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)

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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. It is in this liminal phase that individuals experience a transcendence from worldly concerns and find a higher level of meaning and connectedness. Liminality ultimately affords individuals a sense of unity, or what Turner terms "communitas," as well as a clearer conceptualization of the parameters of their everyday social worlds and their places within them.

While Turner's theories developed largely in response to the more pronounced ritual theater of indigenous cultures, Goffman (1959) developed a sociological contextualization of performance that has become a standard in the social sciences. Goffman employs theatrical metaphor to view everyday life as a kind of ritual drama in which individual actors interact, or "perform," in ways that accord to or veer away from prescribed roles and norms. His dramaturgical approach is a useful conceptual tool for thinking about daily interaction in Western, industrial society. Goffman (1961) extends his analysis to consider interactions in what he terms "total institutions," such as asylums and prisons, where performativity is inhibited and controlled by an all-encompassing, repressive bureaucracy.

One of many offshoots of ritual and performance theory has been a literature on tourism as one of the most profound forms of ritual in the contemporary West. MacCannell (1976) was one of the first scholars to interpret tourism as a means by which individuals move from the ordinary, or profane, matters of everyday life to the extraordinary, or sacred, sphere of difference and play. Graburn (1989) also conceptualizes tourism as the modern equivalent of indigenous ritual, and other scholars of tourism have expanded on the notion of tourism as ritual journey (Brunet and Kirshenblatt-Gimblett 1994; Kirshenblatt-Gimblett 1998; Smith 1989; Urry 1990).

Kirshenblatt-Gimblett (1998) illuminates the process by which the performance of cultural difference for leisure becomes commodified. She characterizes contemporary tourism as an "ethnographic burlesque" in which individuals maintain endless desire for the display of cultural otherness. This desire, coupled with a yearning for the vivid, experiential, and immediate, results in an increased encroachment on "lifespace" (Kirshenblatt-Gimblett 1998). This urgency to access the "backstages" of life has driven tourism to ever-greater depths and invasions (Urry 1990), resulting in a privileging of the spectacle. Best characterized by MacAloon (1984) as the process by which the "private or hidden becomes publicly exhibited," spectacle is a public display of socially significant signs that becomes commodified in tourism. Kirshenblatt-Gimblett (1998:55) explains at least one way in which this "political economy of showing" is problematic: "Live displays, whether re-creations of daily activities or staged as formal performances, also create the illusion that the activities you watch are being done rather than represented, a practice that creates …