Wilderness Laboratories: Rhetorical Acts of Surveillance at American Summer Camps

Abstract

Usually you are called to come to infirmary when you are least expecting to, you don't have time even to take a bath. Being a new girl of course you don't know what to expect because no two examinations are alike.First you are shown into a where you are instructed to take off all your clothes. Of course everyone tries to leave on some of their underclothes but eventually you get all of your own clothes off and put on one of those so-called angel robes....Next you are shown into a room, which by way has all windows open, through which a cool breeze is blowing. There you are confronted by M. T.,1 and I'll tell you right now you would never think by looking at her that she had such fingers. She pokes you all over, then tries her best to you but takes pity and doesn't deliver blow that would really do it.The little room described above suggests a child's fear of physician's office as girl notes lack of privacy and respect that accompany a systematic poking and prodding of her body. The feelings of claustrophobia and surveillance seem to intensify as hard fingers try to knock over patient during inspection. The cool breeze coming in windows is only sign that this doctor's visit occurs anywhere near nature. may be surprising is this letter's provenance. It was written by a child attending a summer camp in 1920s.The description in letter bridges two different epistemologies of body: one located in what appears to be a carefree wilderness, and other connected closely to urban doctor's office, where one might imagine microscopes and lab equipment surrounding patient. Within description, fingers of scientist seem to reach uncomfortably into wilderness in a manner that counters typical camp images of roasting marshmallows a fire and living in rustic cabins. In Nature: The Rise of American Summer Camp, Leslie Paris explains, Children's inculcation into camps' body-focused culture began when they underwent precamp physicals. These exams were designed primarily to keep ill and potentially contagious children out of camps, where they might put others at risk (123). Some may agree that Paris was right when she stated that at summer camp the new interwar social science rhetoric never completely overrode a more sentimental wilderness narrative (Children's Nature 240); however, private summer camps reflect urban society's preoccupation with body surveillance much more than they purport to separate from it, and this is illustrated by focusing on child's body across and within iconic settings at summer camps in early years of their development. A rhetorical study of early camp documents and traditions reveals that wilderness, under a scientific gaze, became a laboratory featuring human sub- jects whose growth depended on intervention of health experts to make them superior in body and mind.Exploring rhetoric, particularly rhetoric associated with body, means embracing what Debra Hawhee explains as transdisciplinarity. In her work on Kenneth Burke and body, Hawhee says, What distinguishes transdisciplinarity from interdisciplinarity is its effort to suspend-however temporary-one's own disciplinary terms and values in favor of a broad, open, multilevel inquiry (3). This study of how American summer camp became a laboratory more than a pastoral setting, draws from disparate sources of information: reports of education in schools and cities to contrast those about camp settings, recent scholarship in disability and medical rhetoric, studies in eugenics rhetoric, and assistance from those who theorize relationships between body and environment. Jay Dolmage is correct when he says that rhetoric may be viewed as the strategic study of circulation of power through communication (3). To discuss responsibly how such power circulates, it is important to look across disciplines to theorize how body becomes a site of power negotiation. …