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Abstract
When people recreate outdoors, they value the quality of the experience. This study examines rhetorical practices that sustain or undermine perceived authentic outdoor recreation experiences. I conducted a rhetorical analysis of my fieldnotes gathered through participant observation and interview transcripts of online and in-person interviews. I suggest that practices of walking in outdoor recreation—such as staying on or going off a trail, running, and wearing inadequate footwear—communicate member status in an outdoor recreation subculture and construct expectations for authentic experiences. My analysis demonstrates how fluid, embodied, repetitive actions can produce or violate abstract constructs such as authentic experiences.
Acknowledgments
This essay is derived from the author's dissertation and parts of this essay were presented at NCA in 2009 and Western in 2009. I would like to thank Danielle Endres, Ray McKerrow, Helene Shugart, Julia Corbett, Joy Pierce, Marc Hall, and the anonymous reviewers who all helped me strengthen this essay. I would also like to thank Kristin Legg and Zion National Park, the David C. Williams Memorial Grant Fellowship committee, and the Floyd O'Neil Scholarship in Western American Studies committee.
Notes
1. Pseudonyms. This is a fictionalized story based on an interview I conducted with a couple who complained about their hike on the West Rim trail and on my own experience hiking on the West Rim trail.
2. David Barna and Jeffrey Olson, “National Park System Attendance Rises in 2007” National Park Service, February 26, 2008, http://home.nps.gov/news/release.htm?id=785.
3. Greg Dickinson, “Joe's Rhetoric: Finding Authenticity at Starbucks,” Rhetoric Society Quarterly 32 (2002): 23–24.
4. Kevin DeLuca, “Articulation Theory: A Discursive Grounding for Rhetorical Practice,” Philosophy and Rhetoric 32 (1999): 334–48; Phaedra C. Pezzullo, Toxic Tourism: Rhetorics of Pollution, Travel, and Environmental Justice (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2009); Elizabeth Fleitz, “Cooking Codes: Cookbook Discourses as Women's Rhetorical Practices,” Present Tense: A Journal of Rhetoric in Society 1, no. 1 (2010): 1–8, http://www.presenttensejournal.org; Marouf Hasian, Jr., “Communication Law as a Rhetorical Practice: A Case Study of the Masses Decision,” Communication Law & Policy 1 (1996): 497–532; Robert Stephen Reid, “Faithful Preaching: Preaching Epistemes, Faith Stages, and Rhetorical Practice,” Journal of Communication and Religion 21 (1998): 164–99.
5. DeLuca, “Articulation Theory,” 339.
6. DeLuca, “Articulation Theory,” 339; Fleitz, “Cooking Codes,” 3; David Machin and Sarah Niblock, “Branding Newspapers: Visual Texts as Social Practice,” Journalism Studies 9 (2008): 244; Francesca Veronesi and Petra Gemeinboeck, “Mapping Footprints: A Sonic Walkthrough of Landscapes and Cultures” Convergence: The International Journal of Research into New Media Technologies 15 (2009): 359.
7. Pierre Bourdieu, The Logic of Practice, trans. Richard Nice (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1990), 52.
8. Carole Blair, “Reflections on Criticism and Bodies: Parables from Public Places,” Western Journal of Communication 65 (2001): 271–94; Raymie McKerrow, “Critical Rhetoric: Theory and Praxis,” Communication Monographs 56 (1989): 91–111; Michael Calvin McGee, “Text, Context, and the Fragmentation of Contemporary Culture,” Western Journal of Speech Communication 54 (1990): 274–89; Martha Solomon, “The Things We Study: Texts and their Interactions,” Communication Monographs 60 (1993): 62–68.
9. Michael McGee, “A Materialist's Conception of Rhetoric,” in Rhetoric, Materiality, and Politics, ed. Barbara A. Biesecker and John Louis Lucaites (New York: Peter Lang, 2009), 19.
10. Dana L. Cloud, “The Materiality of Discourse as Oxymoron: A Challenge to Critical Rhetoric,” Western Journal of Communication 58 (1994): 141.
11. Blair, “Reflections,” 271–93; Carole Blair, “Contemporary US Memorial Sites as Exemplars of Rhetoric's Materiality,” in Rhetorical Bodies, ed. Jack Selzer and Sharon Crowley (The University of Wisconsin Press, 1999), 16–57.
12. McGee, “A Materialist's Conception of Rhetoric,” 23.
13. Pezzullo, Toxic Tourism, 167–68.
14. Dwight Conquergood, “Ethnography, Rhetoric, and Performance,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 78 (1992): 81.
15. Gerard Hauser, Vernacular Voices: The Rhetoric of Publics and Public Spheres (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1999), 33.
16. Phaedra C. Pezzullo, “Resisting ‘National Breast Cancer Awareness Month’: The Rhetoric of Counterpublics and their Cultural Performances,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 89 (2003): 347.
17. Pezzullo, “Resisting ‘National Breast Cancer Awareness Month,’” 350.
18. I prefer the term practice because the theoretical history of the term makes it a perfect fit for the phenomena I would like to investigate. See, for example: Pierre Bourdieu, Outline of a Theory of Practice, trans. Richard Nice (Cambridge, University of Cambridge Press, 1977 [1972]). Michel de Certeau, Luce Giard, and Pierre Mayol, The Practice of Everyday Life, Volume 2: Living and Cooking, trans. Timothy J. Tomasik (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1998).
19. Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, trans. Steven Rendall (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), 147.
20. Dickinson, “Joe's Rhetoric,” 6.
21. Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York: Routledge, 1999); John McKenzie, Perform or Else: From Discipline to Performance (London: Routledge, 2001); John L. Jackson, Jr., Real Black: Adventures in Racial Sincerity (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005); E. Patrick Johnson, Appropriating Blackness: Performance and the Politics of Authenticity (Durham: Duke University Press, 2003); Victor Turner, Process, Performance, and Pilgrimage: A Study in Comparative Symbology (New Delhi: Concept, 1979).
22. McGee, “Text, Context, and the Fragmentation of Contemporary Culture,” 274–89; McKerrow, “Critical Rhetoric,” 91–111; Raymie E. McKerrow and Jeffrey St. John, “Critical Rhetoric and Continual Critique,” in Rhetorical Criticism: Perspectives in Action, ed. Jim Kuypers (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2009), 321.
23. Blair, “Reflections on Criticism and Bodies,” 271–93; Blair, “Contemporary U.S. Memorial Sites as Exemplars of Rhetoric's Materiality,” 16–57; Carole Blair, Marsha S. Jeppeson, and Enrico Pucci, Jr., “Public Memorializing in Postmodernity: The Vietnam Veterans Memorial as Prototype,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 77 (1991): 263–88; Carole Blair and Mary L. Kahl, “Introduction: Revising the History of Rhetorical Theory,” Western Journal of Speech Communication 54 (1990): 148–59; Dickinson, “Joe's Rhetoric,” 5–27; Greg Dickinson, “Memories for Sale: Nostalgia and the Construction of Identity in Old Pasadena,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 83 (1997): 1–27; Greg Dickinson, Brian L. Ott, and Eric Aoki, “Memory and Myth at the Buffalo Bill Museum,” Western Journal of Communication 69 (2005): 85–108; Greg Dickinson, Brian L. Ott, and Eric Aoki, “Spaces of Remembering and Forgetting: The Reverent Eye/I at the Plains Indian Museum,” Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies 3 (2006): 27–47; Jessie Stewart and Greg Dickinson, “Enunciating Locality in the Postmodern Suburb: FlatIron Crossing and the Colorado Lifestyle,” Western Journal of Communication 72 (2008): 280–307; Pezzullo, Toxic Tourism; Phaedra C. Pezzullo, “Performing Critical Interruptions: Stories, Rhetorical Invention, and the Environmental Justice Movement,” Western Journal of Communication 65 (2001): 1–25; Pezzullo, “Resisting,” 345–65; Phaedra C. Pezzullo, “Touring ‘Cancer Alley,’ Louisiana: Performances of Community and Memory for Environmental Justice,” Text & Performance Quarterly 23 (2003): 226–52; Peter Simonson, “The Streets of Laredo: Mercurian Rhetoric and the Obama Campaign,” Western Journal of Communication 74 (2010): 94–126; Danielle Endres, Leah Sprain, and Tarla Rai Peterson, ed., Social Movement to address Climate Change: Local Steps for Global Action (Amherst, NY: Cambria Press, 2009).
24. Michael K. Middleton, Samantha Senda-Cook, and Danielle Endres, “Articulating Rhetorical Field Methods: Challenges and Tensions,” Western Journal of Communication, 75 (2011): 386–406.
25. Blair, “Reflections on Criticism and Bodies,” 274–76.
26. Pezzullo, Toxic Tourism, 9.
27. Pezzullo, Toxic Tourism, 9–10.
28. I camped for a month in Zion National Park, participating and observing the entire time. I have collected over eighty single-spaced pages of fieldnotes from my observations. I also interviewed people both informally and formally in the four ways I discuss in the text of this essay. By informally, I mean participant conversations, which I sometimes recorded in my fieldnotes, and ethnographic interviews. These short, fleeting conversations yielded opinions, contextualized examples, in-the-moment assessments, and plenty of humor. I conducted about 150 of these kinds of interviews. By formal interviews, I mean that I conducted a structured online interview (with open ended questions) and informant interviews. I distributed my questionnaire through CRTNET, the National Communication Association listserve. Additionally, I emailed the link to anyone whom I thought would be interested in participating and asked them to pass the link along as well. This included emailing friends and colleagues. I received seventy responses to the online structured interview. I conducted twenty structured informant/respondent interviews at Zion National Park. These ranged in length from less than ten minutes to over an hour. I conducted these interviews at different locations throughout the park to speak with a variety of visitors. I did not collect demographic information about my participants because I do not desire to make claims about correlations between specific demographic characteristics and experiences, identities, or values. My questions asked people to define outdoor recreation, speak about good and bad experiences, identify a “real” recreator, explain how they prepared for outdoor recreation, and discuss their thoughts on accessibility. The online and informant interviews together have produced over 250 pages of transcripts, which are available upon request from the author as well as stored for examination at Zion National Park.
29. Pezzullo, “Resisting ‘National Breast Cancer Awareness Month,’” 350.
30. Thomas R. Lindlof and Brian C. Taylor, Qualitative Communication Research Methods, 2nd ed. (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 2002): 176.
31. Kevin M. DeLuca, “Unruly Arguments: The Body Rhetoric of Earth First!, ACT UP, and Queer Nation,” Argumentation and Advocacy 36 (1999): 10.
32. Middleton, Senda-Cook, and Endres, “Articulating Rhetorical Field Methods,” 396.
33. Bourdieu, The Logic of Practice; de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life.
34. George Kay and Norma Moxham, “Paths for whom? Countryside Access for Recreational Walking,” Leisure Studies 15 (1996): 174. Peak bagging is the practice of hiking with the goal of reaching a number of peaks.
35. de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life; Stewart and Dickinson, “Enunciating Locality in the Postmodern Suburb,” 280–307; Rajeev S. Patke, “Benjamin's Arcades Project and the Postcolonial City,” diacritics 30, no. 4 (2000): 2–14; Susan Buck-Morss, “The Flâneur, the Sandwichman and the Whore: The Politics of Loitering,” New German Critique 39 (1986): 99–140; Vanessa R. Schwartz, “Review Essay: Walter Benjamin for Historians,” American Historical Review 106 (2001): 1721–43.
36. de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, 93.
37. Stewart and Dickinson, “Enunciating Locality in the Postmodern Suburb,” 286.
38. Jackson, Real Black, 216.
39. Buck-Morss, “The Flâneur, the Sandwichman and the Whore,” 102.
40. Schwartz, “Review Essay,” 1732.
41. The identity group in this case is one based on walking in a national park. However, I see some of these practices overlapping with walking in other outdoor settings and with doing other activities outdoors.
42. Rebecca Solnit, A Field Guide to Getting Lost (London: Viking, 2005), 10.
43. Solnit, A Field Guide to Getting Lost, 13.
44. Bourdieu, The Logic of Practice.
45. These trails look like zigzags going up a steep hill. Vernon Felton, Trail Solutions: IMBA's Guide to Building Sweet Singletrack (Boulder, CO: International Mountain Bicycling Association, 2004), 268.
46. Kelly Burgess, “Woman Falls to Her Death from Angels Landing in Zion National Park,” LA Times, November 30, 2009, http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/outposts/2009/11/angels-landing-death.html.
47. National Park Service, “Zion Map & Guide” (April–May 2009): 7.
48. Dickinson, “Joe's Rhetoric,” 6.
49. Ronald Walter Greene, “Rhetorical Materialism: The Rhetorical Subject and the General Intellect,” in Rhetoric, Materiality, and Politics, ed. Barbara A. Biesecker and John Louis Lucaites (New York: Peter Lang, 2009), 44; Ronald Walter Greene, “Another Materialist Rhetoric,” Critical Studies in Mass Communication 15 (1998): 21–41.
50. Bourdieu, The Logic of Practice.
51. Greene, “Rhetorical Materialism,” 47.
52. Pezzullo, Toxic Tourism, 5–6.
53. Bourdieu, The Logic of Practice, 89.
54. Greene, “Rhetorical Materialism,” 43–65.