‘Tourism State’ Cultural Production: The Re-making of Nova Scotia

Mathews and Richter – amongst many – have condemned the paucity of political analyses in Tourism Studies, while Hall and Meethan have likewise bemoaned the field's related privileging of prescriptivist studies of policy making at the expense of longitudinal, descriptivist interpretations. Responding to such calls, this paper (on the under-suspected ideological power and authority of tourism) critiques the contribution to the understanding of real-world governmental action of the historian McKay as generated in his investigation of matters of cultural representation and cultural formation in Canada. It critiques his rather overlooked 1990s longitudinal Quest of the Folk analysis of agency and appropriation in the worldmaking iconography of place. Delving into practices of folklore ‘selection’ and ‘art and craft’ production in Nova Scotia, McKay charted the rise of what he calls the tourism state there, and showed (chiefly via Gramscian and Foucauldian distillation) how it took over from previously self-appointed interest groups to play a dominant role in manipulating the symbolic image of the province. Thus, the tourism state is found by McKay to be a considerable worldmaking player – though, again, he does not use the term himself – as it engages strongly in the re-naturalization of Nova Scotia as a largely ‘innocent’ and ‘artisanal’ place. Hereafter, this Tourism Geographies critique then provides a prognosis to help guide the development of research agendas in Tourism Studies on the mobilization of symbolic authority through these very sorts of governmentalities in and through tourism. It does this via the provision of twelve research propositions on the politics of place and identity making. These dozen worldmaking propositions are offered to help inspire advanced inquiry into what McKay calls the (state) ‘mythomoteur’ of tourism – the manner in which a regime of representation can grow speedily and incrementally (but not necessarily, consciously) to deny other visions of cultural life and other vistas of local/regional/provincial being.