Reliving off The Swamp: A Cajun Tourism Commodity

Abstract

The development of ethnic tourism involves a process of community‐ and individual‐level objectification and commodification. To be attractive to outsiders, planners and tourism professionals often present local lifeways as unique and local while and contrasting them to an external globalized world. Using a political economic approach, this paper shows that this process of self‐commodification may give tourism professionals some control over how ethnic cultures are is presented, but does so within the parameters of state oversight and consumers’ desires. A case study of Louisiana Cajun tourism reveals how a specific narrative of swamp subsistence is deployed by individual tour guides and through the tourism planning process. This “heritage ecology” is used to romanticize a Cajun cultural ecology as “living off of the swamp” despite the fact that swamp commodities have almost always been produced for external markets. Similar to past commodities, swamp tourism still involves the production of Cajun‐swamp culture for outside consumers. This type of tourism paradoxically presents the image of a physically and socially disconnected ethnic group by fostering connections with outsiders while in the swamp.