Choreographies of Landscape: Signs of Performance in Yosemite National Park

By Sally Ann Ness

As an international ecotourism destination, Yosemite National Park welcomes millions of climbers, sightseers, and other visitors from around the world annually, all of whom are afforded dramatic experiences of the natural world. This original and cross-disciplinary book offers an ethnographic and performative study of Yosemite visitors in order to understand human connection with and within natural landscapes. By grounding a novel “eco-semiotic” analysis in the lived reality of parkgoers, it forges surprising connections, assembling a collective account that will be of interest to disciplines ranging from performance studies to cultural geography.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Berghahn Books
• Release date: Mar 1, 2016
• ISBN: 9781785331176

Sally Ann Ness

Sally Ann Ness is Professor of Anthropology at University of California, Riverside. She is author of Where Asia Smiles (2003) as well as Body Movement and Culture (1992), which won the de la Torre Bueno Prize and the CORD Outstanding Publication in Dance Research Award. She has also co-edited, with Carrie Noland, the collection Migrations of Gesture (2008).  Her research in Yosemite was funded in part by a 2007 John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship.

Book preview

Choreographies of Landscape

DANCE AND PERFORMANCE STUDIES

General Editors:

Helen Wulff, Stockholm University and Jonathan Skinner, Queen’s University, Belfast

Advisory Board:

Alexandra Carter, Marion Kant, Tim Scholl

In all cultures, and across time, people have danced. Mesmerizing performers and spectators alike, dance creates spaces for meaningful expressions that are held back in daily life. Grounded in ethnography, this series explores dance and bodily movement in cultural contexts at the juncture of history, ritual and performance, including musical, in an interconnected world.

Volume 1

Dancing at the Crossroads: Memory and Mobility in Ireland

Helena Wulff

Volume 2

Embodied Communities: Dance Traditions and Change in Java

Felicia Hughes-Freeland

Volume 3

Turning the Tune: Traditional Music, Tourism and Social Change in an Irish Village

Adam Kaul

Volume 4

Dancing Cultures: Globalization, Tourism and Identity in the Anthropology of Dance

Edited by Hélène Neveu Kringelbach and Jonathan Skinner

Volume 5

Dance Circles: Movement, Morality and Self-Fashioning in Urban Senegal

Hélène Neveu Kringelbach

Volume 6

Learning Senegalese Sabar: Dancers and Embodiment in New York and Dakar

Eleni Bizas

Volume 7

In Search of Legitimacy: How Outsiders Become Part of an Afro-Brazilian Tradition

Lauren Miller Griffith

Volume 8

Choreographies of Landscape: Signs of Performance in Yosemite National Park

Sally Ann Ness

Choreographies of Landscape

Signs of Performance in Yosemite National Park

Sally Ann Ness

First published in 2016 by

Berghahn Books

www.berghahnbooks.com

© 2016 Sally Ann Ness

All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purposes of criticism and review, no part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system now known or to be invented, without written permission of the publisher.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Ness, Sally Ann.

   Choreographies of landscape : signs of performance in Yosemite National Park / Sally Ann Ness.

     pages cm—(Dance and Performance Studies ; 8)

Includes index.

ISBN 978-1-78533-116-9 (hardback : alk. paper)—

ISBN 978-1-78533-117-6 (ebook)

  1. Human geography—California—Yosemite National Park. 2. Cultural landscapes—California—Yosemite National Park. 3. National parks and reserves—Public use—Yosemite National Park. 4. Ethnology—California—Yosemite National Park. 5. Performing arts—Philosophy. 6. Ethnology—Philosophy. 7. Landscapes—Social aspects. 8. Symbolism. I. Title.

GF504.C2N47 2016

979.4’47—dc23

2015028312

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN: 978-1-78533-116-9 Hardback

E-ISBN: 978-1-78533-117-6 Ebook

This book is dedicated to Yosemite’s visitors, past, present, and future; and especially to my daughter, Anna Lucile Reck, and those of her millennial generation.

Chinese tourists taking photos of themselves at Tunnel Viewpoint, Yosemite National Park, June 2012.

Photo by Sally Ann Ness.

Contents

List of Illustrations

Acknowledgments

I. Approach

Landscape Performance Theory, an Introduction

II. Visiting

1. Bouldering: Movements of the Unforetold

2. Climbing: Scenic-Obscenic Movement

3. Hiking: Self-World Transformations

III. Moving On

4. Unwinding and Changing Course

5. The Spartanburg Coincidence

Index

Illustrations

Frontispiece. Chinese tourists taking photos of themselves at Tunnel Viewpoint, Yosemite National Park, June 2012.

Photo by Sally Ann Ness.

Figure 0.1. Visitor Anna Reck choreographing a small fact of visitor experience inside a living oak tree in Yosemite Valley, 4 July 2005.

Photo by Erich Reck (from the collection of Sally Ann Ness).

Figure 0.2. Visitors performing on boulders beside the trail to Lower Yosemite Fall Viewpoint, April 2009. Photo by Sally Ann Ness.

Figure 0.3. Amna Shiekh climbing on the Columbia Boulder, October 2008. Photo by Sally Ann Ness.

Figure 1.1. Alan Moore preparing to climb the route Jacob’s Ladder, April 2008. Photo by Sally Ann Ness.

Figure 1.2. Moore climbing Jacob’s Ladder, April 2008. Photo by Sally Ann Ness.

Figure 2.1. Jamcrack’s vertical crack, a typical feature in Yosemite’s granite walls. Photo by Derick Fay, May 2010 (from the collection of Sally Ann Ness).

Figure 2.2. Author climbing on the unnamed crack before the incident occurred. Photo by Darrell Logan, May 2010 (from the collection of Sally Ann Ness).

Figure 2.3. Author at the top of the unnamed crack climb after the speech act occurred. Photo by Charlotte Tonnies Moore, May 2010 (from the collection of Sally Ann Ness).

Figure 3.1. Half Dome seen from Glacier Point, July 2005. The face of Tis-se-yak is said to be visible in the upper right quadrant of the north face. Photo by Katie Manduca (from the collection of Sally Ann Ness).

Figure 3. 2. Vernal Fall Bridge, June 2012, taken at around 8:00 AM, at the beginning of an overnight trip to the summit of Half Dome. Photo by Sally Ann Ness.

Figure 3.3. Backpackers on the alternate route up to the top of Nevada Fall, June 2012. Photo by Sally Ann Ness.

Figure 3.4. Bridge at the top of Nevada Fall, June 2012. Photo by Robert Finch II (from the collection of Sally Ann Ness).

Figure 3.5. View of summit from the end of the fourth stage, June 2012. Photo by Sally Ann Ness.

Figure 3.6. View from the top of Subdome, June 2012. Photo by Sally Ann Ness.

Figure 3.7. Cables of the final stage of the Half Dome hike, June 2012. Photo by Sally Ann Ness.

Figure 5.1. Yosemite Valley’s eastern end, October 2008. Half Dome is to the right. Royal Arches and Washington Column are in the center. Photo by Sally Ann Ness.

Figure 5.2. A frontal view of Royal Arches, September 2008. Photo by Sally Ann Ness.

Figure 5.3. El Capitan, October 2005. Photo by Sally Ann Ness.

Figure 5.4. Ranger in Camp 4, Yosemite Valley, October 2008. Photo by Sally Ann Ness.

Acknowledgments

This book has been more than a few years in the making. It would not have been possible without the assistance of many generous and talented people—just the sort of people Yosemite seems prone to attract. Space will not permit a complete listing of all who deserve acknowledgment, and I apologize to those whose names do not appear. I am no less grateful to them for having been unable to include them here.

The field research for this study required support both inside and outside the park. I am indebted to climbers Alan Moore and Darrell Logan, who volunteered to lead the climbs in Yosemite and who offered technical advice and assistance throughout my practice. This project literally would not have gotten off the ground without them. I am also indebted to climbers Ariel Bohr and Charlotte Tonnies Moore, who volunteered to serve as partners and coaches in gym training and who also accompanied me on climbing trips to Yosemite, as well as reading and responding to early drafts of various chapters. Both were key figures enabling the development of my climbing practice. Thanks are also due to climbers Doug and Sarah Jo Dickens, Drew Hecht, Shannon Moore, Young Hoon Oh, Amna Shiekh, John Vallejo, and Lyn Verinsky and to my climber/colleague Derick Fay, all of whom provided much appreciated information and in many cases climbing support and assistance as well.

In addition to the support given by climbers, my practice was also enabled and strengthened by Pilates trainer Kathryn Scarano, as well as by Drs Mary Ann Magoun, Melinda Ogg, and Hee Chul Kim and nutritionist Mary Sullivan. All of these individuals played essential roles. Their expert care is humbly acknowledged.

I am also thankful for the field research assistance of Katherine Katie Manduca, Deirdre Sklar, Katherine Kendrick Graham and Robert Graham, Justine Lemos, Celia Tuchman-Rosta, Jun Ginez, Patrick Alcedo, Shyh-Wei Yang, Robert Finch II, Channing Carson, and Ernesto Carlos, who accompanied me into Yosemite on various visits and/or provided every kind of field support imaginable (really). While visiting the park, I am especially grateful for the assistance generously given to me by Yosemite assistant superintendant Scott Gediman, Yosemite research librarian Linda Eade, and Yosemite park rangers Joy Sellers Marschall and Mark Marschall. These individuals are living proof that the service in the U.S. National Park Service continues to mean something very real and admirable.

With regard to the field research process, I also would like to acknowledge the late Steven P. Medley (1949–2006), who was serving as president of the Yosemite Association when my ethnographic research began, Christy Holloway, who chaired the Yosemite Association’s Board of Trustees during the years when my research in the park was most active, and the many members of the former Yosemite Association (now reorganized within the Yosemite Conservancy) who either served as volunteers in the park during the times that I myself camped there or who agreed to serve as interview subjects of the oral historical Yosemite Visitors Project I conducted, or both. What I learned from YA and its membership forms the backbone of my understanding of what it means to be a visitor in the Yosemite landscape. The greater part of that learning and the findings of the oral historical research await publication in a future volume. However, while there are too many individuals to name them all here (although every single one merits recognition), I would like to acknowledge especially Kathy Hopkins, Nancy Ornee, and Helen Brohm, who acted as extraordinarily helpful, exemplary YA members in support of my research process.

With regard to the writing process, I am grateful to colleagues David Crouch, Mark Franko, Gary Fuhrman, Justine Lemos, Shakina Nayfack, Young Hoon Oh, Jonathan Osborn, and Paul Ryer, who read and commented on earlier drafts of various chapters. Sincere thanks are due to Steve Coleman and the attendees of the Anthropology Department Seminar of 25 April 2012, at Maynooth National University of Ireland, for their comments and responses to what has become the volume’s introduction. Members of Temple University and University of California, Riverside Dance Departments also provided helpful comments and suggestions in response to portions of the introduction read during lectures presented on both campuses in 2014. Some ideas in the introduction concerning the rhetorical branch of Peirce’s semeiotic and its relation to ethnographic research also took their initial form in comments made in the Presentation of the 2012 special double issue Anthropological Inquiries, written for the journal Recherches sémiotiques/Semiotique Inquiry. Grateful acknowledgment is made to the journal’s editor, Martin Lefebvre, in this regard. The participants of the 2008 Transmissions working group of the American Society for Theatre Research provided helpful comments on very early drafts of chapter 1. Thanks are also due to Nell Quest and Fran Mascia-Lees, who included an early version of chapter 2 on the panel Sensing the Political: Materiality, Aesthetics, and Embodiment, organized for the 2012 AAA Annual Meetings in San Francisco. Naomi Leite did the same with regard to chapter 3 on the panel Touring Publics, Global Interconnections, and Interdisciplinary Engagements: Whither the Anthropology of Tourism, organized for the 2013 AAA Annual Meetings in Chicago. In addition, grateful acknowledgment is made to Sharon MacDonald of the European Center for Cultural Exploration at York University (U.K.) and the participants of the 2013 invited lecture Where the Scenic and the Obscene Meet: Ethical Subject Formations in Yosemite National Park, who provided helpful commentary on an earlier version of chapter 2. Chapter 4 benefited greatly, if indirectly, from a slow read of Joseph Ransdell’s work that took place on the Peirce listserver after Ransdell’s death in 2010. Sincere thanks are due to Jon Awbrey, Jerry Chandler, Gary Fuhrman, Eugene Halton, Gary Richmond, and Benjamin Udell, among many others, for the roles they played in that read. I am also grateful to the individuals solicited by Berghahn Press to review the manuscript. Their comments and suggestions were very much appreciated and useful.

Finally, on a personal note, I would like to acknowledge five colleagues, who are also the dearest of friends: J. Lowell Lewis, Carrie Noland, Christina Schwenkel, Eberle Umbach, and Carla Walters. Their support for this research and their faith in my abilities, in sickness and health, have been essential to this book’s completion. I owe them more than I can ever name or repay. Likewise, I am indebted to my husband, Erich Reck, and to my daughter, Anna, who have borne with me through the many years and strains of research and writing. Their patience, loyalty, love, and compassion have meant the world to me. Words fall very far short of the mark in expressing my gratitude to both.

This research was made possible in part by grants from the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation (2007) and the Huntington Library (2006) and by the continuous support of the University of California, Riverside. It should, perhaps, be mentioned that the study was undertaken without any financial or material support having been sought or received from either the U.S. National Park Service (NPS) or Yosemite’s concessionaire at the time, Delaware North Companies. The NPS did issue a permit for the field research process that allowed entry into the park for research purposes. However, the views presented here are in no way sponsored or otherwise associated with either entity.

Part I

Approach

Landscape Performance Theory, an Introduction

No matter how sophisticated you may be, a huge granite mountain cannot be denied—it speaks in silence to the very core of your being.

—Ansel Adams, Yosemite and the High Sierra

But is it possible to conceive the nervous system as living apart from the organism that nourishes it, from the atmosphere in which the organism breathes, from the earth which that atmosphere envelopes, from the sun round which the earth revolves?

—Henri Bergson, Matter and Memory

The formations of the choreographic are many, expanding beyond the field of the aesthetic.

—André Lepecki, Dance and Politics

Introduction

This book is about Yosemite National Park, the oldest preservation area in the United States, the original inspiration for the American conservation movement, and the template for the U.S. National Park Service as a whole. It is also a book about performance, both broadly and strictly speaking. It is a book about athletic performance and touristic performance, about human and nonhuman performance. Most especially, it is a book about cultural performance and choreographic forms of it in particular.

Yosemite is not a small place. It inspires thinking on a relatively grand scale. In this regard, I seek in the chapters that follow to address in rather ambitious terms the very large issue of Yosemite’s cultural significance. I do so, however, in a way that compels attention to the very smallest details of the landscape’s character, through the standard ethnographic method of participant observation of visitor performances, including my own.

The chapters gathered together in this volume illustrate certain kinds of visitor performance that I observed to be occurring regularly in Yosemite National Park during a series of twenty-two visits I made into it beginning in 2004 and ending in 2012.¹ They are performances that differ somewhat in character from the kinds of cultural performance typically studied by ethnographers. They tend to be relatively informal, individualistic, and improvisational—more like jokes than like operas, to borrow Richard Bauman’s sociolinguistic terms (1977). In some cases, they push at the boundaries of what performance as a concept might best reference, as they often occur without any conventional sort of rehearsal process and without any human audience other than the visitors performing themselves. However, as with any cultural performance, whether it be something as spectacular as a masked Karneval parade in Upper Swabia or a god-dancing Cutalaimatan festival in Madras, or as rich in virtual meaning as a Balinese cockfight, Yosemite’s performances involve public displays of symbols popularly understood to be emblematic of given ways of life.² They are enactments by means of which people—visitors in the park’s conventional discourse—express what they believe themselves to be, to borrow Lloyd Warner’s original phrasing (Warner 1959: 107; cited in Singer 1984: 110). They express it passionately, ethically, imaginatively, and spiritually, as well as ideologically.

I studied Yosemite National Park as a stage for the enactments of what anthropologist Milton Singer termed the great and little traditions of cultural performance (Singer 1984: 165). I became interested in the littlest of the littler of these, as well as in the most energetic and newly minted, although I partook of as wide a variety as possible. It was with the performance of minor, often coincidental or unintended movements and gestures that I became the most concerned. These were acts as small as tripping over a tree root, flicking a pine needle off of a camper’s tent, or slamming shut the door of a bear-proof storage box that wouldn’t latch any other way. They were the kinds of small, but densely layered, ubiquitous facts of visitor experience that might have become the raw material of a work of choreography about Yosemite’s visitors had that been the project at hand. Indeed, they literally did come to serve that purpose, although not in any conventional sense of the term.

Whether great or small, cultural performances provide the park’s visitors with what the pioneering anthropologist of performance Edward Schieffelin once identified as cultural scenarios (2005 [1976]: 3). They constitute culturally salient patterns of activity in which visitors may come to terms not only with who they have been meant to be, symbolically speaking, but also with who they, in point of undeniable fact, actually are—with the stuff of which they are made, as living organisms and as forms of human life.³ Perhaps most significantly, however, these performances enable visitors to encounter who (and with whom), they may be becoming as well, as far as their futures, both more and less vivid, are concerned. In this latter regard, Yosemite also serves as a stage—in both the spatial and the temporal sense of the term—for performance processes that, in their emergent, transformative character, bear a vague family resemblance to those that anthropologist James Peacock, in his landmark study of the ludruk rites of modernization of mid-twentieth-century Surabaya, Java, observed and documented as well (1968). They also relate even more closely, however, to the incipient events-in-the-making created initially in 2006 for the Technologies of Lived Abstraction Series at the University of Montreal, Canada, and collaboratively folded into theoretical writing by Erin Manning (2009: 1–3).

Figure 0.1. Visitor Anna Reck choreographing a small fact of visitor experience inside a living oak tree in Yosemite Valley, 4 July 2005.

Photo by Erich Reck.

I have termed the particular type of performance I studied in Yosemite National Park landscape performance. It is admittedly an awkward phrase. However, it is so in part because it is designed to forge a new kind of connection between ideas that are normally kept apart. So, it vexes. On the one hand, the phrase can be understood as similar in meaning to landscape painting or landscape architecture. Landscape performance, in this sense, references kinds of performance that may take landscape as their primary subject matter. This sense of the phrase is relatively straightforward. On the other hand, however, the phrase is also meant to be understood in the way that phrases such as musical performance or theatrical performance or dance performance are. In this sense, landscape performance identifies landscape itself as something that is a kind of performance, something that is itself capable of performing. This is the definition that jars the most—unless it is taken as a relatively poetic expression (performance being read figuratively), or unless it is interpreted as identifying landscape as a discursive formation that determines the experiences of the human subjects who may be located and defined in relation to it—perhaps along the lines articulated by critical theorists such as Judith Butler or Michel Foucault. Neither of these interpretations, however, is my own. I seek to take the phrase as non-metaphorically as possible, and I do not define landscapes in general merely as human-made discursive formations. It is one main effort of this study, in fact, to demonstrate that such critical theoretical definitions are inadequate to the task of understanding exactly the kinds of performances that are here most at issue. Discursive definitions are not wrong, as far as they go, but they do not tell the whole story of landscape performance, either what it is or how it can come to mean all that it generally does, especially to visitors in Yosemite National Park.

When both senses of the phrase are taken together, landscape performance begins to function in a way that is something like the duck-rabbit image made famous by Ludwig Wittgenstein (1953). That is, it can be understood to exhibit the character of a multi-stable object in the terms of phenomenological discourse (Downey 2004). It becomes a symbol that sustains simultaneously at least two equally valid understandings, the recognition of which depends on the particular perceptions and purposes of its various interpreters.⁴

I would characterize landscapes in general—and Yosemite National Park in particular—as colossal multi-stable objects in their own right. From some points of view, in relation to some kinds of experience, and for some purposes, they may be recognized as discursive formations—as essentially representational, societally constructed, textual objects or hermeneutic palimpsests.⁵ From other perspectives and for other purposes, they may be understood and experienced as geological formations, as nonhuman material realities. From still others, they may be perceived and lived as divinely inspired creations of pure light and energy, perhaps enlightening, perhaps maddening.⁶ The list could be extended indefinitely. A landscape will invariably come across as many things to many people, sustaining innumerable perspectives, experiences, and lines of thought simultaneously and through time.

This multi-stable definition of the symbol landscape performance is not altogether unlike those more typically employed in ethnographic studies of landscape, although it is substantially different from them as well. Ethnographic conceptualizations of landscape tend to identify it either as the (at least partly) natural environmental context of a human cultural group or as a symbolic construct created through culturally specific practices (Bender and Winer 2001; Feld and Basso 1996; Low and Lawrence-Zuniga 2003). In its recognition of the symbol’s inherent multiplicity of interrelated meanings, the definition of landscape performance here employed is similar to the processual definitions of landscape developed by Eric Hirsch (1995) and David Crouch and Charlotta Malm (2003). However, in its recognition of the virtually innumerable variations of meaning the symbol can represent, it also resonates strongly with David Crouch’s later definition of landscape as a creative and emergent spatial pregnancy of possibility (2010: 1) as well as with Mark Dorrian and Gillian Rose’s definition of landscape as a "zone