Sociological Spectrum, 20: 377–407, 2000
Copyright 2000 Taylor & FrancisÓ
0273-2173/00 $12.00 1 .00
SPECTACLES OF ETHNICITY: FESTIVALS AND
THE COMMODIFICA TION OF ETHNIC CULTURE
AMONG LOUISIANA CAJUNS
CARL L. BANKSTON III
Tulane University, New Orleans, Lousiana, USA
JACQUES HENRY
University of Louisiana at Lafayette, Lafayette, Louisiana, USA
Drawing on the example of the Louisiana Cajuns, an ethnic group
that has been enjoying a wave of popular revival in recent years, this
study suggests that changes in the perception of an ethnic identity are
related to socioeconomic transformation. We identify the festival as a
key aspect of the Cajun revival since the 1960s. An examination of the
history, activities, and contemporary spatiotemporal organization of festivals
reveals similarities to other aspects of a society of mass consumption.
Niche marketing, the structuring of recreation around the modern
work week, and the establishment of personal identity through the purchase
of symbolically rich commodities are all embodied in present-day
Cajun festivals. At the same time, the consumption of ethnic commodities
is linked by the consumers with a sense of tradition and descent
from a mythic past. The festivals of southwestern Louisiana are, in this
sense, ‘‘invented traditions’’ and, paradoxically, a measure of the assimilation
of this particular ethnic group into American culture.
What is an ethnic group? The Greek word e q noV, from which
we derive our words ethnic and ethnicity, is often translated as
nation in the older and etymological sense, a set of people who
share a common peoplehood by virtue of birth and ancestry.
Claims of descent, from Aeneas or African captives or the
Acadian exiles, give ethnicity much of its emotional force and
Received 8 November 1999; accepted15 March 2000.
Address correspondenceto Carl L. Bankston III, Department of Sociology, 220 Newcomb Hall,
Tulane University, New Orleans, Louisiana 70118, USA. Email: cbankst@mailhost.tcs.tulane.edu.
377
378 C. L. Bankston and J. Henry
sacred character. A number of anthropologists and other social
scientists have therefore emphasized the ‘‘primordial’’ character
of ethnicity (Geertz 1973; Isaacs 1975). The need for belonging
causes individuals to identify strongly with the particular groups
into which they are born and with the cultural expressions of
those groups.
Although beliefs in a shared heritage do seem to be a fundamental
characteristic of ethnic groups, the objective reality
of a heritage passed from generation to generation is open
to question. The ‘‘socially constructed’’ nature of ethnicity is
widely accepted (Nagel 1994; Allahar 1994). Although claims
of ethnic tradition can often be traced to actual historical
events, these are generally matters of people in the present
interpreting history, and interpretation is of necessity selective.
The past is a ground that can be mined for many diþerent
metals.
Because ethnicity is a matter of interpreting and reinterpreting
a putatively primordial collective past, the nature of ethnicity
changes and speciüc ethnicities change in character as the
social inýuences on interpretations change. New ethnic groups
come into existence, a process referred to as ‘‘ethnogenesis’’
(Roosens 1989). Some ethnic groups assimilate; they disappear
or merge with others (Gordon 1964). Ethnic identities may wax
and wane in popular appeal, so that some periods may be times
of ethnic renaissance or ethnic revival (Royce 1982; Thompson
1989).
In this study, we sought to address the question of why and
how ethnicities may change in character. We drew on the
example of the Louisiana Cajuns, an ethnic group that has been
enjoying a wave of popular revival in recent years, to suggest
how changes in the perception of a primordial collective identity
may be related to socioeconomic transformation. We identiüed
the festival as a key aspect of the Cajun revival since the
1960s. An examination of the history, activities, and contemporary
spatiotemporal organization of festivals, we maintain,
reveals similarities to other aspects of a society of mass consumption.
Niche marketing, the structuring of recreation around
the modern work week, and the establishment of personal identity
through the purchase of symbolically rich commodities are
all embodied in present-day Cajun festivals. At the same time,
the consumption of ethnic commodities is linked by the consumers
with a sense of tradition and descent from a mythic
Spectacles of Ethnicity 379
past. The festivals of southwestern Louisiana are, in this sense,
‘‘invented traditions,’’ as deüned by Eric Hobsbawm, (1983:2),
‘‘responses to novel situations which take the form of reference
to old situations.’’
REVIEW OF LITERATURE
Socioeconomic Structure and Social Identity
Much of the literature on ethnicity in American society has concerned
itself with immigrant ethnic groups; that is, with groups
that owe their distinctiveness as minorities to migration into an
Anglo-dominated society. However, many of the arguments and
perspectives concerning immigrant ethnicity are also applied to
those who trace their ancestral presence in North America back
to the days before English-speaking European Americans
attempted to establish squatting rights. Literature reviews of articles
on both immigration and ethnicity routinely begin with the
work of Gordon (1964), who identiüed what he believed were
the possibilities for cultural minorities. Although Gordon recognized
the theoretical possibility of cultural pluralism, he believed
that assimilation to the social structures and cultural forms of
the dominant society was much more likely. Gordon maintained
that nonimmigrant groups, such as African Americans, who had
assimilated culturally but not structurally were exceptions to be
explained by special barriers, such as racial prejudice and discrimination
(see also Myrdal, Sterner, and Rose 1944 on the
blocked assimilation of African Americans).
It seems fairly evident that a good deal of assimilation in
American life has taken place. Even among the most recent
immigrants, Portes and Rumbaut (1990) have noted a secondgeneration
shift toward English. Zhou and Bankston (1998) have
remarked on a similar generational shift among major Asian
groups. The ultimate form of structural assimilation, marriage
out of the ethnic group, has become common in American
society. Analyses of nationwide samples of ethnic groups have
consistently shown that the majority of ethnic minority marriages
are exogamous with rates of in-marriage among the major
ethnic groups typically varying from 15 percent for spouses
declaring multiple ancestries to a range of 30 percent to 40
percent for spouses of unmixed ancestry (Alba and Golden
380 C. L. Bankston and J. Henry
1986:206–8; also Lieberson and Waters 1988). The majority of
Japanese American marriages are to non-Japanese Americans,
and out-marriages of other Asians increase steadily with each
generation in the United States (Barringer, Gardner, and Levin
1993; Kitano 1988; Kitano et al. 1984).
This apparent trend toward assimilation has led a number of
inýuential observers to maintain that minority ethnicity in the
United States is declining (Alba 1990; Lieberson and Waters
1988). However, although objective ethnic traits do seem to be
in decline, even among the Hispanic and Asian groups who
have arrived in the post-1965 immigration wave, it might be
difficult to conclude that ethnic identiücation is disappearing.
Novak (1971) has noted that even third- and fourth-generation
descendants of many groups continue to identify strongly with
the ancestral heritage, and this has been a basis of political
mobilization. Others have noted an ‘‘ethnic resurgence’’ in the
United States since the 1960s (Alba 1990; Waters 1990; Bakalian
1993). Native Americans, African Americans, Italian Americans,
Irish Americans, and others seem to be eagerly embracing the
identities of their putative forebears (Royce 1982; Thompson
1989). The subjects of the present study, Louisiana’s Cajuns, a
group of White ethnics who arrived in the United States in the
eighteenth century, have shown a similar ýourishing of ethnic
identiücation (Henry 1997).
Objective ethnic traits, which Barth (1969:15) famously and
dismissively referred to as ‘‘the cultural stuþ,’’ may fade even
while claims of ethnicity grow louder and more intense. The
concept of ‘‘symbolic ethnicity’’ proposed by Herbert Gans
(1979) is a plausible response to this apparently contradictory
state of aþairs. Gans (1979:205) described this kind of ethnicity
as ‘‘a nostalgic allegiance to the culture of the immigrant generation,
or that of the old country; a love for and pride in a tradition
that can be felt without having to be incorporated in
everyday behavior.’’ Symbolic ethnicity may be felt even more
deeply than other forms of ethnic group membership. However,
as the Gans quotation indicates, symbolic ethnicity is less a
matter of contemporary ties to coethnics than it is a matter of
perceived historical bonds. The new ethnics Gans described are
categories of individuals who have similar views on their
descent; they do not make up social groups in the strict sense
of the term. When they do interact with one another, on St.
Patrick’s Day or a similar event, they are like shoppers seeking
Spectacles of Ethnicity 381
the same product meeting in a store at the shopping mall.
Indeed, we argue below that they are not like shoppers at all.
They are, we suggest, purchasers of symbolic goods in the mall
of the United States.
How does it happen that people who are losing the objective
traits of ethnic group membership come to claim ethnic identities
so insistently? Joane Nagel (1994) examined this question in
an insightful article on the construction of ethnicity. She
described how ethnic groups and ethnic boundaries constantly
undergo redeünition and transformation as a consequence of
‘‘the interplay between ethnic group actions and the larger
social structures with which they interact’’ (p. 167). Both the
groups themselves and their cultural contents shift as members
negotiate with the society surrounding them. Nagel’s schematization
has contributed greatly to our own thinking on this
subject. However, her discussion raises at least two problems.
First, although the dynamics she described can help us understand
many of the more activist ethnicities, it is difficult to see
what kinds of larger social structures may be shaping the
boundaries of symbolic ethnicities, because, as she recognized,
symbolic ethnicities may depend little on group boundaries.
They may not even involve group membership, but categorical
membership. Second, Nagel described many of the major social
pressures that can lead to the construction of ethnicity, but she
did not consider how changes in the fundamental socioeconomic
framework of modern society can aþect how people
understand and express themselves and their connection to the
world around them.
To suggest that ethnicity is ‘‘grounded in real life context and
social experience’’ (Conzen and Garber 1992:5; also Isajiw 1993)
is to raise the question of what is the real-life context and social
experience of people? Once this question is answered, one can
say what shapes ethnicity and what makes it change its character.
Perhaps the most fundamental change in the social experience
of people in developed countries has been the rise of
economies of mass consumption.
The nation-state, with its centralizing, assimilative tendencies,
emerged with the development of classical capitalist means of
production (Hobsbawm 1990). Anderson (1991) has argued that
the ‘‘imagined communities’’ of nationalism followed the decline
of dynastic and religious traditions. He maintained that the rise
of the bourgeois, tied to one another by official-language print
382 C. L. Bankston and J. Henry
media and by economic activities rather than by personal allegiances,
led to self-identiücations based on the idea of common
membership in the nation. Languages and cultures of politically
dominant groups and areas became identiüed with the nation
itself, and those who participated in these languages and cultures
developed myths of common heritage and descent
(Anderson 1991; Conzen and Gerber 1992). Other languages and
cultures could continue to exist, but they would be identiüed
with people who became ‘‘ethnic minorities.’’ Variations in
recency of immigration, intensity of resource competition, and
degree of political mobilization could help to produce diþerences
in ethnic minorities (Nagel 1994). Nevertheless, being
‘‘ethnic’’ means being part of a group that deünes itself and is
deüned by others in contrast to a central national community.
As Conzen and Gerber (1992:4) have observed
in the second quarter of the nineteenth century, Americans
themselves were engaged in a self-consciousproject of inventing
a national identity, and in the process found themselves also
inventing the category of ethnicity—‘‘nationality’’ was the term
they actually used—to account for the culturally distinctive
groups in their midst. These two inventions were closely intertwined
with one another and indeed with the invention of particular
immigrant ethnicities in ways that historians have only
recently begun to uncover.
In the industrial market economies that fostered the development
of modern nation-states, the groups that were deüned by
contrast to the central national community often shared a
common class or socioeconomic position. Glazer and Moynihan
(1970; 1975) saw ethnicity as arising from the solidarity created
by a common socioeconomic position among people who could
see themselves as sharing ancestry and historical experience.
The emotive, primordial character of ethnicity made it a more
useful basis for political organization than social class alone
(Yancey et al 1976; Rothschild 1981).
The industrial market economy has not disappeared, nor have
social classes. Therefore, socioeconomic position can still be a
structural inýuence on the shaping of ethnic groups (Henry and
Bankston 1999). However, the economy of the late twentiethcentury
United States is not the same as the economy of the
nineteenth- or early twentieth-century United States. As early as
1958, J. K. Galbraith observed that techniques of production had
Spectacles of Ethnicity 383
outstripped distribution, resulting in an unprecedented quantity
of goods available for consumption, even though the buying
power of individuals might lag far behind this productive capacity.
Schor (1998) has argued that the heavy debt burden of
Americans is due to the eþort to consume heavily to keep up
with consumption, an eþort strongly encouraged by the advertising
industry. At the same time that mass-produced commodities
became a more prominent part of the social landscape, the
geographic and social mobility of the late twentieth century
tended to loosen many ascriptive social ties so that the role of
individual choice in group affiliations became even greater than
it had been earlier (Friedman 1999). Even religious affiliation
became less a matter of ascriptive connections to others and
more a matter of voluntary choice among institutions competing
for adherents in the manner of producers competing in a
market for customers (Warner 1993).
As a consequence of these changes in American society and
economy, social organization, behavior, and normative expectations
have come to be based increasingly on the consumption
of mass-produced commodities. Although the word consumerism,
may have a number of diþerent uses (Swagler 1994), one of
the most prevalent uses refers to the organization of social
activities and individual beliefs and behaviors around the consumption
of products. Referring to this sense of the word,
Bocock (1993:77) has remarked, ‘‘Consumption [has] become
established as the characteristic sociocultural activity par excellence
of late twentieth-century post-modern capitalism . . .
Consumption is a, or even the, major characteristic of postmodernity.’’
Other authors have also seen consumerism as a
central characteristic of the contemporary American scene
(Campbell 1985; De Oliver 1997; Ritzer 1999).
The marketing of goods in a consumer-oriented society tends
to become the marketing of social identities (Gill 1997). Consumers
are categories of people that are based not on the relations
of people to each other but on shared relations to classes
of chosen products. Thus, identity-based theories of consumption
(Beck 1991; Giddens 1992; Beck, Giddens and Lash 1995)
have emerged to address the growing tendency of individuals to
deüne themselves in terms of what they buy rather than in
terms of their primary groups or economic or political interest
groups. De Oliver (1997:214; see also Ewen 1988) has noted that
‘‘commodities convey the social attributes of the group and
384 C. L. Bankston and J. Henry
individual (i.e. clothes, musical recordings, personal adornments,
etc.) as well as providing sites of socialization (shopping mall).’’
Because they are means of deüning people, in their own eyes as
well as in the eyes of others, commodities are rich in symbolism.
The choice of a sports utility vehicle or a compact disc is not
simply a choice of an object, but a choice of an identity. Sites
devoted to consumption, such as McDonald’s, Walmart, and
shopping malls, have become central to this identity quest.
George Ritzer (1999) has evoked the almost sacred character
many of these sites seem to have in his phrase ‘‘cathedrals of
consumption.’’
Ritzer’s (1999) thinking was heavily inýuenced by that of the
French social critic Guy Debord (1967). Debord argued that the
modern consumerist economy was tending increasingly toward
a ‘‘society of the spectacle.’’ Spectacles involve the control of
time and space to present human experience as a series of
staged, marketed events. According to Ritzer, the rationalization
of society by the market tends to ‘‘disenchant’’ human activities,
to deprive these activities of their symbolic import. Extravaganzas
and simulations are ways of reenchanting human life
within the context of a consumer economy by staging symbolically
charged events as commodities (see, in particular, Ritzer
1999, chap. 5).
Other theorists and researchers have also noted the growing
role of staged spectacles as symbolic representations and
sources of individual identity and group membership. In a collection
of essays on celebrations in the modern world, Frank
Manning (1983a:6) noted that ‘‘cultural productions have
become the generative basis of myths, lifestyles, and even
worldviews. Instead of social formations giving rise to symbolic
expressions—the nexus identiüed by Durkheim—it is now
symbols that are creating social groups.’’ In the same volume,
Manning (1983b) and Konrad (1983) portrayed public celebrations
as balances between play and ritual that conürm a
social order.
Given the growing inýuence of consumerism in deüning the
social order of American life, we suggest that much of contemporary
ethnicity can be understood as a form of consumption
and that ethnic displays can be understood as spectacles, in the
sense that the word was used by Debord (1967). The centralizing
tendencies of earlier market economies have been partially
superseded by the marketing of symbolically rich commodities.
Spectacles of Ethnicity 385
The commodities themselves refer to an imagined earlier set of
social relations, in somewhat the same way that the imagined
communities of nationalism referred to recollections of prenation–state
historical traditions (Anderson 1991). Nevertheless,
the ethnic identiücation is based less on social ties to other
group members and distinctive cultural and linguistic characteristics
than it is on the consumption of commodities that express
a self-ascription to ancestral social ties, culture, and language.
In the theory that we propose here, identiücation with a
social group involves three factors. First, there is the objective
socioeconomic position of group members: the nineteenthcentury
bourgeois or working class, middle-class suburbanites,
or contemporary blue-collar workers. Second, there are images
of an interpreted past that can be used to render an objective
position meaningful. Third, there is the means of expressing
these images of the past that is provided by the contemporary
organization of social activities. Nineteenth-century social
classes drew on images from the dynastic and religious past to
express their situations in nationalistic terms. Similarly, Bankston
(1997) has argued that Laotian Buddhists living in American
suburbs and working at skilled manual occupations have used
an idealized cultural heritage to develop a group self-image that
enables them to adjust to greatly altered circumstances. The
consumption of ethnic commodities, from this theoretical perspective,
is not simple nostalgia. Instead, it is a response to novel
situations (contemporary socioeconomic position) that takes the
form of reference to old situations (images of a shared heritage)
in terms of the contemporary organization of social activities
(the consumption of symbolically rich commodities).
Festivals and Ethnic Tourism in Acadiana
The commodiücation of Cajun cultural products in recent
years has been noted by a number of authors, and various
explanations of this phenomenon have been oþered. On the
basis of ethnographic data collected in a small village, Esman
(1984, 1985) proposed that tourism encourages Cajuns to act
out their culture for both commercial gain and cultural preservation.
In disagreement, Treð panier (1993) viewed the commodiücation
of Cajun culture as an indicator of its incorporation
to American culture; Cajun culture has become unauthentic in
Treð panier’s view, a sheer commercial attraction devoid of
meaning, and this evolution signals its impending demise. A
386 C. L. Bankston and J. Henry
noted and involved folkorist, Ancelet (1992) argued in favor of
cultural tourism, a measured exploitation of cultural resources
informed and controlled by scholars.
This limited analysis leaves much unanswered and is in part
questionable. The claim by Esman (1984) that tourism perpetuates
ethnic behavior, such as speaking French for the contentment
of visitors, is eminently doubtful considering the
communicative imperatives of a commercial transaction and
the limited and stereotyped use of the language often reduced
to ‘‘Bonjour ! Comment va?’’ Treð panier’s (1993) condemnationcÓ a
of nonauthenticity assumes a static and now largely rejected
view of culture as content shaped by tradition threatened by
change. Ancelet’s (1992) hope for a measured impact of commercialization
on his own culture is in part embodied in recent
creations such as Festivals Acadiens (which he helped create in
1974), the best known of the festivals. However, numerous other
endeavors have suggested that entrepreneurs have the upper
hand over academics when cultural items are marketed; there is
a proliferation of ‘‘Cajun’’ restaurants and boat tours complete
with alligator calling and ethnic joke telling. Interestingly, in
another work, Ancelet, Edwards, and Pitre (1991) pointed to the
adaptability of Cajun culture and the fact that today commercial
Cajun culture bears little resemblance to traditional fare.
However, he viewed it as only a superücial transformation to
‘‘appeal to the sophisticated tastes of a mostly urban population’’
(p. 228).
In works that oþer the most authoritative treatments of Cajun
festivals, LeMenestrel (1997, 1999) oþered to reconcile the
various approaches by studying the interaction of identity construction
and tourism. Drawing from extensive üeldwork in four
communities, she noted that festivals and other touristic activities
reinforce social bonds, contribute to the economy, and
foster identity construction in a dual mechanism. Two concepts
of culture coexist: one as commodity and one as heritage.
Cajun culture, rehabilitated and a unique resource in a rariüed
Louisiana economy, is valued and promoted by insiders who
can use it to shore up ethnic awareness; popular, consumed by
others, a commodiüed Cajun culture signals acceptance outside
the ethnic group and its integration into American society, again
reinforcing a positive ethnic identiücation.
The anthropological treatment of the celebration of Mardi
Gras in a small rural community over the past 60 years illus-
Spectacles of Ethnicity 387
trates how one ethnic event became a commodity. David (1996)
proposed that the recent revival of Mardi Gras results from its
appropriation by the wealthy, well-read, and French-speaking
elite of the rice-growing community. Once a ritualistic celebration
reversing the community’s diversiüed social structure of
large and small landowners, Mardi Gras has been reborn with
the same traditional format but as a commercial event controlled
by the local elite to symbolize the strength of tradition,
social cohesiveness, and their dominance.
The explanation of Cajun ethnic expressions oþered in our
examination of festivals attempts to avoid judging cultural
expressions as authentic or inauthentic. Seeing cultural commodities
as preservation, moreover, ignores the transformation
of the nature of ethnicity in the contemporary United States.
Therefore, we sought to look at the development of the Cajun
festival as part of the changing meaning of ethnic identiücation
in the United States. As in the rest of the United States, relatively
few people in contemporary Louisiana are engaged in
small-scale agriculture, hunting, trapping, and üshing. Among
people who refer to themselves as Cajuns, employment in the
oil industry, factories, and service activities are especially
common (Gramling 1989, 1996; Henry and Bankston 1999). Like
other working-class and middle-class Americans, the southern
Louisianian of today is much more likely to buy dinner at the
Super K-Mart than to trap it in the bayou. However, the past,
our evidence indicates, has not become irrelevant. Many
southern Louisianians draw on images of an agricultural past to
make sense of a postindustrial or late industrial present. They
express and experience these images of the past as items of
consumption in a marketplace because they are ütting a subjectively
primordial social identity into contemporary forms of
social organization.
METHOD
Our aim in this study is the interpretation of the theoretical
signiücance of a social phenomenon rather than the testing of a
hypothetical question of fact. In other words, we intend to
present the case for interpreting festivals as an expression of
ethnicity in terms of the cultural context of a consumer
economy. This involves providing a concrete description of the
economic base of cultural expressions in modern Louisiana,
388 C. L. Bankston and J. Henry
describing the historical development of festivals in terms of
changes in this base, and demonstrating how festivals and festival
events may be usefully interpreted as the consumption of
ethnic commodities.
We have used a variety of data sources to piece together a
picture of the Cajun festival. We have had access to two valuable
sources of quantitative information. To describe the socioeconomic
setting of modern Acadiana, we use data from the
Louisiana Electronic Assistance Program, made available by
Northeast Louisiana University and available online at http://
leap.nlu.edu. To look at characteristics of festival attendants and
examine the association of participation in Cajun-themed festivals
with Cajun ethnicity, we made use of a unique data set
collected by the Council on the Development of French in Louisiana
(CODOFIL) on participation in activities relating to Louisiana
French ethnicity in 1989. This was produced by a random
telephone survey of 1,020 households in the eight parishes in
the center of Louisiana’s Cajun country. Although this data set
is now a bit old, it was collected after the ethnic festival movement
was well established in southern Louisiana. Moreover, to
our knowledge, it is the only survey in existence with detailed
information on participants in Louisiana Cajun festivals.
We also made use of lengthy and detailed collection of qualitative
data through participant observation. Both of us have
attended and observed Cajun-themed festivals. From 1984 to
1992, Jacques Henry was an official with CODOFIL, one of the
key organizations in the Cajun ethnic revival movement. In this
position, he took part in arranging festivals and maintained continual
contact with festival organizers and ethnic activists
throughout the Acadiana region.
ANALYSIS
The Socioeconomic Setting of Modern Acadiana: The
Ecological Context
As we are suggesting that the meaning of ethnicity is related
to socioeconomic structure, it is useful to look brieýy at the
socioeconomic structure of contemporary Acadiana, the region
that is home to the Cajun-themed festivals. As we note below,
the images of Cajun life celebrated at these events are rooted in
rurality. Is the society surrounding them equally agrarian?
Spectacles of Ethnicity 389
Table 1 shows numbers and percentages of jobs in various
industries in the parishes of Acadiana in 1996. Agriculture
employed fewer people than any other industry: Barely 2
percent of workers in Acadiana were in agricultural jobs. Not at
all an agrarian society, the region on the contrary does have
substantial employment in industrial activities, with about 28
percent of its workforce in the classic blue-collar industries of
construction, manufacturing, and mining. Over 7 percent of the
workforce were in construction work, over 11 percent in manufacturing,
and just under 10 percent in mining, virtually all of
which was petroleum mining. On this last percentage, we
should note that only about 3 percent of all workers in the state
of Louisiana were in mining in 1996, so that Acadiana’s concentration
in mining was actually quite large, a consequence of petroleum
mining activities along the Gulf of Mexico (Gramling
1996). The areas of greatest employment, though, were those
usually associated with postindustrial economies: the service
and retail sectors. Close to one third of all workers in the region
were in the service industry, and over one out of every üve were
in retail sales.
A corollary to industrialization of southwestern Louisiana in
urbanization is this: Approximately 7 out of 10 Cajuns in this
region live in metropolitan areas (U.S. Bureau of the Census
1992). Assuredly, this rate is smaller than that of the area’s nonCajuns
(80 percent), and for that matter of Louisiana and the
TABLE 1 Distribution of Employed Persons in Acadiana
in 1996, by Industry
Industry No. workers % total workforce
Agriculture 6,430 2.02
Construction 23,531 7.39
Manufacturing 35,534 11.15
Mining 29,286 9.20
Service 98,485 30.92
Retail sales 66,264 20.81
Wholesale sales 17,371 5.45
Finance & real estate 15,053 4.73
Transportation 26,641 8.36
Total 318,484 100.00
Note. Data from Louisiana Electronic Assistance Program,
Northeast Louisiana University.
390 C. L. Bankston and J. Henry
United States (77 percent); the ubiquity of pick-up trucks, boats,
and horses, as well as the much-enjoyed proximity to waterways,
prairies, and woods, testify to the continued relevance of
a rural lifestyle. However, the modern amenities and pastoral
surroundings are mostly used by a commuting workforce for
recreational use.
The festivals of Acadian Louisiana, then, do not take place in
a geographic setting of farmers, hunters, trappers, and üshers.
The potential audiences for these events are people who earn
income from jobs found elsewhere in the late twentieth-century
economy. Because it may be thought that the festivals are a
direct inheritance of an earlier socioeconomic structure, we turn
now to an examination of the historical development of these
events.
Origins and Development of Cajun Festivals
Just as modern-day Disneyland emerged from the older
models of the World’s Fair and the amusement park (Ritzer
1999), contemporary festivals in Louisiana have historical precursors
in parish (county) and state fairs, as well as in the seasonal
celebrations of rural people. The fairs were designed to meet the
needs of an agricultural economy. State involvement with fairs
began in 1861, when the Louisiana legislature established the
Mechanics and Agricultural Fair Association (Puneky 1961). In
1877, the state held its ürst annual fair, which became known in
1905 as the Louisiana State Fair. Also in the late nineteenth
century, farmers began to form farmer’s institutes, ‘‘sessions in
which farmers met to hear lectures on solving their problems’’
(Puneky 1961:1–28). In 1897, these farmer’s institutes formally
established the Louisiana Farmer’s Institute, which helped to
create six parish fairs the following year. By 1902, there were 16
parish fairs. Louisiana’s largest parish fair, the Washington Parish
Fair, began in 1903. It is worth noting that this largest fair has
moved away from agricultural exposition as a chief purpose in
recent years and toward the reconstruction or construction of
ancestral heritage. During the 1980s, old residences, a blacksmith
shop, and a general store were moved to the fair grounds
from scattered sites and restored as a museum village of the
parish’s founding families (a village that, in fact, never existed
until the restoration).
Festivals in southwestern Louisiana, as opposed to state and
rural fairs, began to appear toward the middle of the twentieth
century. The oldest one, the National Rice Festival, took place in
Spectacles of Ethnicity 391
Crowley in 1937, a successor to the original Rice Carnival, which
had a short run a decade earlier. Other festivals were later
organized such as the blessing of shrimp ýeets (1930s), the Yambilee
Festival (1946), and the Dairy Festival (1949; LeMenestrel
1993). The growth remained limited: By 1965, there were 21 festivals
in the southwestern area of Louisiana known as Acadiana
(Henry 1997).
In several ways, the festivals that were established from the
1930s through the 1960s were heirs to the traditional celebrations
of agricultural societies; they were dedicated to the
main local agricultural product, be it shrimp, crawüsh, cattle,
sugar cane, cotton, or oranges; they mostly took place during
the months of September and October to coincide with the end
of the harvest season or the beginning of the üshing or planting
season; ünally, although early Louisiana festivals were secular
aþairs, they typically included a mass or a blessing by the local
clergy. In all, they contributed with Catholic holidays (Easter, All
Saints Day, Christmas) and secular patriotic celebrations to form
the cycle of community activities.
The launching of eþorts to revitalize Louisiana’s French
culture in the 1970s coincided with a signiücant increase in the
number of festivals and a change of their meaning. By 1977,
there were 36 festivals in Acadiana, 88 in 1985, close to 300 in
1993, and 240 in 1998. Most of the festivals in existence today
were established after 1968. Explanations of this phenomenon,
also noted statewide, rely on two main factors: ethnic revival
and economic diversiücation. Whereas early festivals had only
implicit ethnic connotations, recent festivals have made the
Cajun connection explicit: Thirty-four percent of festivals in
Acadiana in 1993 had an ethnic marker in their name
(Lagniappe on the Bayou, Festivals Acadiens, South Lafourche
Cajun Festival; Henry 1997); in 1998, 19 percent had an ethnic
marker, but the ratio increases to 40 percent if the 60 diþerent
celebrations of Mardi Gras are included.1
The launching of Festivals
Acadiens in 1974 was a particularly important point in
ethnic festival history in Louisiana. This was a conscientious and
self-conscious attempt to maintain Cajun music as a living tradition.
Many individuals were active in organizing this yearly
1
The decrease is likely due to a change in the reporting of events and manifestations by the
Louisiana Office of Tourism as it appears that some festivals in Acadiana do not appear in the
listing. Other indications that ethnicity remains vibrant commercially are events by other groups
such as the Black Heritage Festival, St. Patrick’s Day, Calling of the Tribe powwow, and even an
Irish/Italian Festival in Lake Charles.
392 C. L. Bankston and J. Henry
event, but its most active proponent and most tireless supporter
was Dr. Barry Jean Ancelet, a professor of French at the University
of Southwestern Louisiana, who later earned a doctorate
at a French university. In various accounts (Ancelet 1980; B. J.
Ancelet, personal communication, Feb. 17, 1995), Dr. Ancelet
reported that he had discovered his own sense of heritage while
abroad in the French-speaking world, a signiücant fact when
thinking about the meaning of contemporary ethnic festivals.
The role played by the in-dislocation, the separation from group
membership stimulating the search for the historical roots of
ethnicity, has been similarly reported by other Cajun activists of
this period.
Festivals are dedicated to major topics in Cajun culture, particularly
foodways and music. In 1998, 17 of 46 festivals were
dedicated to products from the environment (wildlife, oysters,
crawüsh, frogs, peppers), crops (sugarcane, rice, cotton, herbs),
and 14 were dedicated to processed products (gumbo, boudin,
sauce piquante) with an emphasis on pork products (cochon de
lait, cracklin, grande boucherie, viande boucanee) and seafood.
The remaining third are mostly dedicated to Cajun music
(Festival de Musique Acadienne, Accordion Festival). In 1999, the
state of Louisiana dedicated its 300th anniversary year—and a
special brochure—to the FrancoFeü te, a year-long celebration of
its French heritage with an emphasis on Acadians who plan to
meet by the thousands at the Congres Mondial (Louisiana Office
of Tourism 1998, 1999).
From the inception of the ethnic revitalization movement,
ethnic claims were connected to economic pursuits. The 1968
legislative act establishing CODOFIL instructed the state agency
to develop actions for the ‘‘cultural, economic and tourist
beneüt of the State’’ (Louisiana Legislature Act No. 409, p. 1)—
largely successful, CODOFIL officials have repeatedly emphasized
their ability to bring dignitaries and paying visitors to
Louisiana as well as the free worldwide publicity their endeavor
generated to justify their mission and request state funds. The
state and local municipalities also strived to capitalize on the
promotion of an ethnic image; in addition to festivals, twinnings
with foreign cities mostly from the French-speaking world, close
cooperation of local officials with cultural associations, renovation
and building of local attractions (commemorative parks,
theaters, museums) became major tools of economic develop-
ment.
Spectacles of Ethnicity 393
At the state level, the economic downturn brought about by
the oil crisis of the mid-1980s triggered a renewed interest in
tourism as an alternate industry. A Louisiana Office of Tourism
had been established in 1977 but really became active by the
1990s with increased funding and the launching of coordinated
programs (tax-free shopping for foreign visitors, nationwide
advertising campaigns, division of the state into üve speciüc
zones). Although claims of the economic impact of tourism are
inherently difficult to gauge (tourism is not listed as an industry,
anyone traveling 100 miles for at least one day is considered a
visitor) and tend to be inýated by interested parties, tourism
appears to be a signiücant industry: It is estimated that over 20
million visitors spend $6 billion, ülling 97,000 jobs and generating
$765 million in taxes in 1994 (LeMenestrel 1997).
Here again, the importance of foodways and music is ýagrant:
They are part of respectively 64 percent and 46 percent
of local attractions compared with 20 percent and 14 percent in
the rest of the United States (cited in LeMenestrel 1997:161). This
situation is due in part to Cajun cuisine and music. All accounts
of the popularity of Cajun cuisine point to the skills of chef Paul
Prudhomme, who almost single handedly made Cajun dishes,
spices, and ambiance a nationwide phenomenon. The fame of
Cajun music owes more to the recognition it has gained among
afficionados of American folk music and the ongoing expansion
of the musical tradition by young musicians to new audiences.
Expressions of Ethnic Group Membership: The Decline of
Language and the Prominence of the Festivals
The Encyclopedia of Cajun Culture (Douglas and Isherwood
1979) says of festivals in southern Louisiana, ‘‘Attracting both
locals and tourists, festivals are an important part of Cajun life,
and occur throughout the year in Acadiana. Most of these
feature Cajun food and music, as well as arts and crafts’’ (p.
257). As we have seen, however, this important part of Cajun life
is a fairly recent addition to the social landscape of southern
Louisiana. Nevertheless, data from a survey conducted by
CODOFIL support the contention that these events are widely
attended in this part of the state. In Table 2, we present reported
attendance at Cajun-themed festivals in the six parishes in the
central part of Acadian Louisiana, by claims of Cajun or Acadian
ethnicity and by age. We report attendance at these festivals
with and without the Festivals Acadiens in Lafayette as this is
394 C. L. Bankston and J. Henry
TABLE 2 Attendance at Cajun-Themed Festivals, at the Festivals Acadiens,
and at all Cajun-Themed Festivals Except the Acadian Festival, and French
Language Ability, by Age
Cajuns Non-Cajuns
Festival Attendance,
French Language Ability , 40 40–49 501 , 40 40–49 501
All festivals
No attendance 74.2 81.6 94.6 81.2 87.2 94.8
Attended one festival 17.8 16.7 3.6 17.6 11.7 5.2
Attended two festivals 6.7 1.8 0.9 1.2 1.1 0.0
Attended three festivals 0.6 0.0 0.9 0.0 0.0 0.0
Attended 4 or more 0.6 0.0 0.0 0.0 0.0 0.0
Festivals Acadiens
No attendance 91.4 93.9 98.2 87.2 93.1 96.9
Attended 8.6 6.1 1.8 12.8 6.9 3.1
All festivals but Acadiens
No attendance 80.4 86.8 95.5 92.8 93.1 97.9
Attended one festival 13.5 12.3 3.6 7.2 6.9 2.1
Attended two festivals 5.5 0.9 0.0 0.0 0.0 0.0
Attended three festivals 0.0 0.0 0.9 0.0 0.0 0.0
Attended 4 or more 0.6 0.0 0.0 0.0 0.0 0.0
Total 163 114 112 250 188 193
French language ability
Neither understand nor speak 48.1 15.9 6.3 70.7 54.8 46.1
Understand, do not speak 1.9 4.4 0.9 2.4 2.7 2.1
Speak, but not ýuently 37.7 26.5 22.3 20.5 17.0 15.2
Fluent in French 12.3 53.1 70.5 6.4 25.5 36.6
Total 162 113 112 249 188 191
the best-known, attracting the largest non-Cajun tourist audience.
Table 2 also reports French language ability by age group,
as language use is considered one of the chief objective ethnic
characteristics of the Louisiana Cajuns.
Three interesting facts appear in the data on all festivals. First,
in the two younger age groups (under 40 years and 40–49 years),
those who classiüed themselves as Cajuns were more likely than
those who classifed themselves otherwise to have attended a
festival. Over one fourth of Cajuns aged 39 or less had attended
at least one festival compared with fewer than 19 percent of
Spectacles of Ethnicity 395
non-Cajuns of comparable age. In addition, 8 percent of these
young Cajuns had attended two or more festivals compared
with just over 1 percent of the young non-Cajuns. In the middle
age group, over 18 percent of Cajuns had attended a festival
compared with under 13 percent of middle-aged non-Cajuns.
Second, festival attendance is linked to age as well as ethnicity.
The younger people in both ethnic categories were more likely
than older people to have participated in these events. Multiple
festival attendance, moreover, occurred primarily among young
Cajuns. Of the 22 people who had attended two or more festivals,
17 (77 percent) were Cajuns and 13 (59 percent) were
young Cajuns. Third, participation in an ethnically themed festival
is fairly common in southern Louisiana. Over 14 percent of
all those in this random survey said that they had been to one
of these events. If we take into consideration the fact that older
people tended not to take part in these activities, it seems to be
even more common. If this random survey is representative of
the population, it appears that nearly one out of every üve
people under age 50 and between one out of every four and
one out of every üve people under age 30 in southern Louisiana
has been to a festival dedicated to the celebration of Cajun
ethnicity.
We report attendance at the Festivals Acadiens, the bestknown
and most self-consciously ‘‘authentic’’ of the Cajunthemed
festivals in southern Louisiana, separately. The
non-Cajuns were more likely than those who labeled themselves
Cajuns to have attended this event. Further, this was the festival
in which most of the non-Cajun participants had taken part. It
would appear that the very success of the festival has led it to
appeal chieýy to an audience outside of the group it represents
and whose name it bears. This wide popular appeal is interesting
because Festivals Acadiens features music, cultural activities,
and foods that are virtually exclusively devoted to the celebration
of Cajun ethnicity. We suggest that ethnicity as a commodity
blurs the line between authenticity and inauthenticity.
Although ethnicity can be marketed to ethnic group members,
it may be most successful when the feeling of participation in an
ethnic heritage can be sold to the larger public. The more
apparently authentic this heritage claims to be, the greater its
marketability.
Once we remove Festivals Acadiens from the analysis, the
association of Cajun-themed festival attendance with self-
396 C. L. Bankston and J. Henry
described Cajun ethnicity becomes evident, particularly among
the young people. Indeed, one out of every üve younger Cajuns
had participated in one of the festivals other than Festivals Acadiens.
The association of youth, particularly Cajun youth, with
festival attendance is interesting in light of data on language. As
has been previously documented, French-language ability, the
chief objective cultural marker, is in a state of rapid decline
(Landry, Allard, and Henry 1996; Bankston and Henry 1998).
Only 12 percent of young Cajuns in our sample were ýuent in
French, compared with 70 percent of Cajuns in the oldest
group. The young people were the least likely to bear the linguistic
marker of their ethnicity, but they were the most likely to
enjoy ethnically themed festivals. Ethnic expression through festival
attendance, moreover, was as accessible to nonmembers
as it was to ethnic group members.
Table 3 gives selected characteristics of festival attendants
and nonattendants. There was no clear linkage between parish
residence and festival attendance, except that attendants were
most likely to reside in Lafayette, particularly when Festivals
Acadiens was included in the analysis. Whites were much more
likely to participate in these events than were Blacks, even considering
the fact that Whites constituted the majority of the
population. Again, festival attendants were generally younger
than the nonattendants.
Perhaps the most interesting results in Table 3 are the ündings
on occupation. People with professional, technical, and managerial
jobs were proportionately the most likely to attend festivals,
among both Cajuns and non-Cajuns. Those in
working-class types of jobs made up the majority of the population,
particularly among the Cajuns, and therefore most of the
festival-goers were working class. There were very few people in
agricultural activities in our sample, and none of them had been
to a Cajun-themed festival.
As we have discussed above, festivals emerged as a vehicle of
ethnic expression in recent history, when Acadiana had changed
from a rural farming and üshing society to a modern industrial,
retail, and service economy. This ecological shift, we suggest,
dislocated the population from its older identities and social ties
and created a desire to reconstruct identities by reconnecting
with a rapidly disappearing past. Here, we see that those who
were most uprooted, the professional classes, were the most
likely to visit the places where ethnic identity is marketed.
Spectacles of Ethnicity 397
TABLE 3 Selected Characteristics of Attendants and Nonattendants at all
Cajun-Themed Festivals and at all Except the Acadian Festival
All except
All festivals Acadian Festival
Non- NonCharacteristics
Attendants attendants Attendants attendants
Parish of residence (%)
Acadia (rural) 6.7 13.0 9.2 12.3
Evangeline (rural) 10.7 5.8 18.4 5.4
Iberia (urban–rural) 10.0 12.5 9.2 12.4
Lafayette (urban) 44.7 19.8 23.5 23.0
St. Landry (rural) 4.7 18.0 6.9 16.8
St. Martin (rural) 14.0 6.6 19.5 6.5
St. Mary (urban–rural) 5.3 13.1 8.0 12.3
Vermilion (rural) 3.4 11.2 5.7 10.6
Race
White 91.9 82.3 94.1 82.7
Black 6.8 17.0 5.9 16.4
Median age 36 47 36 45
Occupation
Professional, technical,
managerial, higher
sales 29.3 20.8 25.3 21.8
Cajuns only 26.1 16.6 21.2 17.8
Lower clerical and sales,
crafts, operatives,
laborers 55.3 56.0 60.9 55.4
Cajuns only 62.3 63.8 67.3 62.9
Agriculture 0.0 1.0 0.0 1.0
Cajuns only 0.0 0.6 0.0 0.6
Other 15.3 22.2 13.8 21.9
Cajuns only 11.6 19.1 11.5 18.7
N 150 869 87 932
Cajuns only 69 320 52 337
Festivals and the Commodi cation of Time, Space,
and History
Festivals are by deünition spectacles, staged public events.
When Debord (1967) argued that the modern market economy
was creating a society of the spectacle, he was not suggesting
that spectacles came into existence only with mass consumption.
However, the pervasiveness of the spectacle is a consequence
of the postindustrial capacity for reproducing human
398 C. L. Bankston and J. Henry
experience as a marketable commodity in a temporally and geographically
delineated setting.
Agricultural societies are strongly inýuenced by the rhythm of
planting and harvesting, with the harvest typically the chief
occasion for celebration. As Table 4 indicates, Fall, the time of
harvest, continues to be a popular season for festivals. The
greatest number of festivals in 1998 fell in February, because so
many of these ethnic-themed festivals were associated with
Mardi Gras, which came in February in that year. However, üve
Cajun-themed festivals were held in September and six in
October, the harvest months in Louisiana. Also note, though,
that there are no months without festivals. This is because the
timing is driven less by any agricultural or religious calendar
than by marketing calculations. In interviews with festival officials
and in the course of participation in festival organization,
the organizers continually stressed the need to spread the
events over the course of a year in order to avoid competing
with one another for attendants and to account for the region’s
hot summer weather.
A second important point about the timing of festivals concerns
their placement in the week. All of these, without exception,
are weekend events. Some may start on Thursday
afternoons, but they are timed around the modern workweek,
TABLE 4 Number of
Cajun-Themed Festivals per Month
in the Year 1998
Month No.
January 2
February 9
March 3
April 5
May 3
June 2
July 3
August 2
September 5
October 6
November 1
December 5
Total 46
Spectacles of Ethnicity 399
with the main events scheduled Friday evening through Sunday
afternoon. This may seem obvious : Of course, one might object,
who could attend a festival on Monday morning? The very
assumption that this is an obvious time to hold spectacles, when
examined, suggests how deeply the modern workweek has sunk
its framework into the organization of time. The weekend is the
time for social events, for the shopping mall, for trips to Disney
World. It is also the time for spectacles of ethnicity.
If Cajun festivals resemble other commodiüed entertainments
in their temporal organization, they also display commodiücation
in their arrangement of space. All festivals are held
in open spaces, usually in parks and downtown areas. Festivals
Acadiens, for example, is held in the central park of Lafayette,
Girard Park. Very few actually charge admission fees. The Crawüsh
Festival in Breaux Bridge is notable because it recently
started to charge an admission fee in order to control the
impact of large crowds (over 100,000) on a small town. Most of
these are manifestly free events, not commercial endeavors.
However, the intentionally noncommercial character of the festivals
makes the predominance of commercial activities at them
all the more interesting.
The center of the festivals is generally a stage, providing free
music for all the attendants. At the Festivals Acadiens, music is
provided either by zydeco bands or by groups that provide
some variant of traditional Cajun folk music. A number of the
other festivals, particularly those outside of the Lafayette area,
present the ‘‘Cajun country music’’ that blends local strains of
music and characteristic Louisiana instruments such as the
accordion with electric guitars and the rhythms of contemporary
popular country music. Around the stage, the festival
grounds are organized as temporary shopping malls, with
booths under small tents.
Two kinds of activities predominate in the booths: the sale of
putatively ethnic foods and the sale of arts and crafts items. All
of the booths that we have visited readily accept credit cards
(see Ritzer 1999:156 on the importance of the credit card for the
new means of consumption). The foods include dishes such as
jambalaya, stuþed breads, and crawüsh and alligator dishes, all
prepared by local merchants. These foods may vary in their
quality and in the degree to which they would have been familiar
to inhabitants of southern Louisiana in the late nineteenth
or early twentieth centuries. Nevertheless, we are not interested
400 C. L. Bankston and J. Henry
in evaluating the historical authenticity of foodstuþs or in acting
as culinary critics. The important point is that all of these foods
have explicit associations with Cajun ethnicity; those who eat
them are consuming ethnicity by ingesting ethnic products.
The arts and crafts items are also symbolically rich. Paintings,
carvings, decorated aprons, t-shirts, and miscellaneous knickknacks
predominate. Again, all of these items intentionally
evoke Cajun ethnicity. They also display an ironic relationship
with history, in which an idealized past is re-presented through
contemporary media. An illuminating example of this ironic representation
may be found in the work of the popular artist
Floyd Sonnier, whose images are ubiquitous at these festivals.
Sonnier is a skillful draftsman, and a man old enough to remember
southern Louisiana in the decades before World War II. His
paintings dwell on old Cajun barns, horse-drawn vehicles, musicians
playing informally for friends and family under moss-hung
oak trees, and humble old-style homes with outhouses. The
rural imagery of these pictures portrays the lives of farmers and
trappers, of people who live oþ the land and make their own
entertainment.
As is the case with all artistic representations, the scenes in
Floyd Sonnier’s work are interpretations of the world. However,
these scenes are emotion-laden interpretations of a world that
no longer exists. Even the humblest of homes do not have outhouses
today, and the musicians are professionals performing on
stage, not playing informally on the galerie under the moss.
Sonnier’s paintings are sold as prints, but they also take a variety
of other formats. Booths will sell Sonnier images on t-shirts,
coþee cups, plates, calendars, and virtually anything else that
has a surface. Ordinary items of consumption are thus transformed
into emblems of ethnic identity.
As iconography, Floyd Sonnier’s art provides an interesting
example of the commodiücation of history. Products sold at
boutiques connect individuals to a version of history. It should
be noted that ethnicity, while constructed, is not constructed ex
nihilo. Sonnier can actually remember the scenes that he portrays.
Similarly, the musicians do draw on an indigenous musical
tradition when musically inclined relatives and neighbors would
indeed gather to play informally. The commodiücation of ethnicity
does not involve inventing ethnic üctions so much as
drawing on a deeply felt tradition and recasting this tradition in
the form of reproducible, marketable products.
Spectacles of Ethnicity 401
DISCUSSION AND CONCLUSION: POSTINDUSTRIAL
AMERICA AND THE COMMODIFICATION OF
ETHNICITY
We have presented four major ündings regarding the relationship
between Louisiana Cajun ethnicity and festivals. First, we
have seen that the economy of ‘‘Cajun country’’ in Louisiana is
similar to the economy of other regions of the contemporary
United States. The service sector provides the greatest proportion
of jobs, although there is also a fairly large percentage of
jobs in manufacturing, mining, and construction. Agriculture
and related ‘‘traditional’’ activities do not employ many people.
Second, we have seen that Cajun festivals are not inherited,
primordial celebrations but ‘‘invented traditions’’ of recent
history.
Third, we have seen a complex relationship between ethnicity
and festival attendance. Those who identify themselves as
ethnic group members are more likely than others to participate
in these events. However, the most self-consciously ‘‘authentic’’
ethnic display, the one that makes the greatest eþorts to root
itself in pastimes, crafts, and skills with the purest pedigrees of
traditionalism, is the one that is most likely to appeal to outsiders
rather than to insiders. Younger people, especially among
those who identify themselves as Cajuns, are more likely to participate
in festivals than older people. On the other hand,
younger people are less likely than older people to be ýuent in
French, the single most important objective marker of this
group.
In large part because the self-consciously ethnic Festivals Acadiens
is set in Acadiana’s urban center of Lafayette, festival
attendants tend to be drawn more heavily from the urban–
suburban region of Lafayette than from the more rural parishes.
Although the majority of those in the area and at festivals are
blue-collar workers or service workers, particularly among the
Cajuns, people at the professional–managerial–technical level
are proportionately the most likely to attend festivals.
Finally, in looking at the actual occurrences of these festivals
we have seen that they are concerned with the marketing of
symbolically rich commodities in the context of the contemporary
American market economy. Festivals are weekend events,
not celebrations of harvests. They are organized as temporary
shopping malls, with staged entertainments surrounded by bou-
402 C. L. Bankston and J. Henry
tiques. Still, although the form of the activities is that of the
present-day cathedral of consumption, their content is historical
nostalgia.
Much of this seems to evoke the symbolic ethnicity of
Herbert Gans (1979): the consumption of symbols of ethnicity
divorced from ethnic ties. However, we would like to suggest
that symbolic ethnicity is a misleading phrase. All ethnicity is
symbolic, as ethnicity is a meaningful categorization. In earlier
times, ethnicity symbolized a relationship between politically
and ethnically dominant in-groups and disadvantaged outgroups
in the centralizing nation-state of classical capitalism.
This symbolism has not receded entirely into the past: Group
diþerences in political and economic power are still a major part
of the American social landscape. Nevertheless, the economy of
mass production has given a new emphasis to the social identity
of consumer: the individual who exists out of the context of
group ties and in relationship to commodities, objects of consumption.
Thus, a more accurate term for ethnicity based on
the consumption of ethnic products might be commodiüed eth-
nicity.
Why should ethnicity continue to exist, or even become
more self-consciously emphasized, as ethnic social ties and linguistic
and cultural markers weaken? Here, we should recall the
putatively primordial character of ethnicity: Ancestry links one
to a past that is perceived as ‘‘authentic’’ and provides one with
an identity taken to be authentic precisely because it seems to
be so deeply rooted. To the extent that individuals are socially
identiüable as consumers, as people who are connected to one
another through items of purchase, they lack the sense of
having primordial ties and identities that they perceive as
authentic. The answer to this dilemma may be to imbue commodities
with historical meaning, to make items of purchase
reverberate with the signiücance of an idealized past. Indeed,
this recent tack taken by Cajun activists and entrepreneurs on
their heritage has been met with popular, commercial, and
media success. It can be interpreted as an indication of the
ability of Cajun ethnics to adapt to a changing socioeconomic
environment. Thus Cajuns are not ‘‘selling oþ’’ their culture but
rather accommodating it to a postindustrial, postmodern society.
The paradox of commodiüed ethnicity is that it can easily
provide a vicarious sense of primordial identity even to non–
group members. Although Cajuns are more likely than non-
Spectacles of Ethnicity 403
Cajuns to attend festivals, the latter do participate in large
numbers. At Festivals Acadiens, the most self-consciously
‘‘authentic’’ ethnic event, the latter actually predominate. Vicarious
ethnicity may actually be the key to much of contemporary
resurgent ethnicity. Commodiüed ethnicity can provide a
sense of being connected to a meaningful past (albeit a somewhat
weaker sense) to out-group members as well as in-group
members. One need only reýect that the Native American
renaissance in literature that has made best-selling authors of
Native American writers such as Sherman Alexie could not have
taken place if it had to depend on Native American readers
alone. Similarly, African American identity is marketed as a
commodity to both group members and non–group members in
television shows and music CDs.
This brief examination of the ethnic festival in south Louisiana
can, in our view, shed some light on the ongoing construction
and reconstruction of ethnicity. We suggest that the assimilation
versus ethnic identity dichotomy that has historically shaped a
great deal of thinking about ethnicity was a product of centralizing
industrial nation-states. The ‘‘ethnics’’ were deüned by contrast
to a central national community that was, by default,
‘‘nonethnic.’’ However, individuals increasingly participate in the
contemporary economy as consumers, deriving social identities
from choices of categories of products rather than from participation
in social groups. Participation in the contemporary
economy also means a disjunction between current socioeconomic
position (as nine-to-üve workers or oil-rig hands) and
ideas about group membership derived from historical traditions.
This disjunction tends to heighten ethnic awareness rather
than diminish it: English-speaking grandchildren paradoxically
have a greater attachment to ethnicity than their Frenchspeaking
grandparents, and the foreign-educated professor
returns to Louisiana with a sense of his heritage that he never
had as a child. Perceptions of historical tradition provide the
substantive imagery of ethnicity, but this imagery must be
reshaped into contemporary forms. To üt into a consumer
economy, ethnicity must become a commodity.
Although we maintain that our concept of commodiüed ethnicity
has wide application to other groups, one of the chief
problems in this line of thinking is to determine the extent to
which other ethnic and racial categories may be reasonably
deüned in terms of the consumption of commodities. As we
suggested above, some aspects of contemporary Native Amer-
404 C. L. Bankston and J. Henry
ican and African American identity may be reasonably understood
as commodiücation. We do not see that membership in
groups such as these can be reduced to consumption of products,
because group membership is still closely connected with
systematic socioeconomic disadvantage. Nevertheless, even for
these groups, the consumption of symbolically rich commodities
is becoming an increasingly important part of self-identiücation
and identiücation by outsiders.
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