Toward a Sensory Ethnography of Plantation Museums: Emotional Labor, Affect, and Place-Making at McLeod Plantation Historic Site
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Keywords: plantation museums, emotional labor, sensory ethnography, labor, place-making
Abstract Type: Paper Abstract
Authors:
Emma Jay Walcott-Wilson,
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Abstract
Tour guide experiences are important both because they influence how people understand history and because tour guides are a large and under-researched population of laborers in a tourist economy. One way to unlock these experiences is with a closer examination of their embodied and emplaced roles at the site where they work. For guides at McLeod Plantation Historic Site, both the banal experience of work and exceptional encounters with broader narratives of history are inseparable elements of daily life. Guides’ memories dovetail with the memory embedded in the objects and narratives of the site. A guide’s sense of belonging and/or alienation is integral to the construction of the stories they share with visitors. In turn, the way they express these stories is shaped by their daily encounters with other objects, bodies, and auras of place. In this paper, I explore the daily, lived experiences of guides at McLeod, how they perceive their labor, and its affective consequences.
Toward a Sensory Ethnography of Plantation Museums: Emotional Labor, Affect, and Place-Making at McLeod Plantation Historic Site
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Paper Abstract