The Sacralization of Fidel in Everyday Life: An Exploration of Cuban Tourism and Nationalism

• In Event: 078 - Section on Sociology of Culture Refereed Roundtable Session
  In Refereed Roundtable 100min: Table 17. Nations, Collective Memories, and Immigration

Abstract

Scholars suggest that nationalism and tourism can be characterized as having religious dimensions. Within each of these domains research has established that people’s understanding and actions demonstrates the shifting boundaries of Durkheim’s original idea of the sacred and profane. While an increasing body of research situates observable phenomena within Durkheim’s conceptualization of religion, there are little, if any, studies of the mechanisms by which the things, people, places, and ideas associated with nation-states or tourist routes become sacred or profane.
Thus, I make a case that narratives, as speech acts, are an essential mechanism in sacralizing, i.e., making sacred, the secular, i.e., those objects, people, and places that are not explicitly religious, in the domains of tourism and nationalism. Using ethnographic data from Cuban field-sites, I attempt demonstrate that what I call “micro and macro” narratives serve to align actors, objects, and events of the concrete, experienced world of tourism with larger plots, trajectories, destinies and moral codes of nationalism. These speech acts, however, do not need to be narrated by living human beings. Moreover, narratives can create systems of resemblance and differencing (i.e., binary oppositions) between symbols that grant tourists a basic sense of the authentic or the sacred in relation to the objects, people, and places they experience. While narratives are not causal in nature, they are organizing, sense making structures and can be used as resources to classify the sacred and profane and thus are a mechanism of sacralization of the secular.

Author

• Ian Peacock, University of California, Los Angeles