The Namche Conference: May 24-26, 2003 People, Park, and Mountain Ecotourism Participants and Presentations: Jon G. Donlon

Jon G. Donlon, Email: jhdonlon@hotmail.com (Baton Rouge, Louisiana, USA). AbstractLocality or Universality: Commodification of Culture and Cultural Sustainability This paper discusses, briefly, the development of tourism (as a leisure pastime) related to bringing the participant into contact with culturally different groups. Contact may be facile or even involve fabrication, or it may be fully—emotionally and intellectually--engaged. Then, it itemizes several of the social or political concerns which have been articulated as cultural contact in a “commodified” context. A number of these concerns circulate in one way or another around change, or the appearance of change, introduced into the host culture by members of the donor culture. Penultimately, three examples of local area “material culture” which are created in part or essentially in whole for the tourist market (wire toys in Southern Africa, camel wrestling in the Aegean coast of Turkey visitor orbit, traditional music from “Cajun” South Louisiana) are discussed. A fourth, Mardi Gras as a cultural expression, is described at some length in light of it offering a remarkable example of long-term hybridization: well established change within continuity. References Donlon, Jon. (1999). Tradition and change in wire toys of Southern Africa. Studies in Popular Culture 22: 44-51. Elbert, H. (1984). The material culture of Zimbabwe. Harare, Zimbabwe: Longman Zimbabwe. Fabian, Johannes. (1990). Power and performance: Ethnographic explorations through proverbial wisdom and theater in Shaba, Zaire. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press. Kirschenblatt-Gimblett, Barbara. (1998). Destination culture: Tourism, museums and Heritage. Berkeley: University of California Press. Magin, Andre, and Jacques Soulilou. (1996). Contemporary art of Africa. New York: Harry Abrams. Meyer, Salome, and Peter Comley. (1990). Art from South Africa. Botswana. Lincolnwood, IL.: Passport Books. Oxford Museum of Modern Art. London: Thames & Hudson. Urban, Hugh, B. (1998). The torment of secrecy: Ethical and epistemological problems in the study of esoteric traditions. History of Religions, 37:3, 209-240.

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