Folk for Whom? Tourist Guidebooks, Local Color, and the Spiritual Churches of New Orleans

The transformation of local culture into local color at the hands of the tourism industry is a global phenomenon. Tourist guidebooks, as markers of tourist "sights," play a major role in this process, and thereby help to construct the tourist gaze and the tourist experience itself. In New...

Full description

Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Published inThe Journal of American folklore Vol. 114; no. 453; pp. 309 - 330
Main Author Jacobs, Claude F.
Format Journal Article
LanguageEnglish
Published Columbus American Folklore Society 01.07.2001
American Folklore Society, Inc
Subjects
Anthropology
Authenticity
Color
Culture
Ethnic Studies
Folklore
Guidebooks
Religion
Spirituality
Tourism
Travel
Voodoo
Louisiana
United States > US
Online AccessGet full text

Cover

More Information
Summary:The transformation of local culture into local color at the hands of the tourism industry is a global phenomenon. Tourist guidebooks, as markers of tourist "sights," play a major role in this process, and thereby help to construct the tourist gaze and the tourist experience itself. In New Orleans, guidebooks from the Federal Writers’ Project of the 1930s to commercial publications of the 1990s have included the Spiritual churches as local color. The descriptions of the churches in the guidebooks emphasize their link to Louisiana folk culture, especially voodoo. What is ignored is the complexity of the religion and the extent to which the churches’ beliefs, rituals, and organization resemble mainstream Christian denominations. The perpetuation of this image of the Spiritual churches in the guidebooks is necessary, however, because markers have to point somewhere in their descriptions of Voodoo as a part of the local culture.
ISSN:0021-8715
1535-1882
DOI:10.2307/542025