Performing the Sacred Nation: Travel, Music, and Dual Nationalisms in “Rick Steves’ Symphonic Journey”

• In Event: Places and Performances as Cultural Objects

Abstract

How are collective imaginations of the sacred nation formed? This paper conceptualizes the tensions of “dual nationalisms” as both sacred and profane through a study of American travel guide and PBS legend, Rick Steves, whose performance of travel preaches “travel as a political act” to audiences as a means to purify one’s self of ethnocentricity. Travel is a generative site for the study of heritage and material culture because performances of nationalism inherent therein eclipse boundaries of “the road” and are staged across multiple sites - both place and time - using varying means of symbolic production, like social media, television, guidebooks, and music. Performances of travel articulate national imaginaries. Whether a backpacker, a pilgrim, a heritage tourist, or a comfort-seeker on a cruise, the dialectical relationship between the “traveler” and “the world” serves as a site of moral formation, including tensions between idealizations of the sacred nation and the profane ills of ethnocentrism. Drawing from literature on nationalism and material culture, civil sphere theory, and the cultural sociology of music, as well as a background of ten years of ethnographic research of Rick Steves’ Europe, this paper examines Steves’ orchestral event “Rick Steves’ Symphonic Journey,” described as a celebration of “19th-century nationalism and romanticism,” as a performance of travel that uses music to articulate competing imaginations of the nation as both sacred and profane. As he rejects profane visions like Christian nationalism or fascism, Steves preaches a self-described “George Washington-style nationalism” that encourages American audiences to imagine themselves as members of a longstanding democratic civil sphere that reaches back (or across) to nationalist movements in Europe. More broadly, this paper investigates how material and sensory cultures are used to substantiate mise-en-scène by actors who wield means of symbolic production in successful social performances.

Authors

• Anne Elizabeth Taylor, Mount Holyoke College

• Eva Hanson, Mount Holyoke College

• Aleena Jafar-DeCesare, Mount Holyoke College