Where the Scenic and the Obscene Meet: Ethical Subject Formations in Yosemite National Park

Abstract

Lifestyle sports such as climbing often transgress conventional norms of civil conduct. This occurrence is frequently attributed to the character of the human subjects who participate in these sports. Such subjects may at times acquire a reputation for being both unruly and unethical, particularly when they engage in climbing at locations that are ideologically invested with conservative political symbolism. Such is the case with climbing in Yosemite National Park, a touristic landscape that is both a world-class destination for elite climbers and the United State’s most powerful icon of American wild and scenic beauty.

Visitor acts of climbing in Yosemite evidence multiple processes of subject formation. Some climbing performance processes serve to reinforce, reiterate, and valorize established patterns of ethical subject construction. Others serve to defy and/or deconstruct them. Still others forge self-world relationships out of which ethical forms of conduct emerge that are relatively uninfluenced by pre-existing constructions of normative behavior. The spatial theory of Henri Lefebvre and the pragmaticist sign theory of Charles S. Peirce are useful in identifying and interpreting these various processes of ethical subject formation. They are particularly helpful in analyzing visitor acts of climbing that entail the use of obscene language. Such performances in Yosemite’s ecotouristic context are considered to be intensely disrespectful to the “zone of patriotism” that the national park landscape is understood to define. Lefebvre’s theory of spatial practice, however, as well as Peirce’s rhetorical theory of sign genesis, suggest that climbing performance can invent patterns of ecologically-defined action that assign novel meanings to even the most firmly established and ethically-charged linguistic symbols. Climbing in Yosemite, in this regard, exemplifies complicated and creative processes of ethical subject formation, processes whose interpretation cannot be adequately formulated by recourse to standard theories of cultural and social construction alone.

Biography

Sally Ann Ness is Professor of Anthropology at the University of California, Riverside. She has conducted ethnographic research in urban provincial centers in the Philippines and in Yosemite National Park in the United States. Her work has focused on various forms of symbolic action, both in the practice of everyday life and in extraordinary ritual and secular performances. She has written on the semiotics of festival life, dance, and sport, as well as on tourism development and its consequences for cultural practice and cultural identity. She is author of: Where Asia Smiles; an Ethnography of Philippine Tourism (2002); Body, Movement, and Culture; Kinesthetic and Visual Symbolism in a Philippine Community (1992); and is co-editor, with Carrie Noland, of Migrations of Gesture (2008).

Her current book project, The Choreography of Visiting; Essays on Landscape Performance in Yosemite National Park, was funded in part by a Guggenheim award in 2007. It focuses on athletic forms of visitor performance in Yosemite Valley, interpreting their role in the formation of self-world relations that give rise to novel constructions of self, place, community, and culture.