WRITING SAMPLE

The following is an excerpt from an essay I wrote for my Culture Conservation course at WKU comparing two approaches to community identity. In the traditional perception of the concepts of cultural conservation, emphasis has previously been placed on longstanding ethnic heritage from deeply place-rooted communities. In analyzing Gabberts Winter Carnival in a Western Town and Wilsons The Myth of Santa Fe: Creating a Modern Regional Tradition from this perspective, we start into the new age of culture conservation practices by shifting the focus to contemporary traditions beginning in the memorable past. First instituted in 1965, Winter Carnival in McCall, Idaho is a relatively recent development in community practice. With the closing of the lumber mill in 1977, the importance of the carnival increased in the shifting economy of the town. Where previously tourism served as a secondary portion of economic support, it became the entire industry on which the survival of the community hinged. Payette Lake and the surrounding wilderness area is a popular tourist destination in the summer, but in a place of brutal winters, the town needed to project the image that it encapsulated a wonderland of sport, art, and icy beauty. The transformation from a location to a destination (Gabbert 2011:6) caused a shift in community identity. Tourism draws primarily from other Idahoans, and winter tourism is almost completely dominated by the Winter Carnival... ...Because the McCall area has undergone rapid socioeconomic changes in the past 30 years, (Gabbert 2011:6) and because the notions of community are so open, cultural tourism has a different impact value on McCall tradition than it does on communities more commonly studied from a culture conservation perspective. Because it is white working and middle class Idahoans performing primarily for white working and middle class Idahoans, the fetishism of the work of others (Williams 2011) and staged authenticity (Williams 2011) are arguably not as detrimental to the community as conservationists would traditionally uphold. While Winter Carnival concentrated, intensified, and transformed key cultural ideas and relationships by putting them on aesthetic display, (7) these values are not remarkably different from the consumers of said displays. This is particularly important in regard to the recent shift to the professionalization of snow sculptures. While snow sculptures were initially markers of community identity (Gabbert 2011:100) and created by locals, by importing sculptors from Boise State University and the University of Idaho, and other professional artists, the community identity shifts from being McCall-based to Idaho-based. Further, by including the State Snow Sculpting competition in the McCall Winter Carnival, the cultural display becomes even more broad... Chris Wilsons The Myth of Santa Fe: Creating a Modern Regional Tradition is another example of contemporary communities and issues of construction and invention of tradition... By selecting a community aesthetic based on specific local building traditions, the architectural style became the framework for the city narrative. This is, like McCall, a city reacting to rapid socioeconomic change by inventing a tradition based on cultural tourism...