{"title":"安哥拉监狱竞技:囚犯牛仔和监狱旅游","authors":"Melissa Schrift","doi":"10.2307/3774031","DOIUrl":null,"url":null,"abstract":"This article examines the Angola prison rodeo as a form of tourist performance and ritual. It argues that the rodeo capitalizes on the public's fascination with criminality through the spectacle of animalistic inmate others subdued by a progressive penal system. The essay introduces the notion of institutional tourism in relation to the polities of representation. (Tourism, performance, prison, spectacle, representation) ********** Every Sunday in October, thousands of people glut the back roads leading to the Louisiana State Penitentiary to be spectators at the Angola Prison Rodeo. Hailed as \"The Wildest Show in the South,\" the rodeo features untrained inmates competing in events borrowed from professional rodeo and made unique to Angola Prison. The rodeo thrives as a tourist attraction, not by virtue of its location but because it promises unparalleled spectacle. Spectators travel many miles to attend the Angola rodeo and access one of society's most censored private realms. Indeed, the prison is a space that defines itself by its ability to conceal. As a place that both hides offenders from the public eye and restricts inmates from accessing the public, the penitentiary denotes layered meanings of concealment. The United States' collective imagination of prison life implicates associations with the 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 the worst of humanity. Prisons are the antipublic, institutional replicas of hell itself. It is thus, perhaps, surprising that when the prison is made public, people line up to see. The spectacle of the Angola Rodeo is yet another example of contemporary popular culture's fascination with criminality, evident by the overwhelming success of television crime shows, entrepreneurial efforts to commodify prison life (Wright 2000), and the expanding industry of penal tourism (Adams 2001; Strange and Kempa 2003). Despite a robust anthropological literature on the 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 the Angola prison rodeo. Drawing from scholarship that understands tourism as ritualized interaction and performance, this article suggests that the Angola rodeo, like many tourist sites, capitalizes on the promise of cultural difference rendered through the display of inmate cowboys participating in a rodeo on prison grounds. It argues that the rodeo serves as a forum for the display of animalistic inmate others who are effectively subdued by a progressive penal system that simultaneously ensures captivity, control, and rehabilitation. The Angola rodeo is treated in this discussion as an officially sponsored tourist ritual that plays on the public's fascination with criminality through the 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 the Angola rodeo situates itself within ritual and performance theory with particular interest in how such theory informs tourism in the contemporary world. Dealing primarily with non-Western cultures, Turner (1967, 1969) established the significance and mechanics of the \"social drama\" of ritual. According to Turner, ritual serves a fundamental role in the 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 the sacred that individuals enter into a state of liminality, characterized by Turner as a realm where conventional social norms dissolve in the face of anomie, alienation, and angst. …","PeriodicalId":81209,"journal":{"name":"Ethnology","volume":"43 1","pages":"331-344"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0000,"publicationDate":"2004-09-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.2307/3774031","citationCount":"33","resultStr":"{\"title\":\"THE ANGOLA PRISON RODEO: INMATE COWBOYS AND INSTITUTIONAL TOURISM\",\"authors\":\"Melissa Schrift\",\"doi\":\"10.2307/3774031\",\"DOIUrl\":null,\"url\":null,\"abstract\":\"This article examines the Angola prison rodeo as a form of tourist performance and ritual. It argues that the rodeo capitalizes on the public's fascination with criminality through the spectacle of animalistic inmate others subdued by a progressive penal system. The essay introduces the notion of institutional tourism in relation to the polities of representation. (Tourism, performance, prison, spectacle, representation) ********** Every Sunday in October, thousands of people glut the back roads leading to the Louisiana State Penitentiary to be spectators at the Angola Prison Rodeo. Hailed as \\\"The Wildest Show in the South,\\\" the rodeo features untrained inmates competing in events borrowed from professional rodeo and made unique to Angola Prison. The rodeo thrives as a tourist attraction, not by virtue of its location but because it promises unparalleled spectacle. Spectators travel many miles to attend the Angola rodeo and access one of society's most censored private realms. Indeed, the prison is a space that defines itself by its ability to conceal. As a place that both hides offenders from the public eye and restricts inmates from accessing the public, the penitentiary denotes layered meanings of concealment. The United States' collective imagination of prison life implicates associations with the 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 the worst of humanity. Prisons are the antipublic, institutional replicas of hell itself. It is thus, perhaps, surprising that when the prison is made public, people line up to see. The spectacle of the Angola Rodeo is yet another example of contemporary popular culture's fascination with criminality, evident by the overwhelming success of television crime shows, entrepreneurial efforts to commodify prison life (Wright 2000), and the expanding industry of penal tourism (Adams 2001; Strange and Kempa 2003). Despite a robust anthropological literature on the 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 the Angola prison rodeo. Drawing from scholarship that understands tourism as ritualized interaction and performance, this article suggests that the Angola rodeo, like many tourist sites, capitalizes on the promise of cultural difference rendered through the display of inmate cowboys participating in a rodeo on prison grounds. It argues that the rodeo serves as a forum for the display of animalistic inmate others who are effectively subdued by a progressive penal system that simultaneously ensures captivity, control, and rehabilitation. The Angola rodeo is treated in this discussion as an officially sponsored tourist ritual that plays on the public's fascination with criminality through the 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 the Angola rodeo situates itself within ritual and performance theory with particular interest in how such theory informs tourism in the contemporary world. Dealing primarily with non-Western cultures, Turner (1967, 1969) established the significance and mechanics of the \\\"social drama\\\" of ritual. According to Turner, ritual serves a fundamental role in the 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 the sacred that individuals enter into a state of liminality, characterized by Turner as a realm where conventional social norms dissolve in the face of anomie, alienation, and angst. …\",\"PeriodicalId\":81209,\"journal\":{\"name\":\"Ethnology\",\"volume\":\"43 1\",\"pages\":\"331-344\"},\"PeriodicalIF\":0.0000,\"publicationDate\":\"2004-09-22\",\"publicationTypes\":\"Journal Article\",\"fieldsOfStudy\":null,\"isOpenAccess\":false,\"openAccessPdf\":\"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.2307/3774031\",\"citationCount\":\"33\",\"resultStr\":null,\"platform\":\"Semanticscholar\",\"paperid\":null,\"PeriodicalName\":\"Ethnology\",\"FirstCategoryId\":\"1085\",\"ListUrlMain\":\"https://doi.org/10.2307/3774031\",\"RegionNum\":0,\"RegionCategory\":null,\"ArticlePicture\":[],\"TitleCN\":null,\"AbstractTextCN\":null,\"PMCID\":null,\"EPubDate\":\"\",\"PubModel\":\"\",\"JCR\":\"\",\"JCRName\":\"\",\"Score\":null,\"Total\":0}","platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":null,"PeriodicalName":"Ethnology","FirstCategoryId":"1085","ListUrlMain":"https://doi.org/10.2307/3774031","RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":null,"ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":null,"EPubDate":"","PubModel":"","JCR":"","JCRName":"","Score":null,"Total":0}
引用次数: 33
摘要
这篇文章检视安哥拉监狱的竞技表演,作为一种旅游表演和仪式。它认为,牛仔竞技利用了公众对犯罪的迷恋,通过动物性囚犯的奇观,其他人被进步的刑罚制度所制服。本文介绍了与代表性政策相关的制度旅游的概念。(旅游、表演、监狱、奇观、表演)**********十月的每个星期天,成千上万的人涌向通往路易斯安那州监狱的小路,观看安哥拉监狱竞技表演。这个被誉为“南方最狂野的表演”的牛仔竞技比赛,让未经训练的囚犯参加从专业牛仔竞技中借来的比赛,这是安哥拉监狱独有的。牛仔竞技作为一个旅游景点而蓬勃发展,不是因为它的位置,而是因为它承诺无与伦比的奇观。观众们千里迢迢来到安哥拉观看牛仔竞技表演,进入这个社会最受审查的私人领域之一。事实上,监狱是一个以其隐蔽性来定义自己的空间。作为一个既将罪犯隐藏在公众视线之外,又限制囚犯进入公众视野的地方,监狱代表了隐藏的多层次含义。美国人对监狱生活的集体想象隐含着与私人的联系——隐藏的违禁品、秘密的性关系、黑暗和邪恶的思想。虽然很少有人能真正描述一个隔离的牢房,但大多数人都能想象出某种版本的“洞”——一个深而黑暗的地方,里面储存着人性最坏的一面。监狱是反公众的,是地狱本身的复制版。因此,当监狱向公众开放时,人们排着队来看,这也许令人惊讶。安哥拉竞技表演的壮观景象是当代流行文化对犯罪的迷恋的另一个例子,从电视犯罪节目的压倒性成功、将监狱生活商品化的企业努力(Wright 2000)和不断扩大的刑事旅游产业(Adams 2001;Strange and Kempa 2003)。尽管有关于当地和全球旅游动态的强大人类学文献,刑罚旅游却很少受到民族志的关注。本文旨在通过讨论安哥拉监狱竞技,鼓励刑事旅游的考虑。根据将旅游业理解为仪式化的互动和表演的学术研究,本文认为安哥拉牛仔竞技会与许多旅游景点一样,通过展示囚犯牛仔在监狱场地上参加竞技会,利用了文化差异的承诺。它认为,竞技表演是一个展示兽性囚犯的场所,这些囚犯被一个渐进的刑罚系统有效地制服,同时确保囚禁、控制和改造。在这个讨论中,安哥拉的竞技表演被视为一种官方赞助的旅游仪式,通过在根深蒂固的种族和性别规范、暴力和国家威权主义的历史背景下,“活着”的囚犯的奇观,利用公众对犯罪的迷恋。仪式剧场与当代旅游对安哥拉竞技表演的分析将自己置于仪式与表演理论中,并对这些理论如何影响当代世界的旅游业特别感兴趣。特纳(1967,1969)主要研究非西方文化,确立了仪式的“社会戏剧”的意义和机制。根据特纳的观点,在所有文化中,仪式在社会身份和关系的创造和转变中起着根本作用。他认为,仪式涉及到一个过程,通过这个过程,个人离开他们正常的、世俗的世界,进入非凡的、或神圣的体验领域。通过进入神圣的仪式,个人进入了一种阈限状态,特纳将其描述为传统社会规范在面对失范、异化和焦虑时溶解的领域。…
THE ANGOLA PRISON RODEO: INMATE COWBOYS AND INSTITUTIONAL TOURISM
This article examines the Angola prison rodeo as a form of tourist performance and ritual. It argues that the rodeo capitalizes on the public's fascination with criminality through the spectacle of animalistic inmate others subdued by a progressive penal system. The essay introduces the notion of institutional tourism in relation to the polities of representation. (Tourism, performance, prison, spectacle, representation) ********** Every Sunday in October, thousands of people glut the back roads leading to the Louisiana State Penitentiary to be spectators at the Angola Prison Rodeo. Hailed as "The Wildest Show in the South," the rodeo features untrained inmates competing in events borrowed from professional rodeo and made unique to Angola Prison. The rodeo thrives as a tourist attraction, not by virtue of its location but because it promises unparalleled spectacle. Spectators travel many miles to attend the Angola rodeo and access one of society's most censored private realms. Indeed, the prison is a space that defines itself by its ability to conceal. As a place that both hides offenders from the public eye and restricts inmates from accessing the public, the penitentiary denotes layered meanings of concealment. The United States' collective imagination of prison life implicates associations with the 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 the worst of humanity. Prisons are the antipublic, institutional replicas of hell itself. It is thus, perhaps, surprising that when the prison is made public, people line up to see. The spectacle of the Angola Rodeo is yet another example of contemporary popular culture's fascination with criminality, evident by the overwhelming success of television crime shows, entrepreneurial efforts to commodify prison life (Wright 2000), and the expanding industry of penal tourism (Adams 2001; Strange and Kempa 2003). Despite a robust anthropological literature on the 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 the Angola prison rodeo. Drawing from scholarship that understands tourism as ritualized interaction and performance, this article suggests that the Angola rodeo, like many tourist sites, capitalizes on the promise of cultural difference rendered through the display of inmate cowboys participating in a rodeo on prison grounds. It argues that the rodeo serves as a forum for the display of animalistic inmate others who are effectively subdued by a progressive penal system that simultaneously ensures captivity, control, and rehabilitation. The Angola rodeo is treated in this discussion as an officially sponsored tourist ritual that plays on the public's fascination with criminality through the 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 the Angola rodeo situates itself within ritual and performance theory with particular interest in how such theory informs tourism in the contemporary world. Dealing primarily with non-Western cultures, Turner (1967, 1969) established the significance and mechanics of the "social drama" of ritual. According to Turner, ritual serves a fundamental role in the 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 the sacred that individuals enter into a state of liminality, characterized by Turner as a realm where conventional social norms dissolve in the face of anomie, alienation, and angst. …