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

Abstract

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 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.