UC Riverside

I chart negotiations of local, particular, self, other, away-ness and cultural competency in Cape Breton's traditional Scottish music and dance culture. Cape Breton's traditional culture, always already being produced and enjoyed by locals, is now an attraction for visitors who are allowed to watch, enjoy and even participate...within certain boundaries. I show that culture turned into a tourism commodity, even a "salvation" island industry, does not result in cultural unraveling, upheaval, or inauthenticity. In such an environment, the matter of cultural ownership and belonging underlying the motivations of Cape Breton's locals and tourists in all their efforts to define, live, and experience culture. Some organizations, like the Celtic Heart of North America Co-operative, curates cultural experiences offered by local institutions into easily commodified and consumed experiential packages for tourists. At the same time, practitioners and participants in Cape Breton's communities, including culture brokers working at the local institutions that cater some events to tourists, ensure that myriad local events continue to evade packaging and marketing efforts. Through various strategies, locals maintain barriers to participation at many cultural events, including some of the events that are ostensibly accessible to visitors from beyond the island, as well as those events considered most quintessentially local. Out of the way locations, lack of interpretation (or the presence of interpretation that is too detailed), social situations that are closed to non-locals, and other barriers are some of the strategies and circumstances that curtail how accessible, and thus commodifiable and touristic, these events can become. Through such strategies, locals subvert the ability of tourists to participate in the local traditional culture, and thus retain more ownership over the system of practices, embodiments, and social norms that collectively comprise the culture of Cape Breton's traditional Scottish community. These normative practices delimit the performances and participation of locals and tourists, and I examine who can participate in Cape Breton's traditional Scottish culture, and how. Questions about normativity guide me throughout: what is authentic/traditional embodiment? what are the rules for (in)correct/culturally (in)appropriate performance? who gets to participate because of their ethnic, gender and sexual identities, and who is left out.