Situating the Local by Inventing the Global: Community Festival and Social Change

Abstract

Every year during its Winter Carnival, the village of McCall, located in the mountainous region of west central Idaho, transforms itself into an outdoor museum of snow and ice. Sculptures made entirely of snow and as large as buildings can be found on street corners, in front of buildings, and in the park. The sculptures are ostensibly made by townspeople and are extraordinarily realistic, drawing upon literature, popular culture, and local life. Visitors might see a giant Snoopy or Darth Maul rendered in ice, wild bears frolicking over fallen logs, or a Model T car stuck in the snow. State sculptures are part of a state competition, located in the park, and are less detailed and often abstract. All are festive objects and designed to attract tourists to this remote and scenic resort town, who travel around to view them as part of the Carnival's activities. The other primary festival attraction is the main parade, which entails a Mardi Gras theme, but somewhat incongruously concludes with a quasi-Chinese dragon that wends its serpentine way down main street and is manned by local schoolchildren. It turns out that not only the snow competition but also the entire festival is fraught.1 Winter Carnival is plagued by a host of problems common to modern Chamber of Commerce tourist productions, including a continual shortage of volunteers, burn-out, and general ambivalence (Thoroski and Greenhill 2001). The festival's purpose is to generate dollars during a slump in the winter season, but people here are ambivalent about tourists and dislike Winter Carnival crowds. Despite Chamber of Commerce rhetoric that Winter Carnival is [economically] good for the community, many businesses claim they don't make a cent during Winter Carnival, since their regular customers stay away.2 Local snow sculptures are often outsourced to outside groups. As an all-volunteer event, it takes a tremendous amount of effort to produce Winter Carnival, and many people wonder why they do it. Residents breathe a sigh of relief when it is over. But Winter Carnival continues to occur annually. Why? What is going on? And why does the Mardi Gras parade conclude with a Chinese-Mardi Gras hybrid dragon anyway? This article illustrates how the McCall Winter Carnival, and more specifically the snow sculptures and the parade, are a primary means through which local residents reflect on and negotiate major recent controversial socioeconomic transformations. The cultural performances that constitute Winter Carnival are collective productions grounded in and emerging from local culture and social life, in a setting in which local culture and social life have undergone major change over the past decade. The McCall area has been affected primarily by the reorganization of industrial capital, which in turn has reconfigured local space. McCall is situated on the shores of Fayette Lake and surrounded on all sides by national forest, which is in turn adjacent to the Frank Church River of No Return Wilderness Area. It is a quiet, beautiful scenic area that has been primarily a logging community since it was founded in 1889. The prominent Brown family owned the local timber mill for most of the twentieth century, and the mill employed many people in McCall during that time. McCall also served as a social hub for loggers working in lumber camps in the backcountry, who came into town on weekends to dance, drink, and socialize. The Forest Service has played an important role in the economy, since almost eighty-eight percent of land in the county is federally owned.3 The headquarters for the Payette National Forest has been located in McCall since 1908 (Preston 1998) and McCall has been a smokejumper base since 1943. The timber industry, government agencies such as the Forest Service and Fish and Game, and the surrounding ranching areas have cultivated an outdoors-oriented population, the majority of whom work closely with the natural environment. …