Daniel Maher uses case studies of the representation of frontier history in Fort Smith, Arkansas, to yield insight into wider issues involved in the commemoration of cultural heritage. Although his focus primarily is on ways that the National Park Service interprets heritage at the Fort Smith National Historic Site, Maher also analyzes related sites and projects in western Arkansas and eastern Oklahoma. Maher uses the idea of the “frontier complex” as a central trope for examining these sites, and demonstrates how this concept sheds useful insights into a wider range of presentations of western history. He casts the frontier complex as a psychological construct that provides tourists with a set of imagined assumptions and a framework for envisioning the frontier. The dominant symbols, tropes, and narratives support imperialism, nationalism, racism, sexism, and other ideologies that bolster the overall mythos of Manifest Destiny and the conquering of the west. Maher convincingly shows that elements of the frontier complex are enacted in the process of developing the interpretation of a heritage site as well as through watching western movies, playing cowboy and Indian, reenacting the past through living history events, and simply visiting a heritage site.
The first chapter opens with an engaging and imaginative reconstruction of Maher’s own fantasy world when he was a child who played with plastic cowboys and Indians marketed as the Marx Toys play set. He correlates the fantasy tropes and narratives in this imaginary world to the processes of reenactment that Tony Horowitz explores amoung Civil War living-history interpreters in his book Confederates in the Attic. This symbolism of “the attic” refers here to ways that the engagement with history actually relates more to contemporary fears, anxieties, and assumptions about modernity than to a recreation of past history. Throughout the book, Maher provides valuable insights by comparing the imagined world of Civil War living historians with the historical imagination of tourists engaged with the Fort Smith site and frontier heritage. The dominant ways of constructing themes in this history relate to distinct eras: namely, an Era of Removal (1804-1848), an Era of Restraint (1848-1887), and an Era of Reservation (1887-1934). The remaining chapters explore implications of the frontier imaginary in relation to key themes in each of the eras. After assessing the creation and development of frontier tourism over the past centuries, Maher suggests that we may be in a new era marked by the closing of the frontier complex.
Maher is an anthropologist, and he references relevant and useful scholarship on display and heritage tourism in his lucid writing. He completed extensive fieldwork at a variety of sites, and he deconstructs salient elements in the representation of heritage by exploring the symbolic systems within historical contexts. His writing on the “Hanging Judge” Isaac Parker is a tour de force in this study. In the interpretation at Fort Smith and in the tourist’s imagination, Judge Parker is a force for bringing justice and order to a chaotic and lawless territory. The park’s interpretation represents him as a bestower of efficient and effective justice in the newly created state of Arkansas. Maher uses historical documents to reveal that Judge Parker was far less than impartial and that his court-ordered executions sentenced more African-American and American Indians to death than whites. This type of historical critique is perhaps the low-hanging fruit, but it’s essential to the subsequent stages of analysis.
Maher asks readers to consider the wider implications in asserting that this region was lawless and disorderly. Exactly what elements were chaotic? Maher convincingly demonstrates that the assumption that this region was wild and needed to be tamed supports the dominant ideology in which indigenous people were portrayed as savages and part of the landscape that simply needed to be refined through Manifest Destiny. This twofold process of first using historical evidence to question claims and then elucidating ideological constructs is a model for heritage studies, and Maher’s work shows how the historical underpinnings of hegemonic ideologies continue to persist in contemporary assumptions about the region’s heritage and culture. Turning history into heritage and then using tourism as a device for interpreting history and culture can yield valued insights into the past. Maher provides cautionary tales of examples where this framing as “edutainment” obscures, rather than clarifies, our understanding of cultural history. What happens when a child flips a switch to send small dolls to their fates in a miniature gallows and laughs when the trapdoor is swung down? How might the safe distance of a tour of Miss Laura’s establishment create an image of early twentieth-century prostitution that is more complicit with Vivian’s Cinderella story in the movie Pretty Woman than with the actual experience of sex slaves?
Mythic Frontiers is an important contribution to cultural heritage studies. Maher’s insights are useful for directors and interpreters of heritage sites as well as for scholars interested in the interpretation and representation of history and culture as heritage. Folklorists interested in public and applied folklore as well as festival, cultural representation, and folklore and fantasy will appreciate Maher’s interdisciplinary methods. Folklorists who study mythology, however, may quibble with Maher’s representation of myth as falsehood. His demythologization is well warranted and appropriate to his subject. Maher also uses perspectives from the scholarly study of mythology to explore the symbolism and emotional import of myth. A deeper discussion of scholarship on mythology that goes beyond the too simplistic dichotomy that myths are in opposition to truth could have added to his insights. The ritualistic elements of tourism, for example, are evident in Maher’s discussion. More in-depth use of scholarship on mythology could have allowed him to further develop and expand his insights into ways that narrative, ritual, symbol, and history are all integrated in the display of the past as contemporary heritage.
--------
[Review length: 960 words • Review posted on November 8, 2016]