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

Abstract

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 experi- ence 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 Louisi- ana 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 de- scriptions of Voodoo as a part of the local culture. A Short History of Tourist Guidebooks AMONG TOURIST DESTINATIONS IN THE UNITED STATES, Louisiana has long been a favorite. While the state as a whole has unique attractions, New Orleans has been the drawing card. Visitors stroll the streets of the French Quarter and Garden District, dine in Cre- ole restaurants, listen to traditional jazz, ride on streetcars along St. Charles Avenue, and visit the tomb of the area's most famous 19th-century voodoo practitioner, Marie Laveau. These are among the city's most popular attractions and constitute the core of the typical tourist experience. In contrast, city residents have access to places and events that can be described as the (Goffman 1959). This is the local culture that visitors seldom see but sometimes witness as staged performances or read about in magazines and tourist literature. Among the backstage events in New Orleans, un- doubtedly the best known are the second-line parades organized by a variety of African American social clubs and benevolent societies. 1 In a recent analysis of second-line pa- rades as local culture, Helen Regis describes them as celebratory occasions that trans- form urban space creating an alternative social order that private clubs actualize by 'taking it to the streets' in those very neighborhoods ordinarily dominated by the quotidian