Great Plains Studies, Center for
Date of this Version
Winter 2002
Citation
Great Plains Quarterly Vol. 22, No. 1, Winter 2002, pp. 3-21.
Abstract
Ethnic tourism in the United States has become big business. An estimated six billion dollars were spent on various forms of "heritage tourism" (including ethnic tourism) in the US in 1995 alone.1 At first glance, this desire for roots and tradition within an American public more often noted for its worship of progress and individualism may seem surprising. Yet as Americans have become increasingly mobile, wired, and rootless,2 many have become disillusioned with the growing urbanization and industrialization of their society3 and have begun efforts to recapture a sense of what they perceive as traditional rural community. A common means to this end is for the disaffected to try to reconnect with the ethnic folkways of their immigrant ancestors, by visiting tourist towns set up for this very purpose.
This longing for an idyllic folk culture past has had a notable impact on the American landscape as communities reinvent themselves to cater to these desires. Throughout the country, many towns (often the sort of struggling rural farm communities that are common throughout the Great Plains and Midwest) have begun to project their ethnic past to the outside world in hopes of drawing tourist dollars. Pella, Iowa, for example, has redone its town into a vision of its Dutch ethnicity (complete with windmill) while Fredericksburg, Texas extols its German background.4
Lindsborg, Kansas, is one such "imagineered" place. On the outskirts of this central Kansas college town of 3200 residents, originally a Swedish Lutheran colony, signs say "Valkommen to Little Sweden, USA." Remodeled storefronts along Main Street, the main commercial district, sport faux-Swedish fronts on standard midwestern architecture, and Swedish-themed gift shops offer a cornucopia of Swedish-themed goods. The Swedish Crown restaurant even offers a complete Swedish menu and smorgasbord (Figs. 1 and 2). Houses are adorned with small red Dala horses, a modified old-world folk craft that has become a ubiquitous, inescapable symbol of Lindsborg's identity. Festivals such as the biennial Svensk Hyllningsfest (honoring the Swedish pioneers who settled in the Smoky Valley), the Midsummer's Day festival, and the Lucia Festival at Christmas time all provide opportunities for visitors to sample traditional Swedish foods like lingonberries or the notorious lutfisk, to listen to Swedish folk tunes, or to watch one of the active and enthusiastic local Swedish folkdance troupes. Many residents don their own Swedish folk costumes during these festivals to further get into the spirit of things. Surprisingly, the enthusiasm for things Swedish extends well beyond the one-third of residents who claim Swedish ancestry. Although certainly not all of the town's non-Swedes take part in the festivals, a substantial proportion do, and some even wear Swedish costumes of their own.
In this article, I examine the economic turmoil that led to the reinvention of Lindsborg as "Little Sweden, USA," the creative ways that Lindsborg residents responded to this crisis, as well as the impacts that commercialization has had on residents' own attachment and devotion to their ethnic heritage. Although my narrative is specific to Lindsborg, similar stories could be told of many of the towns that have imagineered themselves into visions of timeless communities rooted in a misty, folk-culture ethnic past, and who have cre.,ated in the process a new, distinctly (and paradoxically) modern landscape.
Comments
Copyright 2002 by the Center for Great Plains Studies, University of Nebraska-Lincoln