya is open and creative because of the environment and context of movement, but the guides are restricted as to what types of information are used during the creative process. They are performers, but because of the social context of the experience, they are performing a standardized type of nature. This dualism of structural and anarchic capacities of performance is the vital link between Thriftian performance and the Lefebvrian triad.

2.2.3 Placing the Study These two approaches can supplement each other by using performativity to add depth to an undertheorized aspect of the social spatialization perspective: how individuals come to engage in representations of space through spatial practice. This dissertation attempts to bridge a gap between these ways of understanding spatialization by applying the performativity approach to spatial formation during key moments in which individuals interact to produce and communicate conceptions of place. Rather than taking textual place representations as indicative of the socially constructed image of the swamp, I fuse the marginality and performativity perspectives in a way that allows one to understand the involved actors as producing space in context. This technique allowed me to utilize experiential “data” from participating in the tours as well as traditional interview scripts where I was able to delve deeper into the motivations and ideologies of the guides. To this end, l focused on several different contexts in which individuals performed the spatialization and marginalization of place: the public hearing process, the swamp tour, and the interview.

2.2.3.1 Public Scoping. As tourism became a powerful sector of the Louisiana economy, the state’s Department of Culture, Recreation and Tourism became proactive in promoting growth specifically for the Atchafalaya Basin. In 1997 the Atchafalaya Trace

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Heritage Area was created on the state level and in 2006 the region earned federal recognition as the Atchafalaya National Heritage Area (ANHA). The ANHA commission has since implemented a 15 year plan that gives the area “strategic direction” towards sustainable growth in tourism and “saving important cultural and natural resources” (Atchafalaya.org 2010). To create this regional identity, a public scoping process gathered information from local residents, business owners, and public officials who were asked to respond to several open-ended questions about the Atchafalaya. The performance of writing in the ANHA public scoping arena is taken here to be a function of what Thrift calls “soft capitalism” (Thrift 2005, p.11). Such an apparatus is focused primarily on giving businesses and commodities an even sharper competitive edge by creating and managing knowledge through cultural circuits. Since the knowledge gathered for this purpose was taken at open meetings, within the region, and from people who felt they had a stake in the Basin, planners justify it as representative of ‘public opinion’. I reject this naïve perspective that the statements made in the scoping process were the unmediated ‘will of the people’. Surely, who was involved, how the surveys were publicized, and how the written statements were gathered filtered out some opinions. Nonetheless, the data from this scoping process constitutes one set of performances, conducted within a specific and highly ritualized context. Thus, my analysis of data from the ANHA’s public scoping exercise formed a baseline for comparison for examining performances of marginality in an entirely different context: the swamp tour.

2.2.3.2 Swamp Tours. Analysis of the “experience economy”, as it has been termed by Pine and Gilmore (1999), is complicated by the fact that its products are not simple use-values. Rather, they constitute new frames of sensibility into which consumers must become deeply invested. Commodities become “time limited rights to streams of content” or, “an animate surface that is capable of conducting ‘thought’” (Thrift 2005, p.7). This accurately describes how a swamp tour is designed. A period of time is partitioned in the animated (by the guide) surface of the swamp, and, using a common knowledge of nature-society relations, the guide fashions a representation of the place that either challenges or supports the tourist’s expectations. The context of this performance is constantly changing due to movement and unpredictable animal and plant actors. Moreover, a unique performance is constructed iteratively by the guide who draws from a cache of common, repeated information as well as instantaneous sensory clues from the environment around him. The guide is not alone in his or her ability to perform space. Just by showing up and sitting in the boat, the tourists perform their roles as expected and become the recieving end of the show. By communicating their expectations and reactions to the guide’s cues (consciously or not), tourists reproduce the guide’s position as translator of the swamp as well as the identification of the swamp as a marginal space of interest. Beyond the human participants, non-human actors including animals, plants, and the swamp water itself actively constitute the tour-space (see Chapter Six). This is especially evident in the case of alligators who, as noted by Wiley (2002), often iteratively interact with the tour guide as they perform what the tourist perceives as an act of ‘natural instinct’ in response to the guide enticing them with a piece of chicken. Thus, the tour performance becomes a heterogeneous amalgam of relational actors, cognitive speech

21 acts, non-cognitive movements and reactions, conscious resistance and subconscious reproduction, but the space retains the sense of alterity to justify the price of the tour.

2.2.3.3 Interviews. Finally, I treat the interviews with guides and tourists as performances as well. In any conversation, there are roles played by the participants that limit or shape their acts of speech. During the performance of speech in an interview the expectations about the direction of the conversation are even stronger as the guides assumed I had some knowledge about the Basin and I assumed them to have a native position. The fallacy of assumption was revealed by the fact that some guides would feel the need to give me the basic physical geography of the Basin (since I was nevertheless an outsider they assumed I did not know) and others would reference events such as droughts and floods with the assumption that I was aware of them even if I wasn’t. From my standpoint, I often spoke of the ANHA with guides as if they were aware of it and few of them were, and on the other hand I naively assumed that commodification of Cajun culture would be a touchy subject though most participants were comfortable with even kitschy representations. Thus, the context of an interview is a unique type of performance whereby the participants must judge each other under different power relations than are present on the boat (i.e. not commodified, not time limited, one-on-one, less dependent on surroundings).

2.2.4 Tourism Performance Studies A handful of past authors have addressed tourism from similar standpoints. Working from a drama studies perspective, Wiley (2002) analyzes how nature and ethnicity are performed in a small sample of Louisiana swamp tours (we had some overlap). Chiefly he finds that, along the tours, discomforting moments arise that seem to contradict the guide’s characterization of the swamp both as dangerous and as a wilderness. Wiley also notes that the guides portray the “swamp Cajun” as a Cajun sub-type “whose lifestyle allegedly results from a long interrelationship with the swamp environment” (Wiley 2002, p.8). More particular to geography is Edensor’s use of a Butlerian notion of performance to highlight how “touristscapes” are borne out of the performance of place (2007, p.200). Particularly interesting is his characterization of tourism as “unreflexive habit” (p.202). Waitt & Cook (2007) also take moments in ecotourism as their point of inquiry. Much like the proposed dissertation, their study is informed by Thrift’s performativity theory as it uses a non-representational method of photographic reflection and interviews to assess the subject-object binary construction of nature that is inherent in the structure of the tour and the outlook of tour participants. These authors provide useful guidelines that informed this dissertation methodologically and theoretically. As Thrift notes, “capitalism [i]s a continual struggle to release new forms of representation that can capture how the world is, new forms of subject that can hold the world in their grip, and new forms of surface that can define how space and time should turn up in that world” (Thrift 2005, p.13). These new forms correspond directly to the actors that produce marginality in this context, namely, the swamp tour (new representation), participants in the swamp tour and scoping process performances (new subject), and the ANHA (new surface). Thrift’s notion of capitalist development is easily extended to these performances of marginality through spatialization, and retaining the focus on the moment gives the study a critical edge as well. “Whilst [capitalism] has its

22 contemplative aspects, based in the time of learned knowledge, it is chiefly an order of the moment, and a means of crafting the moment“ (Thrift 2005, p.11). My work takes these crafted moments as the present tense creation of the Basin as a commodified tourist space.

2.3 Methods

The study commenced along three steps that were practically arranged in a workflow to maximize the effectiveness of time in the field. In general, data was collected using established qualitative methods and scrutinized using the qualitative data analysis software Atlas.ti.

2.3.1 Phase 1: Collect Atchafalaya Representations To compare constructed representations with performed experiences, a cache of information about the Atchafalaya was assembled. This step was vital to the process because it yielded an understanding of hegemonic claims to the space: representations of space that “have a substantial role and a specific influence on the production of space” (Lefebvre 1991, p.42). Before undertaking fieldwork, I gathered a broad variety of sources as representational texts. Using textual analysis to search for common marginalizing themes allowed for the comparison of sources including promotional pamphlets, history books, and webpages. The list of articles, books, and webpages and a cache of pamphlets has been assembled for this purpose (see Appendix B). These are general books about Acadiana and about the Atchafalaya, some that concern its associated species and some works that assess swamps in general. Also vital to the study are visual representations such as film and photography. The fiction-documentary approach in Flaherty’s 1948 Louisiana Story shares some of the same conclusions about the swamp as a handful of other film projects such as Melton’s 2007 Atchafalaya Houseboat. Representational sources transmit spatialization and marginalization through text, music and imagery. Using these types of sources to show how marginality is contested is a common method used by social spatialization researchers (e.g. Hetherington 1997; Shields 1991; Sibley 1995). This method is also applicable to work that uses a performance approach (Little 1997; Waitt & Lane 2006). In addition to analyzing representations of the Atchafalaya Basin, I used this period to perform other key tasks that needed to be undertaken prior to fieldwork. Paramount among these was identifying and scheduling swamp tours. At least 16 swamp tour businesses operate within the study area (Schaffer 2006). The list of possible tours was taken from Schaffer’s unpublished thesis that examined the effect of the 2005 hurricane season on Louisiana swamp tours. Internet searches and snowball sampling was used to add tours to this list and to verify that they continued to be in operation (see Appendix A). A phone call or email was sent to guides to schedule the tour and interview. Tours were included whether or not their guides claimed Cajun heritage as the exclusion or inclusion of Cajun cultural information from the tour (and how it may be presented differently depending on the tour guide’s claimed ethnic status) was relevant to the questions at hand. Other preparatory activities involved developing the interview instruments for guides, tourists, and others involved in the tourism economy and securing lodging and making other logistical arrangements.

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Another source of representations came from a database of ‘public scoping comments’ that were collected during public meetings held throughout the area to guide planners as they formalized the borders and scope of the ANHA development and preservation region (ANHA Scoping 2009). Seven questions were posed to guide the ANHA and 174 individuals contributed comments. This database is available online and I was able to scrutinize this information as a performed representation of the Atchafalaya that would help me formulate questions and make me familiar with common attitudes towards the place. As a part of the ANHA’s plan to create a tourist-space, these comments served as a source of authenticity to the planners who in turn used them to build a particular, othered image of the Basin. The comments served to inform my fieldwork but also were used as essential texts in my analysis on par with interview transcripts. By the time I engaged in fieldwork in Louisiana I had a firm grasp on what is commonly ‘known’ about the Atchafalaya nature and cultures from an outsider’s and local’s points of view.

2.3.2 Phase 2: Fieldwork: Interviews and Swamp Tours My methodology for the swamp tour study was derived from techniques initiated during a pilot study in 2009, when I conducted research on several swamp tours on the Wakulla River, near Tallahassee, Florida. For that study, I combined post-tour interviews with the tour guides and tourists with observations of performances by both (and by the surrounding nature) during the course of each tour. Activities in the field primarily revolved around experiencing swamp tours. Tours were scheduled to allow for interview time before and after. In some instances, the swamp tours were videotaped to allow for later comparison. Since each tour required extensive work before and after the actual event, unless necessary, I took only one tour per day, and I attempted to experience each swamp tour at least once so that different tours could be compared in content and aesthetic feel. During the pilot study, guides acknowledged that, although the tours were somewhat scripted, there was always a possibility for what one respondent called a “National Geographic moment” such as an alligator attacking a deer (Interview V, 2009). In order to record fresh reflections on the experience, observations were taken on paper during the tours, followed by deeper voice- recorded verbal evaluation usually on my ride home. During the tours the guides all knew my intentions, though most of the tourists did not. I attempted to avoid influencing the trip any more than any other tourist might. This is to say, I generally kept quiet, but asked questions if I was confused, and responded when questions were asked of me. Thus I was neither an objective outside observer nor an intentional director of the tour. Rather from my privileged position – known as a researcher to the tour guide and thought of as just another tourist by the tourists – I recorded observations and allowed the experience to unfold as it may. My observations of the tours were complemented with interviews with guides and post-tour interviews with tourists. Data from the interviews with guides was combined with insights from observations to determine how guides balance the need to produce an exotic experience with their own expression of culture. Views on extraction, environmental protection, the ANHA, and ecotourism were also assessed. I also tried to understand how the guides are received by other Cajuns as producers of cultural commodities. Wiley found that Cajun swamp tour guides were, “slightly embarrassed by

24 their role” in front of other Cajuns on the shore (2002, p.10). Guides were able to elucidate whether they used their performance as a stage to resist spatial stereotypes, which would have suggested that they were working within Lefebvre’s spaces of representation (1991). Just as observation of the tour guides was complemented by interviews, observation of the tourists was enriched through post-tour interviews as I sought to determine what tourists expected of their time in the Basin and how the experience affected their understanding of the space. No tourist comes to the swamp with the same information or leaves with the same experience. As the source of the profits so desired by the ANHA and the guides, the tourists must be drawn to some imagined geography of the Basin; indeed, as crucial participants in the tourist economy they participate in the construction of this imagined geography. To assess this conjecture, interviews were conducted after tours with tourists. Permission to ask their clients for an interview was obtained from the guides and subsequently from the tourists. This qualitative approach was successful in allowing people to express their feelings about the topic and the affect of the tour when it was fresh on their minds. Waitt & Cook (2007) found similar success with this method in their eco-tourism study in Thailand. The embodied experience of the tour through the eyes of the tourists revealed a variety of affects of the performance. The fieldwork took approximately eight weeks. I experienced thirteen different tours and ventured into other applicable Atchafalaya experiences such as swamp themed shopping centers, famous restaurants, dance halls, museums, historic re-creations and interpretive centers. The fieldwork was broken up into three sections. The first two weeks initially were focused on tours in the northern part of the Basin but in the end due to the popular bayou in Marksville, LA closing, the initial period was spent in Baton Rouge for the eastern Basin tours. Second, I spent one month in Lafayette/Henderson where the bulk of the tours are located. I split my time on tours between Lake Martin, the Atchafalaya Visitors Center launch ramp, and the Henderson Levee where most of them were located. I also met with guides at local restaurants and their houses to conduct formal and informal interviews. My final leg of the journey was spent in the Morgan City/Houma area, the southernmost cities in the Basin. Here I spent a week taking tours and collecting interviews. All in all I recorded interviews with 34 different people in the Basin as well as hours of video and hundreds of photos.

2.3.3 Phase 3: Transcription, Coding, Analysis, and Writing The final step of the study occurred once I returned to Tallahassee after all of the field data had been gathered. Transcriptions were made using a listen-speak method aided by Dragon Naturally Speaking 9.0 voice recognition software which greatly reduced the amount of time to get the interviews on paper. Informed by the cache of hegemonic claims to this swamp space gathered during Phase 1 and the experience of the fieldwork, coding commenced around the types of marginalizing language, attitudes towards the swamp, misconceptions about the swamp and Cajuns, environmental threats, restoration and several other tropes. Analysis commenced once the interviews were coded for their common claims on the swamp space. What can be surmised from my observation of swamp tours and subsequent analysis of data is that a spatializing discourse emerges whereby the articles of the landscape are coded through reference to ecological, economic, historical or other

25 categorical senses of understanding. This information “sticks” with tourists to varying extents but the nature of a tour implies an openness to subjective experiences of space. The fieldwork was productive, successful and quite fun.

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CHAPTER THREE

PLACING THE STUDY

After explaining my theoretical position on how space is produced collectively and how this is performed by individuals, I now turn to the more particular notions of landscape, place and culture and how authors have related them to the Atchafalaya. The association between socialized ideas and personal performance is placed on public display through tourism. What is fascinating about the space-time of a swamp tour is the performance of guiding: the embodiment of representation. Guides, such as those who so differently constructed alligators in the introduction of Chapter Two, negotiate culture and nature by positioning themselves as swamp insiders. They note how long they have been guiding, how long they have lived in the area or how long their families have lived in the area. This background information creates a trust with the audience that the guide can authentically perform the spatialization of the swamp. A guide actively reproduces existing representations, represents new events under normalized spatializations and defies the established representation as he codes the space with his words and actions. Since all of this occurs as a commodified experience, the guide is implicitly commodifying the landscape, but even as he does so the swamp remains an open space of representation, for both the tour guide and the tourist. When a guide laments the onslaught of logging, he codes the space as humanized and used. But when he takes the tour to a tree that survived the logging spree, the swamp still seems “pristine” even if in a small pocket. Either notion of the environment (as “used” or “pristine”) transmits tropes of swamp preservation that, to the guides, contradict the forces of development. In each encounter, the guide may represent by adhering to common scientific or resource notions of the swamp (i.e. referring to Alligator mississippiensis’s ecology and economy) or he may use his stage to craft a new resistant representation (i.e. by implying that gators can “parle le français cadien”). In this sense he takes advantage of his ability to freely move within the social spatialization trialectic as he performs. Perhaps this is why most guides noted in interviews defined themselves as educators and entertainers, and as tourism professionals they are certainly practitioners of spatialization. The French concept of flâneurs which encompasses a person who moves with intentioned experience is also applicable to the swamp tour guide (Baudelaire, 1964) So far, my characterization of the role of swamp tour guides, performance and spatialization could apply to any boat-tour environment, and in terms of applying the theories of general spatial production through performance this is as it should be. But, the intention of this work is to argue for a rootedness in unique place within the framework of space production. Before I move away from spaces and place in the abstract and turn to the Atchafalaya as an experienced place, I will review some of the broader trends in geographic literature that have led to my understanding of the production of unique places and cultures. I begin with analysis of how some geographers have used the

27 concepts of landscape place, space and culture that support my approach to performed social spatialization. After “placing” my study, I continue with a review of works from other disciplines by authors that have focused on the Atchafalaya and I present a cultural- environmental history of the area. Finally, I delve into the findings of my study and assess the overall culture-nature-economy context of my research.

3.1 Landscape

Jackson begins his classic piece “Discovering the Vernacular Landscape” with a call to redefine the concept. The traditional definition- one that has motivated geographers since Sauer- is “a portion of the land which the eye can comprehend at a glance” (Sauer 1996, p.316). However, today, geographers write of “Disease Landscapes” and “Animal Landscapes” neither of which is about interpreting diseases or animals at a glance (Schærström 1999; Matless et al. 2005). So, I will piece together how this came about. The history of the English use of the term is traced back to the early 17th century when it referred to a picture- an artist’s interpretation of the landscape. Its Dutch predecessor landscap was also rooted in painting (such as the works of Duerer and Breugel) but referred to the land itself (like today’s geographic meaning) rather than the painting. The English landscape painting soon became commonplace in art and according to Mitchell was significantly motivated by Milton’s description of paradise (Mitchell 2008). Early landscape painting motivated the rise of what we might today call “landscaping” as the English countryside began to be shaped into bucolic gardens and pastoral scenes- life imitated art. By the 19th century landscape painting had been thrust into hyper-romanticism and a new continent via Cole, Bierstadt, and the Hudson River School. This period is probably the best illustration of the power of the landscape painting to produce stylized representations that were realistic in opposition to the abstract, but nevertheless presented a false sense of beauty and harmony of nature. The most important moment for landscape in geography was “The Morphology of Landscape” where Sauer not only proposed it as the unit concept, but also repositioned landscape as the actual “shape of the land” rather than the painting. Sauer challenged the discipline by writing, ”the task of geography is conceived as the establishment of a critical system which embraces the phenomenology of the landscape in order to grasp in all of its meaning and color the varied terrestrial scene” (1996, p.299). He acknowledges the selective power of judgment geographers will have in doing landscape analysis and proposes morphology as the methodology of landscape analysis. Morphology encompasses the reading of a landscape for both its human and non-human forms. Sauer sees the baseline as being the “natural landscape” which has not been altered by humans, though he concedes that “in its entirety it no longer exists in many parts of the world” (1996, p.307). His basic and most wide-reaching conclusion is the application of the formula: “Culture is the agent, the natural area is the medium, the cultural landscape is the result” (Sauer 1996, p.310). It is safe to say that this formula, though it has waxed and waned, has been used by geographers ever since this work was published. Sauer formulated the basis of Cultural Geography with his work at Berkeley and even the pejorative use of “barn-types” to describe such work speaks to the staying power of Sauerian landscape.

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Moving forward, other essential landscape work can be found in Jackson, whose “Discovering the Vernacular Landscape” seemed to imply a search for more “soul” in landscape by acknowledging places that were (at the time) outside the realm of geographic analysis. Jackson’s “vernacular landscape” acknowledges the issue that landscape is not atemporal by attempting to address it not as a “static utopia” but “as an environment where permanence and change have struck a balance” (Jackson 1996, p.320). His notion of the vernacular also meant a landscape where “the evidences of a political organization of space were largely or entirely absent” (Jackson 1996, p.321). Though this assertion would make today’s postmodern cultural geographer’s head spin, in 1984 this was evidence of landscape’s new cultural turn. Soon thereafter, Daniels’ “Marxism, Culture and the Duplicity of Landscape” used landscape in the metaphorical sense that inspires much of the “-scapes” of today (Daniels 1996). Daniels posits a different yet complementary type of dualism that exists between the viewer and the subject. He notes that “sometimes a landscape seems to be less a setting for the life of its inhabitants than a curtain behind which their struggles, achievements and accidents take place” (Daniels 1996, p.335). Through the analysis of several pivotal authors’ texts Daniels enlightens his version of landscape as evidence of the power struggles that created it. Landscape is ”an ambiguous synthesis whose redemptive and manipulative aspects cannot finally be disentangled” (Daniels 1996, p.329). The turn to the postmodern landscape can be found in Barnes and Duncan’s 1992 Writing Worlds: Discourse Text and Metaphor in the Representation of Landscape. The authors deconstruct writing as a practice and determine, ”once we sever the supposed one-to-one link between language and brute reality, the notion that writing mirrors the world is untenable” (Barnes and Duncan 1992, p.2). The idea of the text is then translated to the landscape. “The social life-as-text metaphor is easily applicable to landscape because it too is a social and cultural production” (Barnes and Duncan 1992, p.6). Landscape reading persists today as a practice to characterize and describe or to uncover the hidden motives and taken-for-granted power geometries of spatial organization. The landscape concept has most notably been critiqued for its naturalizing and masculinist gaze. Rose’s 1993 Feminism and Geography: The Limits of Geographical Knowledge explored the limitations of landscape visualization as an objective act. She saw the interpretation of the landscape:

“not as a material consequence of interactions between a society and an environment, observable in the field by the more-or-less objective gaze of the geographer, but rather as a gaze which itself helps to make sense of a particular relationship between society and the land” (Rose 1993, p.87 my emphasis).

This particular relationship reified by the visual act was that of scientism and masculinism. “This particular position is to look actively, possessively at women as objects” (Rose 1993, p.88). She forges the connection between femininity and nature. The pleasure of fieldwork and landscape viewing is akin to voyeurism. Beyond a poignant critique of landscape via art, Rose also notes the failures of using a landscape as text which “…denies the phallocentrism of the geographic gaze” while employing a visual act to gain knowledge (Rose 1993, p.101). In her pivotal paper “Geography as a

29 science of observation: the landscape the gaze and masculinity”, Rose contends that geographers have feminized nature in their conception of landscape and thus have traditionally been careful not to “over-respond to the pleasures of their observed landscape” (1996, p. 345). This, she argues, further genders nature- which should be avoided. Moreover, maintaining some distance for the sake of scientific objectivity ruins the appeal of studying the landscape. She presents the arguments of “new cultural geography” which couches the landscape as an elite controlled space and the act of valuing the landscape as an activity rooted in the subjugation of others. In general Rose’s critiques pit looking and nature as a dualism. “The active look is masculine and the passivity of being looked at is constituted by the feminine position” (Rose 1996, p. 348). This piece is useful in the sense that it is critical of the practice of landscape interpretation, but still finds it a useful tool in need of a different approach. As a reaction to Rose, Mitchell notes, “[h]ence, cultural geographers have increasingly turned to examining how landscape images themselves are, and have been, constructed not by individual artists and scholars but by the long development of a ‘visual ideology’ of landscape (Mitchell 2000, p.224). Rose’s impact has thus been permanent as a challenge to the politics of the gaze that must be addressed by geographers who use it as a source of knowledge. Her critique is well founded, but it depends upon the feminization of nature. which assumes the landscape is predominately the domain of nature or the non-human, a perspective that is critiqued in the remaining chapters of this dissertation. Geographers have had their fascinations with landscape since Sauer and have produced several critical assessments of its use. Using the landscape as a discreet object of inquiry necessitates it being bound or defined in some sense and geographies must address this problem. Thanks to Rose, we have seen the masculinizing effect of the landscape fetish. Today’s landscape studies need critical reflexivity and an attention to possible overreliance on either cultural or natural explanations. Though today’s geographers are able to craft a representation of the world at a glance, we are far from being able to “comprehend at a glance”.

3.2 Place

Place as both a site of analysis and a way of looking at geography has been essential to the construction of geographic knowledge. Cresswell’s Place: A Short Introduction provides some helpful insight to its history within geography (2004). Cresswell traces the beginnings of dealing with place to the practice of regional geography. The fascination with delimiting the boundaries of the region can be described as early attempts at place description. Place finds its stronghold though in the 1970’s through humanistic geography. Humanistic geography can be seen as a backlash against the systematic modeling and scientizing of space and a turn towards phenomenological methods. This was not a turn to the uniqueness of place, “rather, place was seen as a universal and trans- historical part of the human condition” (Cresswell 2004, p.20). He goes on to identify Yi- Fu Tuan and Edward Relph as the geographers who had the most impact on the idea of place. Tuan’s 1975 “Place: An Experiential Perspective” gives place its meaning through experience. “Place is not known only through the eyes and the mind but also through the more passive and direct modes of experience which resist objectification” (Tuan 1975,

30 p.152). This is a notable difference between landscape and place that I will return to later. His idea of “centers of meaning to groups” allows him to expand the notion of place from the intimate such as the home to larger scales such as the place of a nation (p.153). Tuan privileges visibility as a characteristic of place but not with the same gazing purpose of landscape. “Its visibility [the nation’s] is promoted by the vast educational and propaganda machinery of the national government” (Tuan 1975, p.163). Relph’s most influential work was Place and Placelessness from 1976. Therein he contrasts place as lived and meaningful, “incorporated into the intentional structures of all human consciousness and experience” with placelessness or, “the weakening of distinct and diverse experiences and identities of places” (Relph 1976, p.42,6). Placelessness is not as much a location as a technique of erasing meaning. Relph also provides a multi-scalar notion of place. “In short, those aspects of the lived world that we distinguish as places are differentiated because they involve a concentration of our intentions, our attitudes, purposes and experience” (Relph 1976, p.43). Humanistic geographers have more-or-less accepted place as existing as a concentration or slow-down within space, but most importantly place has come to signify location imbued with meaning through experience. Buttimer offers some useful insight to the place/space relationship in “Grasping the Dynamism of Lifeworld”, another influential piece from 1976. “First, space has been construed as a mosaic of special places each stamped by human intention value and memory” (Buttimer 1976, p.283). She posits “Lifeworld” as the “latent substratum of experience” (p.287). ”Behavior in space and time could be regarded as the surface movements of icebergs, whose depths we can sense only vaguely” (p.287). Her focus is on phenomenological inquiry and some of what she writes is a harbinger of the ways phenomenology is used by today’s non-representational theorists. “Perhaps the critical contribution of phenomenological reflection may lie in unmasking preconscious, preplanned involuntary dimensions of experience” (p.289). Place still plays a central role in cultural geography today. Postmodern inquiry into place has understandably focused on how place is a social product. This is a stark contrast to the idea that place is a universal condition of humanity- the position of the humanists. Cresswell provides a comfortable middle-ground between these two somewhat oppositional understandings of place. He characterizes place as a “necessary social construct”. “In other words, there was no ‘place’ before there was a humanity but once we came into existence, then place did too” (Cresswell 2004, p.33). In a more purely social constructionist line of thought, Price investigates the meaning of places, borders and nationalism in Dry Place (2004). “In Dry Place, I do indeed assert that place is thoroughly socially constructed, that place qua place does not exist. Rather, narratives about people’s places in places continuously materialize the entity we call place” (Price 2004, p.4). She uses the work of Edward Casey to illustrate the relationship between space and place. “Place is prior to space, and indeed space is derived from place. For space and time can only arise from the experience of place” (Price 2004, p.11). This metaphysics of place is in direct opposition to the place the Massey presents in For Space (2005). For her, place is a throwntogetherness of multiple trajectories as is all space. “In sharp contrast to the view of place as settled and pre-given, with a coherence only to be disturbed by ‘external’ forces, places as presented here in a sense necessitate invention; they pose a challenge” (Massey 2005, p.141). In fact Massey directly addresses Casey’s place that such a (Heideggerian) notion of place is “too rooted,

31 too little open to the externally relational” (p.183). I wrap up my discussion of place here with Massey because I see her ideology of space as the most pertinent to my own, and in a way, of all the “places” I have known, hers is the best. Space-heavy constructions of the human experience are not novel to geography. It can be argued, in fact, that the whole of environmental determinism was a reliance on space vis a vis the physical environment as the primary influence on everything from political bodies (Ratzel) to the human physique (Semple). These types of theories have been whole-heartedly abandoned for their hierarchical connotations of humanity, but it should also be noted that they failed by producing a static notion of space as the determinant. This is to say that while agency was allowed in space, i.e. the ability to build, farm or fish; the pre-existing geophysical structure of the locale was favored thus that, for instance, “Mountain regions discourage the budding of genius” (Semple 1996, p.261.). Critics of landscape studies see a similar problem in applying systematic study to something that is, at least on a small scale, constantly changing. Jackson’s concept of the “vernacular landscape” acknowledges this issue by attempting to address landscape not as a “static utopia” but balanced between change and stasis. (Jackson 1996, p.320). This in-between notion of space would seem to support Massey’s point of view (described below) but is followed with a negating premise of de-politicized space. Space is always political as it is the production of people with values. Nowhere is this more apparent than in Massey’s understanding of the role of space within the history of modernity and more specifically globalization. She posits that while postmodern theory has served to decenter the role of European history in the total history of peoples, it has thereby created a spatio-temporal fragment deemed “culture” that never really existed. For example, the spacing of Indian geography as post-colonial does serve to highlight the treachery of colonialism but does so at the expense of creating an imagined geography of a culture that cannot be delineated in a temporal or spatial sense (Massey, 2005). Countering non-western culture against European is still putting it into an arbitrary box for examination. This denies the agency of place and its multiple trajectories. In favor of a more open notion of “coevalness” Massey notes how ethnographers have not only characterized their exotic informants spatially, but by taking a “slice of space” have placed them in another time, often a time of the past, within some teleological western progress (p.70; p.106). Coevalness allows concurrent and emergent trajectories of experience in a multiplicity of spaces. In fact it is this notion of multiplicity that leads Massey to claim that “space cannot be annihilated by time” (Massey 2005, p.98). Space via this classical Marx quote is really reducible to distance, which implies multiplicity. As she puts it, “So: as long as there is multiplicity there will be space” (2005, p.91) The question becomes, how will the global spread of capital re-assert these multiplicities? Massey’s space allows places to be seen as open, unpredictable and in a paradoxical sense uniquely equal. Rather than adhering to the notion of my study as a place or landscape or space study, I accept that considering Massey, multiplicity of place/space implies a multiplicity of place concepts as well and that the Atchafalaya could be considered all three. Swamps and the Atchafalaya have in fact been considered by geographers who could be characterized as taking each of these perspectives, but the questions that have been addressed in this nascent field of swamp geographies do not concern the semantics of the broader unit of study but rather the social positioning of

32 swamps. Next, I move into the specific ways that geographers have researched the swamp.

3.3 Swamp Geographies

One of the first geographers to characterize the southern cypress swamp was Elisee Reclus in his 1894 tome L‘hommes et la Terre (published in English as The Earth and its Inhabitants) where he described the Great Dismal Swamp:

“This truly depressing region presents a frightful appearance, with its great pines bald cypress junipers and black gums, whose gloomy shade falls heavily on the surrounding black lands and its avenues of stagnant waters reflecting a glimmer of the dull light diffused among muddy islets and massed of decaying vegetation” (1893, p.94-95)

I use this castigation of the swamp not to argue that Reclus’ comments were formative of the roots of swamp geography, but to note the breadth of ways geographers have historically characterized the swamp. Although what follows is far from an exhaustive sample of papers that investigate the meaning of wetlands broadly and swamps specifically (even within the discipline), the authors under the lens in this section have contributed what I consider to be some of the building blocks of swamp geographies. The focus here is on wetlands in the US and especially in the Southeast, but some of the debates noted here could surely be found in other domains of land and water. To review these works, I begin with those that investigate the ontology of wetland with Meindl’s “Wetland Diversity: the Limits of Generalization” (2000) and Robertson’s “No Net Loss: Wetland Restoration and the Incomplete Capitalization of Nature”(2005). Then I turn to Meindl’s “Southerners and Their Swamps: The View from Middle Georgia” for his preliminary look into what people know about swamps (2004). Finally for a more historical analysis I use Meindl’s environmental history of the Everglades (2000), and Comeaux’s cultural geography: Atchafalaya Swamp Life Settlement and Folk Occupations (1972). “There is no single, correct, indisputable, ecologically sound definition for wetland…” (Robertson 2005, p.472). Though in this context, the authors were speaking in terms of the physical geography of wetlands, this muddled definition can also be extended to the social concept of the wetlands. Perhaps as a result of this, Meindl (2000) finds the state of geographic education on wetlands to be somewhat paradoxical. While he notes that “inadequate attention is devoted to the enormous diversity of wetlands across space”, he also allows for many meaningful generalizations about wetlands (Meindl 2000b, p.243). Wetland functions such as soil deposition and water purification and their necessity as habitat for a host of organisms can be shared by many types of wetlands, but are not necessarily present in all such environments. For Meindl this confusion surrounding the inputs, outputs and varieties of wetlands is a hurdle for environmental managers who are faced with applying a generalized understanding of process to a unique place. Generalization about wetland loss is also justifiable from Meindl’s perspective since every state in the US has wetlands and has had wetland loss particularly since the industrialization of agriculture (2000). Loss is a narrative that pervades the literature on wetlands (Tidwell 2004) and is supported by scientific

33 evidence, but inquiry into the political and economic production of wetland loss is less familiar. Meindl touches on this in his conclusions about George Bush’s 1989 “No-Net- Loss” program which applies a broad interpretation of the term wetland. ”(M)any observers have wondered if this generalization will lead us to replace a large number of fully functioning wetlands with golf course lakes and water retention ponds that provide far fewer functions of social value” (Meindl 2000b, p.252-3). This lingering question concerning the implications of wetland mitigation is the topic of Robertson’s Antipode piece from 2000. While Meindl sticks to uncovering the interplay between generalization and diversity, Robertson gives a critical assessment of the outcome of creating a broad federally mandated generalization of wetlands which both depends upon and does violence to diversity. Wetlands are by all means a system of flows. Movement of water, migration of animals, growth, death and circulation of nutrients all occur within fairly predictable cycles. Increasing public understanding of these processes is the moral imperative of Meindl’s work. Robertson’s argument is that reducing wetlands to an ecological math problem cannot account for all of the local specificities that are encompassed by the giant and federally mandated construction of the term “wetland” His paper takes the epistemological position that we can best understand how wetlands are quantified and in the end made exchangeable “by understanding how wetland facts are advanced, abandoned or modified as they move through networks of agents far from the restoration site or wetland technician that initiated them” (Robertson, 2000, p.467). Wetlands are made ordinal through taxonomic classification and ecosystem assessment where an (often indiscriminate) number of questions are asked and the wetland is abstracted to a paper evaluation. One typical question used in Robertson’s study of this process in Minnesota was, “Is the area surrounding the wetland mostly undeveloped and uncultivated?” (2000 p.473). He points out the ambiguity of this evaluation as a key to how diversity within a specific wetland becomes a binary yes or no that is then equalized with other diverse ecological systems. This critical paper provides much of the inspiration for my work and will be treated in more depth for its contributions to the literature on commodification of nature in Chapter Five. The previous works have approached the wetland from the perspective of defining it. Meindl’s “Southerners and Their Swamps” creates a framework for discerning what people know about these places (2004). Using a survey methodology, the author focuses attention on college students’ and locals’ understanding of wetland functions and benefits. His general conclusion is that “many people have at least a fair understanding of wetlands” (Meindl 2004, p86). But he also finds that, “some of those surveyed are not aware of some important wetland benefits or policy options” (Meindl 2004, p86). Here we see a disconnect between the categorical understanding of what “counts” as a wetland and the political economic understanding of how wetlands are/should be managed. If we accept the generalizability of Meindl’s wetland benefits (which I believe we can) and accept the inevitable capitalization of the wetlands within the framework of No-Net-Loss, then more education is necessary to bring the public up to speed with the diversity of places that reside under the banner of wetland and the implications of policies that govern them. Finally, I note one aspect of the author’s methodology that provides a small but meaningful context for his research. His survey pool was intentionally taken from Middle Georgia because “nearly half of the nation’s swamplands are in the Southeast” (Meindl 2004, p.75). This fact signifies his commitment to poll those who have likely grown up or

34 live near wetlands and whose understanding of them is based on general knowledge and experience. Meindl thus retains a commitment to understanding the swamp through those who live it. A commitment to the richness of experience is also recognizable in Meindl’s “Past Perceptions of the Great American Wetland: Florida's Everglades during the Early Twentieth Century” (2000a) and Comeaux’s Atchafalaya Swamp Life (1972), both of which use people’s experiences in the wetland to inform their work. Meindl’s piece takes an environmental historical perspective that relies on personal letters and stories about the Everglades as well as archival information. From this paper the reader takes the notion that this wetland was historically constructed as a wasteland and, over a period of a few decades, with the aid of greater technologies and a commodity perspective towards wetland spaces, the Everglades were converted into a productive space of agriculture. Meindl sees restoration as a primary policy goal but does so conservatively as he supports restoration of “the Great American Wetland to some semblance of its pre-drainage condition” (Meindl 2000b, p.393). We can use the historical experience of a shifting geo- mentality towards the Everglades to nurture in the public a scientific rather than economic wetland axiology for the future. Finally, I emphasize two aspects in Comeaux’s volume that provide breadth to the ways geographers understand swamps (or wetlands). To begin with, Comeaux’s writing on swamp subsistence is based on direct researcher experience and the present tense lives of those who call the Atchafalaya Basin home. This method can challenge the abstractions of the swamp with personal and material involvement in the space. Comeaux uses a more striated definition of his study area based on the degree to which people there have subsisted on the swamp. This signifies an experience-based understanding of the space and adds precision that is glossed over by the term “Atchafalaya Basin”. Beyond his research experience, Comeaux’s work adds the dimension of folk culture into the equation. He acknowledges the loss of the physical wetlands of Louisiana but the tone of his volume laments the loss of swamp culture as well. “The old way of life is rapidly dying and it is felt that it should be recorded and analyzed while still viable” (Comeaux 1972, p.3). I see this apparent reaction between environment and people as indicative of the vitality and humanized nature of the swamp. Culture adapts to environmental change and, barring the definition of “the old way of life” vs. today’s Atchafalaya swamp life, it is certainly still viable. Comeaux understands this though. “The primary theme followed in this work is the adaptability of swamp dwellers to new situations” (Comeaux 1972, p.3). Common evidence of this adaptation is found in swampers’ propensity to work seasonally between the subsistence and capitalist economies. “Swamp dwellers believe they can earn a living in either environment or divide their lives between the two as they may desire” (Comeaux 1972, p.27). Though Comeaux sees swamp culture as dying, he also allows for its dynamism, and my research on the Atchafalaya Basin indicates that the swamp and its people are in fact still lively and vibrant. In summary, geographers in the past have looked at swamps and wetlands both generally and specifically. The concept of wetland is somewhat ambiguous in the same way that its material condition falls between water and land. This ambiguity has allowed wetlands to be commodified, over-generalized and functionalized. This broadening of the concept of wetlands has mirrored the shrinking of individual swamps and a subsequent alteration of swamp cultures. But the broad idea of culture has been manufactured in the

35 same social millieu that the concepts of swamp and wetland have been politically and economically produced. So far in this chapter I have addressed the ideas of landscape and place and narrowed them down to apply to a particular wetland or swamp space. To continue, I expand on how geographers and social theorists have understood both the idea of culture and its implications.

3.4 The Ideas of Culture

Though for decades in the history of geography and other social sciences culture was employed unproblematically as an explanatory receptacle for localized or ethicized behaviors, more recent attempts to address its influence have retreated from culture almost entirely. In what follows, I outline the perspective on culture used in my research. Obviously, since the preponderance of the swamp tours in the Atchafalaya are either led by people who are Cajun and make this known, or are explicitly marketed as Cajun swamp tours, treating the manner in which they perform and produce space would be remiss without acknowledging culture. Rather than weighing the validity or authenticity of claims upon the substance of Cajun culture, I instead treat culture as performative, contested and influential to the production of the Atchafalaya. To begin, I address culture from Don Mitchell’s perspective which treats culture as a set of ideas most often employed to further domination of “cultural” groups. I then turn to Bhabha who similarly sees culture as an idea but avoids judgments on the agency of those who apply cultural ideas. Bhabha’s notion of culture supports my earlier claims to how spaces are concurrently performed and produced and is especially relevant in the particular case of the Atchafalaya which accurately complicates the dualism of colonizer-colonized relations.

3.4.1 Culture as Oppressor Mitchell’s contribution to the political economy of culture exposes the countless ways in which culture is implicated throughout geography with unsteady attribution (Mitchell 2000; Mitchell 1995). He specifically recognizes today’s culture as the mode through which commodities are most efficiently marketed. Culture uses partial truths to create the idea of difference between people and that difference is often class. The more particular cultures there are, the more markets there are for objects that are said to represent or belong to such cultures. “Thus, what gets called culture is part and parcel of systems of social reproduction, both at the local level and on a global scale” (Mitchell, 2000 p.82). In an obvious parallel to my work, Mitchell writes, “[p]erhaps the clearest example of this is the growing industry of ethnic tourism, which makes money precisely by integrating difference into a global system of cultural and industrial production” (Mitchell, 2000, p.82). This culture as (re)productive argument has been expanded directly to the labored production of landscape where Mitchell shows how the notion of “California the beautiful” hides the fact that undervalued and exploited labor created the materiality of the space (Mitchell 2008). The connection between landscape and culture in the Atchafalaya is explicit in the existence of “Cajun swamp tours” and Mitchell’s interplay between the two ideas is as simple as Sauer’s human modification + natural landscape = cultural landscape, though much more nuanced and critical. The focus is not on the physical outcome of this process, but the determination of who modified the land

36 and under what conditions. The production of space and culture are achieved similarly under the historical conditions of the capitalist mode of production. “What gets called 'culture' is created through struggles by groups and individuals possessing radically different access to power” (Mitchell, 1995, p108). Thus, culture has its winners and losers who are evident considering the continuation of this class-based productive system. Though this way of thinking about culture as an appropriated and commodified idea provides excellent explanatory power, its flaw lies in the agency of cultural producers who are disallowed from a creativity of action outside of the mode of production. “(O)ne must understand that it is the 'winners' in the clashes who define what culture is and how it gets represented. They implement the idea of culture to represent to themselves the nature of their 'victory'” (Mitchell 1995, p.108). Without any clear delineation of who the “victors” are, Mitchell has given them the power not only to frame their victory but also all subsequent cultured behaviors of the defeated. This perspective presents a totalizing framework of binaries that is just too simple for the Atchafalaya where we would be forced to assume that the American culture provides guidelines for all that is Cajun. Neither “that which is Cajun” nor “that which is American” are truly knowable, and in my research though common attitudes and behaviors were notable, they were inconsistently attributed to Cajuns. The establishment of difference through culture was not always in reference to an outside American oppressor and ethnic/cultural other, but could have also been through differential occupations, political beliefs, or environmental practices to name a few. So, though I cannot deny that the mode of production has influence on the production of culture, and in particular the production of cultural commodities, in the Basin, the dominance of the American culture does not subvert all alternatives. For a more open concept of how cultural associations emerge, I turn to Bhabha.

3.4.2 Culture as Interstitial Fluid Bhabha’s interrogations into culture come through postcolonial theory and in particular in regard to British colonialism. His treatment of the relationship between colonizer and colonized takes neither the position of the colonized as the passive recipient of colonial ways of knowing and doing, nor the naive critical approach that treats the colonized as an authentic source of resistance (Bhabha 1994). Rather, he treats this give and take of reproducing the dominant forms of thought or resisting domination in a spatial metaphor of “thirdspace” where resistance and reproduction are intertwined and melted together. I find this perspective useful because it denies the inherent flaw of both “culture as inscribed” and “culture as self-determinant”. This flaw is the err of consistency. If we were to say, for example, that Cajuns are socially related to the swamp by the fact that they were socio-spatially marginalized or relegated to the swamp, we would miss the perspective that many Cajuns want(ed) to be in the swamp for a variety of reasons historical, economic or otherwise. If we were to say that Cajuns were “placed” with the swamp and that this trope was internally reproduced specifically to create a separation and isolation between them and the American outside, as a sort of eco-barrier, we would miss the fact that this barrier was maintained by both sides and furthermore, that it was porous. Either perspective is inconsistent across both the colonizer and the colonized because both groups reproduce these concepts of separateness from either perspectives. Furthermore, there is no clear-cut Cajun (or American for that matter) perspective on the

37 swamp as Cajun habitat. Bhabha seems to dissolve the assumed consistency of the us/them approach by acknowledging the openness of both resistance and reproduction where neither side is fully idealized. Referring to postcolonial subjects of the British Empire, Bhabha writes, “What we witness is neither an untroubled, innocent dream of England nor a "secondary revision" of the nightmare of India, Africa, the Caribbean. What is "English" in these discourses of colonial power cannot be represented as a plenitude or a "full" presence; it is determined by its belatedness” (Bhabha 1985, p.149). While Bhabha is certainly committed to a critical approach to culture that brings awareness to the drastic results of cultural difference for separation’s sake, he is not placing blame. Mitchell sees the negative material results of culture as the forced reproduction of flawed ideas that in turn maintain the difference and allow “inside the box” resistance. Bhabha instead treats the relation as a not-necessarily-predictable outgrowth of the thirdspace of interaction. Peet finds Bhabha’s use of space to be too nuanced and immaterial and worries that venerating this approach as theory would lead to “the deliberate pursuit of ambiguity in a kind of ' spacey competition ' within a literary- philosophical elite as to who can be most enigmatic yet still suggest a distant message for those clever enough to follow” (Peet 1997, p.379). However, Bhabha’s lack of programmatic specificity, to me, is his point. If we are to say that culture emerges from neither the resistance to the oppressor, nor the blind obedience of the oppressed but in an inconsistent application of both by both, then there is little hope for a roadmap. I find this particularly true in Acadiana where the applicability of post-colonial dualisms is quite muddled by the unsteady positioning of Cajuns as a semi-European and semi-native group. Before expanding on this point specifically, I connect the use of performance of cultures back to Butler whom I used in Chapter 2 to elucidate how spaces are hybrid negotiations rather than fixed substance.

3.4.3 Gender and Culture as Performance Butler succinctly states her position when she writes, “Consider gender, for instance, as a corporeal style, an “act,” as it were, which is both intentional and performative, where “performative” suggests a dramatic and contingent construction of meaning” (Butler 1990, p.177). What is the difference between a performance and expression of gender? The fundamental opposition to the notion of a performed gender is that of a naturalized or biological one that has an essence that could be revealed in all females and males respectively. Gender, Butler argues, is a social product, not a natural expression. The construction of gender as natural does the greatest violence to its flexibility such that our gendered behaviors seem to be as unavoidable as breathing. Though gender seems to be more physiologically delineated than ethnicity, there is no doubt that the biological bloodline justification of the latter is equally corporeal and naturalizing. In the same way that people justify gender differences by biology, they tie ethnicity to a natural disposition rather than social. Butler is arguing that the performance of even that which seems natural is still only considered natural because we consciously or unconsciously reify it as a biological truth. Repeating that one is either male OR female and in terms of the Basin, that one is either Cajun OR American does not do justice to the fact that all four are fluid categories but with substantive material implications. Culture is performed with much more fluidity than gender and is thus more overtly social, but nonetheless, adhering people to a set of behaviors, a language or a common ancestry by noting their

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Cajunness is an error of attribution. Two specific notions of Cajun fluidity come to mind that position culture as performative. Guirard references a friend’s perspective on Cajuns “knowing their place” when he writes:

“In talking about the future of the people, he forsees a time when Cajuns will be relegated to the position of minstrel-- asked to sing a song, play an accordion, talk French, cook some crawfish. Put on a show for the experts who know best. A Cajun will not make a living being a Cajun; a Cajun will make a living acting a Cajun” (Guirard 2006, p.81)

Obviously in this instance the author laments the performability and authenticity of “acting Cajun” but in countering one set of activities (the minstrel) with another (the way of making a living that is being a Cajun, for him crawfishing) we see at least that Cajun is something that can be acted. Second is the idea that one can become a Cajun by assimilation. One guide spoke of a common saying:

“See the old people had a saying that you can become Cajun one of three ways. By the blood: your mama and daddy are both the Cajun you are a Cajun. By the ring: if you marry into the Cajun family you are an honorary Cajun. And then by the backdoor: you move into the area and adapt to the Cajun lifestyle and you become Cadien” (Interview O 2010)

The notion of backdoor Cajuns (which came up more than once) implies that being Cajun is something that you can learn to reproduce. If culture can be learned to the point of less- than conscious reproduction, it is no stretch to say that it is performed as a “dramatic and contingent construction of meaning” (Butler 1990, p.177). Whether the use of culture is for intentional show as in the Cajun minstrel (which would tend toward Mitchell’s explanation), or something that one can learn to reproduce, it still remains a fluid and contestable rather than an explanatory force.

3.4.4 Colonized Cajuns? To re-insert the power relations that are iterated through performance I return to the specific dualistic performance of Cajun vs. American and its strange colonialesque attributes. Obviously “American” itself is a loaded term, but I use it because in Acadiana this is how the “outside other” has been most often referred to (Bernard 2003 and consequently in its title Americanization of a People). When treated as a homogenous Franco-American group, which is often the perspective of historians, Acadians (and to some extent Cajuns) seem to be less the colonized and more the colonizer with typical European-Native American give and take of knowledge and customs (Conrad 1983). However, they are also treated within the context of English and then American colonization where they become like the native (not necessarily Native American, but more, people who are a fixture of a habitat). Tentchoff makes this explicit in reference to antebellum Acadiana, “at this juncture the powerless population of the countryside became in effect a colonial subject (1980, p.233). This establishment of Cajuns as colonized is accomplished in several ways. First, in reference to Acadia by implying that they evolved into a non-European culture who happened to speak French and adhere to Catholicism. Conrad writes, “one discovers that

39 for a century after the establishment of Acadia, with only minor interruptions, the French settlers went about organizing a society which was founded on the French tradition, but almost entirely superstructured by themselves” (1983, p.9). This idea of a native society is further developed by authors who often note the economic, linguistic and political isolation of Acadians (Conrad 1983; Gilmore 1933; Western 1973). In Acadiana, Cajuns were constructed similarly to Native Americans as inhabiting wilderness, simplistic and uncivilized as Conrad writes, “depicted as an ignorant, cunning, superstitious swamp- dweller, living in squalor in a moss-draped, reptile-infested wilderness which is truly a backwater of American civilization” (1983, p.1). Cajuns were also notably not French. Henry’s review of the changing Cajun demonyms found “never are the Acadians labeled franḉais, a term reserved for French citizens or for those claiming direct French ascendance” (Henry 1988, p.37). The indirectness of Cajuns’ French ancestry is only accomplished by a nativizing maneuver. Positioning Cajuns as a no-longer-European ethnic group is also achieved by references to the constant influx of African, Caribbean, and Native American cultures purveyed by the state (Atchafalaya Trace Commission 2002) and by academics such as Bernard who used the phrase “cross-cultural pollination” (2003 p.xix) and tour guides in my study (Interview O 2010). However, despite all of these attempts to separate Cajuns from European ethnicity, countless instances can be found in the literature where Cajuns embraced their Europeanness. In comparison to enslaved African Americans, Tentchoff found that Cajuns were considered “poor whites, but whites nonetheless (1980, p.231). Furthermore, the establishment of French language education in the 1970’s initially rejected Cajun French for standard French (Bernard 2003). This is a striking example of how complicated the concept of Cajun culture really is and how such colonizer-colonized relations are a strange hall of mirrors that reflect and refract depending on one’s position. Bhabha notes, “Consequently, the colonial presence is always ambivalent, split between its appearance as original and authoritative and its articulation as repetition and difference” (1985 p.150). Positioning Cajuns and Acadians as native or European is not just an ascribed and hegemonic practice of ideas as Mitchell may have it. Similarly, the use of native uniqueness or European whiteness is not a consistent form of Cajun resistance. Whereas applying the inside-outside opposition commonly associated with “Americanization” is tempting, the use of Cajun culture is performative and evades subject-object or colonizer-colonized dualisms. Despite theorizations on how Cajun cultures are flexible and creatively performed, the idea of what it means to be Cajun has been taken up by many writers. Past authors have presented a great deal of factual information about topics such as Cajun relations to the American society, the material realities of Cajuns who lived in the swamp and the near complete transformation from a subsistence community to a market and commodity driven cash economy. Some of these works present themselves with a tone of scientific objectivity while others take a more opinionated stance based on the facts but they all share the trait of representing the connection between people and the Atchafalaya.

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3.5 Atchafalaya History and Geography

A cultural geography of the Louisiana Cajun people has not been recently addressed, and though past work has addressed some Cajun geographies, Acadiana as a whole has not been investigated by geographers. Few ethnic groups remain in America that possess the place-based historical ties, linguistic, religious, and social cohesiveness that are found in the cultures of Acadiana. The goal of this section will be to outline several aspects of the historical cultural geographies of the Cajun people, their development of a collective identity as an ethnicity and their predominate presence in the unique natural environment of the Atchafalaya Basin. Several questions can be addressed concerning the Cajun ethnicity. How have authors addressed the rural, forest/marsh/swamp environment and their affect on “expressions” of identity? How has the group been politically, or economically characterized? How has the pressure from the external Southern and American cultures manifested change within the Cajun society? These and other inquiries will be addressed by review of a fairly exhaustive set of literature. Perspectives from history, sociology and linguistics will be acknowledged, but the general point of view shall be from a place-based cultural geographic position. It is also important to note that this geography will place designation of the Cajuns as a group distinct from the total society of south Louisiana; that is to say, though some authors have approached the study of Cajuns as a chorographic study of Acadiana (Del Sesto and Gibson 1975), or as a regional linguistic approach such as “French Speaking Farmers of Southern Louisiana” (Kollmorgen and Harrison 1946), I shall consider the ethnic group distinctly as those who claim specific Acadian heritage or culture, not just south Louisiana or French speaking. This section will focus on the gamut of the Acadian timeline, but will make conclusive claims that are applicable to Cajuns in the twenty-first century. I also write on the assumption that the Cajuns do share (or did share) certain group characteristics that, although perhaps not held across the entirety of the group, can be identified as specifically Cajun. Finally, without yet delving into the associated differences between the referents “Acadian” and “Cajun”, I shall use them interchangeably, although I contend that the latter is somewhat less formal. The authors on this topic have shed light on many aspects of what it means to be Cajun both today and historically. Foci within the literature are notable concerning the more familiar aspects of Cajun identity, such as food, music and language. I attempt a deeper analysis based on two broad topics. In the broadest sense these could be described as cultural ecology and sociology. More specifically though, the literature has perceived unique qualities of the culture in the realms of human-environment interactions and communal cohesiveness. Although many of the subtopics investigated here are overlapping, or at least seem to have mutual association, I separate them into several broadly defined categories: Cajuns and the Swamp, Ethnic Communal Cohesiveness, and Americanization.

3.5.1 Cajuns and the Swamp Conceptions of the culture of Acadiana are widespread in the US (and to some degree abroad). Though it was unlikely that the 18th century settlers could imagine their ethnic identity being boiled down to a flavor, “Cajun” is a part of the US American vernacular. Beyond the spice, music, film, television, literature and art have all shaped what the

41 outside world thinks of Acadiana and its residents. Part of this construction of identity is an association with the swamp. This association is tenable in the sense that South Louisiana contains innumerable acres of swamps, and historically the inhabitants of the region used their local environment for subsistence. It also seems true in the sense that expressions of culture from within the region employ notions of the swamp. But historically the swamp has been portrayed as negative (see Wilson 2006), and being labeled as the “swamp people” had to be disadvantageous at some point. The tenuousness of this cultural natural relationship is grounded in the historic. For centuries, the Acadian culture has been isolated by and dependent upon the local ecosystems that bounded residents’ day-to–day lives. The concepts within the Cajun culture of living off the swamp and isolation from external cultural pressures have historically shaped the relationships that Cajuns had with the natural world.

3.5.1.1 Isolation. The material reality of wetlands makes them an impediment to travel. This fact combined with the massive size of the Atchafalaya discouraged contact between those who lived within its reaches and those who did not. Thus geographic isolation has played an important role in maintaining a sense of Cajun identity. Baker notes poetically, “Inhabiting their remote corner of the world, they clung to their own traditions scarcely touched by the dominant American cultural mode” (Conrad 1983, p.103). The Atchafalaya and Mississippi River deltas are at least a major impediment to travel, and at most an impenetrable swamp. Although river travel is the most efficient means of transportation, reaching the backwater bayous and oxbows often required boats that as one Cajun put it, “could float on wet grass” (Brasseaux 1987, p.112). Even today, crossing the Atchafalaya swamp on Interstate 10 requires traversing an eighteen-mile bridge, a miracle of engineering. The swamp has steadily been penetrated by a procession of vehicles types, but even in the 21st century it still presents a physical and social barrier. More important though is how this physical barrier affected the growth of the culture of Acadiana. Del Sesto states, ”While physical isolation might have contributed to the isolation of Acadiana, it would appear that cultural factors were equally, if not more important. The ascendancy of Cajun culture… is readily understandable as a partial consequence of a self-imposed isolationism” (1975, p.5). Here we see isolationism as a conscious expression rather than a deterministic trap. Gilmore also finds isolation to be a notable factor in his “Social Isolation of the French Speaking People of Rural Louisiana”. “It is doubtful that geographical, occupational, and language isolation have been as effectively combined to produce social isolation of ethnic groups anywhere else in America”(Gilmore 1933, p.82). Perhaps the most interesting study of isolation is Western’s 1973 study, “Social Groups and Activity Patterns in Houma, Louisiana”. Here the isolationism within the ethnic group is quite notable. Although he contends that, “The true Cajun is not by preference a city dweller”, in an empirical time-geography in Houma he graphically shows that the ethnic Cajuns have virtually no contact with any other group in the town other than through the local high school (Western 1973, p.308). Kollmorgen and Harrison write that the Cajun patois itself has led to “social isolation and group cohesion” (1946, p154.). Tentchoff agrees that the frontier environment led to an independent society of French-speakers (1980). Bernard’s book The Cajuns: Americanization of a People concludes that the breakdown of the physical and cultural barriers to isolation provided by highways, hospitals, and other social services as well as

42 large numbers of Cajun GIs in World War II were the largest impetus to the Americanization of the Cajuns. All of the literature concerning the isolation of the culture has contended that although being separated from mainstream society has been vital in shaping the Cajun identity, with time, its effects have been minimalized. Today in fact, with mass marketing and commodification of the culture, the ‘concept’ of Cajun is truly the antithesis of isolated, though the Cajuns themselves may still reside in physical and social isolation.

3.5.1.2 Living off the Swamp. To open his thorough investigation into the history of the Acadian people and their forced immigration to what he calls “New Acadia” Brasseaux quotes Lieutenant Governor Paul Mascarene from 1720, “[The Acadians live] in a manner from hand to mouth, and provided they have a good field of cabbage and bread enough for their families with what fodder is sufficient for their cattle, they seldome [sic] look for much further improvement” (Brasseaux, 1987, p.1). This statement was intended to characterize the peoples of the original North American Acadia in present day Nova Scotia, but as supported by Brasseaux, the culture retained this nature through the periods of migration and adaptation to the Louisiana landscape. A society of subsistence hunting and agriculture, the Acadians reaped what they sowed, but did not seem to sow more than what they needed. According to this narrative, the people were content “living off the land”, for they knew no other way. The maritime Canadian wilds was ruthless, and “in order to survive, the colonists were compelled to adapt quite rapidly to their new surroundings, exploiting virgin forests and meadows as sources of food, clothing, and shelter” (Brasseaux 1987, p.3). The Cajuns were quite adept at meeting their survival needs through the natural environment. This fact can easily be supported by the multitude of environment-based occupations they took up, which provide a “diagnostic underpinning of Cajun culture” (Del Sesto 1975, p.6). Begnaud and Gibson in Del Sesto and Gibson’s The Culture of Acadiana: Tradition and Change in South Louisiana provide an in-depth summary of these traditional folk occupations (1975). Though the Cajun people were primarily involved in a subsistence economy (especially in the earlier periods of settlement), authors note several occupations that became supplemental incomes once lines of barter became opened. All of these activities grew out of the early connections to “foreign” markets and technological advances that allowed for the commodification of swamp products. It is also notable that most of these activities influence the media romanticized imaginary of the Cajun landscape. For centuries before the Cajuns arrived, the Native Americans of South Louisiana used Spanish moss in many applications. The new Acadian arrivals fell in their footsteps and found several uses for the bromeliad. It was mixed with clay and used (by both groups) as a binder in the traditional wattle and daub construction techniques. As a commodity, it needed to be processed by gathering, curing and ginning to remove dust, sticks and other impurities (Del Sesto and Gibson 1975). The moss was marketed and sold to furniture factories for use as stuffing in upholstery. As the industrial revolution diversified the total economy of the US, the Cajuns gained access to a market that demanded skills they had practiced for centuries. Furs had been used for clothing and the fur-bearers for food. By the 1970’s Louisiana had a multi- million dollar fur industry and provided 40% of the US wild fur production. The Cajuns had a corner on trapping mink, possum, raccoon and, after a 1940 hurricane flooded E.A

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McIllhenny’s Avery Island farm, nutria invaded the Cajun homeland (Del Sesto and Gibson 1975). The negligible market for furs today has essentially made trapping there a hobby rather than source of dependable income. The crawfish is the foodstuff most symbolized by the Cajun ethnic group. Crawfish as a market industry came about around the turn of the century, as a result of innovations such as refrigeration that allowed the “mudbugs” to be preserved and transported. The shift to a commercial application also followed a shift from wild caught to farmed crawfish, which was found to be an excellent rotation crop with rice, an Acadian agricultural staple (Del Sesto and Gibson 1975). Today’s crawfish market is dominated by farmed crawfish, predominately because the wild harvest varies annually due to water conditions in the Basin (Louisiana Crawfish Harvest Statistics 2007). Innovations that spurred the crawfish industry also aided the commercialization of fishing. Important commercial and subsistence species were catfish, buffalo, gaspergou (aka bowfin, grinnel), and gar (Del Sesto and Gibson, 1975). In more modern times, the Cajun people have profited from commercial sea fishing in the Gulf of Mexico which was motivated primarily by chef Paul Prudhomme’s creation and marketing of blackened redfish (Bernard 2003). The swamps of Acadiana provide a bounty of protein foodstuffs, and the Cajuns used their in-depth knowledge of the environment to market several other meats, although most have achieved only regional success. Crabbing, alligator hunting, frogging, and turtle catching have been marketable in the last century, and provided an external source of income for many Acadian people (Del Sesto and Gibson 1975). Also, with infrastructure from the timber boom in the region, harvesting cypress and other trees which were historically used for traditional products (especially the dug-out pirogue canoe) became a viable source of income (Bernard 2003). Especially in the infancy of Cajun settlement in Louisiana subsistence agriculture and animal husbandry were vital for survival. From Nova Scotia, the settlers brought several crops and animals that failed to succeed as viable products. Sheep, wheat, flax and corn all failed, and were replaced by cattle, rice, cotton and maize respectively (Brasseaux 1987). Once the people adapted agricultural crops and techniques, the means of production steadily shifted from pure subsistence, to a barter economy, to a full- fledged market economy by the latter 20th century. The literature maintains that the degree to which Cajuns lived off the swamp has lessened over time. By around 1960, the general shift from a swamp-based to a market- based economy had been cemented. Esman contends “Prior to 1960, Cajuns were still largely employed on family farms, producing cash crops such as cotton or sugar cane. They were not subsistence workers in that they did not produce all of the goods that they consumed, but their saleable produce was limited in quantity and most Cajuns were closely tied to their lands” (Esman 1982, p.205) This fact can also be supported by Padgett’s 1968 paper that outlined, among other phenomena, the Acadian fisherman’s transition from small vessels used for primary food collection to the large commercial fishing and shrimping boats of today which he attributes to standardization of techniques and facilities within the industry. This type of change can be seen as an effect of a greater faculty of the Cajun culture, adaptability.

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3.5.1.3 Adaptability. Several authors have outlined adaptability as one of the staples of Cajun culture that has ensured its survival. Del Sesto notes the adaptability of the culture by outlining the situation faced by the original settlers in Louisiana Acadia,

”The original Acadian did not bring with him the knowledge skills or equipment necessary to gather moss; to fish the sluggish rivers and bayous; to catch the crawfish, frogs, alligators, shrimp, and crabs; to trap the muskrat nutria and mink; nor was he familiar with the planting of sugar cane and rice- the two crops which presently dominate the South Louisiana landscape” (1975, p.6).

Thus, the current landscape can be used as evidence of the adaptability of the people. Brasseaux also finds adaptability in the Cajun ethnicity. “The remarkable adaptability of Acadian cuisine to Louisiana’s agricultural products was matched by the capacity to harmonize their costume with Gulf Coast climactic conditions” (Brasseaux 1987, p.136). He also notes this trend in architecture, as the Nova Scotian dwelling types did not fare well in the subtropical climate. Brasseaux sums up the adaptability of the original generations of settlers: ”The pragmatism and flexibility that had long characterized Acadian society enabled the destitute immigrants immediately to disregard obsolete and impractical agricultural productions, architectural technology, and culinary skills for their Louisiana counterparts” (1987, p.149). It becomes more difficult to characterize adaptability in today’s Cajun culture. It seems that change may be introspective. Heylen finds that “In 1968…Louisiana saw an upsurge of francophone activism; if not quite the Quebecois-style militancy, then at least a plea to be left in peace to live in ‘the forest primeval’”(1994, p.453). Perhaps the abundance of traditional product festivals (Rice, Crawfish, Shrimp, Oyster Festivals, etc.) can be seen as an adaptation that still not only creates (if only temporary) market spikes, but also gives the Cajun people an outlet for identifying themselves with traditional elements of their living off the swamp (Esman 1981).

3.5.2 Ethnic Communal Cohesiveness The independence of Acadian people coupled with their social and physical isolation yielded an economic and social character that was fundamentally different from the external Southern and US American culture. The Cajun culture that seemed to exist before the ”external domination” can be described as communal, egalitarian, anti- materialist, anti-modern, and placing value in the present as opposed to traditional conservatism. Many investigations into the culture of Acadiana have revealed these ideologies.

3.5.2.1 Anti-materialism Subsistence Anti-modernism. Brasseaux most successfully illuminates the history of this type of ideology with his exposition into the continental pre-history of the Acadians (1987). The roots of the ethnic group can be traced back to feudal peasants in southwestern France. Here, he believes lie the underpinnings of the Acadian mentality. The peasants were under stress of nobles who steadily required more of their subjects, but provided less and less towards their quality of life. The peasants became very protective of their belongings and through this oppression began to hold landownership as the highest independence. “Products of a pre-

45 capitalist environment, they sought neither prestige nor affluence through land acquisition, but rather economic independence and a comfortable existence patterned upon their former agrarian life-style” (Brasseaux 1987, p.4) The ethnicity carried this mentality across the Atlantic, and further, across the frontier to their Louisiana home. The literature speaks of these anti-materialist and subsistence tenets. These concepts are supported because of the fact that in many instances where the (especially earlier) Acadian people could have accumulated excess, profit, or access to greater markets, they chose not to. This ideology was also noted by Robison, “The Acadian farmer was not a highly skilled craftsman. Rather, like farmers of all times, he was a jack-of-all-trades” (Robison 1975, p.66). A specialist thrives only in a market economy where inflated values can be attributed to more highly specialized products. A jack of all trades seeks to support himself by sufficiently caring for all of his diverse needs, not perfecting one trade and using the profits derived thereof to care for his other needs. As such, a materially oriented individual within the early Acadian society would have had no means to subsist. Western evokes this as a separation from the Southern baron society. ”The Cajuns of Terrebonne were not part of the popular image of the white “aristocracy” of the old South, for very few of them operated plantations or owned slaves…If anything they were “po whites”, but their unique characteristics- their language, their social and physical isolation, and their occupations- made it difficult to fit them into the Deep South caste and class hierarchical structure” (1973, p.302). Tentchoff calls the Acadian landscape, “an island of refuge- a virtual sanctuary- for those adrift in the midst of the ruthlessly exploitive planter society” (1980, 232). Gilmore’s description of the geography of the swamp which provided only small plots of land for farming, but an “unlimited” “abundant” and “prolific” supply of a variety of usable (and theoretically marketable) commodities was well suited to this type of ideology (1933, p.79). This anti-modernist interpretation is further developed by Kollmorgen and Harrison’s in their “French Speaking Farmers…” (1946). Throughout this text the authors note the “failure” of the farmers to adhere to modern agricultural standards and practices. “Lack of experience, managerial ability, capital, and efficient work habits are cited as handicaps characterizing these small farmers” (1946, p.157). All of these purported failures are in reality symptoms of a society that does not place value on expansive specialization and accumulation of profits. They also note that the state of Louisiana implied and directly stated the ambition to re-populate the region with more economically progressive outsiders (Kollmorgen and Harrison, 1946). The authors contend that in order to redistribute the population with “thrifty peasant groups with a North-European background” federal government intervention might be necessary (1946, 158)! Such attitudes, both by the state of Louisiana and authors such as Kollmorgen and Harrison, reveal that Cajun economic practices were characteristically in opposition to the external wealth-driven world. Del Sesto concurs this contrast, “The Cajun was the antithesis of the Anglo-Saxon Protestant ethic of North Louisiana” (Del Sesto 1975, p.1). Despite centuries of general abidance to these ideologies of economic restraint, eventually the pressures of the outside world became dominant enough to significantly infiltrate the Cajun mentality. Although Cajuns did not seem to be a pivotal player in the earlier plantation economies, it was probably within this sector of commercialized agriculture that the more financially ambitious members of the ethnic group began to separate themselves from their anti-materialist past. “ The birth of Acadian capitalism

46 held profound, long-term ramifications for the equalitarian and fiercely independent frontiersmen”, writes Brasseaux (1987, p.190). “It is thus hardly surprising that members of the emerging elite were the first to purchase slaves as a means of restoring their lost prestige” (Brasseaux, 1987, p.191). Slave-ownership itself was destructive to the economic independence of the Cajuns (more below in Egalitarian). And, once oil was struck in neighboring Southeast Texas in 1901, the seeds sown in the plantation era began to sprout, and by the booming era of Louisiana oil extraction in the 1950s and 1960s the majority of Acadians were full-fledged participants in the capitalist economy. This ideological transformation did little to help the lot of Cajuns economically. More in-depth analysis of the role of ethnicity and economy can be found empirically through Bankston and Henry’s Blue Collar Bayou which argues that modernization played a pivotal role in establishing today’s Cajun economy of ethnicity (2002). Here they tackle the notion that the transformation of the Cajun ethnicity over the last 50 years has engendered a Cajun working class, and that this phenomenon holds the group together in the face of a commodified symbolic ethnicity. Particularly interesting is their thesis on class consciousness. The authors note the applicable Marxian categories of Class-In-Itself and Class- For-Itself, the former being an economic and material cohesiveness that is objective, and the latter being a type of class that is conscious and subjectively acknowledged by the group. Though this characterization could be applied to the Cajuns who do not necessarily have an ethnic-class consciousness, Blue Collar Bayou makes the point that class consciousness is worked into an ethnic-historical collective ego that celebrates the group’s working class roots (2002). Rather than depending on a class- solidarity in a present-tense “us vs. them”, Cajuns today more often appropriate common symbols and history to encapsulate their ethnicity. In Guirard’s Psychotherapy for Cajuns he argues for a similar understanding of this disconnect with the past (2006). His thesis is that the separation from “living off the swamp” has doomed the old ways of life and has left psychological scars on the people. Particularly in reference to the nexus of ethnicity and economy he writes:

“We seem far more ready to give up our cultural inheritance than our financial well- being…We would prefer to inherit money than a strong cultural identity. This was not always true for Cajuns. So we became financially stable and secure in a way that our ancestors never enjoyed in France, Eastern Canada or in the first 150 years in South Louisiana. And we became more culturally unstable year after year.” (p.91)

These authors’ perspectives make it clear that in Acadiana social class (in a “pure” sense as the relation to the mode of production) is blurred both by upward mobility and a tendency for Cajuns to see themselves as an ethnicity rather than a conscious proletariat. While the above section has shown how authors have related Cajun culture to the outside, I move now into how Cajuns have been characterized internally.

3.5.2.2 Communal and Egalitarian Ideology. The early Acadian ethnic group can be described as both communal and egalitarian. The principles of economic, ethnic, and racial equality began to erode with the economic stratification supplanted by industrialization, but communal cohesiveness can still be noted even in the 21st century though it has expanded into a culture rather than ethnic based community.

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A communal ideology can place value on cohesive ethnic ties. If an ethnic community exists amongst an excluded outsider community, it seems that its boundaries would be maintained by ancestry. But, over several centuries within the Louisiana Acadian society the reliance on “blood” ties to the original Acadian society has lessened. The sense of community was greatly facilitated by the high value placed on family ties, but through intermarriage “the family” was broadened to include the greater Acadiana population. Brasseaux expands on the importance of family within early Acadian society:

“The French peasantry had been essentially a patriarchal society placing great importance upon the extended family. The significance of these social units was enhanced by the great number of endogamous marriages called for by the rigid caste structure in France. Thus, a propensity for social cohesion was a prominent part of the cultural baggage carried to America by the Acadian pioneers” (Brasseaux 1987, p.4-5).

Even though this author speaks of an era in the early 18th century, Bankston III and Henry found in a 1999 study of marriage endogamy that, “Everywhere, rates of endogamy tend to be higher than one would expect given percentages of Cajuns in each parish” (p.1333). Thus, Cajuns tended to marry Cajuns. However, if the definition of who was Cajun was flexible and allowed non-ethnic Cajuns to become Cajun, how can endogamy be delineated? Though this approach to studying Cajun cultures fails in the sense that over time anyone can be Cajun, if we accept that once someone of any “blood” background is identified as Cajun they tended to marry other people identified as Cajun, then rates of endogamy do illustrate a communal cohesiveness. . Endogamy itself must be broadened into a non-ethnic but intercultural endogamy simply because exogamous marriages did not necessarily lead to a “watering down” of the community, but rather the inclusion of locals with other-than-Cajun ethnic backgrounds into the Cajun group. The culture has always been fairly fluid and both historically and today incorporates people, language and symbols from Spanish, Creole French, German, African, Native and Asian populations. Returning to the early era of Acadian settlement, a strong sense of community can be seen in the actions of Ambrose Theriot who funded a community boucherie or beef butchering/celebration for a group of newly established settlers. Brasseaux contends that such private philanthropy was “commonplace” as new immigrants were “quickly integrated into New Acadia’s socio-economic structure” (1987, p.111,112). Celebrations of community have also been an essential communal socializing factor. Sexton finds this in the “country Mardi Gras” which emerged independent from the commercialized melee in New Orleans. “Country Mardi Gras helped to integrate particular neighborhoods and to promote a local sense of community and identity” (1999, p.300). Green finds a similarly functioning socialization present in rituals such as horseracing (legal) and cockfighting (illegal but practiced) especially as an initiation of young males (1981). A vast majority of the literature concerning Acadiana speaks of a general sense of community cooperation that serves as a distinction from the external non-Cajun world. However, the issue of blood ties to the original Acadian diaspora seems to no longer be an important demarcation of who “counts” as Cajun. Perhaps engendered by the values placed on community, the egalitarian nature of the Acadians has been documented by the literature. In The Founding of New Acadia Brasseaux writes, “Louisiana’s Acadians have often been noted for their equalitarian

48 principles” (1987, p.188). Tentchoff attributes this to economics, “Because it did not vitally serve the plantation economy, this nascent society remained equalitarian” (1980, 232). She also sees this as a primary function in the greater social organization of the culture: “Given its spontaneous development, its geographical dispersion, and its equalitarian structure, Cajun society did not evolve overarching institutions of any kind” (1980, 233). She insinuates that the external institutional hierarchy countered the principles of Acadian community. She further notes, “the post-civil war social order insisted on encompassing and regulating the equalitarian communities that had sprung up in the interim” (1980, p.233). What is important to consider, though, is that equality as noted by many of these scholars is based not on equal rights of all community members, but the lack of a racial or class hierarchy. The Cajuns have not historically shown an “all people are created equally” mentality. More accurately stated, the group adhered to “all Cajun men are created equal”. The disenfranchisement of women and (with the influx of slave-holding) non-Cajun minorities followed parallel to the mentality of the dominant Southern culture. What can be considered equalitarian though, at least in comparison to the Anglo-American world, was the notion that the Cajun identity was open to assimilation of members from other second generation immigrants. German, Spanish, Italian, and Creole ethnics did become functionally “Cajun”. This inclusion was primarily based on shared language, but was temporally extended to full membership into the community. “Names like Romero, Hernandez, Schnexnayder, and McGee are now considered Cajun” (Harris 1975, p.148). Cultural features such as the accordion (from the Germans) and dishes like gumbo and roux (West Africa/Creole) are essentially Cajun imports. I note again that the Cajun ethnicity was never completely egalitarian, but in comparison to the outside racialized society, and a greater openness to outsiders, it showed significantly greater internal heterogeneity.

3.5.2.3 Focus on the Present. Perhaps the most often cited Cajun mantra is, “Laissez les bon temps rouler”, or let the good times roll. This mentality is cited by almost every source, academic or not, as the unofficial slogan of Cajuns. Also important as a linguistic text is the phrase “Joie de Vivre” which is erroneously translated as “joy of life”, but is more accurately, “joy of living”, or “joy to live”. I expand on these concepts in order to delve into the deeper psychological tenets of Acadian culture, which I see as an intentional focus on the present. Rather than saving and preparing for the future, especially economically, Cajuns are constructed to be lackadaisical. Heylen notes this ideology as it is expressed in Cajun theatre (1994). Esman also adds, “what Cajuns do share is a strong cultural emphasis on play. To ‘pass a good time’ is the ultimate Cajun goal, and parties, celebrations, and dances are a universal feature to Cajun life” (1982, p.202). Esman’s piece on ‘festivals change and unity’ within the Acadian culture primarily outlines an economic cleft between modern Cajuns that is exemplified by both groups (the poorer ‘coonasses’ and the more elite ‘Acadians’) trying to “out-festival” the other (1982, p.207). She also contends that cultural revival and tourism marketing have accentuated this mentality through the boom of Cajun cultural festivals. “Among the great attractions were the festivals which in addition to being rituals, capture the famous Cajun good times ethos” (1982, p.208). Harris interprets ‘laissez les bon temps rouler’, “Or, when you work, work like hell; and when you play, play like hell.” She also adds, “Cajuns also say, ‘mais. pass a good time, cher’ which is a way of telling you to stop

49 being so ‘uptight’ about things, laugh and enjoy life” (Harris 1975, p.84). It is apparent that these foci on the present, enjoyments of life and celebration are substantive to the Cajun way of life. Collard concludes, “Indeed the Cajun spirit of pleasant merriment has not dampened, but is as bright or brighter than ever” (Collard 1975, p. 118). “There have been many converts to the cult of la joie de vivre, and Vernon Parenton’s (1938) often quoted tale of the man who said, it is ’easy to catch and once caught, who in the hell wants to change’, may well account for the apparent immutability of this aspect of the Cajun style of life” (Collard 1975, p.118).

3.5.3 Americanization, Marginalization According to Bernard, several historical events played a major role in the assimilation of the Cajun culture. He begins during World War II with the stories of a multitude of Cajun soldiers who exposed and were exposed to the dominant American culture(s). Many soldiers brought back with them fragments of Americana in their speech, such as one Cajun GI surnamed Hebert who began referring to himself as [Hee bert] instead of the traditional Acadian [A-bear] (2003, p.11). The soldiers especially began to relate to the consumerist “American Dream” instead of the anti-materialistic subsistence that characterized their ancestors. The new generation of Cajuns, ”now found it increasingly difficult to resist tantalizing goods offered by mainstream America” (2003, p. 34). Of similar importance was the mass availability of electricity, then radio, and then television. The media was initially adapted to the local culture and radio (and eventually television) from Lafayette was broadcast in French. However, as the popularity grew, the national English language broadcasts became dominant, and began the gradual whittling down of Cajun French dominance in the Acadian home. Economic growth in the region also injected the Anglo-American experience into the Cajun homeland, especially through the oil industry, which actually began in Louisiana in 1901, but boomed in the post-war era. The development of the Cajun identity as an opposition to the mainstream continued through the rest of the 20th century, and became an object of academic study and political contestation. Through several arenas of cultural saturation, the Cajun cultural landscape became largely Americanized by the turn of the 21st century. However, the size of the population that claims Acadian ancestry has not faltered. The 1990 census counted nearly 400,000. Nor has the physical size of the region shrunk. The State of Louisiana constituted Acadiana contains 22 parishes. Today the ethnicity of Cajun is vibrant and alive in these parishes, but the identity and the people themselves have suffered in the face of Americanization. Today’s Cajun is a product of sixty years of contest with mainstream America. Cornell and Hartman identify several characteristics of ethnic identities in their book “Ethnicity and Race” (2007). Of those, they bring up the dichotomy of assigned vs. asserted identities. Assigned identity is “ascribed by outsiders or circumstances” while asserted identity is “claimed by [the] ethnic or racial group” (p.86). Cajun identities have developed in the last sixty years through assertion and assignment. The assignment of identity has gradually lessened in terms of negative portrayals, but has also arisen through the nationalization and globalization of the culture. In contrast, the level of asserted identity by the Cajuns has gradually increased in the same time period. The following is an explanation of the modes of identity assignment through repression.

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3.5.3.1 Identity Assignment: Repression. Perhaps the most shocking history of the Cajun people was the era of French language repression in the Americanized Cajun education system of the middle twentieth century. In Acadiana the growing American identity became fixated on English-only education much to the resistance of the local population. From the onset of Americanization, the Cajuns were depicted by the outside as dirty, hedonistic and “good representatives of white trash” (Bernard 2003, p.xvii). The authority in Louisiana became determined to homogenize their population and began punishing school children who spoke French. This repression is widely documented by Bernard and also supported by my interviews (Interview D 2010). “They called them names like “swamp rat”...forced them to write lines (‘I must not speak French at school’), made them kneel in corners on kernels of corn, or slapped them with rulers” (Bernard 2003, p.18). Arlyn Berthier recalled,” The girls were punished different, as they were forced to walk around the flagpole with bricks in their hands” (cited in Bernard 2003, p.18-19). This type of punishment was sanctioned until around 1960. Its effect, though, was felt for the rest of the century in the rapid decline in the number of Cajuns who learned French as their primary language. Between 1966 and 1970 only 12% spoke French at home as their primary language (2003, p83). The removal of French from the landscape showed further ascription of the Cajuns’ language as inferior and subjugated by American English. Though my work looks specifically at how identity manifests through tourism, a review of Cajun identity assertion could not be complete without reference to the socio- political projects of Action Cadienne- a non-profit organization dedicated to the preservation of Cajun French, and the state-level equivalent Council for Development of French in Louisiana or ‘CODOFIL’. These unique organizations challenge the dominance of English in Acadiana- a region that was French-speaking (at least in recent history). Action Cadienne’s slogan is “Because it is impossible to conceive of a culture without being able to speak its language” (Action Cadienne, 2011). The group accomplishes its goal of spreading the original language of Acadiana by holding seminars, immersion programs and demanding the availability of bilingual education in the Acadiana parishes. CODOFIL was formed in 1968 by the Louisiana Legislature to counteract the decades of Cajun French suppression that the State actively pursued in public schools (CODOFIL 2011). Although the program has been contentiously debated, it has been successful in promoting the language through community outreach, education and establishing connections to the international French-speaking community (CODOFIL 2011). The debates that emerged with CODOFIL speak to the hybridity of Cajun culture. Though the community was initially excited about the state recognizing the ills of the past and seeking to repair them, the meaning of “French” became an issue since Cajun French was not a written language. Again we see disagreement between those Cajuns who connected themselves with continental French and those who saw it as a unique culture native to the Americas. In desecration of the Cajun French language, the chairman of (CODOFIL) Jimmy Domengeaux asserted that “Cajun French was ‘worse than redneck English’”(Bernard 2003 p.127). His organization took pains to promote Standard French, which is dialectically verbally and aurally different than Cajun French and was castigated for doing so. Even today on the CODOFIL website, there is inconsistency in referring to the language as “Louisiana French” (a hybrid of several

51 dialects) and Cajun French (CODOFIL 2011). These two organizations seem counter- hegemonic because they attempt to subvert the dominance of English. In fact Action Cadienne uses heated rhetoric in its “Manifesto”. “Destruction”, “violent” and “tragic” are all used in reference to the decline of Cajun French (Action Cadienne, 2011). However, the English hegemon is also being replaced by the European Standard French which fails to recognize the “independence” of Cajun French. Either way, in the US context, the intentional use of French is a classical example of symbolic characterization of space that circumvents the dominant nationalist paradigm of English.

3.5.3.2 The Ethnic Other. As often is the case with an “othered” culture, Cajuns were labeled with and ethnic slur. The origin of the term “coonass” is hotly contested, but it originated around the mid twentieth century as an ethnic slur for Acadians. Perhaps most popularized in the oil fields where cultures met, outsiders (often transplants from Texas) gave the term a boom (Bernard 2003). Although some Cajuns have recently embraced the term, historically, it has been negatively connotated, and it was officially condemned by the Louisiana Legislature in 1974. Coonass still is present in literature, film and television, and in many forms of ethnic denigration. Any othering by use of an ethnic slur is assigning the identity of that slur and the coonass, perhaps a rural dirty buffoon, is an outside repression. Along with linguistic devices, the Anglo-American outside also assigned negativity to the Cajun’s religion. In the 1980’s Protestantism began winning over many Cajun converts in South Louisiana. Some fundamentalists tried to win over the historically Catholic Cajuns by spreading literature. One pamphlet called the Catholic Church “’gruesome’, ‘hateful’, and ‘satanic’”(Bernard 2003, p.125). This type of propaganda contributed to the Cajun exodus from their traditional faith. Cajun cultural assignment can also be seen in the imported Cajun culture that emerged with Cajun flight from Louisiana after the oil markets faltered in the 1980’s. As with many American ethnic cultures, Cajun became a sort of brand name for any food that was spicy, and any music that had an accordion. This sort of assignment emerges as a commercial bastardization of the Cajun culture, and although it may be inspired by reality, is certainly not intended to be authentic. In the US, the general meaning of the assigned identity given to Cajuns has been negative. With the rise of culturally appreciative attitudes in America, this may change in the future, but the past has shown an era of repression. It is notable that many of the themes discussed here are overlapping and influence each other. I believe that the literature included in this study does well to characterize an ethnic group that has been marginalized in the past, and commodified (as marginal) in more recent years. Any of the geographic themes of physical and social isolation, living off the swamp, or adaptability could be expanded into more specific research. Similarly, the social themes of anti-materialism, anti-modernism, communal/egalitarian ideology, and focus on the present, could be further exposed. This type of research may be hindered by the the inherent dynamism of the boundaries of culture in general and the flexibility of “Cajun culture” which adheres to a 300-year cultural timeline with great influxes of external stimuli. I believe though, that the themes identified here are still present to some degree even in today’s updated Cajun culture, and probably will persist even through commodification and the impending loss of the Cajun French language.

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3.6 Today’s Atchafalaya Culture Nature Economy

Moving away from the swamp as it is produced through representations, I now will show how people use current and historical constructions of the Atchafalaya to position the threats to control and use of the Basin. This section will make the point that in the Basin today many competing notions of history are used to justify or critique the present state of affairs. While representations from the literature do coalesce around certain notions of what it has meant to live and work in the Basin, today there is no singular narrative that connects people to the swamp. This inconsistency was found not only between participants that I interviewed, but even within many of their perspectives. Such internal contradictions of ideology do not devalue my guides’ points of view. In fact, they often acknowledged that there were not always good objective “answers” to the environmental and cultural issues that they saw as problematic. One guide summarized the situation when he said “So it is a toss-up between the people living here and the ecosystem” (Interview F 2010). Before leaving for my fieldwork, I designed some general questions that would help me ascertain how my participants thought about their habitat. Considering the fact that few authors have looked specifically at the relationship between people and the Atchafalaya, I asked questions that were broad but categorical. For example, “Who should control the Basin, the federal, state or local government or private landowners?” For many of my participants, such a question would often incite a vitriolic response, but presenting the options for control got them to focus and elaborate on the structural and de jure situation which was often in contrast to their experienced reality. When answering my questions and exploring the Basin through conversation, the guides often bounced general cognitive information with the realities of how things have played out. For example: “But now we can take them to court because you can't depend on Wildlife and Fisheries, Department of Natural Resources, Corps of Engineers any of those agencies that are supposed to regulate in the Basin they just don't pay any attention” (Interview M 2010). In this instance a guide complained that though current environmental protections are adequate, they simply are not enforced and therefore not followed. This type of information would be missed without having an individual’s perspective, and in what follows I will show that there are no collective ethical truths to either the history of people and the Atchafalaya or the current cultural geography of the place in relation to the use, threats, or control of the Basin. . The Atchafalaya is a place that is constructed as having a common “static time-slice” as a historical record, but is an open trajectory of spatial multiplicity in the present (Massey 2005, p.23). Rather than weighing each of the literature’s propositions (from the previous section) against what I found, I present people’s perspectives on today’s Atchafalaya through their responses to a few questions about how people interact with their swamp habitat. To begin, I will introduce how respondents thought the Basin should be used. Though use, control and threats to the swamp were often interconnected, (i.e. without private control of land it would not be used for and threatened by careless oil extraction) separating the human-swamp interaction this way allows me to show thematically how people think about the Basin.

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3.6.1 Using the Swamp For many respondents, discussing how the Basin should be used was difficult because there are so many people, commodities and activities that take place there. Furthermore, locals were more likely to note how it shouldn’t be used, and this would lead to a discussion about oil, logging etc. In general, this points to the fact that people either have a hard time conceptualizing or valuing all of the possible uses for the Basin, or perhaps they do not separate the utilitarian notions of “the Atchafalaya Basin” from the dependencies of the Acadiana region as a whole. A few trends emerged from my conversations that speak to how locals think about the swamp. Some of these notions are rooted in historic uses and claims to the Atchafalaya while others seem to be motivated by the more general sense that swamps are a dirty, infested, scary or an otherwise marginal place that should be managed accordingly. Often though, the latter attitude was not espoused by the guides themselves, but was projected by them onto an anti-swamp “other” who was constructed as the enemy. One indicative response from a guide was, “People are treating it like a drainage ditch which it isn’t and never has been” (Interview A 2010). This enemy presented a threat to the swamp and the notion of the swamp that she and her cohorts were presenting on tours by maintaining the Basin as a marginalized negatively connotated space, or by using the swamp as source of capital investment and extractive returns. Furthermore, this response indicated the internal hetereogeneity of the notions of “people” in the area. The respondent in this case was referring to both the people who flexed political economic power to abstract the swamp into a system of drainage so that it could be drained, and the people who indiscriminately dumped trash around the swamp. The “others” were those who valued the swamp differently than herself. For many years, swamps were treated like a barrier to growth and capitalist development unless they were drained, logged and converted to farmland (Wilson, 2006). The Atchafalaya fell victim to this trait and was gradually cut back to make room for more exploitable lands especially since the growth of the 19th century plantation economy. Considering the unpredictable and unstable material reality of swamp access and development, draining and logging the swamp was itself a marginal investment and became appealing especially in periods of regional economic distress. Today the swamp still presents a barrier to investment because of problems of access, and the attitude seems to be that if a corporate entity can invest enough time, labor and equipment to the Basin, they can reap financial rewards. Thus, the Atchafalaya is constructed as a space where you can invest enough money to get a return. In several interviews, respondents stated that money and corporate interests were more powerful than the law or the material trouble of getting to the resources. When speaking of dike-building and draining the swamp one perturbed respondent said, “And the people that do that kind of thing usually have a lot of money. They can bring bulldozers and drag lines out there and change nature to their own wishes and everybody else can go to hell” (Interview P 2010). Others were more open to the idea of the swamp as a utilitarian or commodity space if development respected nature. “Development and landowners have done their best to try to make money off of their land, which there is nothing wrong with, but when you destroy the environment to enable you to do that it is a problem” (Interview A 2010). Development itself is a broad category of swamp use. Most respondents referred to development as a well-funded, massive rearrangement of the ecology, particularly the

54 flow of water. This is to say, development was generally seen as a corporate or big- money activity rather than development of crawfishing, tourism or other economic activities with less environmental impact. The two most common sources of land-use development that the interviewees critiqued were farming and housing. The most common crops that are seen as encroaching on the swamp are soybeans and sugar cane. Both crops were scorned despite the fact that sugar cane farming has been a fixture in the area for centuries. Though locals’ involvement with some industries (particularly oil) is used as a point of cultural/historical pride, this was not the case for the cane fields. A local who had seen the process of draining, logging and conversion to sugarcane on his generational family land (where he still lived) felt sorrow that he was too young at the time to prevent this from occurring. Another respondent often countered development of soybeans against crawfishing which he saw as more environmentally and socially sustainable.

“I don't have the numbers in front of me but if you look at the numbers of productivity for crawfish per acre of the swamp it's amazing how many thousands of pounds per acre are produced. There is way more than if you drain the swamp and put a soybean field. So you can get more food per acre than any other terrestrial ecosystem and you have people that love it and really are willing to live in houseboats without hurting the environment taking advantage of the productivity of the swamp” (Interview M 2010).

Agriculture was treated not only as an inappropriate re-assembling of the environment, but also as a source for pollutants which are detrimental to water quality and wildlife. The second most commonly cited (ab)use of the swamp was draining for housing development. The pressure to develop on the edges of the swamp is most prevalent in the Baton Rouge area where the urban is separated from the swamp by only a few dozen miles. Nowhere was this resentment more prevalent than at the now defunct Alligator Bayou Swamp Tours south of the capital city. As revealed by a “former employee, present volunteer” who still looked after their on-site animal exhibits, the pressure to develop these areas for housing was magnified by the large migration of New Orleanians to Baton Rouge after Hurricane Katrina (Interview A 2010). The story of Alligator Bayou is emblematic of the ways that agglomerations of political and economic power have been used to usurp the Atchafalaya for development. Alligator Bayou Swamp Tours was the most prolific swamp tour operation in Louisiana. With a large boat capable of seating 60 people and multiple tours daily the business served not only out-of-town tourists interested in the swamp but was a staple field trip for area school children since 1993. In 2009, the business shut down because the bayou was drained and water access was closed to their 1,300 acre private preserve. Permanently opening the parish-maintained six-foot floodgate was accomplished by a group of landowners represented by an entity called “Natural Resource Professionals”, who stated, “We can’t run our business without that open” (Wold 2009). This company was formed to sell wetland mitigations to developers and banks to offset projects that drained wetlands for housing development in Baton Rouge. They successfully made the argument that keeping the gate closed left their lands flooded and disqualified for

55 mitigations (though the volunteer stated that this was never the case). The dispute between the Alligator Bayou owners and the consortium of landowners was characterized by one guide as green-washing because, although the stated motivation for opening the gate was to protect more wetlands, the end result was to open more of the surrounding wetlands for housing development (Interview M 2010). This was also the position of the preserve’s owners (Interview A 2010). In a 2009 Baton Rouge The Advocate piece, an Audubon Society representative (who was against the draining) was quoted as saying, “Nobody is considering in this quest for ecological improvements, which is going to take more than just opening that gate, that the first step in this is to destroy the business” (Wold 2009). And in the same piece an LSU coastal researcher found it strange, “that an established business like Alligator Bayou Tours is being closed down in favor of a possible mitigation bank enterprise in the future”. He went on to say, “If you lower the water level, you are going to hurry housing development on the edge. We’d have to deny 100 years of human development in this basin to deny that’s not a possibility” (Wold 2009) Though the volunteer at the operation noted that the desire to close the business was motivated by personal vendettas against the two owners from the neighboring landowners, there is no doubt that financial gains played a part. The dispute in this situation revolves around competing notions of how the Basin should be used. Both entities were private landowners, but the final call was made by Iberville Parish which was threatened by a lawsuit to raise the gate. Here, the development of the swamp was only achieved though pumping money into the right science to create environmental assessments that spoke to the needs of the developers. Though general public attitudes towards the swamp no longer construct it as a bane to civilization that could only be used as a marginal source of resources, the swamp is still a place where large economic and political investments are necessary to extract profit. Development through agriculture or housing were common utilitarian axiologies but resource extraction via oil drilling and logging were also notable ways that locals saw the swamp being used. Oil exploration has been a staple on the Atchafalaya landscape since at least the 1940’s. Flaherty’s 1948 film Louisiana Story played a part in cementing the cultural connection between the Atchafalaya and the oil industry by painting a naïve picture of Cajun swamp subsistence in harmony with the exotic industry outsiders. The film was funded by Standard Oil specifically for this purpose. Since this era many exploratory productive wells were drilled, though today, only one operational platform rig is still on line. Employment in oil has been maintained as a source of pride for some Cajuns and for this reason some respondents saw further exploitation of oil as an acceptable use of the swamp. One guide who had worked as a geologist stated “There's a lot of oil in that Basin. We seismographed that whole basin not long ago so there is oil in there but I don't see no reason why we shouldn't be drilling in the swamp” (Interview N 2010). However, most locals were opposed to oil drilling and the negative results of building pipelines. These attitudes were probably exacerbated by the fact that throughout my research, the Deepwater Horizon site was gushing thousands of barrels of oil a day into the Gulf of Mexico. The greatest impact of drilling noted by my interviewees was the preponderance of spoil banks left by the drilling companies. Though state laws require anyone drilling in the basin to restore the sites to their pre-drilling state, none of them followed through with this responsibility. Therefore, after pipelines were dug to move oil across the Basin, leftover dirt was left in an elevated pile (spoil bank) that extended the

56 length of the pipeline. With so little elevation relief in a swamp, a mound of dirt even one foot over the water line impedes the necessary sheet flow of water downstream and robs areas south of the spoil banks of water-borne oxygen. This problem was especially detrimental to crawfishermen whose crop size has always been directly correlated to the amount of flowing oxygenated water. “The frequent experience is like you go out and lift your traps and all the crawfish are dead because there is no oxygen in the water because it is not circulating” (Interview P 2010). To fight this problem, the crawfishermen started an industry association (Louisiana Crawfish Producers Association) so they could pool their resources and voices and push litigation against the oil companies and the state for failing to enforce the law. This political battle over sheet-flows motivated much of the anti-oil rhetoric in those I spoke with. Often the dispute was couched as a ‘David and Goliath’ situation. “It was like they had their money they needed oil and we couldn't fight them and that is how it was for years before [the LCPA]” (Interview Q 2010). Beyond this critical oil attitude, others were simply opposed to further drilling “trashing it up with oil rigs” or because they felt that petroleum was doomed in the long run as an energy source (Interview J 2010). Similar vitriol was directed at cypress logging which was seen as unsustainable and in many ways as the death of the swamp. Though cypress logging was outlawed in many areas of the Basin, small companies were able to set up operations that cut and chipped the trees for mulch sold at Home Depot, Lowes, Wal-Mart and other garden stores for as little as $2 a bag (Save Our Cypress Coalition, 2011). Though illegal, these operations continued under the radar until 2008 when, motivated by indisputable aerial photography evidence provided by the “Save our Cypress Coalition”, the Corps of Engineers shut down the last mill (though the state did not prosecute). One guide stated that the market for the mulch was based on the “bullshit” idea that cypress had properties that pine did not (Interview J 2010). Another saw the elimination of logging on private lands as the primary reason that the government should buy up as much of the Basin as possible. In general none of my respondents or anyone else whom I chatted with saw cypress logging as an acceptable use of the Atchafalaya. I turn now to the notion that the Basin should be protected as a space of wildlife. The Atchafalaya National Wildlife Refuge covers over 15,000 acres in the heart of the Basin that allows public hunting fishing and other outdoor recreation (Atchafalaya National Wildlife Refuge 2011). Though none of my participants specifically referenced the refuge, many saw wildlife management as a sustainable use that also protected the cultural heritage of hunting and fishing. One guide felt that the management and access to the Basin should be based on the historic rights of trappers: “What built America, the frontier?...And the legislation was geared towards those people supporting that industry. So they built laws about trespassing in favor of the trappers” (Interview O 2011). Though trapping today is hardly an industry, he saw the usufruct rights of trappers as the roots of public land policy. Another respondent considered the Basin to be a place where animal management could exist within a place of aesthetic importance.

“It should be utilized; people ought to be able to commercial and sport fish it. And designate like they have today game preserves not [for] hunting but game management hunting with a permit. It's just I think it

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ought to be declared a national treasure or something in that category because it is Louisiana's Grand Canyon” (Interview N 2010)

Many guides were comfortable with the notion of the Basin being both a place of intrinsic or aesthetic value and a source of fish and game. They often placed at least as much value on protecting the heritage of hunting and fishing as on the beauty and splendor of the environment. While this type of attitude was expected considering attitudes I had heard from other locals, I found it somewhat surprising that some guides who had such a day-to-day interaction with wildlife, had no opinion on how wildlife in the Basin should be treated politically.

INTERVIEWEE: Oh yeah the people fish at this and that. I think they are going to make a wildlife management [refuge] if I understand right. KEUL: How do you feel about that? INTERVIEWEE: I think that might be good, I don't know. I'm kind of like a quiet person you know. I have been here for 69 years I'm not worried about that (Interview U 2010).

All of my informants thought that the Basin should be utilized for at least some of the commodities that have been produced there. No one felt that it should be walled off and left alone. The Basin is a space where material and experiential resources are extracted often without regard to who has the title to the land. Our land-based system of ownership presents an abstract governance of uses but the material reality of the swamp’s flux, flow and indiscriminate access makes the literal and figurative fences between tracts seem like a lost cause. However, the Basin is “owned” by a patchwork of public and private entities, and those who use the space were usually quite opinionated on who did the best job balancing sustainable use and outright exploitation.

3.6.2 Controlling the Swamp Who should control the Basin? Though few informants could give a singular answer to this question, many were outspoken about the failures of the current cadastral situation in the swamp where federal, state and private spaces have been historically woven together. One guide pointed out the complex patterns of ownership during his tour by noting that at one point as we were traveling through the bayou state, federal and private lands all lay before us (see Figure 2).

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Figure 2: Multiple cadastral regimes

Here, private landowners controlled the left bank, the state “owned” the waterway and the right bank was federal land. This situation is further complicated by the fact that in this land-based ownership regime, water levels constantly change and thus boundaries are literally and figuratively fluid. A few guides stated explicitly that the federal government should “own” the Atchafalaya. “We need a program where they [the federal government] would start buying up the swamps to take away the swamps from corporate entities” (Interview M 2010). Another informant stated, ”I am a very conservative person but when it comes to certain things I can go the other way. I would like to see the basin expropriated, everything in there, by the federal government” (Interview N 2010). I use this perspective because it highlights how contradictory the notion of control was for my respondents. Often times they felt that if the state or federal government were to take over, they should grandfather in some private landowners, particularly hunting clubs which are seen as an important part of the Basin’s cultural heritage.

“If you have got a big lease and you have got all this land leased and it belongs to some lumber company and it gets bought up by the government then you lose that lease and you have been hunting there since you were a kid and you have your kids and their kids hunting with you, and you're going to lose this. That is your heart” (Interview O 2010).

Obviously determining who would be grandfathered in would be subjective and contentious to say the least. “Let the state and federal government take care of it and watch it and then grandfather in some of the hunting clubs that are decent people” (Interview N 2010). Several of the guides suggested that they were the kind of decent people who should be allowed to have hunting leases.

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Other respondents were more specific about which entities would manage the Basin best. The Army Corps of Engineers which is tasked with controlling the water that is allowed to pass through the Atchafalaya River was often mentioned. Sometimes the Corps was seen as helping protect the Basin by progressively buying up more land, but more often, it was criticized for its historic role in creating the levies, disrupting the natural flow of water and subsequently channelizing the Atchafalaya River. A common response was “Well, get rid of the Corps of Engineers. Let it flood and dry like it's supposed to” (Interview J 2010). In general, locals made little distinction between federal, state and local government as sources of control. I wondered if they thought that local but public control was better, but one guide made it clear that even parish-level control was not a small enough scale. “I don't think that it is the government's job to protect the environment; I think it is the people's job. And I resent government thinking that they are better qualified than people with native intelligence such as myself” (Interview J 2010) Yet when I pointed out that “the people” could be seen as controlling the Basin through private landownership, he gave quite an interesting response:

“The fact of the matter is we are part of the natural environment and humans are predators and possibly overbearing and not being in harmony with the land in the water like the Native Americans were. So if I would say who should be in charge of that, let the Indians do it” (Interview J 2010).

While his solution seems radical, it points to the fact that however they perceive the cadastral relations in the Basin, many locals are fed up with the current multiplicitous venues of control. No one with whom I spoke felt that private landownership was the best way to divvy up land in the Basin. According to respondents, private land in the Basin is owned predominately by resource corporations. Some smaller tracts are owned by hunting clubs, but most clubs lease lumber company lands. Below I reproduce a few quotes that illustrate feelings toward private landownership:

“The private landowners hate the crawfishermen and we are just troublemakers to them” (Interview P 2010).

“Private landowners are a big problem because they want everybody out there because they don't live there; they are absentee landowners” (Interview O 2010).

“I don't like it. I never did like private land” (Interview F 2010).

“But because it's private property and this is a ‘free country’ [finger quotes], I think there is always going to be a struggle as the private landowners, oil and chemical companies like Dow, DuPont, Freeport- McMoRan, ExxonMobil, these big players are going to use their money to muscle out the little guys who should be allowed to live there” (Interview M 2010).

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“They don't really care” (Interview R 2010).

On the whole, most people with whom I spoke had disdain for both the government and private landowners in the Basin. Furthermore, several respondents noted that the regulations imposed on individual and corporate landowners were de jure only. Eessentially, people (and the state) did whatever they wanted to the Basin with little to no consequences. One seasoned crawfisherman spoke about confronting oil companies about upholding their responsibility to protect the water while they drilled. “We would tell them y'all have to dike that location, and they would look at us like we were crazy you know” (Interview Q 2010). The same chagrin was also noted in attitudes towards state agencies and non-governmental organizations that were seen as ineffective in protecting or controlling the Basin. In summary, when treated as a whole, the Atchafalaya has many parties who compete to control the space. To understand more specifically who has the ability to affect the goings on in the Basin, the scale of inquiry would need to be much smaller and treat the heterogeneous cadastral landscape as such.

3.6.3 Threats to the Swamp The Basin is by no means a pristine wilderness (though many referred to it as a semi- wilderness). Years of logging without regeneration, levies and boat canals have shaped the swamp as a highly humanized space. Yet locals believe something is still there that needs to be protected. Certainly the use and control of the swamp can have adverse effects on the environment, but what specifically are these threats? I turn now to the disruption and physical damage that has resulted from how the swamp has been used and controlled. In the most abstract sense, what locals see as threats to the swamp are activities that establish a stasis in a space of constant downstream flow. The two most noted culprits were the levies and the pipelines, or when placing blame, the Corps of Engineers and the oil companies. The results of “fixing” the swamp have been sedimentation and channelizing of the river. A natural levy has always bound the Atchafalaya River. When snow melt and spring rains made it down the Mississippi and drifted west into the Atchafalaya, they would overcome the levy and flood the forest, regenerating the flood-dependent species for another year. However, once people established fixed communities around the river, the occasional above average floods such as 1927 were catastrophic. Though people have been adding to the natural levy for generations, the federal government’s Flood Control Act of 1928 was the first massive levy building project in the area (Reuss 1998). The Atchafalaya River levy was extended upwards of 25 feet in some places and by the 1950’s, created a boundary between places that would flood and those that would not. The levy is still a barrier between people and water in the Basin, and is to a large extent a linear staging grounds on the cultural landscape for activities within the swamp. The other most important fixed control of the swamp is about 45 miles upstream of this location at the Old River Control Structure which was completed in 1963 to divert 30 percent of the Mississippi River’s water into the Atchafalaya and prevent the larger river from overtaking the smaller and drying up ports in Baton Rouge and New Orleans (Reuss 1998). Both of these additions to the Basin’s flood regime were seen as necessary to protect lives and investments in the region, but many locals see them not as

61 protections, but as disruptions of the natural process of lowland river flooding. A concise opinion and explanation was offered by one respondent who explained the failures of flood control:

“The thing what has ruined the Basin is that the federal government engaged the US Army Corps of Engineers to control floods. The control policy was containment rather than the natural distribution of the water through the bayous. The irony of containment is that we had better flood control when we operated within the system of nature which was distribution” (Interview J 2010).

The overarching complaint about these attempts to reign in the river was that it caused all of the sediment that would normally drift downstream into the Gulf to be deposited upstream outside of the main channel, filling in and drying up the swamp. This problem is further exacerbated by the fact that the Old River Control intentionally diverts sediment-heavy water from the bottom of the Mississippi to prevent sedimentation along transit routes into the open Gulf. Whereas the structure lets 30 percent of the water through, it is designed (and regulated) to allow 50% of the Mississippi’s sediment to enter the Atchafalaya. Southward sediment flow is also impeded by the illegal oil pipeline spoil banks. This problem was noted by nearly all of the swamp tour guides and particularly by those who currently or in the past had supplemented their living by crawfishing. One respondent stated specifically that this was the reason he had given up crawfishing.

“The basin silting up also means more sand. Crawfish don't like sand they don't reproduce as good in sand. So we are finding that the crops get less and less. You get more crawfish from farms than you do from the wild crawfish now. So I had to start working construction work to make ends meet and then I started doing more work than I did fishing.” (Interview O 2010)

Beyond sedimentation the raising of the levies has caused the Atchafalaya River to cut progressively deeper into its bed which presents another set of problems. Initially, this would seem to give the water more room to flow, but one guide explained the limits of controlling floods this way: “Now we are trying to contain it in such a small corridor it gets way way high. Ten times higher” (Interview F 2010). So the added depth cannot make up for the decreased width of the river. As with any channelized river, the speed of water flow has increased. This speed does not allow sediment enough time to settle in the river’s delta and instead pushes material further out in the Gulf rather than building up the barrier islands. This was seen as a threat because land and vegetation slows hurricanes.

“Levies take water where you want instead of where it normally goes so the sediment would build a structure to withstand hurricanes and you don't have that anymore. You don't have that marsh structure to hold the ground and buck that wind and now it is just sand and nothing there”

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(Interview F 2010)

The levies were also seen as disallowing the natural floods that replenish water and oxygen for fish, trees and crops that are grown in the Basin. It is notable that the threats of sedimentation and river channelizing were treated not only as threats to the natural landscape, but the human as well. When the water is unseasonably low and stagnant due to the combination of a dry winter up north and the impediment of water by human modification, wild crawfish harvests take a nose dive. Several respondents remembered 2007 as the worst year on record when only 1.4 million pounds were harvested compared to a high water year such as 1993 when 69.3 million pounds were taken (Louisiana Crawfish Harvest Statistics 2007). Also, less water makes for fewer navigable waterways (especially for larger boats) and this makes for less spectacular sightseeing. The threats to the Basin are based on the swamp’s reaction to the human modification. They depend on the notion of the swamp as a place where non-human nature is left to grow and cycle as a healthy ecological system even though the changes that have taken place particularly over the last century are irreversible. Perhaps the best reflection on the present human-environment arrangement was stated by an outsider. When asked what the greatest threat was, a tourist responded, “It seems like the biggest threat to me is people sometimes people don't know how to appreciate what they have” (Interview H 2010). The history of the Basin as a humanized habitat runs counter to its construction as a pristine and untouched wilderness that is used to promote tourism. This speaks directly to the notion that both culture and nature are not factual substances in the Basin, but flexible and political processes. But despite this contradiction of a natural versus humanized space, there seems to be a tradition of ever-encroaching development and exploitation of swamp commodities that places older types of subsistence land-use as less threatening than current projects to drill, drain and log the Basin. And even though my research participants were despondent about the current utilitarian and cadastral regimes, they all spent their energy and time trying to convince people that there was something worth saving and that changing the approach to managing the space could bring back a sense of respect and balance between sustainably harvesting what the swamp produces and cashing in on a marginal investment in a marginalized space. However unstable the broad concepts may be, the guides used their influential performative abilities to craft an idea of a culture or nature under attack. Having established themselves as experts, and earning the trust of tourists, their impressions are not presented as opinions. These moments of fact creation in the Atchafalaya give both performance and spatialization a tangible context that is ripe for inquiry.

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CHAPTER FOUR

WILDNESS ON THE MARGINS

As noted in the previous chapter, place, landscape and culture are dynamic performances of spatialization. Yet, these broad tropes can be used to characterize all spaces whether they are overtly human or not. In what follows, I turn to a more narrow place-myth that delimits a particular attribute of the Atchafalaya Basin- wildness. I suggest generally that wildness is performed as a trope of the Basin both to highlight its ‘purity’ and its exoticism. Though a more refined conception than place or landscape, wildness as a spatial or cultural attribute is far from unique to the Basin. This type of representation has been used to create dualisms concerning several types of spaces that seem to be opposed to centers, cities or ‘civilization’. Geographers have written extensively on how spatial separations or purifications such as wildness are established whether in tangible or mental space. In particular I utilize authors who have dealt with the broader notion of marginal spaces, rural geographies, and environmental histories and geographies of the wilderness. I set up the idea that social spatializations of marginality create a framework for thinking about rural and wild spaces, yet both should be considered outside of the center-periphery spatial hierarchy. Then I introduce wildness in the Atchafalaya and suggest that despite its sometimes essentializing and marginalizing effects, wildness is a performed characteristic of this place. The performance of wildness has served to code the Atchafalaya Basin as exotic for consumption through tourism.

4.1 Marginality

Constructing spaces on a social hierarchy has been connected to the basic distinctions people make between themselves and the extra-bodily world. When people create a self- other distinction they often attach the other to a space, and when these positive or negative distinctions are reiterated by our experience and social conditioning en masse, geographers refer to them as marginalized people and spaces. When a local refers to his or her surroundings as an “undeveloped wild area” these surroundings are reiterated as marginal (ANHA Comments 2010). When a tour guide says, “I can’t believe someone over there hasn’t got killed” (Interview N 2010) he codes the people of this swamp as violent. And when an author writes of “an environment that is rare and natural in a world that continues to become more crowded and artificial” he suggests that the swamp is a pristine and untouched place, threatened by people and civilization (Guirard 1989, p.87). These quotes all serve to establish marginality by creating for better or worse an ‘other’ space or ‘other’ people.

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Cajuns are certainly a classic example of an other. If this is not revealed simply through historian Shane Bernard’s title The Cajuns: Americanization of a People, then their otherness is highlighted by his basic conclusion that Cajuns became “American” during a certain series of historical events- namely WWII. To Bernard, the term Cajun “ceased to describe a mainly French-speaking, non-materialistic, impoverished people on the fringe of American society and instead referred to a largely English-speaking, consumer-oriented, middle-class community whose members closely resembled mainstream Americans” (Bernard 2003, p.146). The exotic is noted here as the Cajuns seemed to be a people from another time, a ‘primitive society’ existing in some non- market socialist utopia before mainstream America penetrated their social boundary and impregnated them with hegemonic ethics.

Why is this a problem? Bernard’s attempt to characterize this process was rooted in documentation not only from archives, but personal perspectives of those Cajuns who had lived through this era and suggested that they had witnessed ‘Americanization’ and even had endured “citizenship training” in school (Bernard 2003, p.17). So this traditional to modern breakdown was a shared experience. The danger lies in how he and other authors cast American progress as bringing Cajuns forward in time when their coexistence in space implies concurrency in time. Massey addresses this in reference to the hegemony of neoliberalism by noting, ”[c]onvening spatial heterogeneity into temporal sequence deflects the challenge of radical contemporaneity and dulls the appreciation of difference” (Massey 2005, p.99). Her approach to space allows for a ‘presentness’ that tries to avoid the hierarchical socialization of spaces/people. This post- structural perspective allows for the appreciation of difference from a standpoint that all times and spaces are equal, which challenges spatiotemporal judgments of people. Though authors have good-hearted intentions to inform us of the often pernicious results of the American imperial ‘advance’, in doing so, they create a victimized and less- empowered Culture that is somehow antithetical to American and easily overwhelmed. Extended from the body to nations of us and them, it is this hierarchy of self-other that is most eloquently deconstructed by Said in Orientalism (1979) and has been the focus of many post-colonial forms of inquiry.

4.1.1 The Other Said focuses on Orientalism as the production by literature, social science and geopolitics of an “imagined geography”. He was not, however, the first to use this term. Wright’s 1947 “Terrae Incognitae: The Place of Imagination in Geography” provides an earlier account of the possible problems of imagining places- although he concludes that such imaginations can be made scientifically objective. What today we would call the ‘other’ he refers to as the “call of the Sirens” (Wright 1947, p.1). Considering the outcome of Odysseus’ crew when they heeded the call, Wright’s piece may foretell the dangers of the fetishization of exotic cultures. In fact he does acknowledge its problems. He understands the power of the geographer’s imagination: “The less imaginative we are the less fresh and original will be our writing and teaching, and the less effective in stimulating the imagination of others” (Wright, 1947, p.5). Then he notes, ”[b]ut a powerful imagination is a dangerous tool in geography unless it is used with care” (p.5). The care he writes of is

65 essentially scientific objectivity, the failure of which is often the motivation of post- colonial theorists. Ryan provides a well-put characterization of Said’s Orientalism which unpacks the sometimes nefarious results of Western theorists’ imaginations. “Said’s critical analysis of texts, particularly those of the Western novel, exposed the ways in which Western cultural forms often accepted and legitimated the structures of colonialism” (Ryan 2007, p.473). Said’s “orient” is constructed primarily through British and French colonialism and refers to the “near-east” rather than the American use of ‘oriental’ in reference to East Asia. He rightly places the power of representation within the hands of those who mass-produce knowledge. “Thus a very large mass of writers…have accepted the basic distinction between East and West as the starting point for elaborate theories, epics, novels, social descriptions, and political accounts concerning the Orient, its people, customs, “mind” destiny and so on” (Said 1979, p.2). The ‘crisis of representation’ has allowed an imaginative geography to be written upon people that reproduces the needs of those in power to justify war, racism, and generally the presentation of an anti-self for colonialist Europeans. This was a “Western style for dominating, restructuring, and having authority over the Orient” that denied their ontological existence as a ”free subject of thought or action” (Said 1978, p.3). “The Orient” became an open container that Europeans could inscribe with that which they rejected from their society (the profane) and concurrently that which they sought (the exotic). In summation, “the Orient” became all that Europe was not or could not be. Since Said, many geographers have expanded study of Orientalism or in general the practice of “othering”. Clayton’s “Imperial Geographies” has the goal of positioning scholars within the production of Eurocentrism (2007). Though giving voice to the colonized seems like an honorable attempt to subvert the dominance of the colonizer, the voice that is given has an unmistakably European accent. Writing of Jacobs, Clayton notes a “vexed truth” that “much post-colonial scholarship within and beyond geography tends to reinscribe the authority of western events, agents and texts that it ostensibly seeks to expose and subvert” (2007, p.458). Thus, post-colonial scholarship still uses the power of the colonizer’s gaze. Gregory’s “Imaginative Geographies” is a thorough investigation into the question of how Said established his own perspective (Gregory, 1995). Through an extensive biography Gregory unpacks the situations that motivated Said in his two ‘lives’ first as a colonial subject and second as a scholar of colonialism. Gregory provides an in-depth review of how Said applies Foucault to Orientalism. Foucault acknowledges ‘the divide’ between West and Orient, but is more supportive of the notion of voicing the colonized than perhaps Clayton would be comfortable with. “It is necessary to create the history of this great divide throughout the formation of the west, to follow its continuity and its exchanges, but also to let the tragic liturgy of its simplified inscriptions become visible” (Gregory 1995, p.457). According to Gregory, what Foucault and Said have in common are their investigations into the “discursive construction of exclusionary geographies” (Gregory 1995, p.457). With the “geographic imaginary” now defined as the mental separation of peoples, I will treat these “exclusionary geographies” as the tactic that applies the separation of self/other onto space.

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4.1.2 Spaces of Otherness The making of spatial/cultural exclusion is the topic of Sibley’s book Geographies of Exclusion (1995) and is also addressed in Shields (1991) and Price (2004). In a section titled “National Identities and Alien Others” Sibley relates the creation of national identity to certain spaces that the dominant culture deems indicative of their ‘selves’. “The countryside, as it is represented by those who have a privileged place within it, is the essence of Englishness, so those who are excluded from this purified space are also, in a sense un-English” (Sibley 1995, p.108). He goes on to note what this practice necessitates: “The cultural heterogeneity of the countryside or the city has to be denied if these fictional characterizations are to symbolize an imagined national community” (Sibley 1995, p.108). Making a unified nation entails robbing the landscape of difference that in turn subjugates the people to a process of de-legitimization. Once people have been stripped of their legitimacy as a part of the nation (a dehumanizing maneuver) just like the Oriental other, they can receive the anti-culture of the dominant. Sibley notes this process that is made significant through representation in his chapter “Mapping the Pure and Defiled”. Imaginary geographies have created “polluting bodies or folk devils who are then located ‘elsewhere’” (Sibley 1995, p.49). Blackness, poverty, savagery and excrement are all characteristics given to those who are disallowed from the dominant national discourse. His analysis here focuses on Gypsies as the receptors of exclusion. The treatment of Gypsies can be compared to the construction of Cajuns by the ways they are both ‘naturalized’. Science confirmed and religion sought to save those who were considered “closest to nature, in a primitive state” (Sibley 1995, p.102). The capacity to survive in a harsh environment (such as the swamp) is seen as proof of a culture’s naturalness. But, “[i]f they are a part of nature, then they are less human” (Sibley 1995, p.26). Though this notion of closeness to nature may today be seen as a positive characteristic as such peoples are constructed as proto-environmentalist ‘stewards of the land’, setting them apart from ‘the rest’ is marginalization nonetheless. Places on the Margin by Rob Shields provides another poignant exposition of the separation of spaces/peoples (1991). Particularly through Lefebvre, Foucault, and Bordieu, he questions the cultural categorization of ‘marginal’ places. He aligns the high/low hierarchy of people (such as via othering) with the spatial binary of central/marginal. Said’s principle of “positional superiority” “allows a series of ambivalent representations of and relationships to the Low or the Marginal” (Shields, 1991, p.5). Places become “labeled, much like deviant individuals” and he calls this process “pathologically irrational forms of behavior” (Shields 1991, p.11). Establishing isolation of places has been a bastion of social separation and in relation to the Canadian North was even quantified through “isolation allowances” that factored into tax exemptions in places far from urban centers (Shields 1991, p.171). Though the Euclidian distances may not be comparable to those in the Canadian North, the friction to travel provided by the swamp created an isolation trope that endures in the literature. Representing isolation in relation to Acadiana can be found not only in Gilmore’s 1933 geography, “Social Isolation of French-speaking Farmers”, but also in Bernard’s more recent (2003) work. Isolation is taken to be the primary fact that shielded Cajuns from the outside and gave them the appearance of being a relic from another time. But, as Bernard writes, ”[m]eanwhile, the war shattered Acadiana’s isolation exposing Cajuns who had remained at home to Anglo-American culture” (2003, p.15). Seen as rising from an

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“impoverished people on the fringe of American society,” marginality places the ethnic group as historically below or progressively behind the hegemonic American culture that seems much more well-cultivated (Bernard 2003, p.146). By characterizing Cajuns as modernized by les Americains the author ignores the fact that that they experienced the same passage of time as other Americans and socially isolating and marginalizing them can be thought of as an act of colonization. Price’s (2004) discussion of the “blank white page” picks up on themes raised b Sibley and Shields as it critiques the creation of marginal people and places by American hegemony. The blank white page she speaks of is a metaphor for the conceptual smoothing of the United States. Borrowing Deleuze and Guattari’s smooth and striated spaces, she writes, “[t]his smoothing of spaces constructed a blankness that was at the heart of dominant landscape attitudes in colonizing societies more generally” (Price, 2004, p.41). Tropes of whiteness and emptiness (and, as I suggest, wildness) serve again to delegitimize people and their homes. Her analysis is also useful in its treatment of ‘natural’ spaces.

“Understanding the polar, jungle, ocean and desert spaces [surely we can insert swamp] as smooth was a gesture of colonization, a crucial aspect of empire building, one that sought to erase prior claims to places and allowed a direct unmediated inscription of the colonial worldview” (Price 2004, p.41).

American society, while venerating the ‘wilderness myth’ and thereby attributing spatial purity of nature, violated the ability for people to live in such places in the collective geographic imaginary. Sibley notes that such “peripheral minorities” (in his case Gypsies) “are mysterious and romantic, harmonizing with nature in ways that civilized society cannot” (1995, p.102). Wild or natural spaces host Appalachian people, Indigenous Americans from Arctic to tropic, Cajuns, Gypsies, runaways, hippies and even ‘granola’ environmentalists all who seem to ‘know’ nature better than urban humans. The basis of these myths is understandable. Someone surrounded by the swamp environment will know more about swamp flora and fauna. For an urban person with little or no skill in reading the land, the breadth and depth of the swamp man’s swamp knowledge would be indescribable. But being part of the spatial periphery also makes the swamp man part of the social periphery so his knowledge may be coded as old fashioned or simple. Sibley addresses folk knowledge “which constitutes data for social scientists rather than being recognized as a form of conceptual understanding which can be considered on the same level as academic constructions of the social world” (1995, p.122). Knowledge of the swamp is not important enough to the social production of the US to warrant learning en masse, yet can be extracted for experiential commodities. This however, can be contrasted with lifeways where one has more contact with socially connected, powerful people; perhaps in Manhattan or even in Lafayette’s Oil Center. Therefore, the experience of living in natural places, rather than limiting one’s ability to be intelligent, ethical, exploitative and human, instead provides a palate of interactions that happen to be matched with a particular spatial stereotype of otherness. This difference is put on display, for better or worse, through swamp tourism.

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4.2 Rural Space

The Atchafalaya Basin is certainly constructed as wild, but its landscape also includes small towns, agriculture and primary extraction of resources. Some vistas here emulate the pastoral ideal while others show the mundane character of large-scale monoculture, but beyond the land itself, the cultures, whether Cajun or not, are typical of rural America. Geographies of exclusion have taken up the deeper theoretical substances of the hierarchies of space and can be useful for understanding what is implied by rural. A particular quandary in the literature is how to conceptualize ruralities independent of the urban, even if rural economic well-being is dependent upon the city. In my interpretation, some uses of exclusion are open enough to allow for an independent rural agency, but they still evoke the urban as the center from which the rural is excluded. To consider geographers’ treatments of the rural, I begin by reviewing political economic discourses that strictly functionalize rural space as serving the city. I continue by returning to the authors on marginalization, who allow for the agency of rural people but accept its dependence on the urban via the production of space. I conclude with works that take on rural geographies independent from the city. Throughout this section I use references from my fieldwork that support each of these notions of rurality or localness in opposition to an outside source of power. In each case, responses were taken from discussions we had about who should have (or does have) the power to control the Basin. Capitalism’s need for proximity has focused analysis on the city and perhaps has shielded humanity from the frontlines of primary extraction: clear-cuts, vast plains of monoculture and factory farms. This creates an unnecessary hierarchy of spaces based on the assumption that cities are the righteous focus of humanity. The fact that cities house the production of socially important knowledges, political and economic decisions, and many of the material and artistic items of humanity does not give cities spatial precedence over the extra-urban. Paradoxically the flows of power run through the city even though, in an empirical sense, most of the terra firma is rural. The weak conception of rural as the anti-space to the city relegates millions of people to an amorphous social periphery and does violence to the spatial and social energies that create these spaces. The opposition to urban lies first in the rural space’s natural character as opposed to the “artificial” city, but also in its people who can be receptacles for society’s ills- poverty, illiteracy and savagery, to name a few. Rural spaces then can be marketed as an escape from these ills as elaborated by Hopkins who explores the marketing of countryside spaces (1998). Such spaces are produced from a Marxian perspective as a necessary cure for urban capitalism. The country provides the raw materials for and the escape from the metaphorical factory. Hierarchically separating spaces (and therefore people) does violence to the rural by essentializing it qua its function. Understandably, there is much more to the rural than its function to support the urban and, though a handful of geographers have addressed this concern, most (especially Marxists) have accepted this notion and moved on to analyze the city as the locus for the production of space. . 4.2.1 Slaves to the City When speaking of the impact of the 1927 flood one guide highlighted how the concentration of power in the city played out for Acadiana. “Coolidge came down here

69 and sided with those creoles of New Orleans and we didn't get paquante, nothing. That is the law, it goes with the money. And that is not the Cajun way” (Interview O 2010). Before the oncoming high water of the catastrophic flood, particular levies were dynamited to protect New Orleans which subsequently and intentionally sent several feet of water into the parishes south of the urban center. A bad flood in Plaquemines Parish became a complete inundation of water. Critiquing this disregard for the rural in favor of the urban is the motivation of those Marxist geographers who have taken up this distinction. Yet their explanations are at best formulaic and at worst, dehumanizing. Motivated by their need to essentialize the methods of capitalist exploitation, Marxists have functionalized the rural. The basic problems of structuralism certainly apply to this problem since a functionalist view positions rural spaces and people as ‘slaves to the city’. However, Marxist totalizing worldviews are useful in the sense that they can expose the capitalist imperative of exploitation for all its evils and trace the causes back to the systemic contradictions. Since labor is the only force within capitalism that can create value, yet this fact is actively obscured by the powers of the upper-class, one would be amiss to ignore the plight of labor as these contradictions work themselves out ‘on the street’. However, this top-down approach is notably simplistic, and I argue that the rural has thereby been ‘explained away” as the fuel for the city and the playground for the rich. Smith’s Uneven Development was a pivotal work that took an in-depth reading of Marx and the ramifications of capitalism on the production of space. Capital is implicated in producing unevenness and general inequality on a global scale. For this reason it is understandable that Smith’s argument treats the localized interactions of urban-rural with little regard, but he does acknowledge the function of the rural. Rather than actually maintaining the distinction, Smith sees capital as annihilating the difference- but through the urban. “The urbanization of the countryside through the industrialization of agriculture is today an overwhelming reality and one which Marx foresaw” (Smith, 1984, p.148). Marx used the rural-urban dichotomy as a tension maintained by capital that produced the city. Smith argues in contrast that the rural has essentially been urbanized through industrial agriculture and though the separation does still exist in some places, it should be seen as a “relic from the origins of capitalism” (Smith 1984, p.149). The rural is dying because of its functional relationship with the urban. Harvey provides further evidence for the annihilation of the rural in capital’s quest for the “reduction of spatial barriers” in “The Geography of Capitalist Accumulation” (Harvey 1996b). “Technological innovations that liberate industry from close dependence upon a particular and localized raw material or energy source permit greater concentration of production in urban centers” (Harvey 1996b, p.607-8). This characterization of the power of cities is vital to Harvey’s classic notion of “the annihilation of space by time”. Since cities are the logical nexus of the relations of production, the rural is characterized as a space of friction that the city can smooth out and overcome. Marx predicted the increasing speed of capital flows via “the constant absorption of primitive and physically uncorrupted elements from the country” (Harvey 1996b, p.608). In addition to the problem presented by “uncorrupted elements” this representation of the rural as a vacuum serves to reiterate its functional position via the city.

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In investigating the cause of the social stratification of space, many Marxist scholars have attributed the basic presumptions of the class struggle as determinant. This could be stated more simply as proletariat vs. bourgeoisie yields rural vs. urban. Soja comments on how Lefebvre’s reliance on space rather than class can move away from such a narrow interpretation and allow spatial relations “a significant transformational potential” (Soja 1980, p.211). Lefebvrian spatial agency seems to allow the rural to be empowered as a space of resistance to the city, yet his closest characterization of the rural says otherwise. I must stretch Lefebvre a little since he does not refer to the rural explicitly, but rather nature “as a source and resource”, essentially dehumanized (Lefebvre 1974, p.30). Natural space is “the background of the picture” and the foreground is the city (Lefebvre 1974, p. 30). As a source of authenticity, Lefebvre gives nature spaces some power, “but it has been defeated, and waits only for its ultimate voidance and destruction” (Lefebvre 1974, p.31 my emphasis). This negates Lefebvre’s intention to give those who experience space the power to resist it through representational spaces “essentially qualitative, fluid and dynamic” (Lefebvre, 1991, p.42). A tension of dependency exists between rural and urban, yet the author sees the urban as the ultimate victor. Even if we treat rural spaces simply as the source of materials for the urban, one cannot survive without the other. Whether the tension arises through class struggle itself, or the appropriation of space within class struggle, the production of the city is contingent upon the extraction of (actual and experiential) commodities from the rural in all of these Marxian analyses.

4.2.2 Semblance of Agency In the Atchafalaya, one respondent reminisced on the transition from freedom to order and locals’ powers to resist:

“It was like we all owned the Basin. You could go where you want. But then people started buying up the land and arresting trespassers which was illegal. But if anybody did anything you couldn't go to court, they didn't have an organization and now we do. If it hadn't been for that [the Louisiana Crawfish Producers Association] we would be out of the Basin now” (Interview Q 2010).

Considering the fact that most landowners who fought the crawfishermen were absentee or corporate, this story implies that in marginalized places, people do have the ability to resist the hegemonic ordering that emanates from the city. If the powers of capitalism were all-pervasive, even resistance from within would be impossible, yet here, through collective action, the crawfishermen have been able to maintain their fishing grounds as community spaces. In my attempt to move from purely functional analyses of rural spaces to ‘the rural for itself’ the works on marginalization occupy a middle ground, essentially two steps away from Marx, yet still critical and semi-structural. Here, I find works that reference psychoanalytic and postcolonial theories to be broader in their allowance for self-realization, and concurrently narrower in their focus on unique processes of power beyond the economic.

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Shields’ concept of social spatialization as the action of separating space via the social is applicable here because of the characteristics of the space that highlight connections to centers of power that lie beyond the rural. He explicitly writes that his focus is on the “pre-constructed cultural discourses about sites” which seeks not to identify what the discourses are, but how they came to be (Shields, 1991, p.31). What is accomplished in the end though is not necessarily an inherent agency in place, but rather an acknowledgment that places are stratified both from the internal and external. “Place- and space-myths are united into a system by their relative differences from one another even while they achieve their unique identities by being ‘set-off’ against one another” (Shields, 1991, p.62). So, the rural and urban are contrasted but this contrast could be reproduced from within the rural and not just upon the rural. In this sense, he corrects Lefebvre’s natural spaces, but without particular reference to rural spaces. Sibley in Geographies of Exclusion addresses the rural-urban dichotomy more directly and his reliance on psychoanalytic theories gives credence to the self in the constitution of otherness. Again I point to his work on Gypsies as occupants of excluded spaces who were socially excluded by constructing them as ‘closer to nature’. He does well to muddle the distinction between (social) self and (social) other by noting the in- group dynamics of Gypsies whose relationships may be based more on a closeness of contact or proximity than extended networks. This “conscience collective” of the group operates similarly to the broader tensions that serve to subjugate Gypsies as the other, but are utilized under specific conditions (1995, p.38). Thus, maintaining the boundaries of purity within Gypsy groups “is more likely in times of crisis, when the identity of the group is threatened” (Sibley, 1995, p.38). Rituals of purity, in this case associated with pollution of utensils, clothes and the body, are heightened under threats to the group but applied differently in different families. His point seems to be that in the process of boundary making, a generalized anxiety causes a culturally specific set of reactions that play out differently among members of the group. This is certainly more complex than the ‘natural’ other as a social outcast and receptacle for urban fears or exoticism. The (social) self is given a capacity to create and express in unique ways. This obviously questions the power of broader ‘social forces’ of domination from the urban. But, his piece is unapologetic in its urbanness. In fact, the concerns of the book are, “exclusions in social space which may be unnoticed features of urban life” (Sibley, 1995, p.xiv). Social structures are implicated in the production of spaces of alterity despite the fact that the author makes attempts to avoid structuralism. “Exclusionary tendencies develop in the individual and the exclusionary practices of the capitalist state are supported by individual preferences for purity and order” (Sibley, 1995, p.36). Here again, the individual seems to have some agency in his or her quest for order, but if they only (or generally) choose to reproduce the tropes provided by the mode of production. Perhaps the material differences between rural and urban spaces set them apart, but on an equal plane. This is the notion of space that Hetherington uses when he writes of heterotopias, an idea developed from Foucault. Hetherington classifies heterotopias as “spaces of an alternate ordering” and, if taken just as this, a heterotopia is somewhat meaningless since all spaces are alternatively ordered compared to some other spaces (Hetherington 1997, p.vii). However, heterotopias are sites of alternate ordering in contrast to the utopian project of society. Utopia is concurrently a no-space and good- space. In Foucault’s analysis, utopia is the driving force behind control and spatial

72 subjugation. Rural space represents a heterotopic order since it necessarily contrasts the urban world which is the site of production of the dominant order. Hetherington uses the idea of competing notions of order/freedom as the imposition of structure on heterotopias. An inherent agency is allowed in such spaces, but unlike Lefebvre, the ‘other’ spaces are not produced exclusively for resistance. He writes, “It would also be wrong to associate heterotopia just with the marginal and powerless seeking to use Other places to articulate a voice that is usually denied them” (1997, p.52). The freedom that Hetherington speaks of is the ability to use the alternative order to revere or subjugate heterotopic spaces from within. This gives us an even less consistent social boundary between us and them (than Sibley) because people are empowered to selectively behave as either. In the context of rural spaces, this work destabilizes the rural agent as either fully passive recipient or active resistor of urban hegemony. These geographies succeed in allowing a social spatialization where the rural is not only a function of the urban, but they fail in breaking this particular dichotomy by still focusing on their excluded nature. Whether through Lefebvrian resistance in Shields or Sibley’s more symbolic exclusion, the question in terms of the rural remains ‘exclusion from what?’ The answer is the city and its powers of agglomeration.

4.2.3 The Rural for Itself “I resent government thinking that they are better qualified to control it [the Basin] than people with native intelligence such as myself…It was truly my blogging that turned the screw in that situation around and brought about changes here at Lake Martin” (Interview J 2010). For this respondent, local, “native intelligence” was not only the most authentic, but the most powerful force in controlling the fate of the swamp. His perspective indicates that we cannot think of rural places only as cogs in the wheel of the city, but we must give them independent power. Though the theorists above only allow for such a practice within the operations of the hegemonic discourse, rural geographies have made some headway in realizing rural power. Paul Cloke is probably the most prominent author writing under the theme of rural geographies, but he is certainly not the first. Fitzsimmons finds, “[w]e have the contributions of Kropotkin and Reclus on the social differentiation of the city and the countryside and the implications of the division of labor which fits the worker to a single task- an urban task” (Fitzsimmons, 1989, p.115). What I believe to be the project of rural geographies is to invigorate the rural as its own place. Steinberg finds the same trouble in the treatment of the ocean, and his suggestion to see the ocean, “not as simply an arena of political contestation but as a space that is saturated with social processes and cultural resonances” can certainly apply to rural spaces (Steinberg 2004, p.2092). Cloke, Milborne and Thomas’s extensive research into rural lifestyles yielded some significant conclusions (1997).

“The long history of post-war discussion of rural-urban dichotomies, continua and intermeshed continua has shown that any functional definition of rurality based, for example, on land use, landscape, or community characteristics will inevitably mask the complexities of overlapping geographical, social and cultural spaces” (1997, p.210).

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They want to emphasize that rural life is experienced in a fundamentally different way than urban and by objectifying the rural only in relation to the city much damage is done. In a study of rural England they find competing narratives of poverty, wealth, isolation, and idyllic nature from the same rural spaces. They do not ignore the faculties of the urban in producing the rural, but allow for contrasting and non-urban forms of rural representation. Several authors have written about how rural peoples project their own relationships with nature. Askins’ study of ethnicity in the rural-urban divide in England found that rural people accepted the divide and, to an extent, relished in their lifestyle proximity to nature. However, they were unable to draw clear lines between theirs and other-urban natures. She contends, “If we consider the rural as, in part, material object, these mutually constitutive relationships between place and identity mean that the physical countryside is intertwined with people’s understandings of rural space and themselves in rural space” (2009, p.369). Her concept of “transrural” breaks the binaries by allowing for place-based specificities that may contradict the functionalization of rural space by the urban. Woods also finds room for rural agency by taking a performative approach (2010). He hopes to highlight the power of rural people “by revealing how discourses of rurality are enacted and routinized with material effects, and showing how the practices and performances of rural actors in material settings contribute to the production and reproduction of discourses of rurality” (Woods 2010, p836). His paper reviews many others (including Edensor, 2006; Carolan 2008; Macpherson 2009) that have shown how the reiteration of urban expectations (especially for tourists) can become embodied and independent of their referent. His paper is also useful for its extensive comments on the positioning of researchers as agents in the exoticization of rural people through our desires to “engage with previously ‘neglected’ and ‘othered’ groups” (p.842). By sticking to performative ontologies, as many have chosen to do, researchers are better able to treat themselves not as objective outsiders but involved participants. The rural break from the urban norm can also be seen in Vanderbeck’s paper on Vermont ‘whiteness’ (2006) . His pivotal study showed the complex manner in which Vermont was coded as the heart of pastoral American whiteness. He shows in the end though, that Vermonters reclaimed their rurality as liberal, progressive, multicultural and especially non-heteronormative. By the 1980’s Vermont had shifted faces and the association of conservatism with rural was effectively broken. Vanderbeck’s work is exemplary in allowing rural people to proclaim their own rurality and is the most innovative concept brought to the table by rural geographies as a sub-discipline. The material needs of capitalist production have long been sought after in rural spaces. Shields notes, ”the spatial is also a condensation of the social relations of production”, and that could not be more visible than the “country as farm” landscape metaphor (1991, p.51). Much of the square mileage of the rural United States is privately owned to ‘grow’ a profit. This spatial division has been drawn from a history and culture and continues to reify the economic arrangement. When the extractable value is taken from the country or its market dries up, the inhabitants must find a new way to exploit their knowledge of and proximity to nature. This may entail taking up a cultural artisan trade, guiding or hosting visitors, or working in cultural or eco-tourism in other capacities. These practices are by no means universal, but this story has been told in

74 countless marginalized cultures. However, despite the power of flows to the city, as geographers, our reverence for place must respect the rural as the source for its own being. By neglecting rural space in favor of urban concentrations, geographers risk ignoring rural peoples’ powers to resist and creatively perform their own versions of the country.

4.3 Wild Spaces

In the Western-dominated social imaginaries of space, the antithesis of civilization and urbanity is the wilderness. “For many Americans, wilderness stands as the last remaining place where civilization, that all too human disease, has not fully infected the earth” (Cronon 1996a, p.7). The idea of wilderness may embody the positive side of exoticization of space where communion with nature and our animal spirit is unfettered by the social, but attaching tropes of purity to space is a separation and marginalization nonetheless. After showing how marginal thinking has been used to functionalize rural spaces via the urban, I now move to how geographers and environmental historians have positioned and critiqued wilderness. I rely heavily upon Cronon who straddles these two academic groups and has produced a career’s worth of work on this subject. By “rethinking wilderness” Cronon hopes to further two primary ideas that work well in concert with social spatialization and marginalization (1996a, p.7). The first is that all spaces are humanized. Nowhere is nature completely untouched, and imagining it so assists in the subjugation of peoples who consider the wilderness home. The second idea is indicative of an environmental ethic; that valuing some nature as pure and relic necessarily devalues the nature that is experienced outside of the wilderness. Despite these contradictions in the rationale of wilderness, the word is used pervasively in reference to the leftovers of the ‘American Frontier’ including the Atchafalaya Basin. In support of this, I point to the 12% of respondents who wrote the word ‘wild’ (excluding wildlife) or ‘wilderness’ to describe the Basin during public information sessions used to inform the creation of the Atchafalaya National Heritage Area (ANHA Comments 2009). The Basin is a ‘wild’ place, and this type of spatial coding serves to marginalize it for tourist consumption. Before revealing the multiple and complex ways wilderness is used in the Atchafalaya, I first review the definitions and histories of the word and then suggest three ways scholars have conceived of its creation: construction of wilderness, production of wilderness, and postwilderness.

4.3.1 Definition and History To begin, I want to define wilderness not in a stable or progressive social theory sense, but in the simplest senses of how the word is used today. I find three primary definitions that reveal the uses of the word. The first is the legal definition as it was established by the 1964 Wilderness Act. Wilderness “is hereby recognized as an area where the earth and community of life are untrammeled by man, where man himself is a visitor who does not remain” (Wilderness Act 1964). The second definition is similar to the first but encompasses more of the spiritual essence of the wilderness as a sacred space. From Deep Ecology Devall and Sessions see wilderness as a space that allows for, “[p]eople in primal cultures, dwelling in ecosystems, bonded to place, having communion with wild

75 animals and realizing that sprit and matter are not inherently separated” (Devall and Sessions, 1985, p.112.). Last I posit the most commonly accepted constructionist claim from Cronon that “[f]ar from being one place on earth that stands apart from humanity, it is quite profoundly a human creation” (Cronon 1996a, p.7). As it stands today these are the most acceptable uses of wilderness in the general public. But this paper must move beyond the common to investigate how scholars have defined and argued over the word in a chiefly academic context. I begin with its early history. Wilderness and the American Mind by Roderick Frasier Nash is the most thorough explication of what wilderness has meant in the United States (2001, orig. 1967). Rather than a full review of his work, I only want to extract a few pivotal moments from his history of wilderness. The first meaning of wilderness in America is wilderness as the antithesis of humanity and wilderness abhorred. This is the wilderness of the puritans and of the 17th and early 18th centuries. Nash writes, “[w]hen William Bradford stepped off the Mayflower into a ‘hideous and desolate wilderness’ he started a tradition of repugnance” (Nash 2001, p.23-4). The next few centuries saw the American wilderness characterized in a similar fashion as containing evil, darkness and gloom. Understandably the resourceful colonists sought out to conquer nature (their bibles had told them so) by fire, axe and pistol. Around the turn of the 18th century the wilderness did an about-face and became a new source of inspiration and spiritual wonder. This was a result of the rise of Romanticism, which “in general implies an enthusiasm for the strange, remote, solitary and mysterious” (Nash, 2001, p.47). This movement was also related to the rise of primitivism that saw civilization as the paramount of human alienation and sought to return to the wild. By the 19th century the idea of wilderness had entered a new phase of transcendentalism through Thoreau and Emerson. Humans were constrained by the physical but could transcend this position through seeking higher truths. Thoreau, of course did this by moving to Walden. From this era Americans began to call for the political preservation of wilderness and in 1872 this dream was first realized with the creation of Yellowstone National Park by U.S. Grant and then followed thirteen years later with the creation of Adirondack Park. Both were protected by arguments for their functional economic value but “wilderness preservation was almost accidental” (Nash, 2001, p.122). The early 20th century saw the first national-scale heated environmental debate around the creation of the Hetch Hetchy dam above San Francisco. This conflict pitted John Muir and the preservationists who did not want the dam but wanted to preserve the land for its aesthetic value against Gifford Pinchot and the conservationist side who wanted to conserve nature for its economic or use value and wanted the dam to provide power for the burgeoning city. President Roosevelt mediated the debate over the course of several years and in the end Pinchot and the conservationists won and the dam was built. 1964 saw the passage of the Wilderness Act, signed by LBJ, which set aside some 9 million acres as an abstractly designated wilderness “untrammeled by man” (Wilderness Act 1964) In a chapter called “The Irony of Victory” Nash notes how the efforts at wilderness protection succeeded, but crowds of visitors and overuse soon tarnished their appeal as a place of pristine nature. “Having made extraordinary gains in the public’s estimation in the last century, wilderness could be loved to death in the next” (Nash, 2001, p.316). Nature by the 1970’s had become popular culture facilitated by innovations in transportation, equipment and information. Cronon adds some helpful insights to the rise of the wilderness that must not be

76 overlooked. “The Trouble with Wilderness, or Getting Back to the Wrong Nature” was his groundbreaking critique of the wilderness concept that first appeared in 1995. It will be addressed later as the most pivotal text for the social construction of wilderness, but first I use its history of the concept. Cronon laments that the wilderness has been “so often conceived as a form of recreation best enjoyed by those whose class privileges give them the time and resources to leave their jobs behind and ‘get away from it all’”(Cronon, 1996a, p.21). This class distinction has often divided so-called bourgeois environmentalists from rural and working class people who have historically been under- represented (at least) at national parks. Another critical standpoint he elucidates is how the conceptual making of the wilderness has coded it as empty of people. This was not only the case for pre-park America but also once the parks were created. Maintaining the idea of a people-free landscape necessitated the (continued) removal of native peoples. A third “trouble” with the wilderness could be found in the frontier myth of rugged individualism that pervaded around the turn of the 20th century and was embodied by President Roosevelt himself. Cronon’s point of contention with this myth was its association of the wilderness with the masculine and conversely femininity with civilization. Paradoxically, “the very men who most benefited from urban-industrial capitalism were among those who believed they must escape its debilitating effects” (Cronon, 1996a, p.14). These and several other scathing appraisals of the wilderness concept led Cronon to proclaim that wilderness should be rethought (or perhaps conceptually abandoned). For a final sense of the history of the wilderness concept, I use Delaney’s “Making nature/Marking Humans” for its dealing with some of the legal aspects (2001). “The overt politicization of “wilderness” is facilitated by the irreducible ambiguity, if not indeterminacy, of the term” (Delaney, 2001, p.492). He sees legal definitions in general as positing nature as either internal or external to humans and the creation of wilderness has functioned to highlight the ways it is external. The language of a 1973 federal court ruling on mining in the Minnesota Boundary Waters Canoe Area identified the goals of development not only as different from the wilderness but “opposing”, “antagonistic” and “anathema” (2001, p.492). In 1980, however, another judge made a ruling that was essentially antagonistic to the first by recognizing that denying rights to mineral extraction would do “irreparable financial harm” to the company that owned them and was not within the spirit of the Wilderness Act (2001, p.493). These opposing viewpoints highlight the fact that though the wilderness has a legal definition, the law has been interpreted ambiguously in relation to the human place within its bounds. With the history of wilderness on the table, I now focus on how geographers have critically considered this space.

4.3.2 Spatial Implications Since their beginnings, geographers have theorized on the space between humans and nature, and understandably wilderness has been a fairly hot topic. In general, three movements have emerged that I label construction of wilderness, production of wilderness and postwilderness. The construction of wilderness thesis is the main point in Cronon’s “Trouble with Wilderness” (1996a). Cronon writes about the political economy of wilderness, and arguably could be grouped as bolstering the position of ‘production of wilderness’.

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However, the evidence used to support his arguments is not dependent upon the mode of production. Instead he takes a broader stance that co-implicates production, the frontier mentality and the construction of nature-society binaries through history. Since wilderness is “a profoundly human creation”, Cronon notes the damage that can be done by equating the wilderness with the pure or pristine (which it has never been) (1996a, p.7). His best clarification of this idea is accomplished by comparing a tree in “the wilderness” with a tree in a garden. “The tree in the garden is in reality no less other, no less worthy of our wonder and respect, than a tree in an ancient forest that has never known and axe or saw” (Cronon 1996a, p.24). Thus, putting nature on a polar continuum between pure (wild) and impure (human) devalues the nature that we come into contact with every day. Reifying this separation “distances us from the very things it teaches us to value” (Cronon 1996a, p.23). The social construction of “the wilderness” then serves to obfuscate nature. Demeritt (2002) clarifies this position on nature as a whole and identifies two main types of nature constructions. The first and most dominant is the “construction as refutation” critiques. Essentially this is what we find in Cronon’s notion of wilderness, where the a priori category of wilderness is refuted. The second is construction as philosophical critique. This type of constructionism seeks to debunk philosophical claims of truth, objectivity and reality. Rather than just being a critique of modernist notions of reality, constructivism provides opportunities for change. “What we had once accepted as self-evidently pre-ordained and inevitable is in fact contingent and might conceivably be remade in some other way, if only we would try” (Demeritt, 2002, p.776). Robbins also addresses the social construction of nature in relation to political ecology. He contrasts ‘hard’ constructionists who see nature as having exclusively social meaning with ‘soft’ forms that accept the tangible reality of nature but contend that its meanings are socially mediated and therefore “incomplete, incorrect, biased and false” (Robbins 2004, p114). Constructions of wilderness can be used in political ecology by viewing it as “an emotive image with broad political effects, including the promulgation of conservation reserves across the world, where traditional local residents are excluded” (Robbins 2004, p117). Constructions of nature have also been used within the sub- discipline to show how environmental “problems” are created for political gain such as the characterization of ecological crises as unprecedented events (despite their reoccurrence) in order to gain relief funding. In summation, constructions of wilderness assume the concept is a reaction to the separations we create between ourselves and other natures that has, through time, solidified into a spatial continuum way of thinking. Next, I address the production of wilderness thesis. Production of wilderness is the Marxist critique of the space. While similar to construction in the sense that the idea is only given value by social means, production maintains that nature and wilderness are created by the relations inherent in the capitalist mode of production. Nature is a social side-product of our economic relations. Neil Smith is responsible for popularizing the production as opposed to construction of nature in his pivotal book that brought Marx to geography Uneven Development (1984). He devotes a large percentage of the book to unraveling the capitalist commodification of nature and addresses wilderness explicitly as the domain ‘of nature’. Key to his argument is the sentiment that within the wilderness lies the purity of nature. This move gives nature a place that can not only be witnessed, but entered and therefore gives nature an inherently spatial and material boundary. In his reading of Nash, Smith sees the rise of two themes, nature as external and nature as

78 universal. The problem with these characterizations of nature is how they are commandeered by capital. Social behaviors are equated with natural events. Nature rather than history has caused the present condition and more bluntly, “capitalism is natural; to fight it is to fight human nature” (Smith, 1984, p.29). He calls the human-nature argument “one of the most lucrative investments in the bourgeois portfolio” (Smith, 1984, p.29). He covers Marx’s views on nature with great depth, but in summary, Marx saw the power of universalizing nature as a tool for domination, and he was also aware of the problems in maintaining the human-nature dichotomy. For Marx, “nature is mediated through society and society through nature” (Smith, 1984, p. 33). Marxists are not unified in their understanding of nature. Castree (2002) argues that though Marxists are often rightly criticized for supporting the nature-society dualism, several authors including Harvey, Swyngedouw and Smith have tried to “modernize” Marxian theories of capital- nature relations. “These internal contradictions, Harvey argues, arise from the fact that “natural” entities take on agency relative to the demands or effects of capital accumulation” (Castree 2002, p.130). Crop failures or mad cow disease could be seen as “natural” contradictions that give the non-human an agency rather than the more classical Marxian interpretation that characterizes nature as being acted upon by capitalist structures. In relation to the wilderness, the contradiction is made evident when wild spaces, created to be an urban escape, lose their purity due to disease, fire or other ecological disturbance as noted in Proctor’s work on the idea of “Ancient Forests” (Proctor 1996, p.269). This ‘watering down’ of structure vs. natural agency is a key counterpoint to Marxist theory addressed in more detail below. Finally, I turn to a strain of thought I call postwilderness. The geographers in this section do not see nature as produced or constructed but rather attempt to break down the difference between the human and non-human. Lumping physically disparate objects such as ticks and cacti into the category of “nature” is just as much a failure as allowing humans to be animals yet animals not to be humans. These theories of hybridity are closely associated with Latour’s actor-network theory, which supposes that we reconfigure the social by applying a network ontology of relations. This move also entails broadening our definition of the loci of power to include non-human nature as well as material objects. The antithesis of actor-network theory is the act of explaining social spaces using broadly defined “social forces” (Latour, 2005). So it would seem that Marxist theories of nature, which traditionally blame ‘capitalism’ would be wholly incompatible, but as I noted above, Castree sees Marxian thought re-examining the possibilities of relational rather than structural conceptions of nature (2002). Since he does not recognize the dualism, Latour’s books have no ‘nature’ chapter. Demeritt notes that “ ‘Nature’, for Latour, “only ever emerges as such, that is, as an apparently purified entity, as the ‘result of a settlement that, for political reasons, artificially divides things between the natural and the social realms’“ (Demeritt, 2002, p.775). The artificial division of nature and humans is the only fact that causes the tropes of purity in wilderness. Whatmore and Thorne are two of the post-structural geographers who have taken up actor-network theory and wildness (1998). Their study takes several animal species within actor networks and shows the role of “wild” animal bodies particularly in the much-less-than wild terrain of endangered species trade. They find, ”[t]he tracking of networks and bodies, as we hinted at the start of the paper, is implicitly concerned with shifting the moral geographies of wildlife from the utopian confines of the 'sanctuary' or

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'ark' of wilderness.” (Whatmore and Thorne 1998, p.450). Thus, if animals are relegated to utopian spaces such as wilderness, they are broken from their human counterparts and this is not only unrealistic, but places them in a realm where they can easily be wiped out. For these authors (who seem unwilling to give up on purities) wilderness is a utopian idea defiled by any human presence. My critique of this argument is that giving people this power to defile wilderness simply by being there is in fact counterintuitive to the idea of actor-networks. This denies our animality. If we were hybrid blends of nature and society just as the animals themselves are, wouldn’t that mean that a human in the wilderness could be just as pure and natural as any other entity? Further, we can apply Haraway’s cyborg concept, “in which people are not afraid of their joint kinship with animals and machines not afraid of partial identities and contradictory standpoints” (Haraway, 1980, p.13). Just as it will complicate human-animal relationships in Chapter Six, the cyborg devolves nature to the point that even a machine can be natural. Applying this philosophy leads to my final conclusion. Despite all of the ways we have characterized wilderness as a myth because of its tropes of pristine nature, we are natural and unequivocally spoiled as well. A cyborg or hybrid wilderness can exist where people, nature and technology intermingle pristinely and purely and celebrate their queerly blended relations. This conception of wilderness was often indicated in my fieldwork when respondents characterized the wilderness not as spoiled or pure, but blended, and pocketed. People’s experiences in the marginalized spaces of the Atchafalaya allow for it to be pure and spoiled, and in fact, the interplay of the two such as through the confluence of clear- cutting and living off of the land, is part of the exotic draw. . 4.4 Wild Cajun Swamp

Since I have shown how people and places get relegated to the margins by representations of purity and through hegemony, I now turn to my approach at ‘fixing’ this problem. My primary tactic is to break away from a cohesive notion of “Cajun culture” and a static Atchafalaya and instead focus on the dynamism of the swamp. Thus, I am not extending ‘wildness’ to Cajuns or the Atchafalaya as a whole, but showing how ethnicity can be woven into performances of wildness in the swamp. I am not concerned with dissecting the ecology of the swamp but how culture is used to express multiple meanings of wildness. Mitchell aptly uses Duncan to discuss the failures of using culture as an ‘answer’: “The term culture could be saved if it were not treated as an explanatory variable in itself but used to signify contexts for action or sets of arrangements between people at various levels of aggregation” (Mitchell 2000, p.34). This is a most practical place for culture because it cannot be commandeered as a catch-all for explaining behaviors that seem to defy another logic. However, as shown through my comments on Bhabha, culture can be used from an individual’s perspective to position the particularities of social spaces. This understanding of culture strips some agency from the researcher and allows cultures to be performed by its proprietors. I see this as a movement away from the common ethnographic trap of seeking as Massey puts it, “coherent, seamless authenticity” (Massey 2005, p.10). Performance is key in understanding the meanings people attribute to culture and nature, yet cannot serve as a text outside of its context. Thrift quotes Schieffelin: “Unlike text, performances are ephemeral. They create their effects and then are gone- leaving

80 their reverberations (fresh insights, reconstituted selves, new structures, altered realities) behind them” (Thrift 2008, p.135). This gives the performance of culture a presentness and openness to becoming that evades a time-stamped objective summary. Rather than allow the ephemeral context of performance to negate my ability to gain an understanding of the Atchafalaya, I will try to dissect the context of the information I have gathered. I begin by positioning my respondents’ interviews in relation to another set of performances of local place knowledge, the database of public comments used to inform the creation of the Atchafalaya National Heritage Area. Both sets of place impressions are formed in the context of nature and culture tourism despite being produced by a variety of ‘interested parties’. This substantive commonality of place promotion allows for the two sets of impressions to be compared, and though I do not suggest that a common grand narrative exists, I find that the ideas of ‘wild’ ‘Cajun’ and ‘swamp’ are often used in concert when referring to the uniqueness of this place. After setting up the basics of how I see the Atchafalaya performed, I turn to the particularities of what people are saying about this place. Locals use fascinating hybrids of nature, culture and purity of space to reflect on the multiple assemblages of their lives. People are also inconsistent and conflictuous in what they say and these performances indicate both that their ideas are not solidly structured into predictable attitudes and that theorizations on cultures and space must adhere to “radical contemporeity” (Massey, 2005, p.8). In order to make a concise point, I group the perspectives into three broad categories. First, I address the Atchafalaya as a wildness of nature and note the use of “semi-wild” as a word that encompasses the oxymoronic character of this ravaged- pristine space. Then, I extend wildness to the behavioral realm and suggest that lawlessness and violence are also coded as a part of the swamp. Finally I turn to what is, in the most banal sense, the focus of my dissertation, the connections between Cajuns and the swamp. Here I find hybridity between people and landscape to be expressed with emotion, often a longing for the past or fear of the future. Before divulging these findings, I want to set the contextual stage of these Atchafalaya performances.

4.4.1 Tourism as the Context of Performance Cartier notes in Seductions of Place, “Comparative conceptualizations of place lend greater interpretive meaning to place/landscape desire and experience” (Cartier 2005, p.4). Though this type of comparison motivates this chapter, I contend that with the vast array of conceptualizations of place, some common ground must be found that links people’s perspectives. The representations that inform my work are drawn from different material contexts (a one-on-one interview after a swamp tour versus written responses from. a public meeting) but are nevertheless united as moments of information gathering about tourism. They shared types of questions such as, “What do you enjoy most about the swamp (or National Heritage Area)”. They also shared types of respondents: locals who were interested in the future of the Basin. Many of the respondents to the public information sessions were actually involved in tourism promotion or at the least, the consumption of Atchafalaya experiences. Though the goals of the Atchafalaya National Heritage Area are broad (Build Understanding and Identity, Expand Economic Opportunities, Strengthen Place, and Increase Community Capacity), as revealed by their management plan (2002, p.25-6), the method for achieving these goals is through development of tourism. In fact, the ANHA is administered by the Louisiana Department

81 of Culture, Recreation and Tourism. Even though the information gathering sessions were open to the public and did draw some responses that were anti-tourism such as, “Leave the Basin alone, don’t turn it into a tourism attraction”, mentions of tourism were decidedly pro-development (ANHA Comments 2009). Guides can also be assumed to be for the development of tourism even if they were solely self promoting. But their responses indicated that beyond the economic determinants they were performers of place in many contexts. They were familiar with doing interviews, acting or consulting for films and television, blogging and writing about the Basin and speaking in public venues. One man who was an ardent promoter of the Basin explained his involvements in tourism as emerging from other types of promotion. “Well we started working with film companies and people would call me up and read my books and they wanted to go out [on] swamp tours, so I used to do that for a while” (Interview P 2010). Often, the information about the swamp would turn up in multiple modes of performance. For example, a guide would tell me the same story during an interview that he had just told on the tour. In a few cases, guides used the same sentences or phrases multiple times in an interview or between two interviews. Guides were conscious of this phenomenon. A common phrase was, “ Like I was saying on the boat” or “Like I wrote in my (blog/book)”. This reflexivity indicates not only that guides are actively performing swamp promotion when they sit down for a research interview, but also that what they say about a place is to some extent scripted for an audience. So we can assume that the motivations of both the swamp tour operators and the ANHA are similar and, for these reasons, the responses were comparable as well. Rather than let the promotion or development of tourism speak for the experience, I also use impressions from tourists themselves, who may be on the receiving end of this production, but are nevertheless performing tourism. Their responses were telling because they were able to reflect on their expectations in comparison to the actual experience of swamp touring. For example, one tourist found that his expectations of the guide were met when he said, “He was that character of a down home country Cajun guy. What you would see in your mind, what Hollywood would come up with what a tour boat guide is like” (Interview I 2010). I was able to interview tourists from almost all of the tours I took within thirty minutes of their experiences when the impressions were fresh on their minds. It was always interesting to listen to them reflect even if they were disappointed in the tour. All in all, the representations of place that informed my work are comparable because they shared the “stage” and topic of the performance of tourism economies from the perspectives of production, consumption and management. Though the context of tourism development united these sets of Atchafalaya perceptions, the motivations for development were not solely about money. The tourist experience is a commodity, but the ‘take-home’ is not only status and pictures. Tourists, guides and ANHA officials are all interested in the transference of knowledge as a part of the experience. The ANHA plan gives explicit references to building national level “understanding” and “awareness” of the region and wants to protect its cultural and natural resources through (tourism) education. Guides are also motivated educators. One guide who was particularly well-versed in swamp ecology refused to call himself an entertainer. “I do the education and let the swamp and the wildlife be the entertainment” (Interview M 2010). They educated because they believed that the Basin was a threatened environment and that they could fight its destruction with information. Another said, ”I

82 will fight for it. I have given talks and when we are on the tour I am very emphatic about my feelings for it and wanting to know that the generations to come will be able to enjoy it” (Interview N 2010). Though the context of swamp touring and regional tourism development is to an extent driven by money, the education that tourists receive cannot be overlooked as an equally important motivation. However altruistic education may be, we cannot separate the production of place knowledge from the experience commodity. Thrift holds that through the ever-increasing ethic of consumption in the West, commodities now “may increasingly be delivered as time-limited rights to streams of content” (Thrift 2005, p.7). Whether for economic growth or the desire to inform, both guides and managers have a vested interest in maintaining a sense of the exotic to attract visitors. This promotion of exotic natures and cultures begins long before the boats leave the landing and must be realized through tourism in order to maintain word of mouth advertising and repeat customers. In what follows, I argue that exoticism and therefore marginality are maintained by performances of nature/culture hybridity. In particular, wildness of place and people framed by the unique, mystical and dying associations between Cajuns and the swamp are used to seduce visitors and reaffirm/create/sell knowledge about the Basin. I begin with wildness in its most spatial sense, wilderness.

4.4.2 Semi-wild “There is something about being out in the swamp, especially when you're alone, that seems to suck the poisons of civilization out of you” (Interview P 2010). This palatable, healing power of place is an appealing experience as a geographer and place consumer yet when theorized through the framework of literatures on space and natural purity this notion is itself poisoned. Geographers inclined to stick to the experts would spend the remainder of this chapter deprecating the tropes of purity that inhere in wilderness myths and supposed mystical spiritual connections with nature. Yet hypocritically we still would jump at the chance to spend an hour or two floating through these places. Pure nature may be fallacious but only in a theoretical sense informed by our understandings of history and ecology. In other words, can’t a place be “untrammeled by man” if we have no evidence or knowledge otherwise (Wilderness Act 1964)? This, I believe is the frame of reference that many visitors bring to the Basin. And for good reason. The promotional pamphlets and websites show few pictures of the ‘lake of stumps’ landscapes or oil production platforms that dominate some areas of the Basin. For the swamp neophyte the experience of a swamp tour can be disenchanting. One visitor from another state said, “being that it said ‘Swamp Tours’ I was expecting maybe a little bit more wilderness” (Interview B 2010). Guides negotiate this discrepancy by hybridizing the purity of space so as to foster appreciation for what is ‘left’ and by enculturating the natural landscape with history. The narrative of civilization in the swamp often becomes a story of local people living off of the swamp and finally succumbing to the lure/external pressures of resource development. This discourse is manifested by establishing tropes of purity, ravaged loss, and finally by blending the two in the material context of the swamp. Despite decades of uncontrolled logging, massive Corps of Engineers water control projects and petroleum extraction, the Basin is still constructed as a pure space of nature. A guide told me that in the places he goes, “what you see is real” (Interview O 2010). Those who commented in the ANHA public information sessions often used

83 phrases that highlighted the purity of the space. Besides words like “wild” and “wilderness” they coded the Basin as “pure”, “untouched”, “mystique” and a place where one could be “close to nature” (ANHA comments 2009). One respondent’s answers to the seven questions on the survey are telling enough that the reader need not know the specific questions that were asked to see his or her perspective

“1. Undeveloped wild area. 2. Undeveloped wild area. 3. Any human development. 4. See - undeveloped wild area 5. Undeveloped wild area. 6. Over development as tourist area. 7. Probably unrealistic but you asked” (ANHA comments 2009).

Besides pure and pristine, many sources see the Basin as a place of beauty (which is hard to argue with). “Breathtaking”, “pretty”, “beauty” and “magnificent” were all common Atchafalaya impressions (ANHA comments 2009). These few references are aimed at the landscape in general, but many others tied beauty, wildness and purity to specific species such as cypress trees, birds, and other wildlife. In contrast to tropes of purity, locals (but rarely tourists) see the Basin as a place where nature has been exploited and lost. From the ANHA sessions, people used phrases like “destroying our wilderness” and “return to the wild habitat it once was” (ANHA comments 2009). Another respondent positioned the Basin as ‘on the fence’ when he or she wrote, ”It's wild right now, why change it? Once changed, it's gone forever” (ANHA comments 2009). A local writer told me, “A fishermen pointed out that he used to be able to go places in the Basin where you knew nobody had ever been, but you can't do that anymore” (Interview P 2010). So from these points of view, the natural mystique is either on its way out, or too far gone. The ways that people temporally construct the Basin are fascinating. It seems as if the future is bleak, the past is idyllic and the present is, well, somewhere in between. The in between-ness of the present state of affairs indicates the deeper significance of the ravaged-pure continuum by revealing it as an essentializing and subjective discourse. This binary also transposes easily to the material experience and discourses of semi-wildness that are used in the present to negotiate the conflict between past and future. Semi-wildness is not a word that I came up with, but one that emerged in several interviews independently and in the ANHA comments. Though several respondents referred to semi-wild specifically, others did so in a roundabout way by saying the Basin was a “tiny microcosm of a wilderness” or “ in certain places it is a wilderness” or “a wilderness in some ways” (Interview A 2010; Interview R 2010; Interview D 2010). In a theoretical sense the notion of semi-pure is impossible. However, purity and wilderness, though they may be commonly justified by an assumed vastness of space, do not imply a large scale. In fact, no scale is implied by thinking of nature as pure and, in many ways, the patchwork purity of the Basin seems feasible. But to designate which areas are pure and which are violated would be completely subjective and would ignore the preponderance of past activities that have altered the Basin on a grand scale not to mention the fact that the Atchafalaya River’s water level is controlled by a computer upstream in Simmesport. The semi-wild still exists despite it being theoretically impossible or objectively indefinable. Below I list a few interesting ways that locals gave credence to the semi-wild.

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“Prior to the construction of the levies, you actually had communities living in the wilderness” (Interview J 2010).

“When you get out in the swamp it feels like you are in the middle of nowhere, but you know you are not” (Interview A 2010).

“I would like to see a few more interpretive sites and I wouldn't like to see it lose its ‘wildness’” (ANHA comments 2009).

“a relatively safe, wild-like experience” (ANHA comments 2009)

“Semi-wilderness; especially right here because the interstate is running through it” (Interview F 2010).

All of these cases reveal how people can create hybrid spaces to deal with the inconsistencies of pure-ravaged spaces, and in the end, spaces of nature vs. culture. The last comment by Interviewee F leads me into a discussion of ways people designated what was wild and what was humanized within these hybrid spaces. In several instances, guides referenced the Interstate 10 bridge (and to a lesser extent the US 190 bridge) as the dominant ‘border’ or evidence of the Basin’s humanness. (see Figure 3 below)

Figure 3: I-10 bridge over the Basin

Several authors have commented on its significance (Bernard 2003; Reuss 1998) as a ‘conquering’ of the swamp for transit. Paradoxically, another guide spoke of the opposite

85 sense of space when he said, “It is a wilderness area but that is only because you don't have roads and utilities and people living there” (Interview J 2010). Besides roads, people see its non-urban nature as indicative of its purity. One respondent brought out Cronon’s main point by seeing value in “the natural beauty that is not as evident in our towns and cities” (ANHA comments 2009). The Basin was also made wild by having a lack of people, and containing “dangerous animals” (ANHA comments 2009). It was constructed as less wild because of second growth forest, petroleum, canals, levies and tourists. These negotiations of semi-wildness are fascinating for a researcher in their paradoxes. I believe that they reveal the disconnect between academic representations of space (via theory) and spatial practice. In this sense, semi-wildness is a space of representation for the Basin and even if such spaces emerge from the structural contradictions of producing space they are indicative of fluidity and local agency.

4.4.3 Wild Behaviors Moving away from the landscape itself, I want to suggest that wildness is also a part of human behavior in the Basin, a trope also noted by Ogden in her swamp ethnography of the Everglades (2011). Although a range of psychological perspectives are applied to explain deviance, here I employ a commonsense notion of deviance as activities that break the law or involve physical violence. Lawbreaking is by no means unique to any space and is inherent in any society that has laws. I choose to highlight wildness through violence and lawbreaking only because it came up in so many of my interviews. The natural wildness of the space implies that to some extent, it is difficult to access and outside the reach of the law. Though this material factor has greatly diminished with the invention of the outboard motor and the development of more access points, Wilson notes that throughout its history, the Southern swamp has been a place where outlaws, runaway slaves and conscription dodgers could find refuge (2006). Furthermore, it is notable that constructions of the Cajun ‘other’ also tag them as violent. Perhaps this is why when asked what misconceptions about Cajuns tourists bring to the tour, one guide stated, “they think that Cajuns still live in the swamp and they are out there wanting to rape and pillage everybody that comes in” (Interview R 2010). I split my analysis of the discourse on extra-legal behaviors into stories of physical confrontations and violations of wildlife/environmental laws that occurred in the swamp. Many of the stories I heard about violence were set at Lake Martin, a nearly 800 acre artificial swamp/lake used for duck hunting, fishing, as a protected migratory bird sanctuary, and extensively as a location for swamp tours. Its proximity to Lafayette and ease of access made Lake Martin the starting point for at least four different swamp tours. The boat launch at Lake Martin was the setting for many of the stories I heard about physical violence between guides. In a peculiar sense, we could think of the launch as the departure point from civilization to wildness. This characteristic positions it as a hybrid or heterotopic space where the performance of civil society counteracts with the performance of wildness. I asked all of the guides about conflict amongst them and though most felt the competition was civil, in reference to one guide, violence and unscrupulous business practices seemed to be his forte. I only single him out because those who had interactions with ‘the Culprit’ (as I will refer to him) verified stories of physical confrontation independently. The fact that each of their recollections of specific fights were comparable led me to believe that they were more than ‘tall-tales’ or one side

86 of the story. The violence at Lake Martin had driven at least one guide company out of the area. “I started at Lake Martin. It got to a point to where to defend myself, there were probably going to have to be people I would kill” (Interview N 2010). Others spoke of knife fights, death threats and sabotage of vehicles. A guide who worked out of another launch but was familiar with the situation stated, “Man between guns and knives how they didn't have a shoot out over there yet, it's just a matter of time before one of these guys is going to end up face down in that lake” (Interview F 2010). A Lake Martin guide who tried to stay out of the conflict told me how he had to defend himself once:

He approached me where other people [tourists] could hear and acted like I had said something to him, and I never said a word to him. He said ‘what you said to me?’. He said, ‘I'm not playing with you anymore and he slammed the [truck] door on my leg. Then I kicked the door open and it hit him so he came at me in my truck and I kicked him in the throat” (Interview O 2010).

Rather than try to cautiously dig deeper into his side of the stories, when I interviewed the purported aggressor, I asked him the same question as the others regarding conflict between guides. He answered simply, “yes”. Though I had the most insight into violence at Lake Martin, I certainly heard about it in other parts of the swamp as well. The threat of violence had an effect on swamp accessibility for one guide who also did some crawfishing. “We drove up one day and there was some guys there with shotguns. And they told me and Malcolm ‘where you're going’? ‘We are going to check our cages’. ‘No you are not’” (Interview O 2010). Another man who was not native to the area was told to leave, which he refused to do. “I said I'm not going anywhere. And someone was trying to kill me. They were shooting at me at night, through the house from the other side of the lake. I could hear the gunshots and the bullets passing over my head” (Interview M 2010). These conflicts generally involve territoriality in the swamp. Whether through the expansion of dominance over the boat launch, aggression towards outsiders or establishing control in ‘no man’s land’ violence and the threat of violence are facts of life for many who have a claim on the Atchafalaya. I now return to Lake Martin as a site of environmental lawlessness. Despite being a relatively small lake (compared to other areas frequented by swamp tours), in two minutes on a boat one can be out of sight, surrounded by a canopy of cypress. Access is restricted to the rookery at Lake Martin for most of the year to protect the nesting grounds of a wide variety of endemic and migratory bird species. This border in the swamp is designated only by a few signs and the assumption that most boaters know where it is. ‘The Culprit’ in particular was known to try to dissolve this boundary by taking tours into the rookery and removing the signs. He was also known to be hyper-competitive for tourist dollars. A guide who had been the Culprit’s competition at Lake Martin before choosing to move his operation elsewhere told me this story:

“I heard him make a statement one time that he was so damn tired of people stopping on the road and taking pictures and not taking his tour (he is so avaricious) that, ‘I'm going to make those birds move’. And what

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we think, he set off major aerial salutes and skyrockets and roman candles and that stuff on a Saturday night. Because it was so dark, 90% of the birds and eggs and babies never came back” (Interview N 2010).

This type of wildlife violation was seen as denigrating nature and in reference to ‘the Culprit’ was confirmed by several other guides. Another type of wildlife law-breaking was seen as less about hurting wildlife and more about preserving culture. A Cajun guide told me about his hunting club called Mal Faires or “wrongdoers”. Though he didn’t admit himself to breaking the law he explained how wildlife laws were broken as a matter of “being Coonass”.

“The Cajuns pride themselves on their hunting and fishing ability. They also pride their ability on getting away with certain things… the stigma is being Coonass you're going to kill a few gros becs [yellow crowned night heron, a protected species] and make a supper with it and get away with it. It makes it taste better you see” (Interview O 2010).

This guide made a designation between Acadiens and ‘Coonasses’ that placed the latter outside of the mainstream and, admittedly, more wild. Exposing environmental violations was the primary motivation of one tour guide I spoke with. However, his culprits were oil companies and short-lived timber companies that logged cypress illegally. He was the director of an environmental protection group that prided itself on eliminating illegal logging companies that chipped up cypress trees for garden mulch sold at $2 a bag. His next project was suing the State of Louisiana for failing to prosecute oil companies that left spoil banks next to their pipeline dredges, preventing sheet flows of water. In terms of lawlessness, the failure of the state to enforce environmental laws and preserve the lifestyle of the Cajun people, to him, was ethnocide.

“It is illegal under international law what is happening in Louisiana. But the corporations control the government to a point that it is almost unstoppable. So I think the government should get on the job. They should be enforcing the environmental laws to the maximum strength to protect as many swamps as you can” (Interview M 2010).

He was not critical of the laws as much as the state’s failure to enforce them. “The fact that we have cases, it is a sign of failure. Me suing a landowner or me suing a corporation is a sign of the government not doing their job” (Interview M 2010). The connection he drew between the lifeways of the swamp and the vitality of the ethnicity was his most interesting point. It was notable that by using ‘”ethnocide” he referred to Cajuns as a whole rather than ‘people who depend on the swamp’. This claim necessitates narrowing all Cajuns to ‘swamp Cajuns’ and furthermore the purification of ‘swamp people’ to ‘Cajuns’. Thus, Cajuns are assumed to depend on the swamp, and swamp people are Cajuns. Investigating this discourse is the crux of the following section.

4.4.4 Connecting culture and nature

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I assert here that people within the Atchafalaya and tourist outsiders draw meaningful connections between the landscape of the swamp, Cajun ethnicity and wildness. Though the exotic nature of the Atchafalaya Basin is home to a wide variety of people, its most exoticized culture is Cajun. The ANHA plan states this specifically by noting, “the popular cultural identity of the region is strongly associated with the Cajuns” (2002, p.5). Coding the Basin as a Cajun space is problematic from the standpoint of state funded tourism growth. One respondent from the ANHA public meetings called the approach, “Totally unbalanced in favor of the ‘Cajun Culture’ as opposed to providing a true balance with the ‘Creole Culture’ and other cultures” (ANHA comments 2009). The Cajunization of space could also be critiqued as a part of this dissertation since I have devoted little to how other ethnic groups perform and produce the Basin. I have attempted to code the swamp as a Cajun space only by using perspectives that Cajuns themselves see as connecting landscape and their cultures. However, I must admit that I was drawn to the topic because I myself saw the space as a Cajun habitat. I also feel justified drawing these connections as a researcher since most of my work was with swamp tours, none of which explicitly delved into the swamp as a space of other ethnic groups. The dominance of the Cajun connection to the swamp and its wildness was indicated not only by my respondents, but showed up in the public comments as well. The following impressions reveal how the three concepts of ‘wild’ ‘Cajun’ and ‘swamp’ are cohesive in the imagined geography of locals. They are answers to the question of “What makes the National Heritage Area special to you” (all from ANHA Comments 2009).

“Its natural beauty and swamp ecosystem, the wildlife and Cajun culture”

“The natural beauty, the wildlife, & the Cajun people”

“When outsiders think of Cajun Louisiana, the image that comes to their minds is the wild landscape of the Basin”

These respondents grouped ‘wild’, ‘Cajun’ and ‘swamp (landscape)’ as the keystones of their appreciations of the Basin. Especially the last comment reveals that this notion of ‘wild Cajun swamp’ is transferrable to imaginations outside of the Basin as well. Not only do locals connect the three concepts, but they also carry a sense of the exotic in their understandings of space. “Being in the Basin is like being a million miles from anywhere, in terms of nature and culture” (ANHA comments 2009). Performances of space such as this marginalize Cajuns and the swamp as wild and do so in the context of tourism. To show more thoroughly how this is achieved, I separate my analysis into three basic categories. I begin with ways that Cajuns see themselves as connected to the swamp through foodways and ‘living off the land (swamp)’. These are perspectives that illustrate the importance of the swamp to Cajun cultures. Then I show how Cajuns saw themselves as part of the swamp, rather than depending on it. I conclude with ways that people saw the demise of the swamp connection as an indication or cause of the demise of Cajun cultures.

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Especially in periods when capitalist production was less dominant, when only a handful of commodities were produced for markets outside of the Basin, people met their material needs by subsistence farming, hunting and fishing. This was the case for the Acadians before the Grand Derangment and throughout the emergence of ‘Cajuns’ as a Louisiana ethnicity. The connection specifically to wetlands was forged before the diaspora according to one guide. “See Nova Scotia, when they came down here, when they were exiled there was swamp there. When they came here this was not new to them the swamp. Like today, I still live off the swamp for food and everything else” (Interview K 2010). The historical connection to the swamp, for him, went beyond Louisiana. Another told me, “it is a big big part of our living. A lot of different generations came up from their making a living. It is very very important” (Interview D 2010). More in the present tense, another guide romanticized the connection. “It is a relation that is in a peaceful place. It is a place that we enjoy going and we enjoy just looking at it and being in it. Plus, we derive a lot of our food sources [from the swamp]” (Interview T 2010). This was also the impression of tourists from the guides’ perspectives. Tourists “are kind of amazed about our way of life. They say man we never realized people still live like y'all do, making their living off the land” (Interview D 2010). It is notable that so many responses mentioned food. For many people in the Basin today, harvesting wild crawfish is the last ‘ethnic’ industry and keeps the swamp subsistence mentality afloat. I use the word subsistence here not because trapping crawfish is truly a subsistence activity, in fact it is as wholly dependent on market exchange as any other commodity, but people who participate in crawfishing often call it subsistence or ‘living off the land’. One respondent revealed the importance of the swamp to Cajuns by noting that only French-speaking Cajuns were involved in the wild harvest and those who worked for crawfish farms (pond raised) were essentially Americanized Cajuns or not Cajuns. Crawfish farms were seen as a threat to the wild harvest and the overall lifestyles of Cajun crawfishermen. This can be supported by the fact that in 2006, a relatively good year for total crawfish production, only 7.6% of crawfish were wild harvested compared to 51% in 1993 (Louisiana Crawfish Harvest Statistics 2007). Maintaining this lifestyle was not a matter of getting rich, but continuing the culture.

“Being able to make a living off of the land that is what crawfishing, shrimping, and oystering are. Being able to enjoy your environment and make your living off of it. Cajun lifestyle is not how much money you can make, that is Creole. It is being happy with where you are in the lifestyle that you have” (Interview O 2010).

I think this quote also speaks to why crawfishing is seen as subsistence despite the fact that fishermen sell their catch. To my respondents, working in a labor economy to accumulate wealth was the antithesis to living off the land. Living off the land was ‘the Cajun way’, so whether through hunting, fishing or tour guiding (as many confirmed) they were maintaining a connection to their ancestral lifeways. I also asked the guides if they felt like they were a part of the swamp. While some were more hesitant to break down the nature-culture dualism; “not as a part of the swamp as much as I have a deep connection with the wildness”, others had no problem thinking of themselves as “just as much a part of the swamp as a fish or an alligator or anything

90 else” (Interview P 2010; Interview M 2010). Even the first respondent above who spoke of a “deep connection” went on to say, “Our connection to nature is based on the fact that we are it and it is us, and you can feel that out in the Basin” (Interview P 2010). For another guide being a part of the swamp meant that he was completely immersed in it (literally and figuratively). He confirmed being a part of the swamp and went on to say, “I have waded up to my neck in the water from hunting frogs on both sides of the bayou. Snakes come out to the headlight you just take your frog and grab them and throw them out of the way. I don't worry about them, I love the swamp” (Interview T 2010). Language was also a cultural element that connected Cajuns to the swamp. “Often when I'm out in the woods I speak in Cajun French to the fishermen and if I see the same person in a store in Catahoula we would speak English” (Interview P 2010). The blending of people and landscape was supported by tourists. One said that the swamp was “in the guide’s heart”, while another felt the swamp contained “a crossing of animals and human beings”(Interview L 2010; Interview S 2010). In reference to the guide, “his body and the way he moves. He explores things. It's like being a bird” (Interview L 2010). Finally, a guide who was particularly adept at speaking to the point said, “yeah, one can’t do without the other” when I asked if the connection between Cajuns and the swamp was valid (Interview F 2010). Finally, I found many instances when respondents saw the demise of the swamp connection as a harbinger or cause of the demise of Cajun culture, similar to the mention of “ethnocide” from the previous section. Much of the discourse around the culture dying out revolved around the decline of activities that got people out into the swamp. Thus, there had been a gradual moving away from the swamp, beginning with the opening of the swamp to motor driven transit. “See with the outboard motor, it will take you from the levy anywhere you want to go in the Basin in a matter of an hour so people really don't have to live in the Basin anymore” (Interview O 2010). According to him the era before the outboard was “more laid back”. A later development influence that drew people from the swamp was the boom in offshore oil production. “More people working the oil fields are going to the bigger cities and they get away from this going into the swamp” (Interview O 2010). Rather than referencing the past, some guides saw the death of the Cajun swamp connection due to the fact that Cajun children today were “raised differently” (Interview F 2010). “These children here on board today will be raised up in front of a computer they won't be in the swamp. Their entertainment will be that wii and things of that nature [!]. All that's gone” (Interview R 2010). The swamp was not as important as it used to be. Losing the connection usually meant losing the dependence on the swamp as a source of income. Though no one saw the decline of Cajuns depending on the swamp for entertainment (i.e recreational fishing and hunting), these types of activities are not unique to Cajuns in the same way as harvesting wild crawfish. “What will Cajuns do in the Basin if crawfishing doesn't survive? I don't know, some of them could become tour guides I guess but as a whole I think we would be less happy and fulfilled less productive and less Cajun” (Interview P 2010). Obviously this highlights the paradox of using tourism to maintain a connection with the swamp. Though several of my respondents felt that tourism was only the latest adaptation of Cajuns to living off the swamp, even exponential growth in swamp tours could by no means replace the jobs of the hundreds of crawfishermen.

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4.5 Conclusion

After reviewing how geographers and other theorists have conceptualized marginal, rural and wild spaces and the marginalized people that are associated with them, I contend that people have the performative ability to code themselves and their surroundings as exotic without the representative power of the outside world. Rather than dissecting whether their performance is only reaction to the expectations of tourists I conclude that upholding imagined geographies is not exclusively a promotional stunt, but based in the material referents of the space. I came to this research project with the expectation that connecting Cajuns to the swamp was used to denigrate and animalize them as dirty and less than human. This hypothesis was informed by the literature which has taken great strides to expose the nefarious capacities of spatial othering. However, after experiencing the tours, and primarily through speaking with the guides in both a formal interview context and informally, I believe otherwise. Cajuns are constructed as occupying the swamp as a habitat in a symbolic and material sense. But this connection to landscape is celebrated rather than vilified and its decline is lamented. Mainstream appreciation for Cajun cultures and the swamp (nee wetland) environment has emerged concurrently throughout the past fifty years motivated to a large extent by tourism. Certainly not all Cajuns wear tourism “as a badge of honor”, but then again not all Cajuns feel an ancestral connection to crawfishing either (Interview O 2010). Tourism must maintain Cajuns as exotic to continue to operate. But being exotic or having an exotic, ethnic connection to nature does not necessarily imply being less-than human. For most guides, the relationship between Cajuns and the swamp is unique and being recognized and celebrated as being unique is a great improvement upon the ethnic and spatial stereotypes of the past.

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CHAPTER FIVE

THE IDEAS OF NATURE

Through abstraction and the coding of the landscape as marginal in a tourist experience, the Atchafalaya is a space that is being commodified at an intimate, experiential scale which reifies the paradigmatic functionalization of the swamp as a source of value. Critical geographers of nature have assessed the commodification of natural spaces from top-down political economic perspectives as well as from perspectives of local lived experience. This chapter argues that to better understand and critique the process of swamp abstraction and commodification we must acknowledge both structural production and on-site performance of wetland values. Using a performative epistemology positions swamp tour guides as vital producers of experience and knowledge about wetlands. Swamp tours can act to spatialize and commodify the swamp by acting as commodities in themselves, but also spatialize though guides’ valuations of specific landscape elements and processes. Cultural and eco-tourism have thrived in the Basin in the context of wetland environmental protection and Cajun cultural expression and depend on guides establishing narratives of fixity in the habitat. Though working in the commodity context, guides also have the ability to resist the exploitation of the swamp and its inhabitants by creatively rejecting abstract or commodity conceptions of this dynamic place. By observing how wetlands are generalized and valued from within the swamp we can further understand the unique local manifestations of broad economic ideologies and how people are empowered to resist or reproduce them. I justify this argument first by addressing how the broad concept of nature has been approached by geographers. Then I turn to how critical geographers and environmental historians have theorized nature as a tool and outgrowth of broader commodity ideologies and how this has been applied specifically to wetlands. Using the example of Cajun crawfishermen, I show that though this type of approach does have some explanatory power, in the end it fails to account for the multiplicities of everyday life in the Basin. Next, I review geographic literature that suggests nature is given meaning through iterated performances and connect this notion to scholarship on ecotourism. Finally, I use specific examples to show how ecotourism and other versions of swamp commodification are upheld and rejected by guides.

5.1 Framing Nature through Geography

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The goal of the section is to understand the way in which the idea of nature is used within geography as a whole. As an introduction, I review Castree’s 2005 Nature which treats the concept from both a physical and human geography perspective. The meaning of the word ‘nature’ is highly debatable and this debate signals that the concept has no firm essence and cannot be treated as a bounded category. I accept the concept of nature as a social construction which I assume to be a human (social) idea upon which validity of power rests. Beyond being a socially mediated idea, I treat nature as a performed social production. For the purposes of this chapter I often use the word habitat interchangeably with nature. Though the former implies a spatial concept, as social products both signify a humanized domain. Furthermore, Castree notes that the term environment can be contentious because it denies human involvement and thus accepts the dichotomy of human/nature (Castree 2005). I accept this notion of environment as it is used to mean ‘the non-human world’ but also must note the explicit humanness of phrases such as the ‘built environment’ or the ‘political environment’. Finally, herein I also use ‘ecology’ to mean the scientific study of the environment, which may bridge disciplines but as a subject matter has greatly influenced general understandings of nature and knowledges specific to geography. Castree, in his thorough review of nature in geography, writes, ”the discipline of geography has no ‘nature’ – no essential coherent character- in part because of the diverse ways in which geographers comprehend nature” (2005, p.243). Although early influences from Mackinder, Ratzel, and Semple seemed to bridge the gap between nature and society, treating nature as the logic determining human forms, under further scrutiny this perspective was renounced. Today, when it comes to nature, geographers are a house divided. The two camps, physical geography and human geography, adhere to different ontologies and epistemologies, one that accepts nature as real and able to be studied and another that sees the idea of nature as a product of humans that can be studied only accepting a certain subjectivity. Castree over-polarizes the binary to simplify his argument, but does acknowledge that many geographers operate in the middle ground where each can accept the ‘realities’ of the other side’s work. Despite or because of this tension geography has produced a rich tradition of natural philosophy. I use Castree’s Nature as a primer for the geography of nature because, as he notes, this has not been done before. His book runs the gamut of geography, and it is not organized as an edited volume such as Braun and Castree’s earlier work that is heavy on human geographers’ perspectives (1998). Instead, Castree comments on the history of nature in geography, and then broadly assesses the views of the human side, the physical side, and finally the new ecology that attempts to move past the nature/human dichotomy. Castree’s book is the seminal work in this field. I concentrate my analysis then on the human side since physical geographers have well-established realist theories of nature that are not as rigorously critiqued. Here, I find work on nature that covers three perspectives of human geography, the social, the economic, and the political. Then, for the economic side of nature I take two of Castree’s more specific works that focus on the commodifcation of nature and a Marxist critique of nature construction. Finally, I look at geographers’ investigations into the political and legal constructions of nature with two articles from the Annals: Delaney (2001) and Liverman (2004).

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5.1.1 Physical and Environmental Geography and ‘New Ecology’ Castree delves into physical geography’s conceptualization of nature in his chapter Two Natures? The dis/unity of geography. He outlines the realist ontology of nature to which the physical side adheres and gives several reasons that physical geographers are more nature-endorsing (Castree 2005). First, as he puts it, “one can argue that many aspects of the non-human world exist regardless of how we represent them” (Castree 2005, p178). Next, even if we accept that nature is somehow constructed, this does not make its existence false or without power. Physical geographers hold that nature is not completely reducible to social processes, the physical environment existed before society could interpret it. Finally, Castree uses the example of acid rain to show that despite being a problem that has been shown to be caused by humans, its effects are still tangible and can be altered by our input, and thus are worthy of study. While accepting that nature exists independent to humanity, physical geographers also assume that it can be methodically studied. As the geographers most likely to adhere to a self-definition as scientists, this camp employs what Castree calls, ‘the deductive nomological mode of scientific explanation” (2005, p.196). This mode applies methodologically verifiable techniques on systems that have quantifiable variables that function dependently and independently upon each other. Although physical geography covers a vast array of topics, the ontological and epistemological assumptions are uniform and the sub-discipline focuses on producing knowledge about nature rather than knowledge about how nature is viewed without much contest. Finally, Castree introduces the concept of “hybrid-geographies”, which he loosely ties together under the flag of environmental geography (p.224). These authors (though not necessarily self-identified environmental geographers) practice a geography that tries to move past the dichotomous human/nature divide, and values ‘the world’ apolitically as events in time and space. He introduces Thrift’s non-representational theory as the backbone of a relational theory of geography. He also gives credence to actor-network theory from Latour, Callon, and Law as a new way to escape the divide. The influential work of Harvey is noted as “new dialectics” that explain nature from an advanced interpretation of Marx (p.232). Castree also finds value in what he calls “new-ecology” that dissolves the dichotomy by refuting ideas of equilibrium and accepts human alteration of the environment as not any more or less ‘natural’ at any point in history (p.234). What these new interpretations of the world have in common is that they “take issue with the idea that there is some transcendental principle that governs how the world works (like equilibrium or balance)” (Castree 2005, p.236).

5.1.2 Human Geography Human geographers today are positioned atop a century of research that has led them to the conclusion that social processes are the best way to understand how humanity creates the world around itself. The postmodern turn has been vital to human geography, as many have seen fit to investigate the power relations that have been used to naturalize what are essentially human elements. Castree notes, ”In its strongest form, the de-naturalizing argument suggests that nature is not natural (i.e. only apparently natural)” (2005, p.109). The author gives several examples of how contemporary geographers have shown the contestation of nature to be motivated by interests. Using the flag of “Himalayan

95 environmental degradation”, policy-makers in Thailand marginalized ethnic farmers by restricting environmental/subsistence practices that are unique to the group. However, Forsythe and others have shown that the fact of “Himalayan environmental degradation” is debatable but has been presented as a fact and used as a political weapon (Castree 2005, p.128). Also, Cronon is noted for his work that questioned the assumptions behind the concept of ’wilderness’ and showed how different interpretations of wilderness have shaped an American “settler society” (Castree, 2005, p.135). Human geographers also have been influenced by Foucault, who showed how discourses of power construct the human world all the way down to identity and our understandings of the body. Geographers have used this work to investigate ‘human nature’ through discourses on race, gender, and sexuality. Castree also uses Baudrillard to show how geographers have interpreted representations of reality. Finally, Castree questions the motivation of social construction ideologies. He contrasts their interpretation with moral naturalism- a force seen by many postmodern human geographers as inherently authoritarian. “It can close down discussion about appropriate moral behavior by trying to ‘read-off’ an ethical code from the supposed ‘facts of nature’” (Castree, 2005, p.169). I treat Nature as a broad yet thorough investigation into the ways in which nature has been understood by human geographers. I complement this understanding with several more specific renderings that focus on the economic and political constructions of nature. Castree has produced a wealth of literature on the topic, but I use two of his pieces that represent the contemporary economies of nature. In “Bioprospecting: from theory to practice and back again” the author shows that bioprospecting, the search for natural substances (in the rainforest) that can be refined to produce pharmaceuticals, has been represented both as a way to “save nature by selling it” and as a more innovative way to commodify the environment (Castree 2003, p.36). From the neoclassical economic approach, commodifying the rainforest gives it a value that will inherently protect it. From the Marxist approach, Castree writes that, according to McAfee, “the price capital must pay to access hitherto economically unvalued markets is seen less as a ‘reward’ to the stewards of those environments and more as a necessary ‘cost of production’” (Castree 2005, p45). His overall conclusion from the piece is that while the neoclassical argument provides little proof of how nature actually benefits, the Marxist side fails to provide an alternative, and is essentially too instrumental. Castree’s second article, “Commodifying what nature?” questions the substance of Marxist critiques on the commodification of nature (2003). He finds that there is no essential reading of the topic from the Marxian standpoint. The primary problem is that Marxists do not have a substantial definition of nature, which according to the author is commodified differently depending on the object of study. Similarly to the previous piece, Castree finds that Marxists are heavy on theory and claims, but light on evidence or alternatives. His paper not only outlines another problem in defining nature, but also shows the richness of the overall literature. His argument in this article will be given further scrutiny later in this chapter. On the subject of political/legal constructions of nature I introduce Liverman’s “Who Governs, at What Scale, and at What Price” (2004). She believes that geography can offer solutions to the questions in her title in relation to the environment. She also notes that the commodification of nature has been offered as an answer to environmental protection but that this always involves issues of environmental governance that come

96 down to the regional and local scales. Thus, she upholds that the political cannot be divorced from the economic. Her call is for geographers to adhere more to area studies in their work so that they can more directly influence the debates of governance. Delaney investigates the social production of nature through law in “Making Nature/Marking Humans: Law as Site of (Cultural) Production” (2001). He contrasts the authoritative relativity of law with the fluidity of constructions of nature. He investigates several ‘sites’ where nature has been governed to produce law including externality, animality, and corporeality. By defining the body, the animal, and the non-human, and attributing rights thereby, the law reifies the state and recognizes an agency of nature. Delaney problematizes the legal distinctions and offers suggestion to how the constructivist view of nature could be better applied to a legal framework. Though the ontology of nature has been divisive in geography this friction keeps the fire burning. As a critical human geographer, it can be easy to fall into the trap of castigating physical geographers’ lack of sophistication when dealing with nature or “the environment”. Harvey goes as far as writing, “the natural sciences are in a pre-social state” (Harvey 1996a, p.158). But rather than taking a teleological jab that only serves to deepen disdain, I contend that both ‘sides’ are equally important. There is some solace in Hartshorne’s perspective that, “The distinctive purpose of geography is to study the variations over the earth of phenomena which exist in interrelation, regardless of the classification by kind” (Hartshorne 1959, p.34).

5.2 Marxist Interpretations of Nature

Since this dissertation is dependent upon the notion that widely accepted ideas have the power to influence space and how we experience it, I delve into the works of Marxist geographers and critical environmental historians who have produced tomes of literature on this topic. Castree provides a bedrock for this chapter and will be examined further, but first I turn to his contemporaries who have developed Marx far beyond the disheartening notion that “Nature…is not much of a Marxist category” (Smith, 1996 p49).

5.2.1 Harvey and Smith Harvey’s Justice, Nature and the Geography of Difference (1996) exposes the derivation of nature within the capitalist form of production. He begins by implicating money as the solitary method of valuation in an economy. Nature, therefore, can only have two values, one of monetary basis or that is inherent. However, he goes on to show that all inherent meanings of nature are constructed within socially arbitrary frameworks. Inherent values may be construed through multiple voices- spiritual, nationalistic, metaphorical, or ecological - but are created within the throes of power and money. The absence of a neutral mediator of nature can be made invisible by the sources of power. The biologist’s natural discovery is valid within the power of science and its perceived neutrality. In the same light, metaphor creates nature as a seemingly objective point upon which to judge humanity. Social Darwinism was spurred as a result of the extended natural metaphor. Historically, much to Harvey’s chagrin, nature has been characterized on a pendulum between optimism and pessimism. This contest, which encompasses the

97 fear of scarcity and the orgy of unlimited consumption, shields the perpetuation of the exploitation. “There is, in short, nothing more ideologically powerful for capitalist interests to have at hand than unconstrained technological optimism and doctrines of progress ineluctably coupled to a doom-saying Malthusianism that can conveniently be blamed when, as they invariable do, things go wrong” (Harvey 1996a, p.149). Nature is a resource that can be unending or nearly gone. When injecting nature into the Marxian frame of reference, it becomes apparent that socialist politics and theory have often treated the non-human world with the same disregard as the capitalist. Though critical scholars can find countless examples of how the abstraction and commodification of nature have led to ecological crisis, reorganizing the mode of production still treats the non-human world as an input to be configured by labor. Just because one argues for the value of this labor product to remain in the control of the actual producers does not imply a more-than-resource perspective on the material environment. Certainly without the motivations of profit and growth, the exploitation of nature as a source of surplus value would rely more on needs rather than wants. It is tempting and simple to position nature in the same pattern of exploitation as labor and conclude that profiteering labor and nature would be eliminated by taking away the drive for profit in general, but the core of Marxian critiques relies on a human justice ethic that cannot directly be translated to the natural worlds. For example, it is obvious that through the maintenance of class, the labor of some humans is given less of an exchange value than others. But this does not correlate to the notion that the exchange value of a farmed lumber pine tree has a greater value than a “wild” member of the same species and age across the fence because neither has the conscious capacity to create value. The use value of a tree depends on the consumption of its body, not its productive capacity. Capitalism can abstract both the values of labor and lumber to a price, and thus their exchangeability is key to their exploitation, but trees are exchangeable by their death whereas labor must be kept alive and sweating to continue the extraction. Harvey’s concept of ecosocialist politics attempts to mediate these flaws but does so from the perspective that resolving the exploitation of labor is key to revamping the exploitation of nature. He depends on labor because as he writes, “For Marxists, there is no going back, as many ecologists seem to propose, to an unmediated relation to nature…to a pre-capitalist and communitarian world of non-scientific understandings with limited divisions of labor” (Harvey 1996a, p.198 emphasis in original). Thus, we can’t just change our minds, considering our historical and material condition, we must work our way to a non-monetized relation to nature after dealing with our labor problem. Harvey acknowledges that many processes (science, everyday practice, and social relations) can achieve a “more sensitive” perspective towards nature that “re-enchants” us with a greater-than-commodity relationship, and he recognizes that this array of values can be informed by a phenomenological and place-based appreciation (1996, p.199). I contend that the lived interactions with other species and landscape processes are the most important determinant of our relationships with nature and that the personal associations developed through experience (such as piloting a skiff through the swamp every day of the year) can be far more meaningful than “value”. Here again, the failure of a structural perspective is its dependence on totalizing concepts. When Harvey writes, “Money is the only well-understood and universal yardstick of [nature] value that we currently possess” (1996, p.150 emphasis in original) and similarly when he notes that

98 non-capitalist thinking is something that we cannot “go back” to, he rejects the multiplicities of relationships that people currently have with that which we call nature. Just as the idea of a consistent “nature” is ignorant of everyday practice, so is the notion that we have a totalizing “relationship” with it that can be reduced to money or value. To continue with a similar perspective I treat Neil Smith’s seminal book Uneven Development (1990). For Smith the production of nature both ideologically and in a material sense causes the (re)production of space and society. Rather than recounting exactly how Smith theorizes nature through Marx, which has core similarities with Harvey in his dependence on value, I move forward with how he addresses the emergence of nature, consciousness and their relation to production. The fundamental thesis of this work is “At the most abstract level, therefore, it is in the production of nature that use-value and exchange value and space and society are fused together” (1990, p.50). Our natural needs are satisfied by our natural physical and mental abilities to manipulate the non-human natural objects that surround us (on various scales). Human needs for survival not only depend on consumption of the labored material of nature but Smith argues that this process shapes our consciousness. “In this way, consciousness as such is the natural product of productive human activity and of the social relations into which human beings enter with one another in order to produce” (1990, p.55). Consciousness as applied here seems to be incapable of resisting what it does for a living, but later he sees the differentiation of (at least class) consciousness through intensification of class struggle. Smith notes, similar to Harvey, that the only way to complicate our understanding of consciousness (and nature) is through class struggle. Class (or labor) must come first, then we will deal with nature. This perspective denies our capacity to resist a commodity axiology by entwining all thought and behavior into the mode of production or resistance thereof. It also assumes our consciousness of nature is determined by our consciousness of class and considering the powerful rhetoric of capitalism that attempts to hide or deny class, we would assume that in turn, it would deny nature, but the opposite is true. Rather than denying nature or even hiding relations with nature that see it for more than a commodity, capital instead valorizes aesthetic natures to raise their experience (exchange) value. Ecotourism depends on people seeing the landscape as more than a commodity, it just wants to insert a middleman into this experience. And as tricky as the mode of production may be, it has yet to invent a way to commodify class struggle. Nature consciousness must not, therefore, be an undifferentiated dependency of class consciousness. I take this to mean that consciousness as a whole is in fact differentiated and not a natural growth or dependency of capitalism. Smith also agrees with Harvey’s position on value when he writes, “With the development of capitalism at a world scale and the generalization of the wage-labor relation, the relation with nature is before anything else, an exchange-value relation” (1990, p.77). Whether in reference to value or consciousness, the tenet of Marxist theories of nature is that the mode of production provides a totalizing structure to how we experience the non-human world. As a critical geographer, I could never deny that capitalism has great influence over the palette of choices we have including how we abstract things for value. But I posit the statement below as an example of love for another being that does not emerge from any market.

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[Crawfishermen] wanting to kill an otter because it eats crawfish from the traps? No. If I ran across a crawfisherman shooting an otter he had better defend himself. He would be better off shooting at me because I am going to be shooting at him. I don't know if you have ever been around otters. We rescued a baby one last year. They are the sweetest cutest animals. You can't keep them because they are so full of mischief and curiosity that they drive you crazy. But I just enjoy watching something like that play. (Interview N 2010)

5.2.2 Nature as a Commoditiy While I cannot accept the total domination of natural thinking in the Basin (or elsewhere) by capitalism, I do find great value in Castree’s work that seeks to uncover specifically how nature is turned into a product. His perspective is useful because it allows for less- than-tangible commodities such as information to be treated similarly to more well- understood products such as lumber. After summarizing some works on commodification in general I apply his framework for the process of nature to product, I assert that a swamp tour can be seen as following these same guidelines. Castree’s work is appealing because he directly deals with the problems implied by the totalizing rhetoric of most Marxist geographers and has even outlined ways that scholars have tried to “bridge the gap” between perspectives that weigh heavy on individual agency and those that see space governed by “social forces” (Castree 2002). “The continued value of Marxism, it seems to me, is to inquire into the specificity of capitalism and its myriad effects – even as we acknowledge their overdetermination within wider sets of process, relations and events” (2003, p.274). Supporting his notion of specificity of process, his article “Commodifying What Nature” summarizes the work of geographers in the area of political economy of nature by categorizing what they mean by commodification and what they mean by nature (2003a). I begin with a few authors from environmental history who give a less technical yet more poignant account of commodification and continue by introducing Castree’s six aspects of commodification which are a valuable tool that can be used in a structural interpretation of this process in the Atchafalaya. While Castree will add analytical depth to our understanding of commodification of nature, he lacks a degree of feeling that is more tangible in works by environmental historians. Perhaps the most influential work in this genre is Cronon’s Changes in the Land which eloquently distills the process by which North American abundance was transformed into economic resources by early European settlers’ psyches (1983). Though he notes in a calculated sense that the transformation of, say a biodiverse forest into lumber “treated members of an ecosystem as extractable units”, he references several sources whose “descriptions [of their new habitats] often denigrated into little more than lists” of marketable commodities (1983, p.21). He continues, ”People sought to give their landscape a new purposefulness, often by simplifying its seemingly chaotic tangle” (1983, p.33). Thus, the beginnings of European ‘conquest’ of North American landscapes set forth a path dependency for future interactions in the space that was tied to the old continental worldview- one that particularly for religious and pragmatic reasons, was confined to anthropocentric domination of nature through commodification. Mark Harvey continues this line of thought when he writes:

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“As grain, lumber, and beef were commodified, Americans- city dwellers especially- gradually lost sight of the prairies, forests, and grass lands-of nature itself. Together then, abundance and the production of raw materials distanced people from nature. They took nature's wealth for granted; then they forgot it existed” (1996, p.6).

In his call for “A Land Ethic” Leopold rightly questions the economic attempts to conserve non-economically valued members of the biotic community. This argument is certainly salient today in the Basin (and elsewhere) where narratives of green capitalism are often positioned as solutions to overexploitation. After noting that perhaps only five percent of the birds in Wisconsin are saleable he writes, “We have no land ethic yet, but we have at least drawn nearer to the point of admitting that birds should continue as a matter of biotic right, regardless of the presence or absence of economic advantage to us” (1949, p.247). Though not an environmental historian per-se, Leopold’s early critique of ‘saving nature by selling it’ provides a vital supplement to the field and to the overarching theme of commodification of nature through ontological classification of resources. However, theorizing the classification of nature as a resource takes a step away from the material interactions with animals, plants, water and earth. In contrast, White addresses the ‘sweat equity’ of commodification by focusing on work with(in) nature. He certainly maintains a similar opposition to, “the reductions of the natural world to property…and life to the market” but he also finds issue with “the reduction of action to discourse” in his book The Organic Machine (1995, p.x-xi). In describing people’s relationship to the Columbia River through damming he finds that commonly used metaphors, the river was neither killed nor raped rather, “What has happened is closer to a failed marriage” (White 1995, p.59). By comparing the relationship to a marriage, the author insinuates a blending between humans and nature that leaves both somewhat intact rather than an economized division implied by the previous authors. More precisely:

“In damming the river, the workers knew nature through labor. It is foolish to deny that the men who bored the bedrock, who walked the river bottom, who came to know with fine precision the density and composition of the clay, sand and granite of the river were in a full and meaningful sense knowing nature” (White 1995, p.61, my emphasis).

His point seems to be that even within the Western nature or human mindset there is room for a co-constitutive melting that occurs through the ‘heat’ of labor. This speaks clearly to geographers notions of hybridity that inform much of the theory in this dissertation. Environmental historians bring a sense of passion to writing about the reduction of natural diversity to dollars that complements the work of Castree, Smith, Harvey and other more analytically (and overtly) Marxist theorists. As I have shown here, they also add specific accounts of how commodifications of nature gained a foothold in North American mindsets and, particularly in White’s work, the landscape itself. Though they may be critiqued for writing ‘narratives of environmental decline’ the narrative form does provide persuasive and useful evidence in support of the often abstract theoretical accounts produced by geographers.

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The analytical framework put forth by Castree for interpreting the work of geographers on the commodification of nature holds that they all interpret the creation of new Marxian use-values from otherwise “natural” and unique objects. An object does not possess some sort of essence that makes it exchangeable. Though they have specific and differentiated properties, diamonds and gold are still rocks without the historical process that has heightened them to more than rocks. This process is also important to study because a commodity is not simply “an” object, but the focal point of entire industries that create classes of objects, and labor relations, so the implications are more far reaching. The process of commodification can be described as operating under one or more of these fundamentals:

Privatization or assigning a legal title with exclusive rights over an object or class of objects such as Kloppenburg’s work on hybrid seeds as “goods” (1988). Alienability or the capacity of commodities “to be physically and morally separated from their sellers” such as Dickens’ work on trade in body parts (2001). Individuation or the act of separating an object from its supporting context such as Altvater’s work on selective harvesting of Amazonian hardwoods (1993). Abstraction or the reduction of a set of unique entities to a prescribed set of characteristics such as Robertson’s work on No-Net-Loss wetland policy (2000). Valuation or the attribution of value, most often by money, but also by other means such as Castree’s own work on rainforest bioprospecting (2002). Displacement or the separation of the human-environment relations of production from consumption such as Hartwick’s work on gold production (1998).

These acts of commodification may occur alone or in conjunction and can be applied to various types of “nature” as explained in the next section. As a mode of separation, commodification sets up a screen that hides the harsh reality of pricing, extracting or managing the natural world in the same way that the labor relations of capitalist production are separated from view in the classical Marxian sense. Industrial development based on new commodities not only creates more hidden exploitation of labor, but has the leveling effect of exchangeability that denies local specificity of an organism and the labor used to manipulate it. The results of this process are obviously lamented by the authors who interpret them. Castree justifies a critical position on commodification of nature when he notes, “When previously uncommodified things become subject to this specific form of commodification then, in very material ways, they may change. In turn, material change can have physical and moral consequences for people and non-humans“ (2003a p.283). The material and physical outcomes, the “externalities” from an economic standpoint, when taken as a factor of production cannot accurately be mediated by economic valuation and market exchange. Just as commodification occurs through a variety of processes, the “nature” of what is being commodified is also diverse. Moving beyond the simple sense of different natural materials (plants, rocks, water, etc.), Castree categorizes the various works on nature based on how they are functionalized for consumers. As Marxists have focused much energy on highlighting the materiality of the conditions of production, in this work Castree is delving into the differentiation of material natures that are used under these conditions. He uses four categories:

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Nature as External or the selective extraction and indiscriminate valuation of materials by ontologically positioning them without reference to their contextual source such as Bridge’s work on copper extraction (2000). Nature as Internal or the design and manufacture of living commodities that do not exist outside of the needs of production (particularly agriculture) such as Boyd’s work on chickens (2001). Nature as the human body or the externalization or separation of the body as a commodity such as trade in body parts or Yoxen’s work on human genetic material as a product (1986). Nature as information where (particularly genetic) data from nature or folk knowledge about nature have been given exchange value such as in Frow’s work on a case where genetic information was extracted from a cancer patient’s cells and successfully patented against his wishes (1996).

Using these categories for a start, Castree continues by noting how commodification of nature occurs similarly in different situations but always involves market valuation that cannot encompass all of the possible ‘externalities’. Particularly interesting are his notions (supported by the other authors he uses) that commodification wrests some natural objects from their surroundings while ignoring others. Industries are developed around this Midas touch mentality, but not because the objects in question are somehow invested with essential qualities that others were not ‘born with’. Rather, the appeal of these entities turned commodities is their utility for industry that has contingently arisen through a particular mode of production. For example, the teak tree is not ‘naturally’ more useful or valuable than its surrounding biota, its valuation has occurred through the tillage of Western desires for exotic woods. The commodity is itself a tricky category that has been expanded to include less tangible products such as experiences. Others have commented on experience commodities such as swamp tours specifically, and I turn to this literature later in this chapter. But first I want to return to Castree to comment on how the nature experience commodity can be theorized employing his framework. Experiences on the surface seem to be much less tangible than a product such as chicken or copper ore. But tourists take more from an ecotourism experience than a story or place concept and, as elucidated by Castree, the tangibility of the commodity is not particularly problematic. Probably the most common use values drawn from a swamp tour are pictures which for the lay tourist can be used to enhance status, or as art, but as affirmed by all of my guides, many tour attendees are professional photographers who are taken on private tours specifically to collect photos. For professional photographers, the exchangeability and use-value of such product-photos is more apparent. The naturalist adage ‘take nothing but photos’ makes this practice seem environmentally benign, but when guides attract alligators or other animals by feeding them, which occurred on about half of my tours, the manipulation of nature for profit is more apparent. A photographer cannot get a shot like Figure 4 (below) without the labor of the alligator who is motivated by an external input (chicken).

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Figure 4: Nature performing labor

The second ‘take’ from the swamp tour experience is the knowledge espoused by the guide. The guides are entrusted to code the swamp with facts based upon their understandings of science and their own experiences. Though tourists don’t commonly take notes, they have a plethora of questions, some common and others more contextualized, and most are positioned as outsiders to the swamp (in relation to the guide) whether they are from ‘down the road’ in Louisiana or from another country. Also, few of the tourists I interviewed had been on another swamp tour. Therefore, they seemed to have little reason not to believe the guide when he explained to them, for example, the role of flooding in the swamp or in a more contentious case, the success of releasing alligators into the ‘wild’ that were incubated and raised in a hide factory. Facts and photos are only a few of the products that could be theorized as swamp tour experience commodity outputs. But what types of commodification occur here and what types of nature are being commodified? Certainly with regard to the outputs of this experience, nature as information is applicable. Especially in the ‘digital age’ photos are evidence and information, and by all accounts a commodity. The moments are also commodities because access to photo opportunities like the one above is granted by the $25 ticket price. The particular characteristics of the photo as use value could be explored further, but considering that the tours are marketed as photographable moments, their commodity status is evident. The coding of the swamp, its beings and processes is “nature as information” in the simplest sense. Some of this information could be read in books, but the ticket price gives tourists access to a swamp expert. Castree, in reference to Parry, writes, “nature is being de- and re-materialized in all sorts of ways, such that the distinction between ‘real’ nature and its ‘artificial’ relations is not simply blurred but ‘absolutely fragile’”(as cited in Castree 2003a, p287). In this sense, information from photos and “facts” are a nature re- materialized.

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For many tourists, their knowledge of one swamp tour product over another is based on their encounter with a bank of brochures at their hotel or the path-dependency of a Google search. This is to say, to them, one tour is the same as another, and their choices are more often than not based on location. For this reason, the tour itself is an abstraction of a swamp experience. If, as Castree writes, abstraction is “a process whereby the qualitative specificity of any individualized thing (a person, a seed, a gene or whathave-you) is assimilated to the qualitative homogeneity of a broader type or process”, then a swamp tour is certainly an abstraction of a swamp experience (2003a, p.281). Though each tour is not exactly the same, they are marketed to a generic tourist with similar elements and are nevertheless, the same use value. Not only is a swamp tour the commodification of nature through abstraction but also through valuation, where a price is arbitrarily attributed to the experience.

“Capitalist commodities are thus monetized: they have a price and can, to all intents and purposes, consequently be rendered commensurable with things not only in the same taxonomic class of goods but in different ones too (e.g., money can buy you anything from a carbon credit to a medicinal plant to an alligator [experience])” (Castree 2003a, p.281, my addition ).

In the simple sense that Atchafalaya swamp tours have an exchange value (from $20- 50,) they have been commodified by valuation. To summarize, as categorized through Castree’s framework, swamp tours are a commodification of nature as information by abstraction and valuation (2003a).

5.3 The Production of Wetlands

With a framework for understanding commodification of nature I move to work that has addressed wetland commodification specifically. Several studies have approached wetland geography from a social and somewhat critical standpoint. For instance, Meindl has published several pieces which investigate the state of knowledge about wetlands in the US Southeast (2000a, 2000b and 2004). Comeaux penned a thorough and useful cultural geography that is specific to the Atchafalaya Basin (1972). While these works set the stage for our understanding of wetland generalization, this section relies most heavily on Robertson’s (2000) “No Net Loss: Wetland Restoration and the Incomplete Capitalization of Nature”, which proposes that the politics and economics that go into how we define wetlands play a vital role in how they are treated in society. Robertson critically assesses how the defining of wetlands through policy set the stage for the abstraction of wetland services as a commodity and eventually the notion that, through mitigations, one wetland could replace another. The construction of the category “wetlands” by President George Bush’s 1989 No-Net-Loss campaign is a smoothing and equalization of all the types of wetlands into a legal definition. The commodification of the wetlands is accomplished by creating a formulaic abstraction that can be torn from these tangible and diverse places. By abstracting the idea of wetlands, keeping it functional and simple, the spaces can be quantitatively valued both scientifically and economically which allows them to be interchangeable. This exchange is the theoretical basis for wetland mitigations. An

105 exchanged and economized wetland emerges from this process which creates a zone of manufactured wildness that is at once a response to our conception of a wetland and concurrently a lived, natural place where you can get bitten by a mosquito. One of Robertson’s greatest additions to this literature is his notion of the “simultaneity of representation and materiality” (2000, p.486). For a swamp to become a math problem, we must be able to allow for biologists’ and ecologists’ representations to stand directly for the material reality of place. For Robertson, the nefarious outcome of wetland mitigations is not that restoration science gets the ecological processes wrong or that economists in ecological services could never represent the wetland’s true value, but that wetlands become a commodity and thus one place can be replaced for another through a process of abstraction that separates exchange value from use value. Wetlands under No- Net-Loss are “a material / discursive unity called ‘wetland’ suitable for sale” (Robertson 2000, p.466). This classification and codification of space by its perceived ecological function thus initiates a process of commodification that has culminated in policy that, for instance, allows a golf course pond to replace a mangrove swamp. In relation to Castree, this is commodification via abstraction of nature as external (removed from its context). Wetland mitigations under this federal policy rely upon a process whereby broad categories of nature are “rendered equivalent and saleable through the medium of money” (Castree 2003a, p.278).

5.3.1 Closing the Bayou Range To further explore how defining the swamp through the static application of law makes an impact on the lives of its inhabitants, I introduce a debate between the Louisiana Crawfish Producers Association-West and private landowners in the Basin to delimit property rights in a landscape that is complicated by the material dynamics of water and land. Louisiana common law holds that wherever water has flowed is the domain of the state and is thus common property where access cannot be restricted. This construction of the swamp as wet, and therefore public, space resides deep in the swamp’s cultural- political mythology; indeed one guide digressed from his general-interest tour of the swamp and its biota to note that this legal interpretation of access was a founding principle of American settlement which had significantly been structured by maintaining trappers’ rights (Interview O 2010). This traditional interpretation allowed for land-based ownership and usufruct rights in the (land)swamp during the dry seasons and collective usufruct rights in (water)swamp during high water: a seasonally flexible law. Extensive encroachment of private landowners into the Atchafalaya commons began in the mid- twentieth century when developers and oil companies began to buy up large tracts of land (Reuss, 1998). As siltation and backfill from spoil banks shrank the area of navigable waters owners pushed for a more narrow, land-based interpretation of the law. Access to some prime crawfishing grounds began to be limited along the notion that a canal or bayou running through private lands was private property. Local law enforcement then began to feel pressure to prosecute trespassers, and, more significantly to the crawfishermen, encounters across the fences with landowners in the swamp began to become violent with guns drawn (literally). Years of litigation have played out between the Louisiana Crawfish Producers Association-West (LCPA-West) teamed with the Atchafalaya Basinkeepers (a local environmental stewardship organization) and various consortia of private (predominately hunting clubs) and corporate landowners. The

106 position of the side that advocates for land-based rights is summarized in a newspaper article reprinted on the LCPA-West website that quotes Vermillion Parish Sherriff Ray LeMaire:

“The supreme court has ruled that you cannot trespass in a private canal no matter if the tide ebbs and flows there,” he said. “The supreme court has ruled that owning a private canal is just like owning private land.” We have really stepped up enforcement in trespassing,” LeMaire added, “especially on the Vermillion Cooperation Land where trespassing is almost epidemic. “(LCPA-west 2010)

The position of the side that advocates for flexible, water-based rights is also based on a US Supreme Court ruling, though it is unclear whether they refer to the same ruling.

“The court upheld a 1986 Mississippi Supreme Court ruling in which Justice James Robertson wrote that the public’s domain extends anywhere a hypothetical toothpick could sail, including shallow tidal ditches of private land” (LCPA-west 2010).

Besides penning a fantastic axiom of legalese in the “sailing toothpick test”, Justice Robertson’s opinion retained the historical interpretation of usufruct rights that depended on a dynamic and seasonal swamp. The landowners countered by arguing that crawfishing on private lands was trespassing because the crawfish traps sit under the water on the bottom, and the bottom is private property. The lawsuit exchanges themselves are dynamic and constantly changing and thus it is difficult to pin down the ‘rule’ as it stands today. However, the experience on the ground (or perhaps in the mud) espoused by my informants was that the threat of violence towards trespassers has driven crawfishermen away from some prime fishing grounds that they historically have depended on, whatever the latest interpretation of the law may be. A “Green Marxist” interpretation of this process of swamp commodification such as Castree’s or Robertson’s can blame the commodification of the swamp on the broad ideologies of the sanctity of accumulation or the ravenous appetite to wrest uncommodified nature from a place that is constructed as an ambiguous wilderness. In particular, this commodification narrative exhibits Castree’s (2003a) tenets of privatization and individuation. Privatization applies to this process in a very concrete sense because this is public swamp that is being privatized. Drawing boundaries and titles for places has literally defined the US and its history. In a sense, the private entitlement of swampland could be seen as one step along the path to commodified development of space, preceded by exploitation of public resources (predominantly timber) and removal of indigenous peoples (predominantly the Chitimacha). The front for private lands encroaching on public in the Atchafalaya has been extended the full length of both sides of the levee due to increased access through technology (from the introduction of the internal combustion boat motor in the early 20th century to recent ‘Gator Tail’ motors that allow for skiffs to be piloted through inches of water) and through road and bridge building. The pivotal points of these cadastral relations were not only found in the day that the land’s title was signed but also the re-interpretation of the law that allowed swamp to be owned as land.

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These two moments and the re-iteration of their importance have allowed the commodification through privatization to manifest itself. The material and conceptual ‘fencing in’ of a necessarily dynamic swamp also commodifies through individuation, a “representational and physical act” according to Castree (2003a, p.280).The swamp is an active, interconnected context of water, plants and wildlife where a fence seems out of place. As private property it is individuated from its context as if water stopped flowing at the fence and all of the dependencies within the local ecosystem were somehow severed by the stroke of a pen and the tightening of some wire between two trees. This naïve attribute of land-ownership is implicitly critiqued as people pollute the air and water that ‘flow’ through their fences. In this instance though, we see the impediment of a ‘flow’ of people established by the commodification of the swamp. This stoppage of some flows while allowing others is indicative of the severed ties that are implied by the individuation of natural commodities.

5.3.2 Problems with a Structuralist Approach This particular instance of Atchafalaya commodification could be interpreted through the lens of Marxist geographies of nature commodification, and current approaches such as Robertson’s could lend explanatory credence. The establishment of policy and interpretation of law is central to the crawfishermen’s battle over access and is therefore dependent on very specific texts. Treatment of how the law has been established and interpreted and scholarly interpretations of the letters of the law might reveal a complex dynamic of power. It follows from this argument that the process of commodification (the creation/interpretation of legal text) is vital in setting the ground-rules for the partition of capitalist spaces. However, the flaw of depending on law or policy as a point of analysis is the notion that either is deterministic of human activity. Geographers have used critical legal theories to show the disconnect between law and behavior (Delaney, 2001; Blomley, 1994). In the case of the Louisiana Crawfish Producers Association-West and the consortia of private landowners, despite the ‘letter of the law’ the final say in whether a crawfisherman has access to ‘private’ waters comes down to who is there when the boundary is crossed. My sources indicated that ‘illegal’ fences are built that may discourage some, but that these fences are still ‘illegally’ crossed. This ambiguity in the law only comes to head if someone is standing at the fence (often armed). So, in this case, the law is less deterministic than the actual and somewhat random occurrence of the landowner meeting the crawfisherman. While it is tempting to follow the Green Marxist lead in deconstructing the policy process of commodification, such an attempt would fail to account for the fact that people have freedom from enforcement of law in certain settings (like the swamp). Moreover, in any place where there is a disconnect between the dejure rules and defacto life practice, a critical stance could be better informed by starting with lived experience as a location for the reproduction of the dominant paradigms of capitalist commodification of space. The top-down perspective here fails to account for practice in the same way that it cannot fully determine consciousness of nature, axiology of nature or otherwise. Escaping such inconsistencies of determination seems to be the motivation of post-structuralist geographic theories. I now return to performance as a method for understanding how

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grand ideologies can be iterated, rejected, but most importantly ignored by our contextualized creatings of nature.

5.4 (Un)fixed by Performativity

Today’s poststructuralist nature/society geographers have posited several concepts that acknowledge hybridity and openness between people and nature rather than sticking to the separation of the two, which Murdoch castigates as “a key classificatory motif within modern society” (Murdoch 2006, p.108). This separation is implied by commodification of nature because social dynamics of capitalism are considered responsible for our consciousness of nature. I have chosen to apply my findings using these conceptual rubrics because I see them as the most innovative ways that geographers have addressed our fundamental questions about the humanized spaces of natures. Though I do depend heavily on structuralist approaches to study the motivation of swamp tours, in order to investigate the lived experience of eco-tourism I apply a more agent based approach to construction of natures where non-cognitive behavior and creative association with non- human actors affects the capacity of people to create their spaces and experiences. A performative perspective treats the coding of the landscape as a contingent representation but allows the specificity of ‘where’ to also play a part. In the Basin, as shown with the case of the crawfishermen, the lack of structural enforcement opens space to behaviors that are outside of the dominant paradigm. In a sense questioning ‘where’ is the essential project of geography, but concrete physical location is merely the beginning of our understanding of space making. The more relevant question would be how to characterize the creation of abstract or mental spaces that are unique to context. Performance of nature on a swamp tour is space making, but has been treated more broadly as an activity that attributes meaning by sociologists Szersznski Heim and Waterton in their edited volume Nature Performed (2003). They provide a useful notion of the role of performance. “Performance is the manifestation of agency and action through which agency and creativity emerge. Performance is thus ephemeral, unpredictable, improvisatory, always contingent on its context” (2003, p.3). Considering its reliance on context, performance has been central to poststructural human geographies of nature. This approach theorizes performances in the common sense (music, theatre, etc), but also expands the metaphor of performance to the everyday where non-cognitive practices are seen to create our worlds. The tour guide’s ‘performance’ is both scripted and openly creative in the context of movement and the unpredictability of the non-human actors. One guide, who was pursuing becoming a TV host similar to Steve Irwin, made a telling comparison.

It is kind of like Hollywood people go in the theater once in a while because it keeps their edge sharp. Because a lot can be said for being on the stage in the moment in the flesh rather than shooting scenes and an editor making it magic. I could lose my edge as a TV host without doing swamp tours because every swamp tour it evolves. No tour is the same, every group is different. (Interview J 2010)

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As noted in Chapter Two, competing conceptions of performativity have emerged that question whether such a performance is indicative of our social roles and reproduces our socialization (such as Butler’s notion) or if it is a site to transgress boundaries and open up new possibilities. I contend that both are true in performances of swamp tours which are repetitive and creatively new. Before justifying this contention through my research result, I review literatures that have addressed nature as performed, or in the case of Thrift, as practiced (2000).

5.4.1 Nature as a Performance To begin, I address Szerszynski et al.’s edited volume that aptly uses an array of natures and an array of performances. In reference to defining the terms, they note that, “They seem to yield their meanings more readily to approaches that are from the beginning oriented to their inherent multipleness” (2003, p.2). The purpose of the book is to challenge what they see as static applications of nature that dominate polity and regulatory regimes, and I would add to this, theoretical perspectives that deepen the divide between the two concepts. In this sense, the work is political, but it critiques by complication rather than analytical refutation. The foci are on natures as process, breaking away from the fixed noun of nature towards an ongoing sort of ‘naturing’. This is why performance is the epistemological stance of their work, and of mine as well. I choose a handful of their authors’ chapters that I see as having particular relevance in comparison to the ‘naturing’ that occurs on Atchafalaya swamp tours. Crouch’s chapter on allotment gardening in England highlights how performances of nature are inconsistently applied. While Marxist approaches maintain that there are only a few sets of values attributable to nature (monetary, as in Harvey 1996a), and that our palette of understanding is produced by capitalism, Crouch suggests that such structural perspectives provide only a rudimentary understanding of consciousness and erroneously assume consistency. Furthermore, as Crouch would allow, what we ‘know’ is in itself of shaky constitution and does not (or cannot) consistently inform our actions. Crouch writes, “Ideas of nature emerge and are worked in complex processes that may be self-consciously grounded and may not” (Crouch 2003, p.18). To justify his claim, Crouch compares two instances of allotment gardening on a commons hillside in Birmingham, England. The first was a “multiple event of diverse art” that had explicit political motivations and used lights, sound and metaphor to highlight multiple approaches to cultivation, and the other, the iterated act of allotment gardening as a personal practice (Crouch 2003, p.19). His findings indicate that both “political gardening” and individual gardening were performed with degrees of unconsciousness, or as he puts it “getting on with life”, but also that both practices were conscious resistance or “intervention” as well (p. 27). While the gardening-as-social statement was an explicit public and collective intervention of individualized practice, the individual gardeners noted that they saw their practice as intervention to the mundane aspects of their lives. This piece directly informs my understanding of the performance of swamp tour guiding by questioning the banal association of intention with reaction. The assumption that ‘a guide believes X, so he will respond Xly,’ though it may have informed my guesswork before the fieldwork, was not upheld by my findings. The role of individual activities in the performance of nature is explored further by Marvin (2003) in his chapter on foxhunting. This piece is particularly appealing

110 because of the author’s explicit treatment of landscape and animals and its address of landscape. He makes the point that on the day of the hunt the associations between people and the countryside are heightened in a way that differs from the everyday. “Radiating out through the participants is a space that becomes, through the desires, demands and practices of hunting itself, a space in which everything is imbued with, and takes on, a greater significance, in which the experience of the ordinary is magnified, heightened and intensified” (Marvin 2003, p.51). The participants, both people and animals (foxes, dogs, horses), are more alert and aware, but in their iterated everyday spaces. Also, the author gives great agency to the fox who is positioned not only as the object, but the director of the hunt. Thus, a quick and efficiently killed fox, through playing his or her role as the victim of the performance, is not as worthy as a fox that provides better chase. Marvin’s use of animal agency in performances of nature applies wholly to what occurs with alligators on Atchafalaya swamp tours, and will be addressed again in Chapter Six. Also, with reference to the alertness to landscape, the swamp tour is such a performance and the oddity of this heightened awareness is often made evident when the tour boat passes other boats in the process of more everyday activities.

Figure 5: Everyday swamp

Consider, for example the situation in Figure 5 (shot from a swamp tour) where an alert performance of nature is taking place alongside the seemingly mundane transport of lumber. In the guide’s performance of nature on a tour, the space is consciously and alertly created, but is still an everyday space to them. We may assume that similar to fox hunters, tour guides have the ability to move through the space without the same awareness or reactivity as they do on tours; that is, they can turn it off. Another focus of Nature Performed is how everyday performances of nature occur in relation to broader political ideologies, and this can be seen particularly in 111

Horton’s chapter on how environmental activists negotiate between ideals and material needs as they perform their green identities. In particular, Horton identifies the difference between green scripts, or the broader narratives that environmental activists adhere to, and green codes, or the everyday behaviors that they engage in. Environmental activists may adhere to certain ideologies but are unable to consistently practice what they preach. Horton uses the example of shopping where certain types of consumption are ‘allowed’ under the ascribed green identity, while others are not. “Thus, for example, shopping in a supermarket is a breach of green cultural codes, but by placing this behavior in context, and appealing to mitigating circumstances, such as ‘lack of time’ the ‘need for economy’ or ‘the requirements of non-green others (children, guests)’, supermarket shopping can still conform to a green script” (Horton 2003, p.68). The author elucidates how people can negotiate their beliefs with their behaviors and justify them ever so “guiltily”. I use this example for two reasons. First, because behavior is treated as a performance, the evidence in this case gives us the hybrid moments where structure meets agency. Despite the fact that environmentalism is not the all-pervasive paradigm that capitalism may be, these self-structured environmentalists were enmeshed in ideological cultures where they resisted the green ideologies that surrounded them through their everyday material needs. This speaks to the fact that socialized ideas cannot completely dominate however indoctrinated they may become. Secondly, many of my participants were self-described (or as revealed by what they said) environmental activists. They negotiated their ideologies towards environmental protection in quite the same manner as the British environmentalists described above. One justified using a gas-powered motor by saying that he spent a lot more to get a quiet and ‘green’ version. Also, on several occasions, in relation to alligator feeding, guides would note that they disagreed with feeding, but it was justifiable to put on a show for tourists if done properly (chicken vs. marshmallows and deep into the swamp away from possible human-gator mishaps). In summary, while this type of performance of nature is more overtly political and rooted under the ‘green flag’, the insight this chapter provides on the intersections between ideology and behavior are quite valuable. Finally, I turn away from the edited volume and introduce the perspective of nature as a practice espoused by Nigel Thrift. Thrift’s non-representational theory attempts to understand the collective human experience of spaces by turning away from the notion of abstract “social forces” as explanations for behavior. Instead, he suggests a more embodied and present tense geography that treats the affective state of being as the primary epistemological site of inquiry. In line with this, he has penned one piece in particular that deals with the “object” of nature and how we place ourselves in its relation. When Thrift writes about our “background of expectation” in terms of nature, he allows himself an inroad to critique the role of the social in framing nature (2000 p.34). Yet, when he writes, “we need to escape the constructivist notion of the body as simply an inscribed surface”, he steps away from the idea of nature as an idea wholly constituted by the mode of production or the wrangling threads of power relations in general (2000 p.39). If, as Thrift notes, 95% of our brain activity is dominated by the unconscious, then elements of our experience like intuition, anticipation and instinct seem to be much more deterministic than cognitive thought. Though the intensification of capitalism and communication have seemed to speed up our existence, he argues that many attempts have been made to heighten our experience of the body in space and actually slow down

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the present moment into a mystical contemplative practice. This is the background that we bring to nature- our expectations. This type of nature is given meaning through practice where our collective unconscious of what is supposed to happen is confirmed through the body. Thus, when we expect the swamp to be hot and humid, and this is experienced in the present tense through the skin, its naturalness is reaffirmed. This is the politics of ‘bare life’, a concept Thrift borrows from Agamben. When these momentary affective states are brought into experiential industry, they are “made more of” and become simulations of our expectations and in a sense supra-natural. We see this not only in the theming of spaces for tourism, but in “post-colonial forms of adventure” where “the kinesthetic element of tourism has been amplified” (2000, p.49). These types of commodities seek to titillate the body through relying on constructed knowledges of what nature should be and how it can best be sensed. Treating nature in this manner lends itself well to moments of conscious performance, tourism and bodily movement, as noted by Thrift. Therefore, this piece is invaluable to my work. But, as with his other work on non-representational theory, and the gamut of the performance of nature literature, it fails to answer the ‘why’ with the same resolve as the Green Marxists. If performance is instead ‘how’ nature is designated or given meaning, does the motivation to do so emerge intrinsically from our fascination with our habitat? This may be some of the drive to ‘put nature in its place’, but at least in the case of the Atchafalaya Basin and its tourism practitioners, the need to make a living was a strong motivation for starting the business. Considering this, I move on in the next section to review literatures on tourism where the commodification of space is the constitution of an industry.

5.5 Tourism as a Performance of Nature

Nature treated as a broad yet ‘slippery’ category has been theorized to be performable and a source of commodities necessary for capitalist accumulation. Under tourism, however, the image of nature itself is the commodity rather than a discrete ontological form. Since performance lends itself well to active rather than static natures (foxhunting vs. hardwood products) I argue that performing the coding of landscape through ecotourism is best understood as ‘how’ nature is given meaning. On the other hand, the tour guide is performing a service, and this behavior is a commodity in itself complete with abstraction (in relation to other tours) and theoretical exchangeability (with anything else that is ‘worth’ $25). Therefore, I posit the best way to encapsulate what is occurring on swamp tours is ‘performance under the commodity condition’. Many authors before me have theorized the relations and outcomes of tourism including some who have written specifically about tourism as a performance. In what follows, I summarize the works in this field that I find most applicable to my study. For some clarification on terminology, since this chapter deals primarily with the trope of nature, for the most part, I will favor ecotourism. Ecotourism is distinguishable from other types of tourism by expectation. Thrift understands the importance of our subconscious anticipations of ‘that natural feeling’ that is implied by ecotourism, and this narrative is carried even in the names of the tours- “The Last Wilderness Swamp Tours”. Cajun cultural tourism is also essential to many of the tours I took and can be found in many other venues in Acadiana

113 including two Cajun history themed villages in Lafayette that are attentively constructed “slices of time” (Massey 2005, p.23). Though I theorized culture as a performance as well in Chapter Three, for this chapter I focus on the guides’ codings of the swamp landscape as non-human even though I conclude that the two are hybridized and cannot be separated.

5.5.1 Broader Ecotourism When tourists buy a ticket for a tour, they are not simply expecting to see the swamp. The least proactive guide on my tours did not utter a word throughout the trip, but he navigated and was an expert at tossing food to raccoons, buzzards and alligators who expected it, and thus was a professional. Tourists seek for one reason or another to have the landscape translated to them by someone who knows more about it. The view from the dock in the public or private sphere is subjective to the senses and knowledge of the looker and the exchange of money for the tour can be said to indicate some authority lent to the guide’s objectivity. Thus, the swamp could be experienced for free and interpreted only by the onlooker from the boat ramp. In a similar sense, much of the information that is transmitted by the guide could also be gathered without cost. A few books or pamphlets and perhaps a Google image search would give the potential tourist a cache of data about the species and the history and geography of the Basin similar to what would be imparted by a guide. A guided tour, however, sells the combination of the two approaches, the real-time experience of the information. Through the experience of nature, the swamp becomes a tangible place. The tangibility of experience is truly the product of ecotourism. Harvey’s The Limits to Capital gives us an extensive treatment of Marxian political economy that can easily be applied to uncover the motivations of ecotourism. “The only possible motivation for putting money into circulation on a repeated basis is to obtain more of it in the end than was possessed at the beginning” (Harvey 2006, p.13). In this sense, we can surmise that a swamp tour business is founded ontologically as a means to return investment. In another instance, Harvey characterizes the role of the capitalist in creating new forms of accumulation that again can be applied to ecotourism.

“The capitalist producer increasingly ‘plays the pimp’ between consumers and their sense of need, excites in them ‘morbid appetites, lies in wait for each of their weaknesses- all so he can demand the cash for this service of love’. Pleasure, leisure seduction and erotic life are all brought within the range of money power and commodity production” (Harvey, 1990, p.102 quoting Marx).

This nefarious service of love, cultivation of morbid appetites and leisure seduction was notable in Marx’s era and prophesized for the future if the system continued to be structured upon the contradictions of capitalism. Such dynamic innovations on extracting profit from 21st century experiences are addressed by Pine and Gilmore’s 1999 book The Experience Economy. They take some strides to characterize the experience beyond the “service sector”.

“When a person buys a service, he purchases a set of intangible activities carried out on his behalf. But when he buys an experience, he pays to spend time enjoying a series of

114 memorable events that a company stages—as in a theatrical play—to engage him in a personal way” (1999 p.9).

Obviously this sense of theatre is wholly applicable to swamp tours and Pine and Gilmore’s work does provide a segue between performance and economy, albeit with a different rationale. The motivation of capitalist class behaviors are said to be hidden by the system itself, which creates a sense of subconscious rationality for the greater accumulation of capital. And this is the goal of Pine and Gilmore’s book, to teach one how to nurture innovative experiences. Beyond this, the apparatus of the state can also be commandeered to encourage growth in innovative new markets. The creation of the Atchafalaya National Heritage Area was motivated by such a desire, even though many of my guides had never heard of the ANHA or were unaware that it was created specifically to serve their industry. In the Basin today, both individual practitioners and the state itself work to promote tourism experiences for profit by selling a landscape expertise. Cartier and Lew’s edited volume Seductions of Place provides a foundational and critical approach to understanding the establishment of tourism (2005). As applied to the Basin, and perhaps to Acadiana, what is being sold is a “touristed landscape”. “The scope of interest points to examination of places whose larger a priori significance arguably initiates desire to experience, tour, travel, and explore rather than those where tourism economies have been explicitly created” (Cartier 2005 p.3). This type of touristed landscape certainly pertains to the Basin though Guirard fears movement towards the manufactured when he notes, ”we are living, more and more in some sort of Cajun theme park” (2006, p.8). The difference between Disneyworld and The Basin is that one is toured and the other is lived, but the distinction comes down to place intention rather than how it is used. Even though no one permanently lives in the Atchafalaya swamp (within the levies), it was not created to extract tourism dollars in the same way Disneyworld or even the Cajun history parks were. Cartier and Lew also differentiate between place seduction and sense of place, where the former is symbolized and produced through marketing, literature etc. and again is the domain of Thrift’s ‘expectation’ that is brought to experience. Tourism lies “at the interface of mobility/movement, sensory experience, and seduction” and cannot be treated simply as people looking at landscape (Cartier 2005, p.8-9). To get at the deeper implications of tourism, I first address Smith’s chapter on the tourist industry as a global entity and continue with several authors who dissect the intricacies of the tourist as a subject. Tourism is the world’s largest industry, responsible for 10.7% of the global GDP in 2000 or $3.5 trillion (Smith 2005) Adhering to the dissolution of product tangibility, international tourism is considered by the WTO as trade, and Smith acknowledges that in the end the product of tourism is information. “In its purest geographical form, international tourism is the movement and management of capital and information embodied in people crossing the global landscape” (2005 p.74). In her analysis of global tourism, trends emerged that show fluctuations in tourism in relation to global economic crises and terrorist events. Both served to slow growth in tourism, but also to focus tourist expenditures closer to home, thus engendering growth and diversity in regional (home country) tourism. Diversification has occurred in this industry as an attempt to attract more receipts from highly specified markets. She also notes the growth in ecotourism,

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both “soft” and “hard”, the former being more akin to swamp tours, and the latter to adventure tourism such as hang gliding. Though not theoretically sophisticated, her factual conclusions that tourism reflects general global economic trends are necessary because little is written about the world’s largest industry from a geographic standpoint. Her perspective is rooted in the international because she is addressing how ambiguous yet influential this industry has become, but the notion that tourism creates embodied information can certainly be applied to tourists’ visits to a nearby town as well.

5.5.2 Tourism as Performance Moving to a personal scale, I address two pieces that treat the tourist as a subject and delve into what draws them to place and what constitutes interactions with the ‘other’ both as a place and person. As Crouch puts it, the drive to travel is borne from a desire to experience the authentic other, but in the end, as authenticity is never found, the meaning of the experience is bound up in the agency of the tourist as the other, and both co- constitute the space. Modernist notions of travel construct the tourist as detached or transcendent of his or her (typically Western) roots. Crouch argues that the reflexive encounter is what actually occurs, more of a mirror than a window to another world. “The reflexive subject is conceived not so much through mobility and displacement, as through the encounters with otherness that such mobility yields” (Crouch 2005, p.49). He terms a type of tourist who accepts the reflexivity and inescapability of his or her position a “post-tourist” and notes that some post-tourists can actually revel in their positionality. Certainly the ability to consciously play the tourist speaks to its performability and also to the fact that on swamp tours the tourists are not passive scripts upon which swamp facts are written, but active in negotiating the space. Edensor’s study of tourism performance also highlights the drive for authenticity, but does so by integrating literature on the mundane and non-cognitive roles that tourists play in their travels. “Tourism, like other species of leisure, is not characterized by the suspension of norms but is, like the everyday, culturally informed by particular notions about what to do, and how and where to do it” (2007, p.201). He argues that to a large extent, tourism is not reflexive, but repetitive and predictable and transgressions of these expectations are threatening. “This is one of the central paradoxes of tourism, for while the confrontation of alterity is desired, the disruption this creates can engender self doubt or self-consciousness, not conducive to having a good time” (2007, p.202). People want a packaged sort of exotic, one that conforms to their notion of place and person as other but does not make them reflect upon themselves or disrupt their comfort. This type of experience has been documented in particular reference to Atchafalaya swamp tours. Wiley took several tours in the Basin and used perspectives from drama studies to analyze their performance. He finds that expectation plays a similar role in the swamp: ”instead of directly observing an attraction, such as wetlands, tourists will find themselves merely seeking to confirm what it is about them that has been deemed sight-worthy” (2002, p.122) He also notes the paradox of the expectation of wilderness, intensively constructed by advertisements and the guides’ narratives, compared to an experience in which a man and his children were waterskiing near the tour boat. “The sight of these children smiling up at us from the water was an outrage, and it dispelled our "virtual" world, just as if, in a theatre, someone had brought up the house lights during a play” (2002, p.124). Though his study has similarities in location

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and context to my own, I find his particular castigation of the tours unnerving. He chastises the establishment of wilderness and feeding of alligators as well as the hackneyed uses of Cajun culture, and I can sympathize with these critiques, but what Wiley misses is exactly what Crouch highlights. Moments of tourism are consciously staged and involve the tourist not as a passive observer, but as an active producer of space. Wiley seems to find fault in the supposed authenticity of the tours. But what he witnessed was an authentic tourist experience itself, complete with paradoxical transgressions of expectations, moments of total fulfillment (alligators jumping for food) and the mundane and repetitious scripting of Cajun history and cultures- nothing could be more authentic. His fault is critiquing the transgression of his notion of authentic Cajun culture wilderness, etc. rather than treating the tours as a multi-sided (or more) performance of roles in space. Perhaps this failure is wrought from the metaphor of the theatre, where geometry and tradition create a bifurcated set of players (the audience and actors) and the onlooker is erroneously assumed to be uninvolved in the production.

5.6 Selling the Atchafalaya

Though I have offered some examples of how nature is commodified and performed in the Atchafalaya, I turn now to the substantive results of my fieldwork. The Atchafalaya Basin is a commodified landscape from which products such as crawfish, timber and agricultural products are extracted, and I did gain some insight to how guides perceive this type of traditional extraction. But I focus more upon the extraction of value through less tangible means of selling experience in space. The promotion of tourism is ubiquitous in the Basin, especially near the levy as shown in Figure 6.

Figure 6: Henderson levy touristscape

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This is also evidenced by the existence of the ANHA which is primarily concerned with promoting tourism and a regional identity. Smith noted the increased diversity of tourism types and the turn towards regional promotion, both of which are overt in the ANHA planning documents (Smith 2005). Specifically, the Atchafalaya Trace Commission differentiates the “heritage tourist”.

“Heritage travelers are seeking authentic places, quality or ‘world-class’ natural environments, and cultures different from their own. The offerings of the Atchafalaya Heritage Area are a perfect match for this heritage tourist market—a growing market of travelers that spend more money and stay longer than the average visitor” (Atchafalaya Trace Commission 2002, p.13).

Attracting tourist dollars is not a homogenous project, though, as the state recognized entity may purport. Few of my guides had ever heard of the ANHA and several expressed distrust that such an organization would help either their own business or tourism as a whole. However, there was some consensus on the roles of tourism in the area as a favored source for income generation.

5.6.2 Role of Tourism as a Commodifier In general, as one might expect, guides saw the growth of tourism in the region as a positive. Many spoke of the lack of job opportunities, especially for young people who have little to turn to outside of careers in oil extraction and its associated services. In fact several guides had themselves started in petroleum and left the industry for one reason or another. Though they made a decent living guiding, when asked if they would continue guiding if they won the lottery, nearly all of my guides stated that they would because they love doing it. “I have often thought of that, and I think I would. I tell you I would probably do it for nothing” (Interview N 2010). Or as another put it, “Oh yeah, it ain’t about the money, shit no” (Interview U 2010). Along these lines, one guide noted that at eighteen years old he was working offshore making more money than his parents ever had, but he felt that the industry was “doomed”.

“And then of course industrialization, the oil being so powerful and getting people jobs who never had that kind of economic opportunity before, and at the same time destroying the environment that had sustained us for generations. So the oil business has had its pluses but we lived without it for generations prior to the current status” (Interview J 2010).

Tourism was seen as having a positive impact by diversifying employment opportunities. Hotels, restaurants and swamp tours keep locals in their communities (rather than offshore) and gave people a way to highlight what they saw as their ‘southern hospitality’. “It's friendly you know, us Cajun people are friendly. You go to New York, to California and they won't even talk to you; that's what they [tourists] think” (Interview U 2010). This friendliness was not felt by all though. Another guide who had immigrated to the Basin as a young adult had a different experience.

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“A lot of people talk about Southern hospitality, but I have been all over the United States [and] nobody has ever shot at me because I was a foreigner. So I am not sure about the Southern hospitality idea. Maybe when they go to the tourist places of course they are going to be nice to you, they want your money. But if you go into the countryside and try to make a living there is not a lot of hospitality in Louisiana” (Interview M 2010).

Despite this guide’s story of being an outsider, most saw tourism as a point of pride for Cajuns. After picking up on this notion in early interviews, I began to wonder how things had changed from one generation to the next. I asked how the state onslaught against Cajun people that had occurred in the early 20th century through squashing language and in general marginalizing their perspectives had switched towards promotion of Cajun heritage. When I asked several guides if tourism had helped ‘heal the wounds’ of past injustices, I got several telling responses.

“But the real positive influence is tourism has made the people in my parent's generation who were ashamed of Cajun culture, they are realizing that that it is something to be proud of”.”My parent's generation, the shame that they have lived with all their life is still pretty much there, but now they realize because of tourism that the world loves us [for] our uniqueness rather than ridiculing us for being different” (Interview J 2010).

“But they have realized that they have something to be proud of and I think that that has happened in the last 20 years I think they all have a lot of self pride now” (Interview N 2010).

“I see the turn towards tourism more as a badge of honor making the people want to keep their Cajun heritage more upfront. In the 50s in the 40s in the 30s it was trying to be erased by the state. Now the state is all, ‘Come to Cajun country’” (Interview O 2010).

Since one of the main inquiries of my work was to delve into the notion of selling culture without ‘selling-out’, I wondered how guides saw the commodification of Cajun identity. The state of Louisiana’s change of heart from persecution to promotion that was acknowledged by Interviewee O above could be treated as a switch from marginalization to exploitation through tourism. Somewhat surprisingly, even though most acknowledged that ‘Cajun’ was used inappropriately by some as a marketing tool (especially in New Orleans), the commodification of Cajun was not looked upon with much scorn. The general attitude was that they did not feel like ‘Cajun minstrels’ but that they were glad to be independently employed and that guiding swamp tours was a way to make a living off of the swamp just like their ancestors had. Many spoke of the resiliency of Cajun people and saw the turn to tourism as the most recent adaptation. Another guide was still critical of the state for not promoting ecotourism by protecting the swamps. “We are sitting on a

119 gold mine but the State of Louisiana they refuse to invest in protecting these ecosystems” (Interview M 2010). Jobs and cultural preservation were not the only positives though. Getting people out in the swamp environment though tourism was seen as engendering appreciation and protection for the ecosystem. “I have seen that people appreciate their surroundings more”, said one guide (Interview A 2010). Another commented on how some tours took advantage of tourists’ lack of experience and did not take them to the ‘real swamp’, just to the canals. However, he also noted that this was still a positive. “But as long as they educate people I think it is a good thing. The more swamp tours, the more people they can educate, the mo-better for the swamp” (Interview M 2010). This perspective leads into the question of what types of swamp tours are best, and guides saw much differentiation within the abstract category of ‘swamp tours’. Most tours I took were led in either a pontoon boat from 20-40 feet or a ‘native’ crawfishing skiff, a 15-20 foot craft with a pointed bow that has been fitted with seats (see Figure 7).

Figure 7: The Queen Tanya and her pilot(s)

Airboat tours were a part of my research as well, but are far fewer in this region. Most guides disapprove of airboat tours for a number of reasons. To begin, many thought they took away from the experience of the swamp and were more of a ‘ride’ than a tour. Airboats have the advantage of being able to go to places where others cannot because they not only can float in very shallow water, but even can be piloted over land for short distances. Airboats are powered by small automotive engines geared to an aircraft propeller and are extremely loud so passengers must wear ear protection. For this reason, narration is only possible when the tour comes to a stop, and most airboat tours incorporate several 5-10 minute breaks when guides code the swamp. Non- airboat 120

guides dislike them mainly for the noise. A common attitude was, “I have seen birds come out by the hundreds [and] fly across ahead of that boat. All it does is scare everything to death” (Interview F 2010). Another complaint was that airboats are dangerous. “I hate airboats. I think they are detrimental to the environment. There is only two people who have ever been killed doing swamp tours and they were killed in an airboat crash down near New Orleans a few years ago” (Interview N 2010). Despite the noise and supposed danger, tourists seemed to think the positives outweighed the negatives. One tourist highlighted the ‘adventure experience’ value rather than the ‘natural experience’ when he told me, ”I think really being able to go places that you wouldn't normally be able to go in a regular tour, that really adds a lot, so I wouldn't take this tour any other way” (Interview I 2010). My findings support the idea that swamp tourism in the Basin is seen predominately through a positive lens. Selling Cajun culture was a point of pride rather than a discomforting last resort. Tourism can be a fickle industry and guides noted that their businesses went through downturns seasonally, in relation to general economic declines, and as a result of hurricanes (though through travelers’ fears more than actual damage). However, the ups and downs have not scared them away from this occupation. The guides love being in the swamp every day. The joy of their surroundings plus the freedom of being their own boss while educating people about what they think is important and outweighed the financial and job security that they could have had working for the petroleum industry. Many held on to the romantic yet realistic idea that they were living off of the swamp, in the swamp, just like the original Louisiana Acadian diaspora.

5.6.3 Narratives of Nature Next, I turn to the guides’ representations of the swamp. What is stated on the tour by the guide is ephemeral and contextual and cannot be treated as a ‘text’ per say. As such, I did not transcribe tours and apply textual analysis to root my findings. Instead, I took my own impressions from the tours coupled with interview questions about the tours as the source of swamp code discourses. Though this chapter has focused to a large extent on the concept of nature, as many scholars agree, nature is quite indefinable and hybridized and humanity is itself a natural outgrowth. So instead of separating the two, I treat the swamp tour as a space where both are performed under the commodity condition. I begin by commenting on those discourses that construct a static or fixed swamp. The conceptual fixing of the wetlands allows for its abstraction and commodification and, in practice, attitudes toward the swamp as potentially (or historically) fixed space are applied through statements about the swamp’s restoration to a historical time-space. Robertson (2000) and Meindl (2000) both note the politics of restoration as an essential trope in wetland spaces and this was also true in the Basin. If the goal is restoration, the question then becomes, restore to what? Restoration relies on a utopian vision of a time before something essential was destroyed. When interviewing my participants, I asked them, “Knowing what you know about the history of this place, if you could restore it to any year, what would it be?” Most of the guides picked either a cultural utopian state such as before mandatory schooling or an environmental utopian state such as prior to the levees being built, but none picked a year because they thought it applied to both their cultural and environmental dreams. There was little consensus on what should be restored, nature or culture, and even less on which year should be held paramount.

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Responses included 10,000 years ago, 1850, 1910, and 1960, but none of those interviewed felt that the present was as desirable as the past. While the guides share similar day-to-day interactions with the swamp and might be expected to agree on its idealization, these comments highlight that the determination of an objectively desirable state of swamp affairs for restoration would be controversial to say the least. Furthermore, since none of the guides refused or were unable to conceive of a prime restoration year, they were all comfortable accepting a fixed abstract notion of swamp time/space, the same sort of abstraction that is necessary for the commodification of space.

5.6.3.1. Losses. Environmental and cultural loss were dominant narratives that underpinned the narrative of restoration. Physical swamp loss has been a dominant theme in this region’s environmental politics since the 1960’s when national wetland politics emerged, as well as locally since 1963 when the Old River Control system was completed (Reuss, 1998). This major infrastructure change applied the formula that is still used today to control the confluence of the Mississippi, Red and Atchafalaya Rivers. In Simmesport, Louisiana 30% of the Mississippi River’s water is diverted into the Atchafalaya, but more contentiously, 50% of the Mississippi’s sediment load is sent through. This prevents the Mississippi not only from overtaking the Atchafalaya path, but also from silting in the New Orleans-Baton Rouge trade routes. Naturally, the silting has begun to backfill the Atchafalaya delta, and thus wetlands have been lost. Reuss offers an in-depth history of this process in Designing the Bayous where he concludes, “The Atchafalaya Basin has essentially become a ‘designer wetland’ a monument to human contrivance and ingenuity” (1998 p.355). My respondents confirmed that siltation presented a threat of physical loss. When I asked guides, “What is the biggest environmental threat?” one guide said, “I think silting up” (Interview F 2010) while another agreed saying, “The Basin is silting in; that’s a natural phenomenon” (Interview O, 2010). Another threat to the physical environment of the swamp was sea-level rise or salt water intrusion. Responses ranged from “They say our shoreline will be in Arkansas in 2025” (Interview U 2010) to “We are losing a lot of land every year. Like I say on the boat, in 100 years Vermillion Bay is gonna be in Lafayette” [app. 40 miles away] (Interview F 2010). In these instances, the guides never noted a cause of land loss, just that it was a threat. The above respondent also told a story of a congressman who flew over the Basin and saw the advancing fields of soybeans where the swamp had been drained. This experience made the politician go back to Washington and stop what was going on. The guide did not mention names or specific locations, but the moral of his story was that seeing the intrusion of agriculture in the swamp was the catalyst for making a positive, protective change. This story is an example of the complex interplay between policy and place and, by including the story in his tour, the guide demonstrated his resistance to the agricultural commodification of the swamp, but also paid credence to the institution of representative democracy. This story also illustrates the notion of physical loss through resource development which can also be noted in the debate on sheet flows. Sheet flows are shallow sheets of water that migrate down river covering thousands of acres. When oil pipelines are dug through the flat swamp, heavy equipment is used to pile mud up (perhaps even as little as a few inches) along the edges for the length of the pipeline. This

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illegal practice of leaving what are known as ‘spoil banks’ impedes the flow of large pools of water which become stagnant. Ecologically speaking, a “healthy” swamp should maintain a slow drifting water flow. Many players could be implicated in leaving these spoil banks, but in the Basin enforcement or prosecution of offenders is rare. Several guides and a representative from the crawfishermen’s association noted that losing sheet flows was causing swamp loss and, more specifically, loss of prime crawfishing grounds. Other environmental threats were logging cypress for mulch, suburbanization of Baton Rouge and hurricanes. In general, most respondents adhered to one culprit or threat that caused the loss of swamps but there was little consensus between the guides on what the primary threat was. One guide put it bluntly, “It’s a toss up between the people living here and the ecosystem” (Interview F 2010). Cultural loss was also a paramount theme in many of the interviews and tours. In accordance with my perspective on culture outlined in Chapter Three, Cajun culture could not be lost because it is performed every day. However, the respondents felt that some essence of Atchafalaya culture was lost or nearly gone. Culture as I use it here is not understood to be explicitly Cajun ethnicity since Acadiana is often referred to as a ‘Gumbo Pot’ of different cultures. Some tours were given by Cajuns but not explicitly about Cajun ethnicity, others were given by non-Cajuns and did address Cajun ethnicity, and still others were Cajun style by Cajuns. Thus the use of culture by guides was by no means generalizable, which supports my earlier notions of its radically open performability. This finding concurs with Stivale’s notion of “Becoming Cajun” that is inspired by Deleuze and Guattari (2003). Becoming Cajun is an expressive force and, ”both a temporal passage through successive experiential phases and an experimental and spatial process of engagement with diverse cultural practices” (Stivale, 2003 p.21). Cajun culture is not fixed, but what can be said is that culture, folkways, tradition and the like were often characterized as slipping away. Historical evidence could certainly be used to justify this claim. By the mid- 1950’s Bayou Chene, the last of a handful of towns within the levees, was abandoned. Furthermore, the State of Louisiana’s early 20th century assault on Cajun culture through mandatory English-only instruction coupled with the intrusion of mainstream US American cultures through television and radio and the influx of outsiders during the oil boom all drastically altered the cultural landscape of the swamp. An appeal to the nostalgia of a time before what Bernard (2003) calls “The Americanization” of the Cajuns is tempting, especially for those who are a part of today’s swamp culture. But glorifying the past may ignore the fact that people still live in, work in, eat from and treasure the Basin today. Swamp cultures cannot be judged to be better or worse; they can only exist, and they still do. I therefore interpret tour guides’ frequent appeals to a better time as a historical abstraction of the swamp. One respondent said, “Well I’m trying to get people to realize that if something is not done about water quality in the Basin the Cajun fishing culture is going to die out as it has been dying out” (Interview P 2010). Often guides made out the narrative of loss in terms of generational differences. ““There was 1500 of us Cajuns back here [in the swamp]. There is only 52 people left who still live in there permanently and their average age is 86” (Interview U 2010). Respondents also noted “We are losing a lot of the young generation. They don’t even speak French” (Interview D 2010) or “We could lose it all this generation” (Interview U 2010).

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A general utopian historical abstraction of the Cajun swamp would be a time when everyone spoke French, before the dominant market economy (i.e. subsistence/agriculture from the swamp), before mandatory schooling, and prior to the levees. Historical assessments of this region could attempt to pin down a year when all of these cultural attributes were in place, perhaps 1820, but despite some agreement that the swamp during this era was a ‘better’ place, a determination of ‘the good ole days’ can only be subjective. The notions of swamp nature and cultural loss pervaded among the tour guides. For the most part, the perceived losses were split as I have presented them into nature and culture, but one of my primary points of inquiry was to identify the connections between people and the swamp in the sense that some hybridity existed between these two seemingly well-defined categories. When asked, many of the guides acknowledged that they saw themselves as a part of the swamp. Many showed adept and personal- experiential knowledge of the ebbs and flows of water, as well as particular knowledge about alligators, trees, birds, and fish. As a whole, the guides were conscious of their inputs into the swamp via their trash and boat motor emissions, and they were aware that they were ‘trespassing’ into animal domains such as a rookeries or alligator nesting areas. Guides tended to see themselves as caretakers of the Basin not because maintaining the swamp was vital to their business, but because it was their responsibility as a participant in the space. One respondent, who has written several books on this subject, very eloquently described the interplay between people and the swamp. “There is almost a mystical connection between the Cajun fisherman and the swamp. A desire to be a part of the wildness“ (Interview P 2010). Another guide melded the tropes of loss using a concise and effective statement of hybridity. “By killing the swamps they are killing their own culture. Its ethnocide” (Interview M 2010). Furthermore, one Cajun man aligned the ecological health of the swamp with a future of lost culture when he said, “if water quality doesn’t change we will be less Cajun” (Interview P 2010).

5.6.3.2 Changes. In the Basin today, the concepts of cultural loss, environmental loss, and a fuzzy discourse on restoration subsist on static historic constructions of the place. However, the people I spoke with not only spoke to fixed understandings of the swamp, but also to the dynamic. In the dynamic swamp, people, animals, the landscape, and the culture all are in constant flux. “It evolves and revolves into something totally different”, said one guide in reference to swamp culture (Interview R 2010). This view of the swamp is open to possibility and adaptation, and depends very heavily on the present tense. By spatializing the swamp as a dynamic configuration of people and nature, guides give each moment a degree of uniqueness and scarcity which boosts the value of the tour as a source of new and exciting experiences of the wetland commodity. Thrift notes that, “Whilst [capitalism] has its contemplative aspects, based in the time of learned knowledge, it is chiefly an order of the moment, and a means of crafting the moment“ (Thrift, 2005 p. 11). What sets the swamp tour’s crafted moment apart from music, theatre or other performance art is this dynamic churning of the setting on a floating stage. One could argue that through the day-to-day necessities of life, all cultures are in a constant state of adaptation to the world around them. This is certainly as noticeable in the Basin as anywhere else. When a 1920’s accordion waltz sung in an unwritten

124 language blasts over the stillness of the swamp as the guide’s cell phone ringtone, one is reminded that no culture exists in isolation and that the nature and culture of the swamp, and indeed the swamp tour itself, are hybrid experiences. However, the aspects of culture that my interviewees specifically highlighted as examples of adaptation and transformation of swamp life were specifically those that changed their engagement with the market economy. This notion of economic dynamism was noticeable on several time and social scales and indicated that locals saw themselves as innovative in their abilities to extract swamp commodities, material or otherwise. Many individuals migrate in and out of the market economy with the seasonal variability of the swamp and its ‘products’ (crawfish, alligators, fishing, tourism etc.). One respondent confirmed this when he stated, “A lot of people when the water is high [in a certain year] will stop what they are doing and go fishing and make some money” (Interview O 2010). Comeaux found this theme to be prevalent in the area when he noted, “Swamp dwellers believe they can earn a living in either environment [wage labor or swamp] or divide their lives between the two, as they may desire” (1972, p.27). Comeaux suggests that swamp subsistence has become less and less prevalent, but respondents from my study indicated that the ideology of avoiding wage labor for individualized swamp-commodity labor was still alive. A lifelong swamper who moonlighted as a hotel maintenance man noted, “Most Cajuns, they grew up in hardship all their life. If they can’t make it this way, they will go to something else” (Interview O 2010). Another scale of Cajun adaptation was on the cultural and generational scale. These responses came up most often when guides referred to the regional economic turn to oil extraction jobs in the 1960’s and the more recent turn to tourism around the late 1980’s. One guide noted the great role that Cajun ingenuity had in creating the technology that went into the offshore oil platforms (Interview J 2010). Another elderly man spoke with pride about the popularization of “Swamp pop” Cajun music as a source of creative income (Interview D 2010). Probably the most revealing statement to this end was made by a swamp tour guide who, like many others, came into the occupation from an individualized relationship with the wage economy as a teacher/carpenter/crawfisherman: “I see the turn toward tourism more as a badge of honor, making the people want to keep their heritage more upfront” (Interview O 2010). In the experience economy, Cajuns could ‘be’ their ethnicity and still make a living in the swamp. Cajun identity thus is characterized less by a return back to, or preservation of, an idyllic past than by a state of continual adaptation and becoming, a process that also describes the resilience of the swamp itself. It may seem self-evident that the swamp environment is constantly changing, but I sought to understand the depth of meaning that dynamism has to the tour guides, many of whom are on the water every day of the year. All agreed that because of the constant flux of water, light, animal migrations, and so on each tour they give is different. About half of the tours guaranteed an alligator experience, and for the guides on these tours the dynamism of nature caused some problems, often forcing them to feed alligators so as to ensure a performance. Additionally, tour guides had to cope with an ever-changing landscape. Several of my tours took place on Lake Martin, and through several visits to the lake I was able to confirm that even if guides covered the same information or followed the same path, each visit was unique. “We always see something different, always changing,” said one guide (Interview J 2010). The same is true for seasonality in

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the Basin. When asked what their favorite month in the swamp was, several initially responded ‘All of them’ because they are all different; however most conceded that April was the most dramatic. Throughout the year and from year to year vastly different amounts of water are available in the swamp which determines much of the swamp ecology. Flood years like 1973 (and 2011) are in great contrast to times like the dry and meager crawfish season of 2000. In the Basin, despite narratives of restoration and cultural and environmental threats, the experience of the dynamic is the one thing that can be depended on. This dynamism can be understood by using a performative epistemology that allows for creative and original relationships with one’s surroundings but is missed when the swamp or the swamp tour are treated only as an abstractable commodity.

5.7 Conclusion

Some of the events and mechanics of an Atchafalaya swamp tour can be predicted. To some extent, even what the guide will say is predictable because of his need to translate the place in a common language. In the present-tense experience of the swamp, the subjective can avoid neither the absorption of socialized knowledge, nor the spawn of events from the boat’s movement, nor the internal creative response to these events and surroundings. But these aspects of space are influential in all settings. When you purchase a ticket to witness a guide give meanings to the space around you he is providing you an intangible product and acknowledging values that may not inherently arise from your contact with the space. In this way, the guide’s service is an appreciation of space both in the sense of its economic exchange value and in terms of increasing tourists’ respect. When the guide’s position is used consciously or otherwise to reproduce the economic paradigms that depict the swamp as monetarily valued and as an entirety or amalgam of objects, they commodify the swamp. This commodification of the swamp, coupled with the commodification of the swamp tour as an experience, are vital links in understanding the dialectical process of space-making that has yielded today’s post- industrial capitalist wetlands. Furthermore, when a guide constructs the swamp as a space of loss he commodifies the wetland by rarifying its continued existence, and he reproduces this in his effort to sell an experience of this ‘dying breed’. However, the structuralist approaches that treat the swamp and experiences therein as exchangeable or as chiefly motivated by profit returns cannot grasp the day-to- day performance of the Basin. The swamp is performed as a dynamic place that is exotic and worthy of experiencing because each visit will be unique. This facet of swamp experience (that each is unique) seems to fail abstraction and commodification. If the swamp tours were approached (top-down) theoretically as they are most often encountered by tourists (in the bank of brochures at the hotel), each would seem to be equivalent products, transferrable and seemingly mass-produced. But, the experience of each tour, guide, and specific time on the water is different despite their commodified nature.

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CHAPTER SIX

GATOR GEOGRAPHIES

Alligators are particularly relevant to the production/performance of a valued tour commodity and the broader notion of the swamp’s wildness. In the Basin, fear is a dominant subject of conversations about alligators. Fear dominates because it is both the draw and repulsion of human-alligator contacts. People are drawn to experience alligator spaces and want to confront the embodiment of their fears, but they know that such spaces can only be experienced under extreme regulation. However, this is only one side of the relationship. Fear also dominates the discussion of alligator behaviors such that their fear is what governs encounters with people. The following two quotes from swamp tour guides illustrate how strange fear seems to be from alligators’ perspectives.

“When we first find them, they are easy to catch and by the time we have caught them four or five times they have a Ph.D. in how to evade. Boy they get smart fast” (Interview N 2010).

“If a wild gator is fed off the bank by a lot of different people, tourists, yeah eventually that gator is going to lose its fear and come up and hurt somebody. But it is our fault” (Interview A 2010).

In both instances, the gators have altered their behavior because of human experiences. In the first, they learn to fear contact (capture), and in the second they learn to desire contact (food). This is quite comparable to how people come to the experience as well; fearful of contact (attack) and desiring contact (experience points). So in this sense, both people and gators are on equal grounds. Swamp tour guides stand as the mediators who can translate human and alligator behaviors to engender an ethical and mutually beneficial experience for both. These complex dynamics show that animals are not only shaped by the human world, but also that they reciprocate the impact on us. I cannot ignore that the position of humans and alligators in the experience of fear mirrors the performance of inside/outside cultures that Bhabha describes using the metaphor of a stairwell as a liminal space. “This interstitial passage between fixed identifications opens up the possibility of a cultural hybridity that entertains difference without an assumed or imposed hierarchy” (Bhabha 1994, p.4). Thus, similar to the performance of cultures espoused in Chapter Three, our relationships with animals are co-constituted. This research posits a place-based reconsideration of animal geographies that investigates our murky social-bestial distinctions. Past geographic work on animals has ranged from categorical species distributions (via Zoogeographies) to more critical approaches that seek to emancipate animals from the theoretical bondage of functionalism and the construction of anthropocentric binaries. Building on the latter

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motivation, which I see as central to ‘animal geographies’, I suggest an epistemology that considers animal-beings in multiple local contexts in order to demonstrate the open trajectories and hybrid natures of human-nonhuman animal spaces. As a theoretical addition to the emerging literature on animal geographies this chapter finds that while many studies treat animals as recipients of human cultures, a small cadre of works investigates animals as having independent performative capacities. An approach that combines these two epistemologies can avoid functionalization while still acknowledging that humans possess a “conscious intentionality” that makes great impacts on animal worlds (Philo and Wilbert 2000, p.15). I suggest that applying a hybrid paradigm to the relationship between people and alligators allows us not only to bridge this gap, but also to diversify the monotonic treatment of animals as a species which relies on the constructed notion of a non-existent creature that carries all of the characteristics of its bio-similar counterparts. To illustrate this conjecture, I address human-alligator experiences in the Atchafalaya Basin alongside an environmental history of humans and alligators in Louisiana. Since humans have the ability to exterminate, confine or otherwise constrict individual alligator bodies, the relationship between ‘us’ and Alligator mississippiensis as an ‘other’ species revolves around the production of wildness used to justify the humans’ geopolitical maneuvers. As with other animals, some classes of alligators are imbued with various and uneven rights within our shared spaces. However, this unevenness also suggests that some alligators are positioned to have greater affect on networks of human social power than others even within their precariously defined species-level status. Thus, alligators in the Basin are shown to exist neither as a stable abstract category that can be geopolitically regulated, nor as a group of unique social individuals. Rather, through wildness ascribed to classes of alligator bodies, humans actively produce a border that, despite its flexibility, maintains both the human-animal and species-individual binaries while diffusing power to particular gator bodies that can counteract wildness. As with other methods of top-down power diffusion in the Basin (political, economic, cultural), the separation of humans and alligators is uneven and at times, contradictory. I will dissect these strange spaces in three steps that address themes within the literature and how they were supported in my findings. I begin with animals as inputs in human processes, continue with animals as agents carrying their own capacities independent of people, and end with perspectives that blend the two both in both a spatial sense and in their relative power capacities.

6.1 Social Acting Upon Animals

When we investigate human-animal relationships from a perspective where people have all of the power to shape animal worlds, we deepen the constructed divide between us. Fitzsimmons notes the danger of such a perspective when she writes, “We must recognize that externalized, abstracted, Nature-made-primordial provides a source of authority to a whole language of domination. This is the domination of nature, but also the domination of human reality by Nature” (1982, p.109 emphasis in original). When she writes of primordial, the author critiques how we tend to think of animals as ancient, yet less complex and less evolved than people. This makes them manageable, not only for their own (human-created) needs for survival, but more-importantly, for our needs. Despite

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such functionalization, many geographers have bolstered our understanding of human relationships with animals by taking these sorts of perspectives. These works cover a variety of species and functions, but can be grouped together because they investigate the human side of the binary particularly through critiquing our treatment of animals through cultures of exploitation.

6.1.2 Speaking for all Animals When Ingersoll wrote in 1885, “Small and great are falling under the Juggernaut of civilization!” he foretold not only the impacts that people would continue to have on wild animals in North America, but the direction of geographic research in this field as well (p.27). His piece offered dire insights into the impacts of “man” and, though it might make today’s geographer shudder in its sub-humanization of native peoples (“He himself was really as wild and indigenous as they”, p.18), it still cultivates the same moral conclusions about the destruction of wildlife that are offered by more current works. I introduce Ingersoll alongside several other studies that take similar broad spatial and multi-species approaches Many broad scale and multi-species studies of the place of animals in society tell a tale of destruction via human encroachment. Ingersoll’s piece is emblematic of this finding as he looks at the role of human expansion throughout North America and focuses broadly on all wild animals including mammals, birds, fish, crustaceans and reptiles. He implicates commodification of animal bodies (bird feathers for hats), wanton destruction of habitats (bears), fear based eradication (wolves), and overhunting (eastern elk). All of these species-topics and pressures are still significant to animal geographies of today. Rather than giving an extensive review of his piece, I want to comment on two of his conclusions that I think foretell the ethical questions of animal geographies. He writes, ”Whether it is worthwhile that a continent should remain uncivilized in order to preserve its wild animals in their original numbers and freedom is hardly debatable in a cultivated community” (1885 p.43-44). He seems to weigh out the domination of animals in relation to human development by concluding that it is worth it, albeit lamentable. People have found many ways to circumvent this divide between civilization and wildness both by bringing wildness into the city (Wolch and Emel 1998; Anderson 1995) and by bringing humanity into the wild (Philo and Wilbert 2000; Matless et al. 2005). What is notable from this emergence of blended wild-civilized experiences is that they are themselves ticketed and therefore commodified. Our reaction to the eradication of wildness has been to segregate spaces such as national parks, wildlife preserves and zoos for the maintenance of wildness to serve the “cultivated community”. This allows us to have our (animal) cake and eat it too. Though he may not have foreseen the innovative capacity of capitalism to negotiate our animal-ethical boundaries while still making room for profit, Ingersoll knew how to appeal to the pocketbook:

“Yet, it is possible to examine whether much of the waste I have noted in our animal resources might not have been prevented; and putting aside any moral or sentimental considerations-viewing it only from the most prosaic and commercial standpoint, does not this matter call for more earnest attention than it has yet received from the general public” (1885 p.44)?

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In a justification of his moral argument, Ingersoll notes that we are wasting money by destroying our wildlife. Certainly we can conclude that the entire movement of ‘wildlife conservation’ is based on this same notion, rooted in the utilitarian argument. For many species, conservation for use allows their continued existence however humanized and managed it may be. Balmford et al. from ecological economics take this notion to an empirical extreme. They found that, ”social benefits of retaining wetlands, arising from sustainable hunting, angling, and trapping, greatly exceeded agricultural gains” (2002. p.951). However, most animal geographies critique further commodification of animals despite this type of measured success. Another way that geographers have broadly negotiated the human-animal relationship is through analysis of animal spaces within human space. This group of works focuses primarily on zoos and the positioning of animals in urban environments. Kay Anderson’s work on the Adelaide Zoo gives a poignant history of the environment, design and aspirations of the zoo in relation to its variety of different animal bodies and species. She dissects the role of animal display as a conquering and colonizing trope. The zoo, she argues, played a vital role in placing animals within the “black box” of nature that so many geographers attempt to open up and diversify (1995, p.277). “That this 'way of seeing' enshrined distinctive western 'ways of being' in relation to nature, is surely also the case” (1995, p.279). Her history follows the construction of animality at the zoo originally as a “collection,” then as a “circus” or fairground, and finally as the naturalesque that dominates zoos throughout the world. Throughout these periods, the zoo has incorporated elements of perverse masculinity, colonial discourse and nationalism to foster more attendance. Wolch also treats animals and urban environments, but in a more general sense (Wolch, 1998). She wants to develop an urban animal ethic that acknowledges cities as rightfully animalized rather than infested. Though she acknowledges that “the rare and the tame” animals in the city have a voice, this ignores the lives and living spaces of a large number and variety of animals who dwell in cities (1998, p.121). In particular, I find this striation of the types of animal constructions that occupy the city to be useful. Wild, tame, appropriate, threatening, or just urban ‘ambient’ animals such as rats and pigeons all make up an invisible subaltern in Wolch’s “Zoöpolis”. She attempts not to advocate for ‘rat rights’ on par with pets, but more to populate our understanding of the roles of animals in the purified notion of the city.

“Zoöpolis invites a critique of contemporary urbanization from the standpoints of animals but also from the perspective of people, who together with animals suffer from urban pollution and habitat degradation and who are denied the experience of animal kinship and otherness so vital to their well-being” (1998, p.135).

My argument regarding this group of literature is mirrored in this quote. Though Wolch brings a degree of justice to urban animals, she does so by acknowledging yet not engaging the animal participation in cities. My suggestion is that beginning with papers such as Ingersoll’s and continuing with today’s critical ‘animals and the city’ works, animals have been spoken for in the context of humanity. I continue with literature that takes this epistemological paradigm to specific species.

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6.1.3 Speaking for a Species Many authors have avoided writing radically broad geographies of animals in favor of investigating how specific species are socialized within human worlds. This tactic is perhaps easier because people seem to attach a more measurable variety of characteristics to types of animals than we do to the whole range. Human-animal conflicts, such as wolf eradication or endangered animal protection often become symbolic not of animals as a whole, but particular species. I begin with two articles that similarly address the moral implications (or landscapes) of hunting. Both show the complicated discourse that hunters use to justify their concurrent love for and love for killing animals. Though to non-hunters and animal rights activists who are ardently opposed to hunting this paradox may seem insurmountable, both Matless et al. (2005) and McLeod (2007) expose how hunters position themselves within nature to rationalize an extensively symbolic (rather than survival-based) activity. Matless et al. contrast wildfowl hunting with otter hunting in England. They show how science and morality are used to suggest the necessity of hunting or the particular methods employed. Particularly interesting was the hunters’ use of modernity in relation to their methods. Wildfowl hunters saw themselves as modern in the sense that they used clean and humane killing methods while the otter hunters were seen by other hunters as ‘backwards’. They write, “the wildfowler restyled as newly efficient, the otter hunter cast as archaic relic” (2005, p.202). The authors suggest that the distinction between mammals and bird and their respective habitats also played a part. Though otters inhabit land and water that was more materially human, this was contrasted with “the duck or goose flying in and having minimal engagement with a human territory itself often deemed uneconomic” (2005, p.202). The spatiality of findings suggests that the ethical landscape is blended with the material in a way that positions otters as less- removed from humans and therefore worthy of greater moral significance. This led them to conclude that, “Otters by contrast are often individualized, lent personality, and observed and hunted through close pursuit and intimate visual or (through hounds) olfactory engagement” (2005, p.192). Thus, the type of encounter with animals can structure the morality. In a similar manner, McLeod’s study of duck hunters in New Zealand found that when negotiating moralities, emphasis was put on the cleanliness of the kill. This notion was not only supported by the hunters, but also by managing agency materials that promoted such an ethic, sometimes specifically to counter the image of hunters from perspectives of anti-hunters. In fact many of the hunters’ ethics were constructed specifically to counter the anti-hunter mentality. Hunters saw their activities as more natural and “anti-hunting protesters as having a ‘naïve’ conception of nature as opposed to the ‘realistic’ ideals of hunters” (2007, p.161). “Many hunters argue that they are keeping natural populations within a manageable range, which… ensures there is enough food for sustainable wildfowl populations—and therefore fewer ducks suffering a slow death from starvation” (2007, p.162). Along with appealing to a more ‘modern’ kill (similar to Matless et al.), these hunters saw themselves as “responsible predators” (2007, p.162). Several other studies have focused on the human side of human-animal conflicts that are not about hunting, but revolve around inclusion/exclusion from spaces. Two chapters from animal geography edited volumes deal with wolves in North America. Emel covers

131 wolf eradication as an illustration of, “the interrelatedness of racism, sexism, animal abuse and economic practices” (Emel 1998, p. 92). She pens a striking piece that exposes the nefarious history of wolf killing that followed the spread of American ‘progress’. The justifications for wolf eradication were diverse and included protection of livestock, people and big-game animals, as well as the general conquering of wilderness. Perhaps her most precise point is to connect the cult of masculinity associated with hunting and the strange ways that killing the predator became an “affirmation of virility” (1998, p.110). Counter to the project of eradication, Emel positions the recovery of the wolf “as a positive symbol by marginalized others…in sweet opposition to the negative cultural coding” (1998, p.111). She ties the characteristics of the wolf to the oppressed in a manner that makes the feminine, racialized other the conqueror of the conqueror, and leaves the reader with a sense that a wrong has been righted (at least for the wolves). Brownlow takes up the story of the wolf with particular reference to its (re)placing in the Adirondack mountains of New York, a habitat that is markedly different from the notion of the dehumanized wildernesses of the west (Brownlow 2000). He describes the conflict over returning wolves to the region within the context of their initial extirpation in the 19th century when, “in this new place, ‘game’ ruled supreme and the wolf emerged heretical, an animal without a place” (Brownlow 2000, p.149). Bolstered by urban growth on the coast that brought expendable income to elites, a program to construct the region as a playground for the rich washed wolves from the mental and subsequently material landscape. This also mirrored the removal of Native people (also made into “varmints”) and established white settlers whose presence contradicted the notion of a natural tourist space. Today, the same urban conservationist vs. Adirondack resident opposition is fueling the debate over bringing the wolves back. “The irony lies in the fact that it was this very same philosophy [urban conservationist] that was responsible for the wolf’s extermination from the region one hundred years ago” (Brownlow 2000, p.154). Conservation has simply turned a corner on accepting the wolf rather than removing it to justify conservation of other species. The same type of imagined animal-less landscape is noted in Griffyths et al. who discuss feral cat spaces in the English city (Gryffyths et al. 2000). They note, “The desire to eliminate nature, nature as abject and inimical to domesticity, is still there in the (post)modern city. At the same time, though, wild nature is desired” (2000, p.69). They tease out the ‘slippery’ distinctions that are used to position domestic cats as “retaining some of their wildness” while similarly placing feral cats along the wild-domestic continuum (Gryffyths et al., p.58). A group called ‘Cat Action Trust’ argues for the further domestication of and care for feral cats but the authors find that in many spaces (or ‘colonies’ in their ‘cat map’) feral cats live successfully and freely. Their theoretical addition to the literature concerns the construction of acceptance and aversion to wildness in the city which they use to mirror the treatment of othered groups such as Gypsies. “Just as nomads transgress and disturb the urban ‘order’ but, at the same time represent a romanticized freedom, so uncontrolled nature is a source of both anxiety and desire” (Gryffyths et al.2000, p.69). Repugnance towards feral catscapes, then, represents the failed attempt to purify the modern project of the city.

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6.1.4 Species Ethics Both of the seminal edited volumes in animal geography call for the re-examination of ethics to rectify the problems that emerge from thinking of animals and humans as separable (Wolch and Emel 1998; Philo and Wilbert 2000). Jones (in the Philo and Wilbert volume) attempts to summarize the spatial manifestations of ethics by treating animal ‘encounters’, a method that lends itself well to an understanding of the swamp tour (Jones 2000). He argues that all encounters are inherently ethical, but that the ascription of power or moral relevancy within types of encounters varies. “Those outside are rendered faceless and voiceless, and this has generally been the fate of animals in normative ethics” (2000, p.272). In order to give face to animals, we must acknowledge the spatial unevenness of the ethics of encounters. I take his perspective (which is in itself broad in application) as a critique of thinking about animals too broadly. We cannot assume that there is ‘an animal ethic’ reducible to any cultural space because animals are complexly woven into humanity. Furthermore, the way we categorize animals into species is at fault and allows for maltreatment of the whole despite the individual, or the individual despite the whole. This critique applies to the latter group of literatures that successfully complicate our understandings of ‘classes’ within a species, but do so through a species treatment (in relation to people). Jones references the problem that emerges from treating groups of animals rather than individuals in reference to magpies. If they were rare, they might be protected, “Yet, although finding themselves in a different ethics of encounter, their treatment would still be driven by their membership of a given population in a given space rather than as an individual” (Jones 2000, p. 277). This notion of individual vs. population rights plays an important role in the story of the alligator in Louisiana which I will expand upon later in this chapter. The discrepancy between individual encounters and the (imagined) group needs highlighted by Jones proves that to avoid the empiricism inherent in ecology and wildlife management and their unreliable extension to the ethics of encounter, we should move beyond addressing animals as a species. I do not mean to suggest that we abandon work that only addresses one species of animal (I am just as guilty). Rather, we must acknowledge that too much variety exists within human-animal encounters to write meaningful geographies about the role of, for example, ‘Bears in Texas’. Extended even more broadly, treating multiple species of animals within one smaller scale, such as the work on zoos and cities, risks melting the complexities of species-human relationships into the ‘animals’ black-box. This is similar to Anderson’s critique of zoos’ role in placing animals into the ‘nature’ black-box. To move away from over-generalization, we also must include animal agency and perspective in our work. The works reviewed here do make attempts to gain animals’ perspectives (particularly, the ‘ethnographic’ observation of feral cat colonies by Gryffiths et al., and to some extent the acknowledgement of otter spaces by Matless et al.), but in general, their conclusions are about how animals are used by people and the human outcomes of often failed relationships. For instance, both wolf chapters devote much text to paralleling wolf eradication with the white-washing removal of Native people. Certainly, this is a valid and compelling point, but are works such as these cultural geographies that reference animals, or animal geographies? Again, I turn to Jones who questions the focus on discourse as opposed to encounter. “Thus, the prediscursive ethics of these encounters remain unexamined; yet, if they were to be so, they might be

133 acknowledged as deeply unethical by existing normative codes and therefore a matter of great concern” (Jones 2000, p.274). In accordance with my perspective on encounters as performative, outlined in Chapter Two, my appeal for animal agency is rooted in the recognition that all sorts of actors have the capacity to perform in a situation. Ignoring animal capacities or treating them as a species on a food chain solely driven by ambiguous ‘instincts’ is as faulty a logic as attributing aggression to someone’s manliness or emotion to womanliness (such as Butler’s seminal critique (1990)). The move away from structuring paradigms implied by performativity must be extended to other animals as well. There are a handful of works that, in my opinion, attempt to represent animal geographies from an animal perspective. These are considered later in this chapter, after an introduction to the environmental history of alligators in the Atchafalaya Basin.

6.2 Atchafalaya Alligator Environmental History

The American alligator has been a part of the Louisiana landscape throughout all of recorded history. The species as we define it has been around for 70 million years (Glasgow,1991). Father Paul du Ru wrote in 1700, “The beast which passes for something so terrible in Europe is seen here as another fish, the Savages, while bathing, play with it, without coming to any harm” (quoted in Glasgow 1991, p.1). Native Americans used the alligator for several purposes both instrumental and symbolic. Alligator bodies were traditionally used for their skins, tail meat and their fat was rendered for oil. Both Native Americans and Acadians in the Atchafalaya (who arrived around 1770) used the animal to compliment subsistence diets but did not depend upon it. Kniffen, Gregory and Stokes found that “the range of animal life taken and by Louisiana’s Indians knew no limits” (1987, p.201). Although these authors noted the Natives’ different method of taking an alligator -shoving a sharpened stick down its throat- it is likely that the alligator occupied a fairly similar spot within the food economy of Native Americans and Cajuns. The story of human-alligator interaction began to change around the Civil War when desperate southern troops began to tan alligator hides as more conventional leather supplies were exhausted. Although some commercial tanning did occur before this era, markets for alligator hide products that necessitated commercial hunting did not emerge outside of Louisiana until the Gilded Age. By 1869 the demand for alligator leather in Europe had grown unabated, supported by new tanning techniques in France and Italy (Glasgow 1991). Thus began the fruitful yet exploitive pattern of extraction in Louisiana and tanning in Europe that is still in place today. Commercial and private hunting for skins continued virtually unregulated until 1948 when hunting seasons began to be limited. Another notable practice from this time period that can be differentiated from alligator hunting is alligator shooting. Throughout the late nineteenth and early twentieth century “riverboat era” tourists were guided through the swamps where they used alligators as target practice for sport. “Gator killing was for some, a genial sport and was frequently practiced along the Mississippi drainage” (Doughty 1983, p.66). Barrow found an early conservation practice- “fearful that the indiscriminate shooting was decimating alligator and other wildlife populations along the rivers- the very attractions their

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customers found so fascinating- steamboat owners banned the practice by the 1880s” (Barrow 2010, p.134). This was also noted by Ingersoll who wrote:

“As for the alligator, it is now a treat to see one over a thousand miles of half submerged country where a few years ago they swarmed in countless throngs. This is owing partly to the utility of their rugged hides; but more to the senseless habit tourists call amusement, of shooting at every one that can be spied from the deck of a steamboat” (1885, p.36)

Whether due to killings for amusement or for profit, by the mid-twentieth century alligator numbers were noticeably lower (at least in some locations). Though Florida was quicker to reign in the race for hides, Louisiana eventually followed suit and cancelled the 1963 season due to low populations. For the next ten years hunting alligators was illegal in Louisiana. Under pressure from the Audubon Society and other like-minded groups, the alligator was listed as an endangered species in 1967. In 1972 a small season was opened under strict regulation (Glasgow 1991). Over the next decade the entire state was opened back up for hunting and the seasons have expanded since then as hide prices have fairly steadily risen (though fallen in recent years with less global demand for exotic animal products). The American alligator was de-listed as an endangered species in 1987 and has been lauded as one of the program’s greatest success stories (Glasgow 1991). The most pivotal point in the story of Louisiana alligator hunting came during the ten year ban. In 1964 the state first commissioned a scientific study of the alligator farming process and thereafter growing alligators became more lucrative than hunting them. The researchers found that under specific conditions alligator eggs could be incubated and the reptiles raised in captivity. In the wild less than ten percent of the eggs survive to reproductive maturity but in captivity rates of over 90% are not unknown (Louisiana Alligator Advisory Council 2011). This has led to a process of captive breeding and release into the wild at around four feet or eighteen months old. In 1988 farm raised alligator skins overtook wild-hunted skins and since 2000 hunted skins have been less than 20% of the total market (Louisiana Alligator Advisory Council 2011). Today, the profitable practice of egg gathering is aided by GPS and helicopters but is highly regulated. As a veteran Atchafalaya alligator hunter put it, “There’s more paperwork on a baby alligator that there is on a baby person.” (Interview W 2009). Beyond these basic facts is a vibrant symbolic, economic and political history that has seen the alligator portrayed along a continuum from a monster of pestilence to the revered master of a landscape. As Cronon aptly noted, “Nature, political economy and belief- these, in varying mixes have been the chief fascinations of environmental historians’ work” (Cronon 1990, p.1123). In the case of the history of the Louisiana alligator, these fascinations will be nurtured. However, to facilitate analysis and incorporation into the larger discussion of regional nature-society assemblages, I treat them here under the tropes of Adoption: the shift from anti- to pro-alligator attitudes, Separation: the spatial divides constructed within human-alligator relations, and Regulation: the attempt to exert political control over both populations

6.2.1 Adoption In the span of 100 years the Louisiana alligator went from “ugly beast” as penned by Wilkinson in an 1892 issue of Century (p. 400) to the State Reptile in 1983, “promoted to

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the ranks of the pelican and other symbols of Louisiana’s totem pole” (Glasgow 1991, p.142). This transformation is the story of the adoption of the alligator as a meaningful symbol by the people of Louisiana. Barrow has also investigated the species’ symbolic meaning. “Layered onto and related to the perception of the alligator as a fierce man- eating predator is the view of the species as a symbol of the landscape it inhabits” (Barrow 2010, p.132). He writes predominately of the alligator in Florida where the bestial character of “the swamp” has been cultivated by the University of Florida’s athletic program and by earlier traditions in alligator-theatre at roadside attractions. I see this process of adoption in Louisiana not as an event shaped by the alligator’s fearsome social rap sheet, but a turnaround from negative to positive partially motivated by the gains of the environmental movement but more so by the creation of a diverse alligator product and experience market in the 1980’s. Until the middle of the twentieth century, the alligator was seen in largely negative terms. Perceptions of the alligators as a ferocious beast were drawn from travel narratives and the journals of explorers and colonialists. Don Ferdinand, son of Christopher Columbus, characterized Hispanola’s alligators as “so ravenous that if they find a man sleeping they drag him to the water to devour him” (quoted in Barrow 2010, p.130). This image of a fierce alligator helped characterize the spaces occupied by alligators as land that needed to be civilized. Although some authors attempted to dispel these myths- including Audubon (1827) and McIlheney (1934), the overwhelming majority of writing about the alligator was motivated by its supposedly menacing traits. It is also notable that along with the narrative of the snapping alligator was the racist notion that the reptile was more of a threat to black people- especially children. Glasgow found at least 15 instances where this claim was published in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries (1991). In Wilkinson’s 1892 essay he reifies this myth: ”I have frequently been a witness of the fact that a large alligator will persistently pursue and drive to the bank negro boys bathing in this region.” (p.400). Here, alligator fear rhetoric embraced the racism of the period and both are normalized. The turnaround in alligator attitudes seems to have occurred in the 1950s. A 1947 New Orleans Times-Picayune article gives a snapshot of the changing times. “Poor little ‘gator! For all his armor plate and savage ferocity, he is being rapidly killed off “ (Snyder 1947). He continues, “So ruthless has been this free-for-all slaughter that B’rer ‘Gator is just about gone from our Gulf coast and this is not as it should be” (Snyder 1947). Here the beast is both ‘ferocious’ and ‘poor’ and is portrayed as a colloquial Br[oth]‘er. In an even greater appeal to the alligator Pie Dufour’s lively 1951 Picayune article was titled “Alligators Won the Battle of New Orleans”. “So when they started charging on Jan. 8th, there was an alligator hole for every British soldier to trip and fall in. There were holes for the horses too, and the cannons” (Dufour 1951) This piece exemplifies the turnaround of alligator attitudes as the organism is the celebrated hero of the landscape. Presenting the alligator as an object of state pride has been common since this period. Dennie’s 1973 account in Louisiana Conservationist claims “many people have learned the difference in alligators that live in other places…and alligators that live in Louisiana” (p. 14). A 1999 article by Vaughn states “managed as a renewable resource, Louisiana’s symbol of wetland wilderness will continue to flourish” (p.7). Notwithstanding the inconsistencies in the concept of ‘managed wildness’ the embrace of a symbol is evident. The adoption of the alligator as a symbol of the state has driven the creation of

136 several alligator markets. Tour hunting has been offered (at least) since the inception of the post-ban hunting seasons. Out of state hunters are allowed to buy tags at an elevated price and are charged several thousand dollars by a private guide to catch an alligator. This industry markets an experience that is often complimented by Cajun foods and accents. A hunting guide reported, ”Most people don’t just come for the alligators, they come for the Louisiana experience” (Interview W 2009). An alligator hunter and Hollywood location consultant who focuses on Louisiana landscapes, pinned this emergence down to the early 1990s when Cajun culture became a display in New Orleans. “You saw the Cajun culture and you saw the alligators and you saw the swamps and it created a need for people to go out. And it’s one of the things the tourists wanted to see [the alligator]” (Interview X 2009). Wiley’s piece on swamp tours also noted the importance of the reptiles. “The alligator stands out as the star of many tours, as evidenced by its prominence in tour names, road signs, and brochures” (2002, p.123). That the alligator has been fully constructed as the symbolic animal of Louisiana can be blatantly proven by a trip to any shop that sells Louisiana themed merchandise. Kitschy lacquered alligator heads, teeth and the image of the alligator on any sort of clothing can be found in plenty at all major tourist destinations and often on the shelves at interstate gas stations. By adopting the alligator as a symbol of Louisiana and marketing it wholeheartedly, the creature has come to be a point of pride. The rise of the alligator symbolically has paralleled its population and economic rise, and these are not coincidental events. The turnaround in attitudes has been motivated by the production of the species in a diverse group of markets so that interacting with alligators physically, economically or in a symbolic sense has become a source of employment for many Louisianans, and – albeit in a mediated, commodified way – the alligator has (once again) taken on a central role in the Cajun way of life.

6.2.2 Separation The second prominent theme in the environmental history of Atchafalaya alligators is that of separation. I use this term specifically to note the spatial crevasses constructed by the commodification of the animal. The two notable separations are the removal of the alligator’s body from the swamps and marshes and the gap between the international forces of the hide market and the local human-alligator relationships in Louisiana. These abscesses effectively lock in the patterns of exploitation that have marginalized the alligator hunter and the animal itself, even as the alligator is adopted as a symbol. The market separation came about through the contingent history of alligator products which are produced as an exotic leather. The construction of the exotic is geared to a market where Louisiana and its swamps are seen as a foreign place. Two-thirds of today’s Louisiana alligator skins are sold overseas where most of the value added labor is preformed (Regini, 1998). Thus, most of the profit made from exorbitantly priced alligator purses and wallets has remained in the hands of Europeans or urban Americans. Lefebvre sees this type of process as essential to the spatialization of capitalism. He finds that what is most effectively reproduced is the disconnect between daily reality (one’s life) and urban reality (the needs of capital). “This association is a paradoxical one because it includes the most extreme separation between the places it links together” (Lefebvre 1991, p.38). In Louisiana this failure of the alligator industry to accumulate

137 local capital is well noted. Glasgow states, ”An unfortunate aspect of alligator economics in most alligator producing areas is that only the prices paid for raw products remain within the region” (Glasgow 1991, p.216). Perran Ross, a Florida wildlife biologist notes “…the value of finished alligator skin products may be anywhere from five to ten times the raw-product value (Woods 2006). Research was initiated through LSU and the Louisiana Fur and Alligator Council to quantify the need for more of a domestic alligator economy. “Purposes of the project are to: (1) expand market opportunities and (2) develop promotional strategies for Louisiana alligator leather products” (Alligators and Fashion Research Group 2011). Ress reveals the inconsistencies in locating tanning facilities and the value added processes in Europe instead of near the source. “And all of that can add up to big bucks for those of us in Acadiana, the gator hide ‘mecca’ in all of this” (Ress 2005). Another result of this spatial inequality is the mass-production of hides. Alligator farmers make only marginal returns on skins and even less per alligator when the animal is sold ‘on hoof’. Therefore, more and more alligators must be grown for the venture to be profitable. This type of separation is systemic to capitalism and essential to the uneven development of alligator economies. The second separation that has defined this history is the removal of the alligator from the swamps and marshes. Over the last 150 years the alligator has undergone several radical transformations that have served to extirpate it from its habitat. The moves from subsistence hunting to market hunting to commercialized hunting and wild/captive breeding and ultimately to full domestication where eggs are laid at the farm has shifted the control over many alligators’ bodies into human hands. As previously mentioned, 1964 stood out as a pivotal year for this separation of animal from nature, as did 1978 when Allan Ensminger presented a plan to the state that set up the egg collection and farming practices of today (Sheldon and Joanen, 1986) These authors reproduce the necessity of the removal of the alligator from its habitat, ”Scientific farming produces an unmarred, more marketable hide than can be obtained in the wild” (Sheldon and Joanen 1986, p.6). The subjugation of the alligator to scientific farming turns its body into a factory where the alligator body becomes a human tool. Ignoring intrinsic symbolic and cultural values, Lewis calls the farming process “value-added conservation” (1987, p.17). In many sources, the dominant motivations of the alligator farming are economic and the ontological misgivings of the common ‘kill it to save it’ narratives are rarely if ever addressed. The shift in Louisiana alligator production appears to parallel shifts in crocodile production in Colombia and Zimbabwe, where “the drivers for the shift in crocodilian skin production from wild to captive animals were initially mainly conservation, regulation, science… but a second wave of incentives for market production were more commercial in nature and, ultimately, market-led” (MacGregor 2006). While MacGregor suggested that producers should not turn their backs on wild supply, he found a pattern of production that eventually moved the alligator out of its habitat completely and bred it in captivity (MacGregor 2006). If the alligator is valued for purely economic means, it is in danger of becoming a fully domesticated animal, in which case its ties to the region’s culture would become solely economic (as expressed through the commodified form of exchange value) and symbolic. By separating the production of hides from the creation of alligator products, the structure of the international market has served to marginalize the hunters and farmers. The comparison to past colonialist politics of extraction becomes quite evident. In a

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similar manner, the separation of the alligator’s body from the swamp has placed the creature under near-total control of humanity. Capitalism has served to maintain these boundaries and to keep them invisible.

6.2.3 Regulation The most debated aspect of the history of alligator hunting in Louisiana is its regulation. Regulation is treated as the political ability to control activities of both human and non- human actors. Human activity has been regulated as a catalyst to mediate alligator populations and the narratives that construct these power plays are wrought with contention. The regulation of human alligator hunting activity took place primarily on a set of political scales. The most vital lawmakers in the realm of wildlife are the states in which the hunting takes place. Thus, the ten-year ban on alligator hunting had more effect on the industry than any other mandate. Regulation tried to stop the perceived over-hunting of the reptile and violators were hotly pursued. “The Baton-Rouge State Times reported from the combat zone that ‘sweeping the skies with planes and churning through the bayous with high-speed boats, Louisiana’s game wardens are waging a blitzkrieg on alligator poachers’” (Glasgow 1991, p.132). Louisiana Conservationist reported, “all participants agreed that illegal hunting was a serious threat to the alligator and that effective legislative measures should be adopted to plug loop-holes in existing laws” (Palmisano 1972, p.7). From the broader political scale, the US regulated the alligator by signing the 1969 Endangered Species Conservation Act that protected the animal nationwide and eliminated the discrepancies between state laws that allowed some poached hides to have a domestic market. Also influential in the regulation of hunting was the Lacey Act. Originally from 1900, this conservation measure forbade the transportation of certain species and their byproducts across state lines. The Lacey Act was amended in 1969 to include alligator hides a few months before the ESCA (Glasgow 1991). The global scale of environmental regulation was also instrumental in regulating activities in Louisiana by virtue of CITES, or the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species, which monitors and restricts international trade in animal products including alligator. CITES was signed in 1973, a few months before the official U.S. Endangered Species Act was put into place (USFWS 2009). All of these laws made trade and production of alligator hides nearly impossible. Poaching did occur, but was by no means ubiquitous. One respondent, who hunted alligators in Vermillion Parish for fifty years, gave a first-hand account: “Well I won’t say there wasn’t any outlaws. One guy would kill a little three footer and hang it off the dragline boom just to let us know he was there” (Interview Y 2009). In general his experience was that most hunters were glad the bans and restrictions were put in place because the alligator numbers had gotten so low. The final regulation that took place was within the population of alligators. Two competing narratives coexisted during this era of alligator status shift. The first story is the notion of a declining population. Obviously this rhetoric was well supported by political powers on all levels that banned the hunting, processing and trade of alligators. Several other sources verify the tale of endangerment. Archie Carr, a significant Florida naturalist and one of the founders of the American Alligator Advisory Council produced

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an idealistic essay for National Geographic in 1967 entitled “Alligators: Dragons in Distress”. He attributes the plight of the alligator to over-hunting and habitat loss. “But by protecting him, we will show that we have the sense and soul to cherish a wild creature that was here before any warm-blooded animal walked the earth, and that, given only a little room, would live on with us and help keep up the fading color of our land” (Carr 1967, p.148). Carr is one of the few authors that actually questioned the market drive of alligator hunting (and poaching). “If the vogue for alligator bags, belts, and shoes would pass, the profit would go out of poaching, and it would stop” (Carr 1967 p.147). Adding a quirky justification to the conservation argument was Snyder’s 1947 Picayune assertion that “If you study B’rer gator closely, you will learn that his diet consists largely of snakes, garfish and turtles. And if your fish lore is accurate, you will recall that snakes, garfish and turtles are deadly enemies of our game fish”. In 1969 George Laycock published America’s Endangered Wildlife which treated the alligator to its own chapter. Here he acknowledged the social battle the alligator was fighting. “There are still enough alligators living so that some people find it difficult to agree that they are endangered. But each year, drainage continues and the poaching goes on” (Laycock 1969, p.99). It is important to make the distinction that wetland drainage and suburban encroachment were factors often implicated in regulating the Florida alligator population and the alligator population as a whole but were not as prevalent within the literature specifically on Louisiana. Equally as inflammatory and occurring simultaneously with the endangerment/demise narratives were stories of how alligator populations were actually doing well. These studies and articles generally blame flaws in measuring the populations for the mishap or do not address the countercurrent of loss. Poe writes in 1949, “Subsequently with the establishment of refuges, the alligator populations began to climb in Louisiana, Florida, Georgia and other places”. He goes on, “…cropping of alligators on the Delta and Sabine refuges is necessary and desirable to maintain a balance of wildlife” (1949). This article was published in the Picayune less than two years after Snyder called for the conservation of “B’rer Gator” in the same newspaper. Palmisano put it bluntly in 1972, “The alligator is in no danger of becoming extinct.” He directly addresses what he sees as falsehoods of the other side of the argument. “The concept that the alligator is on the verge of extinction has been implanted in the minds of the public and considerable opposition to a consumptive management plan has arisen.” Lewis penned “Searching for Truth in Gator Country” in 1987 where his main contention was that the population estimates made in the 1960’s were inaccurate. “Researchers now know that the shy creatures hide from people and thus are difficult to census”. A 1989 Picayune article quotes Dave Taylor, a Louisiana alligator wildlife official, who said, ”[T]here is strong evidence to suggest the population level has never been much different than it is today” (Jackson 1989). The arguments for and against the regulation of alligator populations were both significant. What has been proven is not necessarily which side of the debate was correct, but that multiple opposing viewpoints were posited during the same time period. The ‘saving’ of the alligator through the Endangered Species Act becomes somewhat suspicious considering the latter arguments, but if the species were saved so it could be domesticated, many would argue that the Act’s purpose was defeated. However, these

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competing notions of wildness and domesticity break down under further scrutiny when human-animal relationships are treated as hybrid and co-constituted.

6.2.4 Conclusion In the Atchafalaya Basin, the alligator has been the success story of the Endangered Species Act. In this case, the dissemination of knowledge that the alligator population was too small caused it to be listed as an endangered species in 1967. The alligator was de-listed (and no longer officially endangered) in 1987. The recovery was based on hunting bans such as enacted in Louisiana but also by egg incubation and release programs that justified farming the alligators. Thus after the recovery, for the hide- hunting industry to be socially acceptable, the perception needed to be changed about the status of alligator populations. The US Department of Agriculture stated in their Global Agricultural Information Network report on the species that “American alligator hides should be demonstrated as legal, ecologically sound products and not as coming from endangered or threatened species. SUSTA [a regional export association] should demonstrate the ‘sustainable use’ aspect of these species and the positive impact that placing a financial value on them has had on conservation and the salvation of wetlands in America” (Regini 1998). For the alligator, a discursive about-face reveals the slippery nature of representations of the swamp. I have shown how many animal geographies can be characterized as cultural/historical geographies of animals and attempted to follow this paradigm in relation to alligators in the Atchafalaya Basin. But these animal geographies are still stories of human interactions and, in a sense, are still anthropocentric. In the next section I develop would could be termed an animal geography of animals – a perspective that gives agency and performative capacity to non-humans by describing the sociality of animals rather than instincts or banal ‘animal behavior’. Though a minority in the literature, I argue that including this type of work in an animal geography is vital to avoiding the trappings of anthropocentrism.

6.3 Animal Agency

If we want to get away from an anthropocentric functionalist perspective that only sees “them” in respect to “us”, animals must be allowed some independence of agency. Theorists have devoted many pages to dissecting anthropocentrism and the tactic I propose in what follows is motivated by Philo and Wilbert, who writes:

“The option is instead raised of a measured, hesitant and reflected upon form of anthropomorphism, one whose self-critical proclivities…would allow the possibility of insights to be produced by considering some non-humans in some situations as if they could perceive, feel, emote and perhaps even ‘reason’ something like a human being” (Philo and Wilbert, 2000, p.19).

In the tourism encounter, people are presented with the experience of alligator agency and see that they do not always respond to our desires, but that they can be taught to do so. Thus, their ‘wildness’ allows them to have their own practices independent of our present needs. If an alligator is always allowed to perform its alligatorness even when

141 raised in a hide factory, it must hold some set of characteristics and capacities that are not human. Furthermore, the present-moment focus of this type of approach allows us to escape the species trap by observing that both humans and alligators behave differently with respect to different individuals or classes of bodies.

6.3.1 Allowing for Animal Agency I introduce a few studies that have attempted not to speak for animals but at least to acknowledge that they are more than tabula rasa bodies awaiting our social ascriptions. I begin with two studies that infer meanings from foxes’ performances, and continue with a piece that delves into how people and cougars interact. Marvin in Szerszynski et al. engages with English foxhunting in an anthropological study that comments extensively on the agency of foxes, hounds and the ‘Huntsman’ who leads the dogs for the mounted participants. In this experience, producing a successful hunt depends not on a quick and efficient kill by the hounds, but the thrill of the chase and skill of all the animals (including human) at performing their respective roles. In fact, if the fox is “chopped” or immediately found and killed, the hunt is not a success because, “It was killed as an unknown animal one with which no relationship had developed” (Marvin 2003, p.55). What emerges instead is a complex ‘dance’ where the Huntsman motivates the hounds who pursue the fox who evades over a longer period of time. The roles of each animal’s instincts in the situation seem to dissolve into a larger social rather than purely biological experience. In relation to the fox, Marvin writes:

“In the commentaries on the behavior of a hunted fox, there was a clear sense that what the fox was doing was something beyond responding to or relying on its natural instincts; it was no mere automaton driven by its biology, but rather, a thinking, aware creature who was an active agent and who in some sense understood the processes of hunting and who created a performance out of the demands of the situation” (2003, p.56).

Though the fox’s life is on the line in this performance, this characterization of its behavior shows that it is not backed into a corner. The fox can use its intellect, knowledge of space, and perhaps its understanding of the hounds to (sometimes) outwit its pursuers. The hounds also are given a performative capacity. The dogs play roles not only of fox-finder and fox-killer, but have a responsibility to the pack and, from the hunter’s perspectives, to the breed itself. Each hound seems to bring a different set of skills to the pack though each needs to have the general capacities as well. The comparison to a sports team seems obvious and this generalist/specialist combination makes the pack more like a basketball team than an (American) football team. In fact, some hounds became too adept. “Such individuals were valuable but, the Huntsmen would add, they should not become ‘star performers’ or indulged ‘prima donnas’ (Marvin 2003, p.57). The hounds are valuable as a team that has a skilled style of pursuit (extra-instinctual) rather than being efficient killing machines (instinctual). The Hunstman is also a vital performer who is judged according to expectations similar to that of the other animals. He needs to balance his (sometimes wavering) control over the pack between over-guidance and loss of connection. He is an orchestrator, like a coach, but also a performer who depends upon (and is by) his own knowledge of the land and his

142 predictions of animal performances. Marvin notes that the Huntsman and hounds are connected by an “invisible thread”, “composed by the inflection of voices, both human and canine, commands and obedience, encouragement and reprimands, understanding and mutual respect” (2003, p.58). Marvin’s anthropology of these animals is exceptional in its thorough elucidation of the roles of all three animals (though he could comment more on the roles of horses). He complicates the notion of instinct but does not go as far as attributing human emotions to the animals, or inferring that hunters can know what the fox wants or thinks. This is the independence of action that should inform our understanding of animal encounters. Though Woods does not use an ‘animal ethnographic’ epistemology of foxes like Marvin’s, his chapter is similar in its concern for the ‘voices’ of foxes. This piece is more in line with the previously discussed work on the cultural/political geography of animals, yet it adds to this section by questioning the role of science, environmental groups and hunters in understanding the performance of ‘foxness’. He covers the political contestation of hunting practices from these three groups, all of which construct the fox differently. The hunters, similar to those in Marvin’s work, saw the fox as strong, quick- witted and elusive, fully capable of ‘outfoxing’ those who pursue it. “In this representation the fox is therefore translated not into the form of scientific knowledge, but into the form of anecdote, art, literary description and country knowledge” (Woods 2000, p.185). “Unsurprisingly, therefore, the representation is challenged by opponents of hunting who claim to have captured a more authentic representation of the fox” (Woods 2000, p.185-6). The role of science in this debate was quite complex. Hunters and farmers used scientific evidence to argue that the fox was a pest while environmental groups used post-mortem veterinary reports to argue that the foxes suffered to death. Woods makes the point that in political debates only scientists are empowered to speak on behalf of animals and that all other perspectives are deemed irrational. With fox hunting though, no direct scientific evidence of the activity’s effect on foxes existed, so all sides bolstered their arguments with anecdotal or related evidence. Woods echoes my concerns for a deeper understanding of animal perspective when he writes, “Yet the animals themselves are completely absent from the political debate: only their ghostly representations, rendered as immutable mobiles, haunt the parliamentary chambers, television studios and newspaper columns where the human actors ‘speak on their behalf’” (Woods 2000, p.199). Gullo et al. use a standpoint similar to Marvin where animals are allowed to act in relation to humans in their chapter on cougar conflicts in California. They argue that “ideas about animals are socially constructed rather than being grounded in direct experience with nature” (Gullo et al. 1998, p.140). Particularly relevant here is their question of “What about animals and their notions of people?” (Gullo et al.1998, p.141). We know that animals have the capacity to learn about humans, and often what they do learn or should learn is fear (this is certainly the case with alligators). The authors discuss habituation and adaptation as the ways that animals learn to either tolerate or avoid people. Often, the fostering of either habituation or adaptation is motivated by people’s desires to minimize negative contact with wild animals or to maximize safety and comfort of both in reference to captive or domesticated animals. Especially for large predators, animal constructions of humans as prey or equally threatening predator are vital to their social standing yet “largely unknown”. Cougars are known to be curious

143 about people and to stalk them, but do not generally prey upon people. Attacks on children have been documented, but often are cast as cases of mistaken identity (where the child is misrecognised as a more ‘normal’ prey) by cougars that have no experience with people. Contact with people in borderland zones due to habitat encroachment has increased the numbers of cougar attacks in recent years. This has led to some cougars “modifying their anti-social habits” (Gullo et al.1998, p.156). Gullo et al. find that both species’ perspectives on each other are misleading. “While border-zone residents are increasingly convinced that cougars pose major risks (they do not), some cougars on the metropolitan fringe seem to think that people are not dangerous (they are)” (Gullo et al.1998, p.156). Since interactions have proven that cougars can learn and are not ‘prisoners of instinct’, the authors argue that we might teach cougars to fear people and human dominated spaces by hunting and treeing borderland cougars and scaring them with loud audio noise of human voices, traffic etc. This type of tactic does well to acknowledge that cougars, like other animals, are able to learn and consequently receive socializations that might engender fewer negative outcomes for both species. These authors have taken what I consider a ‘good faith’ attempt at considering animal agency. But since we cannot escape our humanity, our understanding of animal worlds is necessarily constrained to Woods’ “ghostly representations”. Our judgments are based only on our encounters, not a venture into animal subjectivity. Especially for wild animals, this implies that we will always miss much more than we can know. However, in ascertaining the agency of animals we cannot dismiss the works of animal scientists who bring an understanding of evolution, behavior and spatiality of non-humans. I argue that to grasp animal lifeworlds, works from zoology, ethology and evolutionary biology can supplement our human-social analysis of the encounter in a manner that further digresses from anthropocentrism. Considering this, how can we think of animals, our respective impacts on each other, and our ‘standing’ with them? Furthermore, is this information necessary? Jones argues that it is, because of our shared embodied existence on this planet. He notes in particular the otherness of water spaces to the human experience and how this lack of shared spatial experience has profound implications on water-based forms of animal embodiment. “My suggestion is that our (human) ethical imaginations also find water a hostile, impenetrable space, and that as a result many of the lives lived there are ethically invisible to us” (Jones 2000, p.286). Considering the confluence of water and land in the swamp, our encounters with alligators must also be structured as an ‘in-between’ where the lack of water-based experience informs our (lack of) knowledge. Yet, even in spaces/species where we do ‘know’ much about animals and their behavior or can relate it to our own experiences of space, the knowledge is based on human scientific ontologies which may or may not be applicable in constructing animal truths. These claims on animal behavior are usually made by people who seek to engender animal ethics by anthropomorphizing their subjects (especially more ‘social’ animals such as chimps, prairie dogs or even ants), but their research is constrained by the species trap. This is problematic because just as in human behavior, the capacity or activity of some cannot necessarily be applied universally to the whole, yet with animals, we use such scientific knowledge to manage the whole. In opposition to general, species-based ethics, Lynn suggests a place for context and therefore geography in the consideration of an inter-bodily ethic (Lynn 1998). What he calls “Geoethics” would “generate a situated understanding of moral problems”

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(p.282). Behavior, and therefore ethical behavior, implies a context and this context is shared with animals. This shared fact of life unites beings of all varieties of complexity and consciousness from single celled organisms to animals that have “a commensurate (if different) degree of consciousness and emotional authenticity that parallels, and in some cases exceeds our own” (Lynn 1998, p.283). To mitigate our damage on other worlds, he suggests “geoethical principles”, a series of context-based guidelines to manage our tendency to dominate nature. His focus on context coupled with Jones’ emphasis on encounters lead me to my attempt to theorize the agency of alligators in performing human-alligator experiences on swamp tours in the Atchafalaya.

6.3.2 Alligator Agency in the Basin Within the ‘event’ of a swamp tour, human animals perform as guides and tourists (and researchers). But as one guide put it, “I did an informal survey for a while asking people what they want to see. First thing 95% of them say is alligators” (Interview J 2010). For many tourists, the alligator moment (or lack of) can be a make-or-break for the total experience. Guides certainly understand this and their performance of the wildness or tameness of the reptile is central to positioning themselves within the swamp (which I will expand upon in section 5.4). But as I have shown so far in this chapter, animals should not only be thought of as passive recipients of human traits and knowledge. In the same way that the multiple meanings, uses and behaviors in the swamp cannot wholly be attributed to outside ‘social forces’, but must be negotiated and performed by local rejections and upholdings of spatial norms, alligators must creatively perform space. The role of alligators in the tour is paramount, and since they (like people) are capable actors whose performances (with or without conscious human interaction) can be observed, I focus here on inserting their perspective into our understanding of the encounter. Our knowledge of alligator being must be informed by the work of scientists who study them in a context that is not intentionally produced/performed for human consumption. I do not mean to insinuate that the lens of animal behaviorists is not itself socially constructed, rather to note that most alligators spend their days not interacting with people and that we can gain insight into their lifeworlds through observing them in a manner similar to their human counterparts. Studies in herpetology, ethology and zoology have yielded general information about alligator behaviors that can allow a more in-depth understanding of agency. More specifically, these works indicate that alligators have a keen sense of space- both social and material. The yearly breeding cycles of alligators are fairly well understood. Lance discovered basic patterns in Louisiana alligators who become active in “courtship activities” in early April, copulate in May, and lay eggs in July (Lance 1989, p.1000). The author noted that temperature played a part in reproduction (such that more northern populations began the process later in the year) as well as “social order” which put larger alligators at an advantage (Lance 1989). Each period in this cycle involved the alligators moving between particular parts of the swamp such as the banks, shallow pools, deeper waters and marshy areas. Also noted by Lance but expanded on significantly by Vliet was the importance of communication between alligators (1989; 1989). Both bellowing and head slapping were found to be important activities that operate as a “declaration of presence” to establish territoriality (Vliet 1989, p. 1019). Head slapping is performed from a display site on the shoreline where the reptiles may wait up to 35 minutes in

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preparation for this dance-like ritual (Vliet 1989). Kushlan and Kushlan studied nest attendance by females and produced a ten-step protocol (each step a more aggressive behavior than the last) that alligators followed when approached by their dummy raccoon (a common nest raider). Most interesting were their findings that nesting females used more elaborate behaviors with the approach of a dummy human, and that they would evaluate the efficacy of their staged attacks against the dummy human and alter future attacks accordingly. This conduct led the authors to state, “Such behavioral plasticity and attendant ability to learn quickly from experience is obviously highly adaptive” (Kushland and Kushlan 1980, p.32). In a final homage to alligator place-knowledge I turn to Woodward et al. who studied the spacing of alligator nests (1984). They found that alligators clump their nests together within an area but could find no reason to justify this pattern. The authors concluded that, like some birds, the reptiles were participating in “colonial nesting” (Woodward et al 1984, p.11). If each female protected the area around her nest from any nest predators, having overlapping (clumped) nest-ranges was an advantage to the individuals and the group. All of these studies indicate that alligators have a developed understanding of space, that they are socially interactive, and that they can learn about the spaces they inhabit. Therefore, we must accept that what they bring to the tour performance is far more than a buffoonish instinct to eat, but a calculated acceptance of the human animals who share their swamps.

6.3.2.1 Performances of Labor. Feeding alligators (usually chicken) or not feeding them determines the structure of an alligator encounter on a tour. Therefore, I split my analysis of alligator performances into two types: the performance of labor, when the reptiles are enticed to make an appearance, strike, or jump out of the water and strike with a food ‘payout’; and the performance of being, when alligators allow people to gaze upon and approach them but do so without any (apparent) motivation. Both situations involve performance and labor, but I highlight ‘labor’ only with the first because the agreed exchange of food value is a much more apparent economic formalization of their roles in appreciating the value of the tour. The performance of alligator labor, just like the performance of labor in capitalism as a whole, is governed by more than a cost-benefit relationship. Guides may be unable to attract them with food, or they may be less willing to perform for the same amounts of food or for any amount. Also, not all gators respond to food, but must be taught (like human laborers) to subject themselves to the relationship. One tourist noted the inherent flaws of the chicken wage system when he said, “I have been on other swamp tours where their gators are so used to just getting food all the time that they don't even eat it. They may have to get them riled up to a point where they actually eat the food because they do it all the time. And that definitely takes away from the experience” (Interview H 2010). I witnessed this lackluster desire to perform as well and, to me, it indicates that alligators like humans need to be motivated by more than wages to perform labor. We cannot know if the alligators ‘want’ to perform, but when they have taken three consecutive pieces of chicken underwater to eat (as opposed to snapping it off of a stick three feet off the water) we might wonder if they are not interested in becoming a spectacle. Though this scene is often the climax of an encounter, I want to lead the reader through the steps that usually transpire to set up the moment.

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When alligators perform labor, they do so under specific spatial conditions. They have their own doorsteps and surrounding areas that they frequent (for labor performance) which are usually about half an acre in area. Though the labor site may be shared with other gators, each animal will be found here and only here. At the site of the labor performance, the alligator is familiar with what is expected because of its own history of experiences there which may have included successive transactions where chicken was used to entice closer proximity to the boat beyond cautious curiosity or total avoidance of people. Though the gator probably hears the boat approaching long before the motor is cut off, the guide must signal to the non-human that its performance is requested. The gator might see, but more often hears the guide banging on the side of the boat with a stick, calling loudly or splashing the water. The guide may also throw some lesser pieces of chicken in the water to entice the gator’s olfactory experience. At this point, the stage is set for the human audience, which scans the murky water for the object of their fascination. Though the guide may point out bubbles in the water or suggest a probable location, the alligator makes the decision to let its body be seen above the water. It may poke its head up and approach the boat from twenty yards away, or it may emerge from the shady waters onto the main stage ten feet from the boat. Either way, the gator controls its own entrance. Those who have more fear (or who know they can extend their amount of ‘pay’ by playing shy) come close enough to ‘earn’ a small piece without giving in completely to the desires of the guide. If the gator decides to behave as expected, he or she will circle below the stick that holds the chicken, eying the reward before sinking a few inches back into the swamp and with a fluid whip of the tail, explode from the water and dislodge the avian thigh hanging from its rusty nail. As it snaps down, a barrage of flashes and gasps accompany the gator who quickly retreats a few yards back to properly gulp down the bite. If the non-human feels so inclined, or is convinced that the nail holds more than the smaller chum chunks that are drifting to the swamp floor, he or she might repeat the jump sequence, but will undoubtedly be required to work harder (jump higher) than the time before. Three or four iterations of this pattern commence, and eventually lead to a moment of food/pay ambivalence. The guide may throw the gator a ‘bone’ (literally) to finish off the cache of chicken, or may toss the last reward bite off the stick to the reptile after failing to draw the gator out of the water. Now full (or perhaps bored with the performance), the non-human animal takes the peace offering and withdraws to a place where he or she can witness the tour without being so intently involved, either under the water or from a safe distance. The whole encounter lasts 5-7 minutes and yields the alligator perhaps a pound of meat. This is the general script for an alligator performance of labor, but some variations do exist. If the non-human animals are intentionally secluded (i.e. the swamp is ‘private’ through fencing or closing the waterways) they perform somewhat differently. In this situation, the gators are more learned and their cue to make themselves visible comes when the tourists get on the boat (or even the sound of them approaching on the dock). The guides need not try to attract the gators. As soon at the motor sputters on, they swim up the bayou and after the feeding will follow the boat like roadies, getting their reward any time the pilot cuts the engine. These gators are also likely to remember that they will get fed whether they jump or not so they, like the coons on the shore awaiting a bread Frisbee, only perform when the food is safely tossed into their swampy domain. This type of tour led one tourist to say, “The gators, that was a cool part, but they

147 looked pretty routine. Obviously, the gator was kinda trained” (Interview H 2010). The tourist seemed to want a more ‘wild’ experience than provided by these trained performers (seasoned laborers). Guides are in tune with the desires of their patrons, and for just this reason, many of the tours employed gators not in the performance of labor as jumping, but as performers of being.

6.3.2.2 Performances of Being. Performances of being are produced by the guides to maintain a sense of wildness in the encounter. With respect to the gators, it is possible that some gators work both as jumpers and as recipients of wilding gazes, but the tourists (and maybe guides) do not know if their star performers are moonlighting. In this type of encounter, the gator has more say so because his or her performance labor is not judged. The tourists surely want to see the ‘other’ animal but feeding would feel as inauthentic as if the reptile played the accordion. This is a performance of wildness. Its dasein is flawless and unimpeded by the brutish economy of chicken. In the performance of being, gators are not constrained to specific sites of labor; they may be gazed upon anywhere along the journey. Just as their piece paid counterparts, these gators are aware of the boat before the people can find them. This implies that they too make the decision of whether to be seen or not. As one guide put it, “We see alligators the way that they are going to present themselves” (Interview J 2010). We cannot know whether they intentionally scamper up into the sun to model or simply decide not to slip away, but in either case a semi-submerged log is usually their perch. Once they are sighted (often by the guide, but not always), their performance begins. Human curiosity drives the boat quietly closer to the star who sits frozen like a swampy sculpture. This led one child to exclaim, “Is it REAL?”, breaking the unwritten code of whispered relations. If so inclined, the gator allows the borderspace between his or her body and the boat to be slowly transgressed. Too much noise or a beeline to the gator will break the gazing contract and cause a hasty crocodilian retreat. Once the humans have been positioned to best capture their moments on film, the boat may sit as the guide introduces the performer or characterizes his or her body. If possible, the boat will come closer and closer and some gators will not flinch. But eventually, the need to retreat will overcome the gator’s tolerance of visitors and in a split second the reptile is underwater and swimming away. This is the most common performance of being, sunning on a log. But gators also exercise their dasein performance by going about their everyday alligatorness. They are spotted swimming intently across the open water and occasionally shielding their nests from outside interlopers. Since alligators can hear and see people approaching we must assume that here too they allow or risk themselves being seen. Guides who employ gators as performers of being cannot guarantee that they will show up for work. Similar to the guides that feed, they too depend on the gators’ ‘instincts’ to sun themselves, come up for air, and generally make themselves seen, but they do not economize the relationship. We might think of the alligator as ignorant of the boat of tourists, but they control when they are seen and the distance that is allowed. Thus, we cannot think of them as entirely fearful or fearless of people, only as sentient negotiators of the space. I have shown in the performance of animal wildness in the Atchafalaya that alligators and their behaviors provide an essential input that appreciates the experience. Other authors have also written on how animal agency is vital to the production of human-nature assemblages and I argue that animal geographies that are simply cultural

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geographies of animals often miss this perspective. But neither a human history of animals nor the more zoocentric approaches fully acknowledge the blending of people and animals that occurs in animal encounters. To address how we can think of both sets of actors on an equal plane, I now turn to the notion of hybridity.

6.4 Hybrid Spaces

I have referenced hybridity throughout this work in reference to Cajuns and the swamp, and broadly in terms of people and nature to highlight ways that the binaries are negotiated or broken down. Here I delve deeper into such relationships with a more specific reference to the individualized human-alligator combinations that occur on swamp tours. The presentness of producing the swamp through performance effectively spreads the agency of animals, people and landscape where each can play a role in creating the wildness of the encounter. This ontology has motivated geographers like Philo and Wilbert who acknowledges Latour’s development of Actor-Network-Theory (ANT) which can “rescue the non-human things of the world for social science, to recover the ‘missing masses’, and to give them a ‘place’, a role, an ability to prompt changes, a capacity for agency” (Philo and Wilbert 2000, p.17). However, the transformative power that comes from attributing agency to animals, and furthermore to material objects such as microscopes often leaves us with an extremely broad sense of hybridity of agency. On the other hand, we have Haraway’s cyborgs, which combine science and technology as culture and the body as nature in fascinating “cybernetic organisms, a hybrid of machine and organism; a creature of social reality as well as a creature of fiction” (Haraway 1985, p.65). As opposed to ANT’s roles of ‘others’ this is a much more embodied and visible ‘blend’ of the human and non-human. I see these two perspectives as employing the same motivation (to dissolve the categories of human and nature), yet producing radically different ontologies. In what follows I address how authors have commandeered the idea of hybridity with respect to animals and human- animal spaces. I suggest that these works are opposed by attributing hybridity to either the animal’s socialized body or to the physical bodies of either. I argue that in performances of wildness in the Atchafalaya, an experience of hybridity is produced that needs neither an actual blended body nor a socially empowered animal. By compacting knowledge and experience into a performance of place, human-alligator assemblages are highlighted that successfully complicate the banal separations of people and nature. The best way to state my question on human-animal hybridity within the realms of Actor-Network-Theory and cyborgs is ‘(where) do we draw the lines?’ By lines I mean the capacity and types of agents who effect the composition of human-animal hybrids and by ‘we’ I refer to geographers, or at least those who approach such questions from a spatial standpoint. The spatiality of human-animal assemblages is implied by the separate existence of bodies, but, as my argument will show, is necessitated by the performance of (swamp) experience based hybridity. The basic premise is as follows: both ANT and cyborgs can be applied as tactics that expose hybridity between people and animals by radically opening the influences on our relationships. However, to be useful epistemologically, both must make a degree of ontological commitment to what can influence and what cannot. ANT does not draw boundary lines around types of actors, but instead draws them between seemingly disparate objects using a network topology.

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Alternatively, human-animal cyborgs can be influenced in a more abstract way by ‘social forces’ but depend on the material of the body itself as the substrate for interspecies blending.

6.4.1 Hybrid Networks Several studies have used ANT to elucidate hybridity amongst people and animals. Along with his perspectives on animal agency, Woods depends on the network to show how foxes and deer are characterized in English hunting debates (Woods 2000). Perhaps the most lauded example of this type of work is found in Whatmore’s Hybrid Geographies where she addresses actor-networks used to create and manage wildlife, particularly leopards, elephants, and most applicably, caimans (2002). Both of these authors use the Latourian concept of ‘immutable mobiles’ to hybridize the actors involved in constructing animality. This allows Woods to include “photographs, cinematic film, videos tapes, scientific reports, anecdotal stories” as essential to the representation (and constitution) of animals (Woods 2000, p.183). With reference to elephants, Whatmore depends on the animals existing electronically, “as virtual bodies circulating in computer programmes and internet sites as digitized data or portraits” (Whatmore 2002, p.38). The dependence on items such as scientific reports in networks is typical of ANT work and particularly chic because it strays far from our banal sense of human agency. These studies also implicate the power of people. In accordance with ANT they allow for people far from the sites of ‘live’ human-animal encounter to be drastically influential. Whatmore critiques the “fragmented” management of elephant breeding that primarily takes place in Europe and North America, presumably by people who have no contact with the living bodies. With caimans, a collection of scientists called the Crocodile Specialist Group reviews applications for crocodilian ranching throughout the world. The disconnection of interaction is also vital to Woods’ piece where parliamentarians have the ability to codify fox hunting ethics. Finally, animal Actor-Network-Theorists do depend upon those who actually make contact with animals. In fact, significant portions of their findings hinge upon interviews with handlers, hunters and generally, those who labor with animals. Even in Whatmore’s historical assessment of Roman leopard fighting, she highlights (with historical evidence) those most closely involved with capture, agitation and killing of the animals. And, similar to Woods’ interviews with fox hunters, she speaks with elephant handlers in regards to the animals’ experiences of their enclosure. These authors use three categories of actors, ‘immutable mobiles’ (generally in the form of texts both electronic and material), disconnected people, and people who encounter animals, to prove that vast networks of spatially disparate information and experiences are used to position animals. While I cannot deny the importance of each of these types of actors (or that some actors should be privileged), my critique focuses on their inability to justify these actors as necessary and vital to the production of animal worlds. This critique can be extended to ANT in general, including Roberston’s assessment of wetland commodification which similarly depends on documents and legislators (2000). Latour’s work on the laboratory and its role in the manufacture of science rightly exposes the subjectivity of the scientists and other objects. But why some objects and not others? Murdoch finds that Latour in his study of Pasteur “gives us no grounds for substantiating these claims” (1997, p.738) Can we not implicate the horses in the fox hunt, the builders of caiman farms, or the ammunition in the deer hunter’s rifle?

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Latour’s criteria for inclusion in the network of scientific production is contained by the idea of translation, ”actors must be interested, that is their goals must somehow be aligned with the scientists” (Murdoch 1997, p.737). If this criterion was applied to Woods’ and Whatmore’s works, they have done little to justify how (if) some actors are more aligned with the network than others. What they have done by devoting more attention to the animal handlers (or hunters) is reify the notion that those who make contact are in fact more powerful within the network, thus defeating the goal of symmetrical power relations. By randomly highlighting some actors, the spatiality of interaction is demoted to a role of ‘additionally important’ when I feel that it should be the forefront of analysis. Furthermore, by privileging some networked humans over others but, with respect to the caiman skin trade, ignoring the roles of marketers and consumers of exotic leather products who provide ‘fuel’ for the network flow, Whatmore dangerously steps into economic naïveté. What ANT brings to the notion of hybridity between animals and people is the idea that broader-than-human actors are involved and that interactions without animal presence have power. This is useful since the performance of science and politics are vital to the humanization of animals. However, this type of work is far from revolutionary and I apply Collins and Yeardley’s critique of Callon’s foundational ANT work on scallops which they see as, “an asymmetrical old-fashioned scientific story” (Murdoch, 1997, p.745). Next, I discuss cyborg theory which seems to privilege at least the embodied experience of hybridity rather than assume all possible actors have equal agency.

6.4.2 Embodied Cyborgs I turn now to cyborgs as material representations of hybridity between animals and people. I argue that the cyborg gives precedence to the body, which bodes well with a performative (and thus embodied) notion of human-animal hybridity, but fails to encompass the lived time-spaces as well as present tense performance. The cyborg as first developed by Haraway is a blend of body technology and nature, coalescing as a reaction to and tool of a myriad of dominations, sexual, racist and anthropocentric. “It is not clear what is mind and what is body in machines that resolve into coding practices. Insofar as we know ourselves in both formal discourse…and in daily practice… we find ourselves to be cyborgs, hybrids, mosaics, chimeras” (1985, p35). Her desire to implicate technology in the formation of hybrid selves is similar to ANT works that implicate electronic data and science and their roles in substantiating objects or practices. Here, I address what I see as her dependence on the body as a site that receives the cyborgization. Haraway writes extensively about human (especially female) bodies but has addressed animals significantly since “A Manifesto for Cyborgs” (primates 1989; multiple species 1991; mice 1997; companion species 2003). Though the cyborg is developed much further beyond the body itself, and is more a critique of the hybridization of influences on bodies, many authors (Haraway included) have taken the body as a vital site for the cyborg. Lulka has found that borrowing (from socialist- feminist politics) the body as a cyborg locale might be a stretch, but seems to be supported by Haraway’s later works. “Nonetheless, despite these limits [on cyborgs and nature], the underlying philosophy of the cyborg has been incorporated into discussions of nature and animal others, if not directly, then indirectly, by those who have been

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partially inspired by Haraway’s writing of this creature” (2009, p.381). In particular her work on Oncomouse™ ties together technology and science in the production of an animal body designed to have cancer genes for research purposes. She writes, ”Inhabiting the nature of no nature, Oncomouse™’s natural habitat is the fully artefactual space of technoscience. Symbolically and materially, Oncomouse™ is where the categories of nature and culture implode for members of technoscientific cultures” (Haraway 1996, p.356). Notice that she refers to the mouse as a ‘where’ implying a spatiality of the body. This scale of the body, then, is crucial to understanding how human-animal hybridity works out in the material sense. The creatureness of the cyborg has been addressed by Wilson who theorizes the cyborg not as an entirely stable body but a “figuration”. “Figurations transcend rationalities and invoke multiplicity, but motivate a kind of objectivity through embodied perspective” (2009, p.501). He goes on to note that they are an “inhabiting of performativity” which certainly speaks well for the swamp tour alligator as cyborg. We find more treatment of the bodyness of the cyborg in Schuurman (2009). Though she does not write specifically about non-human animals her elucidation of the impregnation of bodies with data is relevant here. She notes “The merger of databases and bodies in the new cyborg” by giving several instances where bodily behaviors and movements are institutionalized and made electronic to create data on runners, shoppers and writers (p.1338). Finally, Wolch and Emel have taken a similar line of thought by commenting on the tissue engineering project that created a mouse with a skin/cartilage human ear growing on its back to be harvested (1998). They comment on how such meddling with the human form is generally illegal, but the body of a mouse is constructable in the name of science. Though Wilson’s notion of cyborg figuration “is neither entirely figurative nor literal” I have used the above literature to show that cyborgs are often theorized to occupy bodies (2009, p.501). Just like the Oncomouse™ was treated as a ‘where’ by Haraway, embodiment in general implies a geography. I argue that this space of cyborgs is, like spaces of actor-networks, a hybrid human-animal space. Returning to my original question (where (do) we draw the lines?), whereas ANT draws lines between people objects and animals, cyborgs draw lines around bodies. When used in relation to animals, then, the cyborg body is a humanized animal like Oncomouse™ or ‘earmouse’. The hybrid spaces of bodies and networks are opposed in their scale and materiality but equally considerate of hybridity as constituting a multiplicity of (f)actors. Since thoughout this work I argue for the importance of performed experiences of place, I return to this line of thinking as a way to negotiate between these two somewhat disparate ontologies of human-animal hybridity. Guides do explain the roles of networks and manufacture of cyborgs on tours (though not in that language) but neither the ANT nor cyborg perspectives will suffice in elucidating how hybridity happens during an alligator encounter. The network of caiman regulation espoused by Whatmore is almost exactly the one that also creates/manages alligators in the Basin. Thus, I could depend on such a perspective to argue that gators are a hybrid product of global hide trade, though I would assuredly add that this network is fueled by marketing and consumption of high- end exotic handbags etc. But this is not hybridity as it is performed on a tour. On the other hand, I could argue that the farming/re-release of young alligators (who are fed high protein diets to fuel super-growth) constructed by science, producers, and

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conservationists is a shining example of cyborgization where (re)becoming wild is a factor of human process. But again, this is not hybridity as it is performed on a tour.

6.5 Hybrid Human-Gator Experiences

If human-gator hybritidy on swamp tours is to be given a ‘body’ it is the space of experience. This space is ephemeral and unique not only to the particular sets of animal and human bodies, but also the water, trees, chicken (or lack of), time of day, and knowledge etc. that each sentient creature brings to the experience. Hybridity here is about shared spaces and kinship that necessarily breaks down the human-animal binary. Neither the guides, nor the tourists nor the alligators have complete agency, and the hybridity experienced would be fundamentally different if either of the three were removed or substituted with a similar type. My dependence on lived spaces of hybridity is echoed by Wilson’s call to cyborg geographers who should, “inhabit the spaces where the human and nonhuman are constituted and narrate the conditions that established this entry point” (2009, p.512). Furthermore, it can be supported by Lulka who evokes Thrift’s non-representational theory which epistomologically privileges everyday life and ephemeral actions over the representations of ‘experts’. “Even though Thrift’s conception of non-representational theory doesn’t deal explicitly with animality, it is helpful here since it conceptualizes the role of knowledge, affect and power by assessing the interactions of bodies” (Lulka 2009, p.390). Having experienced this ‘interaction of bodies’ I now turn to the specifics of how creatures seem to blend on swamp tours in the Basin. My argument is that we can best understand human-animal hybridity in the moment. Taking this perspective in relation to alligators in the Basin allows me to address a few problems that I have brought up through the literature. The first is, who/what is empowered to effect hybridities (empowerment), second, the unsophisticated narratives of a homogenous species (species problem) and finally, the treatment of animals only as a function of human worlds (functionalization). To illustrate how these problems are better negotiated by a performed experience of hybridity I turn to a few trends in human-alligator relations that came up in my interviews and experiences on the tours. I suggest that the roles of learning, personification (of gators), fear, and the extension of ethics are played by all three types of animal beings (guides, tourists, gators) to perform/ produce the experience of hybridity.

6.5.1 Learning It may seem obvious that people such as swamp tour guides learn more about the swamp with every trip they make. I want to show what they know (from experience) but also that the gators and tourists learn as well. Learning as I use it here is experiential, though it may be informed by cognitive knowledge (particularly for the tourists who ‘receive’ all sorts of information). Tourists learn about alligators in place by watching them and listening to/watching the guide translate the encounter. This is an experience of hybridity because inputs to their understanding of space come from human and non-human animals. Whereas an ANT or cyborg approach in this situation would heavily depend on the guide informing the tourists about networks and techno-social concoctions of alligatorness, this type of hybridity can contradict the outside ‘forces’ that are not as

153 evident on a tour. For example, one tourist said, “the only thing I was nervous about was when the alligators came out, because I know they do jump. But after we were around them for awhile I knew we were fine” (Interview C 2010). The safety of encounter contradicted her constructions of fear. The alligators also learn from people. Many guides explained what and how the gators know. “It takes a long long time to work with these alligators, especially to get them used to people” (Interview D 2010). Iteration thus plays a part in the performance. “That one is very docile because he knows my boat”, said one guide implying that many contacts had made the gator more ‘friendly’ (Interview R 2010). This suggests that even in the experience, we can benefit from an ANT/cyborg ontology by allowing for ‘immutable mobiles’ (boats). By relying on a fusion of these two types of hybridity but focusing them on a particular performed time-space, we have the advantage of acknowledging the power of nonliving elements and non-human actors without having to justify such radical disconnections from the moment. The gators also seemed to have more complex abilities than simply recognition. “They seem to know where the wasps nests are. They get under the wasps nest so you can’t get them. They're pretty smart” (Interview N 2010). Several guides noted that wasps were the most dangerous part of swamp touring, and the gators here (babies who were trying to evade capture/display for tourists) understood this as well. Similar to this complex type of understanding, one guide told me, “So even though you might assume they don't understand English that's actually a big joke. Get out there and start talking about recipes for barbecued alligator and watch them swim off. I mean like on cue” (Interview J 2010). Besides evoking the theatre/performance metaphor “on cue” this guide and the previous revealed how fruitless a scientific attempt to understand Alligator mississippiensis’ cognitive capacity might be. Certainly we wouldn’t expect alligators to be able to understand English or trap people under wasps’ nests, but in a performed hybridity they have this ability. Finally, the guides spoke of how they learn about the gators. “If I tell you a certain time of day they're going to be there, and if I am the first one there, I can just about bet the bank that the gator is going to be there. I know because I am there everyday” (Interview F 2010). I asked all of the guides if they had names for gators to see how/if they personified them (next section). One responded as follows:

KEUL: Are there alligators out there that you have names for?

INTERVIEWEE: No I don't do that. That's all Hollywood. Now I can call a female alligator. For a female you go [imitates grunting] she will come right to the boat! (Interview U 2010)

The ways that guides communicated with the gators varied, but all of them had a method that they had learned through successes. We might also wonder if the variation in ‘languages’ suggests that they were understood only by gators who knew them. Guides, gators and tourists all can learn from each other in the experience of hybridity. This suggests that these three groups are the most empowered in shaping human-animal blends. Even though knowledge of extra-experiential information about gator networks and cyborgization does shape people’s perceptions, we can draw the line around these actors as having the most power in the situation. Furthermore, that fact that

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alligators learn over multiple iterations means that some of the species do not ‘know’ humans. Since their knowledge guides their behavior, we must think of these animals as a different class of gator. Therefore, wholesale claims about alligators as a species (either biological or social) may be remiss. We must recognize that animals hybridize with people and stray from the purified notion implied by the species.

6.5.2 Personification Even though the above guide suggested that naming alligators was “Hollywood”, many of his counterparts did have names for particular individuals. Often these were common Cajun first names that adhered to the gender of the gator. In other instances they were more “American” names. “Betsy is about 16 and she is 700 to 1000 pounds I'm just guessing” (Interview F 2010). A tourist thought this behavior was a highlight of the trip.

KEUL: So what was your favorite part? INTERVIEWEE: It was just watching him call them and his funny names for them (Interview S 2010).

Personification through naming was practiced by about a third of the guides I interviewed, but others gave gators human characteristics in other ways. “Most people think that alligators since they are cold blooded you go out at one or two o'clock in the afternoon to see them. When it is 110°, trust me you are not going to see them. We don't want to be out in that heat” (Interview K 2010). When he referred to “we” he implied that people don’t like such heat, yet he notes that heat is an experience shared by both sets of animals. In another more conscious performance of shared experience, a guide told me, “And today it was raining and they [tourists] say, ’what about the alligators’? [And he responds] They are probably on the bottom [of the bayou], they don't want to get wet” (Interview U 2010). Even though this response is intended as a joke, it reveals that through performance, we can relate to alligators on human terms. Personification, like learning, especially complicates the idea of Alligator mississippiensis as a cohesive species. Also, giving gators human traits by recognizing that they share our experience of the swamp contradicts the separation implied by functionalizing them only in relation to us. If they existed only as inputs to the human system, a system that often involves killing them for various reasons, we would be less likely to position them as ‘friends’ or even ‘co-workers’ as many of the guides did.

6.5.3 Fear As noted at the beginning of this chapter, fear is an important narrative that influences human-gator relationships. In general, fear operates as a regulator of encounters that makes experiences safe for both people and gators. Guides want both people and gators to have some fear, but not too little (this could be dangerous) and not too much (else no ticket purchase). The ‘natural’ state of alligators’ fear of humans was somewhat disputed, but on average, most felt that ”the alligator has a natural fear of man. They will run from you rather than attack you” (Interview R 2010). Fearful alligators may be more ‘natural’, but are not as good for business. We could say the same about over-fearful people, who probably would not come on a tour to begin with. However, fearless gators are a problem that can result in the death of people, but more often in the death of gators. “The only

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time they are taken out is when people start feeding them or playing with them and it gets to the point where they get aggressive or dependent on you for food” (Interview K 2010). Fearlessness in gators is thus caused by over-contact. “I have had them and grown them to where they are 6 feet long, their whole life. He would come when you offer him food but that sucker would've bit my hand off too” (Interview N 2010). People can also become too fearless, which led one guide to note, “You can never domesticate an alligator” (Interview R 2010). The best situation for an ethical and safe alligator encounter is when both have some fear. Guides wanted tourists to know that they can be dangerous, but also that “they are not the monsters that they see on TV” (Interview A 2010). “Some people have a little child and pull them back [away from the edge of the boat]. They are unsure of what the alligator can do, and that is good. Better to err on the side of caution” (Interview O 2010). Guides felt that this was not only the type of experience they wanted, but also the tourists. “They want to know that an alligator can kill them, but they want to know that they are safe too” (Interview O 2010). One guide recounted a story of a small alligator that jumped in the boat. He spoke of the tourist’s reaction, “She said, ‘I wanted to see some alligators, but not that close!’” (Interview Q 2010). Certainly, in the swamp some gators have more fear of people than others. Particularly those who often perform labor for tours are less fearful, and those who are in closed waters and follow the boat around have the least. One tour had gators in a fifty acre enclosure that had been fed their whole lives by people. The guide/handler noted that these had “no fear of people, none” (Interview A 2010). All of this variance in fear again supports the notion that like humans, alligators are not a cohesive species, but are blended through experience with ‘others’. Also, through many iterations of experience, some alligators are much more experienced by people than others. Especially the animals in the enclosure noted above were positioned to have great power over human perceptions of gators. I argue that Jack (the non-human) and his companion, both pictured in Figure 8 below, possessed vast power to perform hybridities.

Figure 8: Animals performing hybrid spaces of fearlessness

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They are more important than all other nodes in a network or technoscientists because they interacted in one time-space (each possessing a bare minimum of fear) without the protection of a boat or fence, for thousands of tourists (who were behind a fence). This tour was by far the largest in capacity and most popular in the state and particularly catered to school children on field trips. Sadly, it was also the one shut down in 2009 by the politicized greenwashing fiasco outlined in Chapter Three.

6.4.3.4 Hybrid Ethics. If we addressed all possible encounters between a human and an alligator in any context we could note that many times (especially in alligator factory farms) one of the beings is killed. Of course, most often the reptile is the victim, but alligators do kill people and in fact 24 fatalities have been reported since 1928, though none in Louisiana (22 in Florida, 2 in Georgia) (Langley 2010). So it seems that our ethics with respect to killing gators is contextual and in general, most encounters do not result in death. Guides and tourists felt that “We should treat them with respect” (Interview O 2010). However, this respect was not warranted just because they could possibly eat us, but more as a reverence for their right to live, similar to the ethics we (usually) use with other people. Some guides described performing their ethics as a respect for the alligators’ ‘naturalness’ or ‘wildness’.

“I want people to have a more natural experience. You have got some guys who wrestle them and you have these guys who hang a piece of meat over the water and they will leap out of the water and grab it. Or some guy will be standing there will be a big old bruiser in a pit that is there every day and he is there slapping him on the nose and everybody is in awe of it. Well that is great for a certain group of people. But that is not what I'm doing” (Interview O 2010).

Ethics came up in relation to feeding in several interviews.

“Well I would like to be able to feed an alligator that would come up to the boat every day on the tour because like right now in the summertime it's hard to show an alligator. But a fed gator is a dead gator so that is not a very practical application and certainly doing a great disservice to wildlife” (Interview J 2010).

Beyond the tradition of killing fearless ‘nuisance’ gators, another guide saw the activity as bad for their health. “I don't feed them, I let them stay wild. I don't believe in it. You know some people feed them and make them jump but not me, because you know what will happen? Their teeth will rot out” (Interview U 2010). Though for some guides, feeding alligators was not ethical, for one tourist, the opposite was true. “I think it is kind of endearing” (Interview H 2010). Others extended human ethics by nurturing gators in their spaces. Commenting on the captive raising/release program, one respondent said, “I think it is great because they return them to the to the wild when they are too big to be eaten by turtles bass and birds, and are big enough to fend for themselves” (Interview N 2010). People also played an ethical role in creating a safe place for gators by limiting

157 hunting and establishing wildlife protection areas. In all of these cases, people blend with alligators by extending ethics to the reptiles. In a reciprocal sense, though it may be difficult to ascertain alligator ethics, perhaps gators behave ethically by not killing people when they have the chance (such as above in Figure 8). This mutual reverence for life is a performance of hybridity. It also suggests that we cannot think of alligators only as inputs in human worlds (either hide inputs in factory farms or passive recipients of socialization). On swamp tours, they are active agents in spatializing the swamp. In an almost comical sense, failure to acknowledge this power in our thinking about alligators (via functionalization) risks naiveté, and failure to acknowledge alligator agency in the wrong situation risks death.

6.6 Conclusion

I conclude by summarizing first my comments on animal geographies as a literature and then my particular ‘placing’ of swamp tour alligator performers within these modes of thinking. Animal geographies often take on the massive task of investigating the roles of all animals within (most often Western) human cultures. Usually motivated to bring attention to the contradictory and brutal treatment of animals in some contexts, these authors succeed by blurring the binaries of humans and non-humans, but do so at the cost of specificity. Others may treat one species or one type of space (such as the city or zoo) but can functionalize the animals as passive recipients of human cultures. Some authors have taken a post-humanist perspective that gives animals agency but do not purport to know what animals think and feel. Almost all of the recent (since ~1990) animal geographies seek to dissolve boundaries between people and animals in some way, most often by referencing hybridity. Actor-Network-Theory and Cyborgs are useful ontologies for conceptualizing hybridity in our strange relationships, but both have the epistemological problem of blurring the line so much that we cannot justify who or what has the power to effect these relationships. Using a contextual, experience based hybridity allows for the observation of ‘players’ and can complicate notions of a ‘black box’ species and over-functionalization of animals via human cultures. This approach also allows for the performativity of space. Just like cultures (as suggested in Chapter Three), the relationships between people and animals should be thought of as reactive to the moment, flexible and creative. However, the flexibility is not completely open-ended in this case. As commodified spatializations, animal experiences on swamp tours are governed by expectations of value, safety and roles that each actor must play. In this animal hybridity, a balance is drawn between freedom and order.

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CHAPTER SEVEN

CONCLUSION

To summarize my findings, after outlining how people have the capacity to produce spaces I have suggested that performance is the present-tense mode by which conceptually produced spaces become tangible reality. Performances of space use both pre-conceived representations of that space and creative reactions to its lived context to spatialize, and in during moments of tourism, this spatialization must maintain a sense of exoticism. In the Atchafalaya, tour guides perform the exotic by creating hybrid blends of Cajuns and the swamp, wild and civilized spaces, and people and alligators. By relying on hybridities-in-the-making as their ‘product’, Cajun tour guides are able to commodify the experience of their interactions with their surroundings rather than “selling out” a static image of a backwater/backward ethnic group- exotic yet denigrating. Guides perform nature through their cultures rather than performing a culture from nature. This distinction is useful for several reasons. First, by acknowledging the guides’ powers to construct nature as they wish, it allows for Massey’s “radical contemporaneity” of Cajun cultures and opposes notions of the ethnic group as pre- modern, uncivilized, or closer to nature (Massey 2005, p.99). Understanding ethnic tourism in this manner may help other groups who are cast as closer to nature be recognized as normal people in an exoticized context rather than exotic people. For Cajuns involved with tourism, the findings imply that, in contrast to what Guirard fears, they might in fact be able to continue making a living ‘being Cajun’ rather than ‘acting Cajun’ (2006, p.81). The product that Cajun guides perform is not an exploitation of stereotypes but a creative negotiation of space that is sustainable, flexible and livable.

7.1 Taking Performance of Spatialization Elsewhere

You know, when you do something like this it's going to be repetitious (Interview U 2010)

For me it is an everyday thing. It is like you, what you do, like you go to school, you teach, you do a little work, it gets boring. Me, my job it's not unlike any other; it is boring in a way. (Interview K 2010)

If we took the above quotes from swamp tour guides as indicative of their capacity to perform spatialization, we could conclude that through the unconscious repetition of facts, stories and associations with the swamp, they spatialize by building the same narrative every day. This notion of performance concurs with Thrift’s nonrepresentational theory where “the non-conscious comes to be more highly valued”

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(2000, p.37). Many geographers have studied this type of performative space, one where action is valued over cognition, and, from a methodological standpoint, observation and experience are favored over conversation or formal interviews (Atkinson 2009; Waitt and Cook 2007; Revill 2004). However, another guide seemed to contradict this notion of the boring or everyday when he commented on how he constructs his performances:

I pull from my stage as well as my comedic persona, the environmental, the cultural and my own personal experiences of living on a houseboat. So I have a multifaceted basket of resources that I can pull from, an incredible inventory. (Interview J 2010)

By utilizing his “incredible inventory”, this guide highlighted his cognitive, representative, structurizing capacity. This contradicts the mundane reaction to the environment that the previous guides elucidated. Surely his days might get boring, and the other guides must draw from a similar blend of themes and experiences, so neither manner of spatializing is ‘right’. Thus, a swamp tour moment is juxtaposed between reaction and cognition, between script and improvization. Because of this, my application of the combination of performativity and spatialization could be critiqued as being crafted for only this type of situation. If this were the case, my findings could inform studies on other types of guiding or active place- teaching where the surroundings and context affect the script, but would be less applicable to moments that rely less on context (such as the geography class) or spatializing moments that are unscripted (such as birdwatching). The question then emerges, does intention to spatialize (by guides) somehow negate the ‘purity’ of performance by focusing on cognitive performance rather than only the everyday? Can we take performance beyond the everyday? Latham argues that the turn to treating space performatively has produced works that “are united by a conviction that the everyday life is a key realm where social power is exercised and maintained, and the everyday simultaneously opens up new realms of resistance to mainstream networks of power/knowledge” (Latham 2008, p.71). His method for dissecting performance of space in Auckland relies on how people behave rather than what they say to him or others. This ‘pure’ performativity method could not take into account the conscious parts of swamp tour guiding such as the rattling off of swamp vs. bayou ecologies or Cajun histories. Though works like Latham’s successfully shed light onto the mundane moments of space creation, they fail to acknowledge how “social power” emerges in moments of performance (p.71). By allowing for spatialization in performance theory and method, we might get a clearer understanding of how broader social ideologies influence the everyday. Waitt and Cook seemed to run into this same problem (relying too much on performance) in their study of ecotourism experiences in Thailand. While they set out with the epistemology that through performance and lived interactions with nature kayakers would be less strict in constructing dualisms between their bodies and the ‘outside’ nature, in the end, they noted that people often ignored their experience of bug bites, heat and smells crossing the bodily boundary. Instead, tourists repeated body/nature dualisms that they knew before the kayak trip, those produced by the outside world of brochures, education, etc. “Consequently, careful attention must always be given to the

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cultural scripts that give permission to what bodies are doing in specific tourist places. These cultural scripts outline how tourist bodies can move through tourist places. They underpin a sense-of-belonging in such places” (2007, p.547). Lack of consciousness of performance (in the extraordinary touristic experience) seemed to signal a return to the cognitive/discourse world. To summarize, performances (intentional or not), are always colored by structure. Just as Waitt and Cook’s tourists stuck to place-myths about the body and nature despite their experiences, Atchafalaya swamp tour guides also negotiated between reification and creative association when performing the swamp. Though the intentionality of my study’s performers is obvious, they are in fact going through the motions of their everyday lives. Furthermore, a swamp tour involves many other sets of actors and the performances of tourists, animals etc. have been shown herein to be vital to the entire experience. This study has shown that we cannot rely completely on ‘the social’ to spatialize, nor can we ignore the power of knowledge to structure performance. Thus, the separation of mundane vs. extraordinary experiences and conscious vs. unconscious performance is not necessary if a combined performance of spatialization is applied. I believe that this perspective leads us towards the notion that in tourism context, rather than people/nature, is exoticized.

7.2 Selling Culture

As noted in Chapter One, in the Basin, Cajun cultures are commodified for tourism experiences and material products yet they maintain lines of perceived authenticity. Selling culture without selling out could be thought of as an attempt to preserve the referent of cultures without letting the expectations of consumers completely dictate what is produced. Though I addressed this problem in Chapter Five, I want to return to it to comment on how authenticity is negotiated. If we relied only on the geographic literature on the commodification of culture for tourism, a bleak and exploitative picture is drawn. “’Culture’ is represented as part of, or as a pristine remainder in, a globally integrated system of social reproduction led (if not dictated) by a set of industries designed to profit from the maintenance of certain kinds of difference between and within people” (Mitchell 2000, p.82). In this sense, there could be no other dictate for what is Cajun than the social production system that commodifies it. Relph also gives us a feeling of falsification when discussing tourist spaces: “Such inauthenticity is often intensified by personal narrowness of interest and by rigid adherence to cultural prejudices” (1976, p. 85). From these perspectives, nothing that is for sale to tourists can be authentic, only images crafted from outsiders’ expectations. I noted Guirard’s comments on the Basin becoming a “Cajun themepark” in Chapter Five. He concurs with the critique of tourism’s power to mold, yet upholds Mitchell’s notion of ‘remainder culture’ when he writes, “The more that the Cajun culture is exploited for the goals and purposes of tourism alone, the less likely it is that anything valid and authentic about the culture will survive and endure” (2006, p. 8). “We feel inclined to give them [tourists] what they want” a guide told me when further discussing the matter (Interview P 2010). What Guirard sees dying is the source of authenticity. I maintain that authenticity is undefinable. Though Stivale has much more at stake in defining the term, in Disenchanting Les Bon Temps: Identity and Authenticity in Cajun

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Music and Dance he agrees that, “discussion of authenticity presumes an acceptable definition of what the term signifies, and recent studies have shown its definition to be extremely complex, variable, and often limited in range” (2003, p. 24). His more appropriately post-modern and open notion of “becoming-Cajun” allows for himself to be constituted as concurrently insider/outsider/tourist/theorist and essentially dissolves authenticity all together. What he does add to the notion of Cajun authenticity is, I think, the same as Guirard’s project, the idea that Cajuns can perform/produce/commodify “on their own terms” (2003, p. 26). During my work in the Basin, I investigated the concept of Cajun cultural commodification by asking guides if they saw inauthentic expressions of Cajun culture. Invariably the discussion turned to Justin Wilson, an author, chef and Cajun humorist popular during the 1970’s and 80’s who hosted cooking shows on PBS. There was disagreement on how ‘inauthentic’ Wilson was. Though he was born in Louisiana and grew up in Mississippi, Wilson was at most a ‘backdoor Cajun’ but was also rumored to be from New York and California. Despite his origins, guides saw Wilson as an actor in the banal sense who “just throws that accent like that. It's just a gimmick on television” (Interview U 2010). One guide confirmed the idea that swamp tourists based their expectations on his hyper-performed Cajunness:

KEUL: Do you ever kick up your accent? INTERVIEWEE: only when I'm doing my [Cajun] humor. I don't use the accent outside of that. There are a lot of people that come expecting everyone to talk like Justin Wilson. (Interview J 2010).

In further discussion about authenticity, this guide also explained how once Cajun “became cool” (referring to the cultural revival era starting in the late 1960’s) the food and dancing began to be exported via festivals to cities throughout the US (Interview J 2010). This caused ‘outsiders’ to begin reproducing Cajun cultures and adding their own twists on dishes and dances. He noted that particularly the food began to lose its referent because many of the festivals were set up as competitions and caused an ‘arms race’ on spicyness. The ‘hotness’ of dishes began to be a Cajun cooking staple (even in Acadiana) though originally (according to him) Cajun foods were prepared for large families (including children) and thus spice was always served on the side and added to one’s personal preference. For him, this loss of referent was not necessarily a bad thing, but more an example of how cultures are open to change. Though they understood some Cajun commodities as inauthentic, most Cajun guides saw themselves as ‘the real deal’. If authenticity is possible, it can be achieved in live, present tense performance of culture. Several guides responded by noting that Cajun was a manner of being. “It's not so much to sell it as it is to present it. We just be ourselves and that is what it is” (Interview U 2010). “I am myself” (Interview N 2010). In this sense the exploitation of culture as commodity did not seem to be denigrating to guides or as Mitchell might have it, “a primary ingredient in geographically uneven systems of social reproduction” (2000, p.81). So to return to one of the original questions, “Can guides sell it without selling out?” if we can accept the openness of cultures and the inherent creativity implied by performance we must acknowledge that

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Cajuns have the capacity to be the referent in a manner free from tourist dictates. They do not necessarily sell out by performing an ethnically self-exploitative image.

7.3 Closer to Nature

Similar to cultural commodification, if we stick to the literature (in historical representations) instead of the experience, Cajuns are constructed as closer to nature and pre-modern. Perhaps the most vulgar instance of such writing can be found in Wilkinson who wrote:

“The region in which they reside is uninviting to more civilized communities. So they will remain, as they have been, for ages, unmolested by the inroads of a superior race, and in undisputed possession of their dismal, moss-draped cypress swamps; their lonely shell-mounds and live-oak groves; their desolate wastes of sea marsh; and their dead lakes and silent lagoons” (Wilkinson 1892, p. 407)

The hierarchical character of this representation is typical of this era of white Western thought. Particularly in this quote we see the association of ‘lesser’ people with not only an extreme but forlorn environment. A parallel can be drawn with the representations of Inuit who are also positioned as ‘closer to nature’ due to their ‘native habitat’. Sibley notes, “the white stereotype of the Inuit in the Canadian Arctic placed them in the wild, as a part of nature, because of their capacity to withstand extreme cold and survive in a harsh environment by hunting and gathering” (1995, p.26). The swamp is doubtlessly constructed as a harsh environment and its people could only be capable of surviving there if they were somehow fit into a “taxonomic scheme” (1995, p.26). However, this type of hierarchical thinking comes from a century ago and using Wilkinson to position today’s Cajuns is difficult to justify. More recently, authors have written about Cajuns and nature in a romantic sense (such as Del Sesto and Gibson 1975), and though these types of works certainly serve to exoticize and construct them as a ‘simpleton other’, they are not pervasive and any damage to the notions of Cajun in the Basin today is hard to notice. In fact, guides were more likely to revel in their supposed pre-modernity not as a relic that had yet to be caught up to speed, but as a conscious resistance to globalization and the wage economy. “I think as a culture the Cajuns were very much in tune with the land until the middle of the 20th century when education, communication, and transportation and industrialization in the form of the oil business radically altered things” (Interview J 2010). Here, the guide does not make an overt judgment of what Bernard would call “Americanization”, but acknowledges that changes did occur for better or worse. The tone of discourse around Cajuns’ relationships with nature in the Basin generally follows this objective perspective: people used to depend more on the swamp for their material needs, now they depend on external markets. As noted in Chapter Three, many respondents felt that parts of the culture had been ‘lost’. Perhaps what has been lost is not the culture, but the notion of being ‘in tune with the land’ that is implied by a more localized economy. To summarize, though Cajuns have been constructed as closer to nature in the literature, most of these types of works are fairly dated and their impacts are hardly

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noticeable in the experience of swamp tours. Rather, guides perform hybridities-in-the- making by blending Cajuns and the swamp, wild and ‘civilized’ spaces, and people and alligators. Though tours could capitalize on the exoticization of ‘swamp people’, they were constructed as exotic not through bio/ethnic ties to the swamp but through context; they live and work in an environment that is itself an ‘othered space’of tourism. The swamp has not determined Cajun positionality to nature, but today plays the role of exotic background. This touristed context allows for the performance of hybridities. Since I have noted their powerful position from which to perform spatializations and the need for them to maintain the exotic, if the ‘closer to nature’ myth were pervasive in the Basin, we might expect it to be reified through guides’ performances. Thus, the fact that the myth was not a part of their performance suggests that it (gladly) may be relegated to dated literary representations. This suggests not that the power of ‘closer to nature’ narratives should be ignored, but that we must performatively reify them to give them power. If ethnic tour guides generally perform nature through culture rather than a culture from nature they can continue to decrease the impact of such myths.

7.4 The Context of Disaster

Though I did not anticipate them, two events provided an important context for my research and substrate for understanding how locals relate to the Basin. Especially considering my interview method and the topic of (broadly defined) people and nature in the Basin, performances of spatialization often commented on the Deepwater Horizon oil spill, which began with an explosion on April 20, 2010, and the May 2011 Mississippi River flood. Oil spilled into the Gulf of Mexico throughout my primary fieldwork period and was a ubiquitous topic of discussion. I returned to the Basin in May of 2011 to reconnect with locals and guides during the high water point of the flood which necessitated the opening of the Morganza spillway at the Old River Control for the first time since 1973. I found many similarities in how people reacted to these two events, one obviously caused by people (the spill) and the other ‘managed’ in a particular manner by people but constructed as a (possible) ‘natural’ disaster. The history of Louisiana has been blanketed by similar hybrid human/natural disasters and the people with whom I spoke reacted by performing cultures of disaster and resiliency that seemed to be a yearly part of life in (at least South) Louisiana. Guides saw the effect of the events not through lost business, but through the failed representation of Louisiana. Especially the media was seen as misrepresenting Louisiana as a homogenous coastal/watery place that has been affected by all sorts of maladies. This caused tourists (both past and future) to be concerned about guides and the availability of tourism enough to call or email. When I asked one guide if the spill had affected his business he replied, “None. A lot of people ask me and I say, ‘that's 100 miles away’ I don't think we will see it because the river is always going south to keep it off” (Interview U 2010). Often media was blamed for not doing more to distinguish the affected areas from the rest of the state. “People think that [the Basin was affected] because they hear the word Atchafalaya, and they have heard of Atchafalaya Bay is covered with oil from the oil spill” (Interview N 2010). For this guide, the media representations of the spill were similar to that of Hurricane Katrina in 2005. “You

164 should've seen it with Katrina. ‘Louisiana was under 10 feet of water’ even here’” (Interview N 2010). Though guides were appreciative of concerned phone calls they received during the flood, oil spill and hurricanes of years past, they could not help noting how flawed people’s notion of Louisiana geography was. Both events had paradoxes that were tangible in the discourse. For the oil spill, the strangest paradox was that the destruction of the physical environment caused outrage, yet bashing the oil companies was wantonly self-detrimental to the community. The oil industry dominates the visual economy of the landscape and employs many throughout the Basin. Some of the guides who were most critical of big oil had worked on rigs themselves and their inside experience fueled their critique. Others were more sympathetic to oil workers and eager to single out the executives. “Make the oilfield be accountable, not the people working, but the moneymaking organizations that are thinking, ‘Well it's not just nice to make 5 billion a quarter we need to make 10 billion a quarter’” (Interview O 2010). One guide wrote the spill off as ‘the price of doing (oil) business. “Don't be totally ‘green’, but 30,000 wells in the last 50 years and this is the only accident that they have had. And there has never been one to my knowledge in the Basin” (Interview N 2010). Critiques of the oil industry were sometimes shunned in favor of forgiveness and a desire to keep everyone working. “I want to see my friends go back to work. They have got families to feed, they have got houses to pay for, they have got truck notes that are coming due” (Interview O 2010). Particularly the “Rally for Economic Survival” on July 21, 2010 indicated that Lafayette residents were constructing Washington’s reaction to the oil spill (the May 30, 2010 federal moratorium on deep water drilling) as a threat to their lifeways. The oil spill was of strange consequence for Lafayette particularly because no direct environmental impacts were felt yet the (imagined) social impacts on the oil industry were magnified. The rally estimated job losses at 75,000 (Rally For Economic Survival 2010). However, a September 16, 2010 Department of Commerce report noted, “This report estimates that the six-month moratorium may temporarily result in up to 8,000 to 12,000 fewer jobs in the Gulf Coast” and furthermore found that oil employment had actually increased from the period of April to July in relation to the previous year (Estimating the Economic Effects 2010). Overall, fear of economic decline and remorse for the environmental destruction seemed to compete for people’s perspectives. The paradox of the flood of this year was even more pronounced. The water was as high as the 1973 flood, yet beyond the levee, the region was in an extreme drought. The drought was constructed by the media, science, and local discourse as alleviating some water level rise by soaking up water in the dry beds of the Morganza spillway. But this only helped temporarily. Rising waters were in a sense a local tourist attraction. Signs at the spillway read “No Stopping Next 5 Miles”. And places where the water was ‘comfortably high’ were packed with people (such as the Avery Island Bridge). Driving through Acadiana, there was an oscillation of dry streams and swollen raging rivers that drastically reminded one of how intertwined the waterways are. All in all, the sense was that the media misrepresented the threat and that ‘we have been through this before, we will go through it again’. Hunting and fishing ‘camps’ are structures particular to this region and often take the brunt of flooding (as they did in this flood) but are not occupied for most of the year. One man told me that his friend was offering up his camp (a small mobile home) to anyone who was willing to pull it out of the Basin before the flood. At

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least it wouldn’t be destroyed and someone else could enjoy it. According to my respondents, people who own camps and the few who live in camp areas full time understand that they will be flooded. Flooding is part of the psychological and economic cost of living in some parts of the Basin and causes people to revert to a common ‘culture of disaster’ where risk is downplayed and living through the disaster is a point of pride worthy of a t-shirt. In accordance with many of the past and more recent works on Acadiana, (and despite the rabblerousing of the oil industry) the overall attitudes towards both the oil spill and flood were of resiliency (Comeaux 1972; Tidwell 2004). Performing resiliency seemed to be quite a circular act. The idea of ‘surviving’ (used similarly in reference to both events) implies the day-to-day movements of place despite the impacts of disaster, and bodes well with the performativity of cultures. In other words, if the culture was not re- preformed on a daily basis, it could not have this ‘ongoingness’ that is implicated by referring to resiliency. I found it strange that Cajuns were seen as both resilient towards natural events (i.e. adaptable) yet, by some, threatened by cultural assimiliation. Though in a theoretical sense we can assume that they also have the capacity to endure “Americanization” if they chose to, this sort of force was more psychologically malignant to the performance of culture than high waters or the oil spill.

7.5 Future Directions

While I feel this dissertation covered with depth and breadth many performances of spatialization in the Atchafalaya Basin, there is certainly more work that could be done. Many of my notions of hybridity of culture and nature could be taken to other arenas of tourism such as alligator exhibits, zoos or parks, and hunting trips. This could expand the notions of performance using actors who use more or less scripted methods for translating the swamp and could shed more light on the importance of instantaneity in performance. Especially concerning the construction of crawfishing as a relic of Cajun subsistence lifeways, a study that worked more directly with the Louisiana Crawfish Producers Association would provide interesting insights on the continuation of their “modern” industry in the face of widespread crawfish farming. I also feel that more work could be done (on my part or someone else’s) to diversify our understanding of race and ethnicity in the Basin. I have commented very little here on the roles of African Americans (in some instances Creoles), Hispanic, and Asian people all who play important roles in the performance of the swamp. I particularly misunderstood the Creole cultures because the word Creole is used both for immigrants from France (especially in New Orleans) and for Francophone African Americans. Despite searching, I was unable to find interviewees or museums and other cultural tourism installations that dealt with their roles in the Atchafalaya. Finally, the method and epistemology of this work could easily be expanded to areas that are outside the (ANHA defined) Atchafalaya Basin. Many swamp tours operate in areas closer to New Orleans as well as to the west and, considering the diversity of constructions of space in the Basin, drawing a line around this river may have been arbitrary. Though my theoretical perspective is different, I see this dissertation to some extent as an ‘update’ on Comeaux’s Atchafalaya Swamp Life (1972). However, where he laments the presumed ‘death‘ of Cajun swamp culture, I reach a very different

166 conclusion. Aided by evidence from four more decades of adaptation as well as a theory that stresses how culture is dynamic and performed (including through tourism), I am happy to report that Cajun culture is alive and well, reproducing itself through nature.

However, my findings here, like findings in all dissertations, are provisional. And here my intellectual trajectory rejoins with that of Comeaux, as we both hope that our works “will stimulate further research on the greatest of all swamps- the Atchafalaya Basin” (Comeaux 1972, foreword).

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APPENDIX A

INTERVIEW SUBJECT AFFILIATIONS

A Swamp tour guide: June 23, 2010 B Swamp tourist: June 24, 2010 C Swamp tourist: June 28, 2010 D Swamp tour guide: July 7, 2010 E Swamp tour: July 8, 2010 F Swamp tour guide: July 9, 2010 G Swamp tourist: July 9, 2010 H Swamp tourist: July 10, 2010 I Swamp tourist: July 10, 2010 J Swamp tour guide: July 13, 2010 K Swamp tour guide: July 13, 2010 L Swamp tourist: July 16, 2010 M Swamp tour guide: July 19, 2010 N Swamp tour guide: July 19 2010 O Swamp tour guide: July 28, 2010 P Swamp tour guide, Louisiana Crawfish Producers Association Rep.: July 28, 2010 Q Swamp tour guide, crawfisherman: July 28, 2010 R Swamp tour guide: August 3, 2010 S Swamp tourist: August 4, 2010 T Swamp tour guide: August 4, 2010 U Swamp tour guide: August 5, 2010 V Swamp tour guide: October 26, 2009 W Alligator hunting guide: March 9, 2009 X Alligator hunting guide: March 23, 2009 Y Alligator hunting guide: March 10, 2009

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APPENDIX B

LETTER OF CONSENT

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APPENDIX C

HUMAN SUBJECTS APPROVAL

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Atchafalaya National Heritage Area Public Scoping Comments. 2009. Louisiana Department of Culture, Recreation and Tourism. http://www.atchafalaya.org/content/management-plan. accessed March 10, 2010.

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Atchafalaya Trace Commission, 2002. Heritage Area Management Plan Executive Summary. Baton Rouge: Louisiana Department of Culture, Recreation and Tourism.

Atchafalaya.org, 2011. Atchafalaya National Heritage Area website. http://www.atchafalaya.org/. accessed February 3, 2011.

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BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH

Adam Keul

Adam Keul completed a Bachelors of Arts in Geography and Political Science in May 2002 and a Master of Interdisciplinary Studies in Geography History and Forestry in 2007 both at Stephen F. Austin State University in Nacogdoches, Texas. He enrolled as a PhD student in Florida State University’s Geography Department in 2007. Adam’s research focuses on how nature is mediated through different cultures and particularly on how commodification and representation are produced and performed in place.

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