The Angola Prison Rodeo: Inmate Cowboys and Institutional Tourism

Abstract

This article examines Angola prison rodeo as a form of tourist performance and ritual. It argues that rodeo capitalizes on public's fascination with criminality through spectacle of animalistic inmate others subdued by a progressive penal system. essay introduces notion of institutional tourism in relation to polities of representation. (Tourism, performance, prison, spectacle, representation) ********** Every Sunday in October, thousands of people glut back roads leading to Louisiana State Penitentiary to be spectators at Angola Prison Rodeo. Hailed as The Wildest Show in South, rodeo features untrained inmates competing in events borrowed from professional rodeo and made unique to Angola Prison. rodeo thrives as a tourist attraction, not by virtue of its location but because it promises unparalleled spectacle. Spectators travel many miles to attend Angola rodeo and access one of society's most censored private realms. Indeed, prison is a space that defines itself by its ability to conceal. As a place that both hides offenders from public eye and restricts inmates from accessing public, penitentiary denotes layered meanings of concealment. United States' collective imagination of prison life implicates associations with private--hidden contraband, clandestine sexual relations, dark and sinister thoughts. Though few could actually describe an isolation cell, most people can conjure some version of the hole'--a deep and dark place that stores worst of humanity. Prisons are antipublic, institutional replicas of hell itself. It is thus, perhaps, surprising that when prison is made public, people line up to see. spectacle of Angola Rodeo is yet another example of contemporary popular culture's fascination with criminality, evident by overwhelming success of television crime shows, entrepreneurial efforts to commodify prison life (Wright 2000), and expanding industry of penal tourism (Adams 2001; Strange and Kempa 2003). Despite a robust anthropological literature on local and global dynamics of tourism, penal tourism has received little ethnographic attention. This essay aims to encourage considerations of penal tourism through discussion of Angola prison rodeo. Drawing from scholarship that understands tourism as ritualized interaction and performance, this article suggests that Angola rodeo, like many tourist sites, capitalizes on promise of cultural difference rendered through display of inmate cowboys participating in a rodeo on prison grounds. It argues that rodeo serves as a forum for display of animalistic inmate others who are effectively subdued by a progressive penal system that simultaneously ensures captivity, control, and rehabilitation. Angola rodeo is treated in this discussion as an officially sponsored tourist ritual that plays on public's fascination with criminality through spectacle of live inmates against a historical backdrop of deeply ingrained racial and sexual codes, violence, and state authoritarianism. RITUAL THEATER AND CONTEMPORARY TOURISM This analysis of Angola rodeo situates itself within ritual and performance theory with particular interest in how such theory informs tourism in contemporary world. Dealing primarily with non-Western cultures, Turner (1967, 1969) established significance and mechanics of drama of ritual. According to Turner, ritual serves a fundamental role in creation and transformation of social identities and relationships in all cultures. He argues that ritual involves a process through which individuals leave their normal, profane worlds to enter extraordinary, or sacred, realms of experience. It is through ritual passage into sacred that individuals enter into a state of liminality, characterized by Turner as a realm where conventional social norms dissolve in face of anomie, alienation, and angst. …