Eating and Exploring
Scots-Irish or Something Else?: Crops, Migration, and Appalachian Culinary Tourism View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Ashli Stokes
Scholars examine increasingly the role of heritage tourism in fueling nostalgic, romantic perceptions of place that link visitors to problematically idealized pasts, but culinary tourism’s ability to heighten these place-based mythologies remains underexplored. Forms of culinary tourism in the Appalachian region of the United States, for example, continue to glorify Scots-Irish and other white ancestral histories through celebrating particular foods. We contend that attending to the rhetoric of Southern Appalachian migration identifies how foodways tourism narratives privilege particular stories, values, and people. Greater attention to migration, or the stories of the movement of people, crops, and goods, helps show instead how food cultures often reflect a complicated cultural interdependence. We first highlight how regions, particularly Appalachia and Scotland from which some of its settlement descends, are rhetorical inventions, examining how culinary tourism privileges one Appalachian imaginary amid numerous inventional rhetorical possibilities. Developing a theoretical framework drawn from migration scholarship, we rhetorically analyze three examples based on fieldwork in Scotland and Appalachia, illustrating how contemporary culinary tourism echoes in “hillbilly” experiences or offers different experiences. Tracing migration stories helps uncover how rhetorical uses of tradition and heritage in promoting Scotland’s food and drink experiences reverberate in Appalachia hundreds of years later, and how they could be interpreted differently. Viewing culinary tourism as an unfolding process, rather than as a product to consume, emphasizes that there are new meanings that can be circulated when we travel to Appalachia and elsewhere.
Imagining Cattle Culture in Australian Literature View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Kathryn Dolan
Australia is known for its cattle culture. I am interested in researching how that culture become dominant, as well as how it compares to other food-based animal cultures, like sheep? Much like the United States or Canada, Australia is a former British colony with a large landmass and a complicated history with indigenous populations—both human and non-human. In the United States, for example, cattle replaced the native bison to the detriment of Native Americans who depended on the bison. In Australia, does a similar event happen with the Aborigines and kangaroos and wallabies? Specifically, I study how cattle are imagined in Australian literature. These literary formulations are what would have been used to create public interest and eventually public policy. I focus on environmental and animal rights issues, past and present, throughout Australian literature. I examine key Australian figures including Patrick White, Nugi Garimara, and Jane Harper in terms of how they describe cattle culture throughout the nation’s history from ecocritical, indigenous studies, animal studies, and posthumanist critical lenses.
Featured For the Love of Wine: An Ethnographic Account of Wine Tourism in Kelowna, BC View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Palbi Sharma B.
British Columbia’s (BC) wine country has become a popular destination for tourists internationally as it welcomes over a million visitors each year (BC Wine Institute 2019). The Okanagan Valley is home to 80% of all the vineyards in BC, making it a premier grape growing region. It is known to be the second largest wine producing region in Canada (BC Wine Institute 2019). One of the oldest producers of wine, within the Okanagan Valley, is the city of Kelowna. Kelowna is known for its unique wine related experiences, serene beauty filled with luscious greenery, mountains, its gorgeous Okanagan Lake, and has the highest concentration of wineries in the Valley. This research explores the narratives of individuals who visit the area and its wineries to embark on wine tours and the people who work in the industry. I trace the narratives of both tourists and hosts and track their desires for self-realization by demonstrating how the place, the industry, and the tour become spaces of renewal and therapeutic relief. I show how the therapeutic experience of self-realization is discovered in new consumption practices of wine and nature, leading to new worlds of experiences associated with Kelowna’s wine country. These narratives outline three themes relating to the quest for self-realization: fulfillment, authenticity and social status.
