Rugged practices: embodying authenticity in outdoor recreation

Discourses about outdoor recreation utilize popular conceptions of authenticity to shape ideas about nature and identity. Authenticity-as deployed by outdoor retail marketers and institutions that cultivate perceptions through landscapes, such as the Park Service-is a rhetorical strategy that emphasizes realness and met expectations. I contend that discourses of the National Park Service and outdoor retailers can function as both artifacts and contexts, subject to analysis yet also creating the milieu in which recreators gauge perform their own authenticity through practices. Practices are mundane, embodied forms of rhetoric that construct social interactions, status, and experiences. My first chapter reviews literature that addresses the intersections of authenticity and rhetoric, consumerism, nature, and identity. It also describes my method and research procedure. In my second chapter, I analyze outdoor retailer catalogues and argue that outdoor retailers position themselves as part of the outdoor recreation subculture that is concerned with environmentalism. Their use of authenticity challenges conventional understandings of resistance and appropriation. I critique another institutional discourse, that of the landscape itself, in my third chapter. Focusing primarily on Zion National Park rhetoric, I explain how maps and trails perpetuate the division between culture (humans, more specifically) and nature. In my fourth chapter, I focus on outdoor recreators themselves to discuss what practices construct authentic outdoor experiences. My fifth and final chapter brings themes across all of the chapters into sharper focus. It directly addresses my research questions about authenticity and rhetoric; delves into theories of materiality, methodology, resistance, and culture; and makes suggestions for Zion National Park based on my findings.

RUGGED PRACTICES: EMBODYING AUTHENTICITY IN OUTDOOR RECREATION by Samantha Senda-Cook A dissertation submitted to the faculty of The University of Utah in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Department of Communication The University of Utah August 2010 Copyright © Samantha Senda-Cook 2010 All Rights Reserved The Uni v e r s i t y o f Ut a h Gr a d ua t e S cho o l STATEMENT OF DISSERTATION APPROVAL The dissertation of Samantha Senda-Cook has been approved by the following supervisory committee members: Danielle Endres , Chair 3 May 2010 Date Approved Julia Corbett , Member 3 May 2010 Date Approved Joy Pierce , Member 5 May 2010 Date Approved Helene Shugart , Member 3 May 2010 Date Approved Marc Hall , Member 3 May 2010 Date Approved and by Ann Darling , Chair of the Department of Communication and by Charles A. Wight, Dean of The Graduate School. ABSTRACT Discourses about outdoor recreation utilize popular conceptions of authenticity to shape ideas about nature and identity. Authenticity-as deployed by outdoor retail marketers and institutions that cultivate perceptions through landscapes, such as the Park Service-is a rhetorical strategy that emphasizes realness and met expectations. I contend that discourses of the National Park Service and outdoor retailers can function as both artifacts and contexts, subject to analysis yet also creating the milieu in which recreators gauge perform their own authenticity through practices. Practices are mundane, embodied forms of rhetoric that construct social interactions, status, and experiences. My first chapter reviews literature that addresses the intersections of authenticity and rhetoric, consumerism, nature, and identity. It also describes my method and research procedure. In my second chapter, I analyze outdoor retailer catalogues and argue that outdoor retailers position themselves as part of the outdoor recreation subculture that is concerned with environmentalism. Their use of authenticity challenges conventional understandings of resistance and appropriation. I critique another institutional discourse, that of the landscape itself, in my third chapter. Focusing primarily on Zion National Park rhetoric, I explain how maps and trails perpetuate the division between culture (humans, more specifically) and nature. In my fourth chapter, I focus on outdoor recreators themselves to discuss what practices construct authentic outdoor experiences. My fifth and final chapter brings themes across all of the chapters into sharper focus. It directly addresses my research questions about authenticity and rhetoric; delves into theories of materiality, methodology, resistance, and culture; and makes suggestions for Zion National Park based on my findings. iv TABLE OF CONTENTS ABSTRACT……………………………………………………………………...iii LIST OF FIGURES……………………………………………………………...vii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS……………………………………………………..viii CHAPTER ONE: LOCATING AUTHENTICITY……………………..…………………….1 Defining Key Terms………………………………………………………….3 Engaging Authenticity in Relevant Literatures………………………………8 Rhetorical Criticism with Complementary Qualitative Methods…..……….19 Chapters Preview……………………………………………………………25 Endnotes…………………………………………………………….………29 TWO: APPROPRIATING RESISTANCE? CONSTRUCTIONS OF RESISTANCE AND MAKING DO IN OUTDOOR RECREATION CATALOGUES………………………...………………………………………36 Outdoor Recreation as a Resistant Subculture…………….………..………37 Constructing Nature, People, and Experiences …………………….………47 Appropriating Outdoor Recreation………………………………………….73 Endnotes…………………………………………………………………….77 THREE: MAKING NATURE MEANINGFUL: AUTHENTICITY, MAPS, AND LANDSCAPES.…………………………………………………………..84 Rhetoric and Critical Approaches to Outdoor Recreation…………..………85 Mapping the Terrain…………………..…………………………………….92 Rhetorical Criticism and the Politics of Preserving Nature………………..114 Endnotes……………………………………………………………………123 FOUR: RHETORICAL PRACTICES CULTIVATING AUTHENTIC OUTDOOR RECREATION EXPERIENCES.…..……………………………133 A Need for Rhetorical Practices…………......…………………………….136 Studying Practices…………………………………………….…………...146 The Pleasure and Politics of Walking and Making Do…….………………152 Practices of Authentic Experiences……………………………….……….156 Experiential Degradation, Rhetorical Practices, and Packaged Parks..………………………………………………………179 Endnotes…………………………………………………………………...187 FIVE: IMPLIED AUTHENTICITY…………………………………………..195 Some Answers about Authenticity………………………………………...196 Rhetorical Criticism and Theory…………………………………………..205 Authenticity and Consumer Studies……………………………………….215 Authenticity and Nature Studies…………………………………………...219 Authenticity and Identity Studies…………………………..………………223 Practical Suggestions for Zion National Park…………………..………….229 Conclusion……..………………………………………………….………..235 Endnotes……………………………………………………………………236 APPENDIX A: STRUCTURED ONLINE INTERVIEW QUESTIONS..……………....240 B: STRUCTURED INFORMANT INTERVIEW QUESTIONS.…………241 REFERENCES…...…………………………………………………………….244 vi LIST OF FIGURES Figure Page 1. A rock line indicating the direction of the trail and cairn………. 122 2. Stairs carved into a large rock………………………………….. 122 3. Staircase made from rough stones……………………………… 123 4. Staircase made from cut stones………………………………… 123 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I have been walking on the path of rhetorical criticism. I thought that path ended with my dissertation but learned that this process is just one stop along the way. The path is worn for me because of rhetoricians who have found their way through the woods. At times, though, I have had to stray from the path to explore some lines of thought. At other times, I have attempted to reshape the landscape to unite several paths. Sometimes I have walked alone but, more often than not, I have walked with other people. My journey would not have been possible without the support and encouragement of many people. To my mom, Linda Arnold, who cultivated in me a sense of curiosity and boldness that has allowed me to start and finish this project and stay in the forest of rhetoric. To Danielle Endres, who most directly contributed her time, knowledge, and efforts, I feel immense gratitude. I would also like to thank other professors who have helped me find my way through terrific academic woods: Helene Shugart, Julia Corbett, Joy Pierce, Marc Hall, Karrin Vasby Anderson, and Eveline Lang. Of course, more people served as academic mentors. To my fellow graduate students who were supportive, especially Michael Middleton, Brenden Kendall, and Guy McHendry, I am appreciative. To the organizers and benefactors of The David C. Williams Memorial Graduate Fellowship (namely Kathleen Hom) and The Floyd O'Neil Scholarship (namely The American West Center), I am grateful for the financial support. To the staff members, especially Kristin Legg, at Zion National Park who enabled me to enter a literal forest instead of a metaphorical one. I am indebted to their cooperation. And finally, to James Comeford, who provided necessary distractions and always gave me library books with a smile. ix CHAPTER ONE LOCATING AUTHENTICITY Authenticity is what drove German Expressionists like F.W. Murnau to shoot films on location. It is what compelled Italian Neorealist Vittorio De Sica to hire a factory worker instead of an actor to play the lead character in The Bicycle Thief.1 Authenticity is what makes the Mona Lisa worth hundreds of millions of dollars and a print of the same painting available for a mere $7.99. It is what prompted Tobias Meyer, the international art dealer of Sotheby's contemporary art department, to wonder why anyone would steal the Warhol "Athlete Series." He stated, "Stealing Warhols is a very bad idea. The art world has become so transparent, and all these works are so traceable, ultimately they become an untradeable asset."2 Authenticity, almost by definition, makes an object or person worth money, time, or effort and something or someone else not. Art examples are common ways of articulating how authenticity impacts desires (i.e., the striving to express, represent, or reproduce the real) and conceptions of worth (i.e., the financial distinction between something real and something fake). However, authenticity does not affect solely the art world. In fact, it impacts mundane decisions about which things to buy, popular as well as scholarly debates about what nature is, and everyday expressions of identity. 2 Through film and art, I became interested in debates about authenticity and the consequences of such debates. Soon after, I realized that this concept means many different things in various contexts and has strong connections to the natural world. For example, it functions rhetorically in banal discourses and shapes who we think we are and where we think we live. It is with this theoretical lens that I approach discourses of outdoor recreation. I am interested in authenticity as a rhetorical phenomenon: What are the rhetorical dynamics of authenticity? How is authenticity constructed and employed? What set of practices comprise authenticity? Why is authenticity persuasive? And what (or whose) interests are served in deployments of authenticity? To answer these questions, I focus specifically on the intersections of consumerism, nature, and identity with authenticity because these are contentious areas in which (sometimes implicit) authenticity claims surface, specifically in outdoor recreation discourses. First, retailers recognize that the outdoor recreation subculture is growing and that, consequently, the demand for outdoor recreation clothing and gear is growing. Second, outdoor recreation generally occurs in nature and, as I will demonstrate in Chapters Two and Three, privileges the conception of nature as a place without humans. Finally, outdoor recreators, whether they would use that term or not, create an identity and subculture with in-group and out-group members. Of course, there are forms of outdoor recreation that happen in urban areas (e.g., climbing buildings in cities, playing bike polo in the park, or backyard gardening), but I am studying places that humans visit because this version of nature is authenticated through outdoor recreation 3 discourses. For the purposes of this study, I am interested in (a) how retailers appeal to "outdoor recreators" and in a sense define what "authentic" outdoor recreating is; (b) how national parks construct "authentic" landscapes in the park; and (c) how people practice outdoor recreation to have "authentic" experiences when in a national park. In this chapter, I begin by defining key terms. Then, I offer a focused discussion of how authenticity functions in the realms of rhetorical criticism, consumerism debates, nature scholarship, and identity research. Although there is not much research in these areas that deals explicitly with authenticity, its implicit presence can be traced throughout theses conversations. Then, I explain that I conduct my research from a rhetorical perspective but operate as a bricoleur who brings in qualitative tools when they will help me investigate authenticity in the outdoor recreation realm. Finally, I close with a map for the remaining chapters, which are organized by artifact and each roughly corresponds to questions about consumerism, nature, and identity. Defining Key Terms My project interrogates several terms that have complicated histories and meanings. Mundane conversations sometimes belie these complex etymologies. I do not take issue with the simple definitions used in everyday discourse, but rather I seek to better understand how we come to such common usages and what the impacts of those ways of speaking and understanding are. I define these terms here to allow the reader a glimpse at some of the complexities that exist and 4 ground the rest of my project with clear terms. I begin by defining my central organizing concept: authenticity. Then, I define my three important subconcepts: consumerism, nature, and identity. I follow this with a discussion of outdoor recreation. Finally, I define three other themes that emerged as important in my work: recreator/recreation, power, and resistance. Authenticity Authenticity, because it applies to different realms, does not have a singular definition. It is useful here to explore this term's complexity because popularly people use it to mean a variety of things without acknowledging the differences in those meanings. Therefore, I offer some general definitions and explain how these definitions are frequently intermingled. To begin, authenticity commonly means three things: "not false or copied, genuine, real"; "having the origin supported by unquestionable evidence, authenticated, verified"; and "entitled to acceptance or belief because of agreement with known facts or experience, reliable, trustworthy."3 I ground my understanding of authenticity in these definitions because I want to critique this concept as it is popularly employed in everyday discourse. However, I suggest that contemporary uses of the term reveal its slipperiness. For example, if something or someone is thought to be original (not copied or faked), then we behave as if it/he/she is supported by unquestionable evidence. Such a use slides between definitions and assumes that one use can stand in for another. In other example, if something or someone matches our expectations (e.g., on a trail or 5 with another person), then we behave as if it/she/he is supported by unquestionable evidence. Again, this demonstrates the abstract sliding between originality or uniqueness, meeting expectations, and foundations for claims about who has the right to speak, what areas need to be preserved, and what kind of buying makes a difference. Ultimately, I see authenticity as discursively constructed and simultaneously constitutive. Because people tend to trust things and people that/who appear to be authentic, evoking authenticity is an especially persuasive appeal. Most people operate as if authenticity is self-apparent or unchangeable. In this way, authenticity is constitutive. It attempts to build not fragmented, complex ideas but rather singular categories. What is often tricky about its discursivity, though, is that once authenticity is defined (or implicitly understood) for a particular culture, some things are real to that culture and others are not. That is, authenticity constitutes what is real, and people regard things as firmly real or fake. For example, in mainstream U.S. society, some people are considered "real women" while some are "female impersonators" or "drag queens." Even though these are constructed, fluid categories, this society designs bathrooms and makes laws as if they are stable, inherent, and true. Therefore, authenticity, although it is a constructed concept, has material implications for how we manage our society. Consumerism, Nature, and Identity It is important to acknowledge that in all three of these areas- consumerism, nature, and identity-proposing a single definition suggests that I 6 assume that there is one definition. This is a danger of research, especially when the researcher wants to complicate such singular definitions and investigate how such constructions are built. Consumerism is a characteristic of a culture that thrives on consuming, not only in terms of what we buy but also in terms of what we see and experience. In contemporary U.S. society, consumerism is pervasive.4 In fact, our economy depends upon people buying goods and services at ever-increasing rates. Historically, people consumed to meet basic needs, but the late 1940s brought "the moment when consumption began most decisively to mark social identity."5 Nature can mean many things, but I am most interested in a popular understanding of nature, which involves places where humans are not dwelling.6 This notion of nature, of course, is socially constructed.7 Regardless, it impacts the values we associate with different places, behaviors in those places, and policies about those places.8 This is why I am especially interested to learn how such a definition is perpetuated through claims of authenticity. Identity refers to perceptions of the self and others, who we think we are. Although postmodern theories about identity challenge the idea of an essential self, most people do not.9 Having a unified conception of the self is one of the ways that people make sense of the world and think of their places in it. Recreation Outdoor recreation became a focal point in this project because it incorporates all of the concepts named above. I define this as recreation that occurs outdoors.10 This broad definition was one of the most common offered by 7 my participants. Spelling recreation as "re-creation" emphasizes another contemporary connotation, that associated with renewing one's self. Our society sees recreation as a break from work and as a means of getting in touch with things lost in conventional life.11 This why a phrase like serious recreation seems like an oxymoron. However, many people understand the difference between casual activities and devoted hobbies.12 The ways that we recreate can say as much about us as the ways we earn money. Therefore, recreators are people who engage in outdoor recreation more frequently than most people, gain and rely on knowledge ascertained through experience, and own most of the necessary gear for outdoor recreation (e.g., boots). For my project, I examined the kind of recreation that happens at national parks: camping and hiking mostly. This type of recreation aligns with skiing, snowboarding, kayaking, snow shoeing, and cycling because all these activities involve nonmotorized forms of movement through areas. For the purposes of this project, I did not include activities such as hunting, target shooting, fishing, and riding OHVs (Off Highway Vehicles). Although these are certainly part of outdoor recreation, they are typically prohibited in national parks. I also excluded sports such as football, soccer, baseball, basketball, bocce ball, croquet, and polo because those usually do not happen in national parks. Additionally, the marketing for three broad groups differs. In terms of marketing, the people who engage in these activities belong to different niches. 8 Power and Resistance The themes of power and resistance emerged because I approached this project with a critical lens. I think of power as a means of controlling both one's own life and the lives of others. Power manifests in choices (seeing them, limiting them, accessing them), agency, access, information, and ability. When forces exercise power over groups of people, they may resist. Therefore, resistance is a form of power or a means of gaining power.13 Complicated cultural structures sometimes aim to control resistant to ensure that people make choices that both make them feel empowered and support existing power structures.14 One of the ways of harnessing power in cultural settings is to use authenticity to perpetuate power structures, control resistance movements, garner support for policies, or mask rhetorical efforts that might raise skepticism. In the next section, I discuss how scholars have engaged authenticity. Engaging Authenticity in Relevant Literatures Authenticity is most frequently analyzed as a quality of identity, of individuals, communities, and companies. Scholars also use the term to theorize about standards, places, and practices treated as "real" because of their assumed nonconstructedness, assumed genuineness, and their opposition to façades. However, while it is assumed that authenticity is constructed, scholars have not widely grappled with how authenticity is constructed, practiced, and ultimately persuasive. I organize this argument by broad topic areas. First, I address rhetorical criticism, then consumerism, next nature, and finally identity. 9 Rhetorical Criticism In rhetorical criticism, authenticity is interrogated as a persuasive, constitutive, and strategic device. My research is grounded in such understandings of authenticity but takes it as an organizing concept of my theoretical inquiry. Although some research focuses specifically on authenticity as a theoretical construct, most rhetorical criticism discusses it as one communication strategy or in the context of one case study.15 The research that theorizes authenticity on an abstract level is not grounded in particular examples, which makes it less useful for application in the practical realm (e.g., for social movements desiring to better reach their constituents). Several studies examine the role of authenticity in constructing a cohesive community (e.g., hip hop or punk rock) or a public persona (e.g., Eminem, Caushun, Cindy Sheehan, or Hillary Rodham Clinton).16 Some examine how authenticity is constructed through film.17 The research that is anchored by particular cases tends to adopt a singular definition of authenticity and thus does not expose the slipperiness of the concept. For example, Kembrew McLeod, Todd Fraley, Lindsay Calhoun, and Robin Means Coleman and Jasmine Cobb all employ authenticity as a quality of identity that allows audiences (both in the hip-hop industry and consumers of that music) to understand the artist.18 They do not discuss it in terms outside of identity, which limits the understanding of where and how authenticity is produced or desired. By contrast my project critiques the different ways that authenticity functions in outdoor recreation rhetoric. This makes a theoretical difference because my approach enables me to demonstrate the various planes on which authenticity is constructed and 10 consequences of such different constructions. Another way that rhetoricians discuss authenticity is implicitly in some theoretical debates. Although rhetoricians do not discuss authenticity per se in debates about materiality, this concept informs the arguments. When Dana Cloud distinguishes between discursive and "real" constraints in rhetoric and power, she implicitly argues for an acknowledgement of authentic barriers to rhetorical power.19 That is, she contends that some social structures exist outside the realms of discourse, evoking the common understanding of authenticity as something that is not constructed. In this case, then, the real constraints are conceived of as existing outside of rhetoric. In arguing the opposite point by the same means, poststructuralists such as Ramie McKerrow, Michael McGee, and Ronald Greene contend that there are "real" consequences of rhetoric.20 Material here is referred to as "real," which I see as an implicit evocation of authenticity because it conflates "material" with verified or evidence (e.g., these are the things that rhetoric does). Some rhetorical scholars, for example Carole Blair, Greg Dickinson, and Rich Rogers, discuss materiality in terms of physicality.21 Although these scholars would not equate physicality with authenticity, this is another popular way of conceptualizing authenticity. This element of physicality, the feel or presence of something, gives it a kind of rhetorical weight that is difficult to garner through other means. Again, the word authenticity does not frequently come into play. However, it implicitly shapes such conversations. Materiality, in addition to being a rhetorical argument in which authenticity is implicitly evoked, is important to my project because it has 11 informed my artifact selection. Specifically, such debates have encouraged me to examine physical rhetoric in the forms of hiking trails and outdoor recreation practices. My use of authenticity differs from these scholars who discuss materiality without explicitly acknowledging the role that authenticity plays in distinguishing something "real" from something that is not because I discuss the physicality (i.e., the materiality) of both rhetoric and authenticity. Analyzing authenticity as it connects with nature reveals authenticity's relationship with materiality. Specifically, it shows that authenticity can manifest in physical ways. Hiking trails, for example, feel real because they are situated in seemingly authentic places. In other words, the physical trail and physical place lend an air of authenticity to outdoor recreation. Consumerism In the realm of consumerism, both consumers and companies employ authenticity when making decisions about what to buy or sell and how to present an image that looks truthful and unified. What people buy and refrain from buying speaks to their ideology, perceived identity, and subscription to particular subcultures.22 In this way, purchasing becomes a practice of authenticity in terms of identity. For example, people maintain loyalty to some brands, such as PBR or Chuck Taylor's, because of what they imply about that person's identity based on the history that the brand has cultivated among particular niches.23 Also, a strain of subcultures-that I argue posses DIY sensibilities that cut across decades of subcultures, permeating punk, hip hop, hipsters, hippies, and outdoor recreators- 12 resists corporate structures on the whole to preserve integrity or sincerity by altering mass-produced goods to serve their purposes or simply producing goods (or finding or stealing them) to avoid financially supporting structures that they perceive as exploiting artists and their work and the uniqueness of their subcultures.24 This articulation of authenticity in consumerism illustrates the close proximity of consumption and identity. However, companies also appeal to authenticity by cultivating proenvironmental reputations with proenvironmental actions, attending to the origins of raw materials and products (such as publishing the country in which they are manufactured or assembled), and offering constructed authenticity to the consumer for a price. In contrast to companies that greenwash their products and image,25 some companies construct an authentic image through practices identified as "good for the environment" or "green." Consumers perceive making actual changes in production and business plans as more authentic. One of the things that companies can change and advertise is the source of their raw materials. For example, New Belgium Brewery is powered entirely by wind, which is accepted as more environmentally sound. Because they claim to be an environmentally conscious company and support that claim with a practice like using a recognized environmentally-conscious source of power, they are meeting consumers' expectations and are perceived as more authentic.26 Companies also use "‘natural' colors, shapes, and materials" to bolster consumers' perception of their authenticity.27 Authenticity in consumerism is one of the most complicated realms 13 because consumerism permeates almost all aspects of contemporary U.S. culture. Therefore it is one of the places that authenticity is evoked on a number of levels to sell ideas, services, and products. The intersection between authenticity and consumerism concerns the identity of consumers and companies; resistance to mass-produced, mass-marketed art (e.g., music) and goods; companies superficially evoking nature (either to greenwash their image or summon abstract cultural associations with nature that categorize it as more authentic than culture); and companies meeting environmental expectations. Including this complicated discourse in my project helps expand the way that identity scholars have theorized authenticity in the past. For example, my analysis of outdoor retailer catalogues in Chapter Two shows that companies use popular constructions of authenticity to position themselves as part of an outdoor recreation subculture concerned with the environment. Additionally, it creates an opportunity to study lay conceptions of authenticity because people invoke and respond to claims of authenticity through consumer and resistive (i.e., anticonsumer) practices. These practices have implications for who we thing we are (identity) and where we think we live (nature). Nature Authenticity also implicitly surfaces in conversations about nature. Although few rhetorical or environmental communication scholars discuss authenticity explicitly, it is an underlying principle or assumption in research about nature and preservation. For example, common definitions of nature 14 position it as something in opposition to culture. This nature/culture divide is problematic because it dismisses the complexity of the term nature and assumes that real nature is "Out There, a little beyond that last rise you can just barely see, hazy and purple on the sky."28 Scholars such as Neil Evernden and Daniel White have started to breakdown this idea of real nature by pointing out its constructedness.29 What this strategy does not do is problematize the dualism of real versus constructed. The assumption that remains in tact is that if something is constructed, it is not authentic. This is not a dualism that I am interested in dissolving. Rather my project attempts to highlight the areas that authenticity informs: landscapes partially modified to perpetuate a naturalistic character, as I do in Chapter Three, for example. In this case, scholarship about the nature/culture divide does not explicitly speak to authenticity. My argument is simply that it might be beneficial to do so. Threaded throughout conversations about nature and culture is a logic that "real" wilderness is worth protecting. Dave Foreman makes the argument that real wilderness exists and that its preservation needs to be prioritized by the environmental movement.30 Of course, such distinctions between what is wilderness and what is not are not simply splitting hairs because laws and entire social movement agendas are based on these fine differences.31 The debates between mainstream environmentalism and environmental justice, for example, illustrate the practical impacts of designating some places as "real" nature and excluding others. Not only do people seek to protect "real" natural places, they are also willing to pollute those that are not.32 In the context of outdoor recreation, 15 some parts of Zion Nation Park become "sacrificed" in part to the millions of people who visit the park each year. They are not "polluted" in the common sense of the word, but they are more connected to human-made structures such as paved roads and trails, buildings, vehicles, and barriers. (In Chapter Four, I call this experiential degradation.) These areas make it possible for much of the rest of the park to get many fewer visitors. For some people, these less popular tracts of land are where "real" recreation happens. For others, it happens in all of these places. Shining a light on the authenticity assumptions in these conversations helps determine some of the underlying logic and expectations of outdoor recreation as well as nature preservation. Commonly, people consider nature more authentic than most other things. Naturalness becomes a justification for oppression and power (as society has made manifest in the cases of sex, race, and sexuality). When people, places, and things are understood as existing independent of culture, they are thought to be more authentic and more valuable. Although this may not be true in every situation, largely it is the case. Therefore, my analysis augments both conceptualizations of nature and authenticity by revealing how the two interact to produce a power rhetorical construct that affects who has power in society. Identity Authenticity in research about identity reveals that people often think they and others have an essential self to whom they can be or should be true. This is the area of research that most directly and most frequently addresses authenticity. 16 Studies of different communities, such as the hip hop community or the punk rock community, reveal that members of these communities perpetuate the assumption of a true self by criticizing those with a perceived lack of authenticity. In subcultures, posing and posturing are practices that are typically met with disdain and skepticism because consistency in character is desirable. In addition to the research in rhetorical criticism that focuses on this, studies in anthropology such as John Jackson, Jr.'s Real Black, in English such as Vincent Cheng's Inauthentic, and performance such as E. Patrick Johnson's Appropriating Blackness document and challenge the assumed simplicity of this phenomenon.33 In the realm of identity scholarship, authenticity is implicitly and explicitly discussed. Authenticity with regard to identity is implicated in gender studies, for example. Within some veins of feminist thought, scholars such as Judith Butler challenge the view of an authentic man or woman, arguing instead that gender is a fluid concept buttressed by controlled performances.34 This perspective challenges popular uses of gender categories that explicitly or implicitly refer to "real" men or "real" women (e.g., Real Women Have Curves). Similarly, some racial and ethnic communities assume that there is an authentic way of being a part of that community. As a person of Cherokee, Irish, Hungarian, and Slovak descent, I wonder which part of me "counts" the most. Am I being authentic if most everyone assumes I am white? Am I white? These are some of the struggles that are explored in literature about authenticity and ethnicity. Subcultures that are threatened by assimilation and perceived loss of culture use authenticity as a means of regulating individuals behaviors in that 17 community as well as ensuring that cultural traditions, rituals, and values are preserved. Because of the rhetorically limiting and enabling consequences of authenticity, scholars challenge authenticity or analyze its constructedness but also discuss the advantages of utilizing such a strategy. One of the dangers of authenticity claims is essentialism.35 Committing too strongly to an authentic identity or a real way of being African American or Asian American risks perpetuating a false one-dimensional picture of a culture. Therefore, research in this area investigates the advantages to being perceived as authentic and the disadvantages of not. Often rhetors deploy claims, performances, or practices of authenticity to bolster their ethos. Authenticity is perceived to establish ethos because it communicates to audiences feelings of good will and good moral standing. In other words, rhetors think they are more credible or trustworthy if they have an essential identity that corresponds to audiences' expectations. This theoretical application of the concept of authenticity can involve individuals as well as communities and companies. Therefore, authenticity is manifested in not only identity enactments (e.g., behaviors, commitments, clothing and outward appearances) but also in marketing strategies, which could be considered a larger-scale ethos moves. My research identifies the means by which people demonstrate their membership (or decidedly nonmembership) in a particular subculture, outdoor recreation. Similar to previous research about authenticity and identity, I identify how appearance, argot, and practices are important to group membership.36 I also 18 move beyond identification to show how these are rhetorical, persuasive, and empowering or disempowering. For example, one couple whom I interviewed explained that they thought couples who wear matching outfits rarely finish trails. To them, then, having complete, matching gear was an indicator that their abilities were lacking. This kind of nuanced way of categorizing people as members or not speaks to the complexities of authenticity in outdoor recreation. In all of these cases-rhetorical criticism, consumerism, nature, and identity- scholars have shown that when people believe an object or person is authentic, its or her/his value raises. In some instances, this attaches monetary value to perceived genuineness, realness, or truth because people will pay more money for something deemed authentic (e.g., a piece of art or a handbag). In an increasingly cynical world, the value of authenticity only becomes greater because people view it as a scarce commodity. My project takes authenticity as a central focus and contributes to a variety of literatures by making the concept of authenticity salient in conversations in which it is only implied and by investigating the means by which it is constructed and the consequences of that construction. I suggest that authenticity has a material component that others have overlooked. Specifically, Chapters Two, Three, and Four illustrate how material objects operate as meaningful subcultural symbols of authenticity. Additionally, I show that authenticity linked to nature carries particular significance because contemporary U.S. society conceptualizes nature as a thing free of rhetoric and human involvement. Therefore, constructing ideas about nature gives rhetors the power to control what it means to be authentic. To do this, I adopt a bricoleur's 19 approach to methods. Rhetorical Criticism with Complementary Qualitative Methods I adopt a rhetorical criticism lens, but, like a bricoleur, I utilize different methods that will help me answer the critical questions that organize my project.37 Therefore, I incorporate the qualitative methods of participant observation, fieldnotes, and interviewing to examine rhetoric that is otherwise unavailable through conventional rhetorical texts. Moreover, I come from a critical perspective that is concerned with how authenticity is deployed to support communities as well as corporations. Rhetorical Perspective Rhetorical criticism is the organizing methodology of my dissertation. I focus on many different forms of rhetoric, but they are topically connected through outdoor recreation. Therefore, rhetors include outdoor retailers (e.g., REI, Patagonia, Zion Works), visitors (of many stripes) and park staff at Zion National Park, and the National Park Service. Although I am interested in outdoor recreation, I do not have a specific community or site that I am investigating. In other words, instead of studying of meaning-making in one particular community or site, I am more interested in how authenticity circulates in a variety of discourses related to outdoor recreation. Many kinds of outdoor recreators exist, which makes it impractical to try to ascertain a solidified sensibility of outdoor recreators. Rather my analysis reveals the multiple ways in which authenticity is 20 constructed, enacted, and practiced in the pastiche of outdoor recreation discourses. As such, even though some of my fieldwork occurred at Zion National Park, my research is not organized around that site. Rather Zion is one research site; other sites include outdoor retail shops and the abstract discursive space of maps, ads, and brochures. These sites serve as both artifacts and contexts for understanding practices of authentic outdoor recreation experiences, which I discuss in Chapter Four. Critical Perspective My critical perspective is grounded in the tradition that critiques capitalism and the cultural structures that support it.38 My analysis reveals that although people and retailers sometimes deploy authenticity toward consumeristic ends, that is not always the case in outdoor recreation. I find that authenticity advances any number of disparate goals that both undermine and bolster social movements like environmentalism. Although I sought to shows how outdoor recreation discourses-both that of industries and individuals-perpetuate a consumption framework, I found that deploying authenticity as a rhetorical strategy could trouble as well as advance capitalist endeavors. Rhetors can strategically utilize authenticity to support proenvironmental efforts to preserve land and increase accessibility (despite the somewhat oppositional implications of both of these goals). My critical perspective provided me with the foundation to question a concept that perpetuates what I see as problematic capitalist structures. However, my triangulated approach helped refine my analytical lens to see 21 authenticity not as a tool deployed toward a single goal but rather as a strategy to advance many goals. Qualitative Perspective I incorporate qualitative methods of gathering data including participant observation, fieldnotes, and interviewing for use in my rhetorical analysis. I am like other qualitative researchers in that I am assembling a picture from many fragments, which rhetoricians do as well.39 I also attend closely to "diverse forms and details of social life."40 The research approach that yields qualitative data is useful to me because it offers me the opportunity to incorporate the concept of presence into my analysis. Phaedra Pezzullo theorizes that being at a place- "being present"-changes the rhetorical dimensions to which a rhetorician can attend.41 Since I am interested in rhetoric that operates on a number of different levels (e.g., sight and sound as well as touch, smell, and feeling), qualitative methods of gathering artifacts are especially advantageous. Research Description I use rhetorical criticism, participant observation, and interviewing in concert to produce results that allow me to more fully-but probably never completely-understand the cultural practices of outdoor recreators and environmentalists. This triad of approaches/methods is especially appealing because it has internal checks to ensure that I am accountable to various participants. It also offers me the opportunity to provide suggestions for 22 organizations involved with environmentalists and outdoor recreators-for example, the National Park Service and other government agencies, outdoor retailers, and environmental movement organizers. Chapter Five contains a section devoted to suggestions for Zion National Park to more effectively communication with visitors. In this section, I describe my interview guide, my participant observation guide, my selection of rhetorical texts, and my methods of analysis. Interview Guide My interview guide was designed to allow me to identify rhetorical practices in outdoor recreation and confirm and problematize information gathered through textual analysis and participant observation. For a copy of my interview guide, see the appendices in Chapter Four. Specifically, the questions that I asked of my participants gave me additional artifacts to analyze rhetorically, as I looked for patterns and themes that explain how attitudes, behaviors, and discourses constitute a particular outdoor recreation reality. I used four kinds of interactions: structured online interviews, informant and respondent interviews, ethnographic interviews, and what I call participant conversations.42 In keeping with their various purposes and lengths, I utilized these interviews at different times to achieve different goals. For example, I started with online interviews to gauge my knowledge of outdoor recreation subcultures and refine my interview questions. Since I dealt with an unstable population comprised of visitors and park staff members, informant interviews were more difficult. However, it was 23 possible to interview certain members of the park staff as informants or gatekeepers. I accomplished the goals of informant interviews-to gain knowledge about "what the significant customs and rituals are and how they are done, which people exercise the real power"-even with a transitioning community because I entered the scene with quite a bit of insider knowledge. And I saw respondent interviews, which are used to clarify meanings and refine or complicate understandings, as the most useful form of in-depth interviewing because of the previous research I have conducted,43 my own field experiences (both as a researcher and not),44 and the possible variations of perspectives among my population. Third, I engaged most frequently in ethnographic interviews, which are short conversations a researcher has with participants in situ. Finally, the fourth kind of interaction is one even less formal than an ethnographic interview. Participant conversations involve interacting as a participant and using different senses to gather information that would not be available otherwise. I used these conversations to interact with people as a participant. This combination of interview styles helped me because it offered different techniques for different situations and allowed me an opportunity to tailor the interview guide to suit these different purposes. My interview guide was an evolving document, serving my needs as I gathered more knowledge instead of my serving it. Observation Guide In addition to interviews, I used participant observation as a means to bridge the epistemological gap between rhetorical criticism and interviewing. 24 While rhetorical criticism positions relies on the rhetorician's logic alone to interpret communication, interviewing assumes that participants' meanings are important. Participant observation utilizes the researcher's lens to directly observe participants' meaning-making processes. Conventional rhetorical criticism does not offer the opportunities to access material rhetoric; being in a place offers a different critical experience. Additionally, interviewing alone would have deprived me of necessary information to make claims about practices. Recording data through fieldnotes served to "strengthen and deepen" my experiences in the field.45 Participant observation brought the information gathered through online interviews, in-person interviews, and textual analysis together. This triangulated approach gave me a chance to make sophisticated claims about rhetoric that is currently un/under-examined. For example, participating in a hike offered the opportunity to examine not only the trail as a piece of rhetoric but also the practices of people on the trail as rhetorical. Neither of these artifacts is available to the rhetorician who relies solely on conventional means of gathering texts. Because authenticity is largely unstated in outdoor recreation discourses, I needed a number of ways of gaining information about it in this context. The notion that a construction such as authenticity can be embodied has been implicit in both rhetorical criticism and cultural studies. Observing this communication phenomenon in situ makes sense as a way to study it. Rhetorical Artifacts Although I consider the practices that I saw and heard vis-à-vis participant observation and interviewing rhetorical artifacts, I also attend to more 25 conventional rhetorical artifacts. I collected two kinds of conventional rhetorical artifacts: catalogues and maps. Critiquing the rhetoric of institutions, specifically outdoor retailers and the National Park Service, emphasizes the fluidity of the contexts in which rhetorical practices exist and make sense. To gather data to analyze the material rhetoric of hiking trails, I engaged in participant observation. I gathered photographs of trails, fieldnotes, and interviews walking the trails of Zion National Park. While this developed my analytical lens, it also provided unconventional artifacts for rhetorical criticism. Applying my rhetorical perspective to many artifacts complicates my understanding of the discourse around authenticity so that it became dynamic. I collected data at Zion National Park by camping from May 20, 2009 to June 20, 2009 in the park. During this time, I hiked most of the trails in the frontcountry (the exceptions include ones that require overnight camping) and a few in the backcountry. I took fieldnotes and transcribed interviews, which are available upon request from the author and also housed at Zion National Park. This change in method enhances analyses of rhetorical practices because rhetoricians can enrich their understanding of a theoretical area by attending to both artifacts and contexts. Chapters Preview My chapters are organized by artifact, each contributing to an overall picture of the rhetorical function of authenticity in outdoor recreation discourse. Therefore, part of my rhetorical lens is constructed through a theorizing of authenticity. Although, I spend time in each chapter addressing how authenticity 26 is constructed and employed, I conceptualize my last chapter as the one that will directly address this theoretical inquiry. Chapter Two In Chapter Two, I focus on the rhetoric of one outdoor recreation institution-outdoor retailers. The purpose of this chapter is to rhetorically analyze how outdoor retailers construct authentic versions of nature, people, and experiences. This chapter's artifacts are conventional ones. Through rhetorical analysis of marketing materials, specifically catalogues, I argue that retailers employ constructions of authentic nature and people to position themselves as members of an outdoor recreation subculture with connections to environmentalism. This claim to membership challenges theories of resistance and appropriation. Chapter Three National parks represent another kind of institutional outdoor recreation rhetoric in the United States, which I analyze in my third chapter. Different parks use different approaches to guiding their visitors through the park, which means that claims about the entire national park system are almost impossible to make. For example, at Zion National Park, the brochure makes suggestions on what to see and prioritize based on how much time one has in the park. By contrast, at Denali National Park, rangers decline to give suggestions to avoid having certain places more crowded than others. I will focus my claims on Zion National Park. 27 After spending a month there over the summer, I have recorded thirty-five pages of typed, single-spaced fieldnotes based on participant observation and took over fifty photographs. I focus on maps provided to visitors at the park entrance and online through a commercial website. I contend that through selection, maps discursively shape visitors' experiences in landscapes.46 However, people also physically shape landscapes, which is why I explain how specific trail crews practices cultivate a sense of authenticity while masking their cultivation. Chapter Four Chapter Four adds another layer to my interrogation of authenticity, moving to an examination of rhetorical practices. I suggest that rhetorical practices differ from rhetorical texts and performances in their embodied and mundane nature. Through participant observation and interviewing, I gathered rhetorical artifacts that differ from the institutional discourses of Chapters Two and Three. In addition to the fieldnotes I mentioned above, I have conducted and transcribed twenty in-person interviews that range from seven minutes to over an hour and seventy structured online interviews. I gathered no demographic data for the online interviews and recorded none for my in-person interviews because I do not want to make claims about correlations between demographic characteristics and subcultural practices. For my observations, I noticed that my participants varied in age, sex, experience level, and place of origin but were more homogenous in terms of race. In this chapter, I argue that rhetorical practices mark membership or nonmembership in an outdoor recreation subculture and 28 create authentic and inauthentic experiences. For example, some behaviors such as wearing appropriate footwear illustrate in-group practices and behaviors such as running down a steep trail demonstrate out-group performances. These behaviors emphasize the challenge national parks face in trying to make these places accessible with preserving them. Chapter Five Finally, Chapter Five more directly returns to the theoretical problem of authenticity as constructed through rhetoric. In that chapter, I articulate the rhetorical dynamics of outdoor recreation and their implications for consumerism, nature, and identity. I will return to the questions posed at the beginning of this chapter and synthesize the analyses of Chapters Two, Three, and Four. In addition, I discuss the implications that my research has for rhetorical theory and criticism as well as how it informs the theoretical conversations at the intersections of authenticity with consumerism, nature, and identity. Studying practices demonstrates how authenticity is produced, calling attention to the construction of contexts and processes of rhetoric. My critiques illuminate why considering rhetorical texts, rhetorical performances, and rhetorical practices together is better for understanding authenticity than considering any one of them singularly because it shows the interaction between layers of rhetorical construction. For example, each of my chapters address different aspects of authenticity in outdoor recreation, focusing on how consumerism, nature, and identity together form a tapestry of rhetorical authenticity. 29 I contend that emphasizing authenticity in criticism highlights interesting theoretical facets of consumer studies, nature studies, and identity studies. In consumer studies, I consider if companies can claim membership to social movements like environmentalism and extend the positive and negative consequences for packaging park experiences. I argue that commonly people conflate authenticity and naturalness in nature studies, which does not encourage people to challenge a single definition of nature. With regard to identity studies, I extend theories about appropriation, claiming that without authenticity, appropriation does not exist. I also theorize how social movements could deploy authenticity claims to further member participation. Then, I close with suggestions for the staff of Zion National Park. Endnotes 1. David Cook, A History of Narrative Film, 4th ed. (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2004), 100 and 362. 2. Carol Vogel and Solomon Moore, "Stolen Art by Warhol is Sought in California," The New York Times, September 12, 2009, http://www.nytimes.com /2009/09/13/us/13warhol.html?hpw. 3. Random House Webster's Unabridged Dictionary, 2nd ed., s.v. "authenticity." 4. Thomas Princen, "Consumption and its Externalities: Where Economy Meets Ecology," in Confronting Consumption, ed. Thomas Princen, Michael Maniates, and Ken Conca (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2002); John DeGraaf, David Wann, and Thomas Naylor, Affluenza: The All-Consuming Epidemic (San Francisco: Berrett-Kohler, 2005); Daniel Horowitz, The Anxieties of Affluence: Critiques of American Consumer Culture, 1939-1979 (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2004). 5. Cindy Patton, Cinematic Identity: Anatomy of a Problem Film (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007), 6. 30 6. I suggest that this is a common definition based on sources we encounter everyday such as books (e.g., On the Loose and Last Child in the Woods) and advertising as well as laws (e.g., the Wilderness Act). 7. Neil Evernden, The Social Creation of Nature (Baltimore: The John Hopkins University Press, 1992); Daniel R. White, Postmodern Ecology: Communication, Evolution, and Play (New York: State University of New York Press, 1998). 8. Kevin DeLuca, "Trains in the Wilderness: The Corporate Roots of Environmentalism," Rhetoric & Public Affairs 4, no. 4 (2001): 633-652. 9. Helga Dittmar, Consumer Culture, Identity, and Well-Being: The Search for the "Good Life" and the "Body Perfect" (Hove, England: Psychology Press, 2008). 10. My data suggest that on a most basic level outdoor recreation involves things that people do outside. The understanding that outdoor recreation can happen anywhere outdoors is attractive to people who wish to identify with this subculture but cannot drive distances to remove themselves from urban areas, to retailers who want to increase markets and sell gear to people who hike around cities, and to scholars who are interested in complicating static definitions of nature. However, for this project, I examine the constructed and interpellated communities of outdoor recreators that do things in areas where people do not live, such as national parks, state parks, and wilderness areas. Even if people do live there sometimes (e.g., rangers), I am concerned with outdoor recreation as a tourist practice of sorts. This particular kind of outdoor recreation differs from the kind done in urban areas, which is why people flock to areas that prevent most people from occupying them permanently. 11. Richard Louv, Last Child in the Woods: Saving Our Children from Nature-Deficit Disorder (Chapel Hill: Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill, 2006); Galen Cranz, The Politics of Park Design: A History of Urban Parks in America (Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press, 1982), 183-206; Ethan Carr, Wilderness By Design: Landscape Architecture and the National Park Service (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1998), 72. 12. Leon Anderson and Jimmy D. Taylor, "Standing Out while Fitting In: Serious Leisure Identities and Aligning Actions among Skydivers and Gun Collectors," Journal of Contemporary Ethnography 39, no. 1 (2010): 34-59. 13. Michel Foucault, Power, ed. James Faubion, trans. Robert Hurley et. al (New York: The New Press, 1994). 31 14. Theodor Adorno, "The Schema of Mass Culture," The Culture Industry: Selected Essays on Mass Culture, ed. J.M. Bernstein (London: Routledge, 2004); Louis Althusser, Essays on Ideology (London: Verso, 1984). 15. I say "most" because some scholars theorize authenticity and rhetoric in particular, grounding their essays in the literature of Heidegger or critical theory, for example. Susan Zickmund, "Deliberation, Phronesis, and Authenticity: Heidegger's Early Conception of Rhetoric," Philosophy and Rhetoric 40, no. 4 (2007): 406-415; Hanno Hardt, "Authenticity, Communication, and Critical Theory," Critical Studies in Mass Communication 10 (1993): 49-69. 16. Kembrew McLeod, "Authenticity within Hip-Hop and Other Cultures Threatened with Assimilation," Journal of Communication 49, no. 4 (1999): 134- 150; Todd Fraley, "Never Been a Front/ Never Been a Fraud/I got Natural Skill. . . : Hip-hop, Authenticity, and Whiteness," International Communication Association's Annual Conference, Dresden, Germany (October 2005); Theodore Matula, "Pow! To the People: The Make-Up's Reorganization of Punk Rhetoric," Popular Music and Society 30, no. 1 (2007): 19-38; Lindsay Calhoun, "‘Will the Real Slim Shady Please Stand Up?': Masking Whiteness, Encoding Hegemonic Masculinity in Eminem's Marshall Mathers LP," The Howard Journal of Communications 16 (2005): 267-294; Robin Means Coleman and Jasmine Cobb, "No Way of Seeing: Mainstreaming and Selling the Gaze of Homo-Thug Hip- Hop," Popular Communication 5, no. 2 (2007): 89-108; Janis Edwards and Amanda Leigh Brozana, "Gendering Anti-War Rhetoric: Cindy Sheehan's Symbolic Motherhood," Journal of the Northwest Communication Association 37 (2008): 78-102; Shawn J. Parry-Giles, "Political Authenticity, Television News, and Hillary Rodham Clinton," in Politics, Discourse, and American Society: New Agendas, ed. Roderick P. Hart and Bartholomew H. Sparrow (Lanham, Maryland: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2001), 211-227. 17. Stuart Price, "American mentality? Trauma, Imperialism and the Authentic Veteran in Mainstream Hollywood Narrative," Journal of Media Practice 6, no. 2 (2005): 83-91; Pavel Skopal, "‘The Adventure Continues on DVD' Franchise Movies as Home Video," Convergence: The International Journal of Research into New Media Technologies 13, no. 2 (2007): 185-198. 18. McLeod, "Authenticity within Hip-Hop"; Fraley, "Never Been a Front/ Never Been a Fraud/I got Natural Skill"; Calhoun, "‘Will the Real Slim Shady Please Stand Up?'"; Coleman and Cobb, "No Way of Seeing." 19. Dana Cloud, "The Materiality of Discourse as Oxymoron: A Challenge to Critical Rhetoric," Western Journal of Communication 58 (1994): 141-163. 20. Raymie McKerrow, "Critical Rhetoric: Theory and Praxis," Communication Monographs 56 (1989): 91-111; Michael Calvin McGee, "Text, 32 Context, and the Fragmentation of Contemporary Culture," Western Journal of Speech Communication 54 (1990): 274-289; Ronald Walter Greene, "Another Materialist Rhetoric," Critical Studies in Mass Communication 15 (1998): 21-41. 21. Carole Blair, "Contemporary U.S. Memorial Sites as Exemplars of Rhetoric's Materiality," in Rhetorical Bodies, ed. Jack Selzer and Sharon Crowley (The University of Wisconsin Press, 1999), 16-57; Greg Dickinson, "Joe's Rhetoric: Finding Authenticity at Starbucks," Rhetoric Society Quarterly 32, no. 4 (2002): 5-27; Rich Rogers, "Overcoming the Objectification of Nature in Constitutive Theories: Toward a Transhuman, Materialist Theory of Communication," Western Journal of Communication 62, no. 3 (1998): 244-272. 22. Scott Lukas, "The Themed Space: Locating Culture, Nation, and Self" in The Themed Space: Locating Culture, Nation, and Self, ed. Scott Lukas (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2007), 1-22. 23. Rob Walker, Buying In: The Secret Dialogue between What We Buy and Who We Are (New York: Random House, 2008); Joseph Heath and Andrew Potter, Nation of Rebels: Why Counterculture Became Consumer Culture (New York: HarperCollins Publishers, 2004); Thomas Frank and Matt Weiland, eds., Commodify Your Dissent: The Business of Culture in the New Gilded Age (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1997). 24. Anne Elizabeth Moore, Unmarketable: Brandalism, Copyfighting, Mocketing, and the Erosion of Integrity (New York: The New Press, 2007). 25. Frank Durham and Sheri Hancock, "Selling the Sun: Mediascapes, Ideoscapes and the Globalized Contest over the Greening of BP," International Communication Association's Annual Conference, San Diego, USA (2003). 26. Greg Owsley, "Why Brand Veneer Must Reflect a Real Soul," Advertising Age 78, no. 26 (2007): 22-23. 27. Dickinson, "Joe's Rhetoric," 5-27. 28. Terry Russell and Renny Russell, On the Loose (San Francisco: Sierra Club and New York: Ballantine Books, 1971), 9. 29. Evernden, The Social Creation of Nature; White, Postmodern Ecology. 30. Dave Foreman, "Wilderness Areas for Real," in The Great New Wilderness Debate, ed. J. Baird Callicott and Michael P. Nelson (Athens, GA: The University of Georgia Press, 1998), 395-407. 33 31. Kevin DeLuca, "A Wilderness Environmentalism Manifesto: Contesting the Infinite Self-Absorption of Humans," in Environmental Justice and Environmentalism: The Social Justice Challenge to the Environmental Movement ed. Ronald Sandler and Phaedra Pezzullo (Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press, 2007), 27-56. 32. Andrew Szasz, Ecopopulism: Toxic Waste and the Movement for Environmental Justice (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1994); Phaedra Pezzullo, Toxic Tourism: Rhetorics of Pollution, Travel, and Environmental Justice (Tuscaloosa: The University of Alabama Press, 2007); Danielle Endres, "The Rhetoric of Nuclear Colonialism: Rhetorical Exclusion of American Indian Arguments in the Yucca Mountain Nuclear Waste Siting Decision," Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies 6, no. 1 (2009): 39-60. 33. McLeod, "Authenticity within Hip-Hop"; Fraley, "Never Been a Front/ Never Been a Fraud/I got Natural Skill"; Matula, "Pow! To the People"; Calhoun, "‘Will the Real Slim Shady Please Stand Up?'"; Coleman and Cobb, "No Way of Seeing." John Jackson, Jr., Real Black: Adventures in Racial Sincerity (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2005); Vincent Cheng, Inauthentic: The Anxiety Over Culture and Identity (New Brunswick, New Jersey: Rutgers University Press, 2004); E. Patrick Johnson, Appropriating Blackness: Performance and the Politics of Authenticity (Durham: Duke University Press, 2003). 34. Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York: Routledge, 1999); Helene A. Shugart and Catherine Egley Waggoner, "A Bit Much: Spectacle as Discursive Resistance," Feminist Media Studies 5, no. 1 (2005): 65-81. 35. Universalizing essentialism is dangerous. However, as Diana Fuss contends, essentialism is also found at the foundation of social constructionism and can be of use politically, as in what is sometimes called "strategic essentialism." Diana Fuss, Essentially Speaking: Feminism, Nature, and Difference (New York: Routledge, 1989). 36. Anderson and Taylor, "Standing Out while Fitting In," 34-59. 37. Norman K. Denzin and Yvonna S. Lincoln, "Introduction: The Discipline and Practice of Qualitative Research," in Handbook of Qualitative Research, ed. Norman K. Denzin and Yvonna S. Lincoln (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications, 2005), 4-6. 38. For example, see Karl Marx, Capital volume 1, trans. Eden and Cedar Paul (London: J.M. Dent & Sons Ltd., 1946); Max Horkheimer, "The End of Reason," in The Essential Frankfurt School Reader, ed. Andrew Arato and Eike Gebhardt (New York: Continuum, 1982), 26-48; Adorno, "The Schema of Mass 34 Culture"; Walter Benjamin, "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction," in The Critical Tradition, 2nd ed., ed. David Richter (St. Martins Press, 1998), 1106-1122; Siegfried Kracauer, "The Mass Ornament," in The Mass Ornament: Weimar Essays, ed. and trans. Thomas Levin (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995), 75-86; Althusser, Essays on Ideology. I also extend past this perspective to include some poststructuralist thinkers. Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, vol. 1 (New York: Vintage Books, 1990); Pierre Bourdieu, The Logic of Practice (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1990); Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, trans. Steve Rendall (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984). 39. I am not doing an ethnography because I am not spending an extended period of time in a place. Although "the term ethnography does not imply any single method or type of data analysis, . . . participant observation is a strategy that nearly all ethnographers employ" (Thomas Lindlof and Brian Taylor, Qualitative Communication Research Methods, 2nd ed. (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 2002), 16). This is why I draw from ethnography literature at times. However, I am not assessing a specific culture holistically. Consequently, I identify with the broader term of qualitative researcher. 40. Lindlof and Taylor, Qualitative Communication Research Methods, 19. 41. Pezzullo, Toxic Tourism, 9-10. Carole Blair also discusses this idea, calling it "being there." Carole Blair, "Reflections on Criticism and Bodies: Parables from Public Places," Western Journal of Communication 65, no. 3 (2001): 271-294. 42. Lindlof and Taylor, Qualitative Communication Research Methods, 176-179. 43. I conducted a structured online interview to gauge my understanding of recreation practices with others' understandings before beginning my research at Zion National Park. It was open-ended and short (10 questions). Additionally, I would not have been able to conduct 70 even short interviews in the time it took me to distribute the interviews. I found this to be a useful starting place and it offered some feedback about what questions would be most helpful in achieving my goals. 44. Before I began this project, I was part of a field crew that eradicated illegal roads and restored areas in the Yuha Desert, which is in south central California. During this time-about eight months-I learned most of what I know about outdoor recreation. Since then, I have maintained relationships with many people from this subculture and understand at least that there are multiple perspectives and types of recreators. As a researcher, my experience is confined to a weekend trip to cultivate a relationship with park staff at Zion National Park, 35 hiking trails that I rhetorically analyzed for a semester project, and a month-long research experience. 45. Robert Emerson, Rachel Fretz, and Linda Shaw, Writing Ethnographic Fieldnotes (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), xv. 46. I use the term "visitors" throughout my dissertation because it is general and encompasses all people who visit national parks even if they are not participants in my study. CHAPTER TWO APPROPRIATING RESISTANCE? CONSTRUCTIONS OF RESISTANCE AND MAKING DO IN OUTDOOR RECREATION CATALOGUES From olive green to tinted ice, from canvas to nylon, from compass to GPS, from, "I'm probably going to die," to "I'm hoping the cell phone works," outdoor recreation has changed in no small part because products and technology have changed. Authenticity has historically been a subtext in outdoor recreation and this subtext has been connected with not only one's abilities but also with the gear that one chooses.1 In this chapter, I engage in rhetorical analysis of outdoor retailer discourses to ascertain the ways that retailers construct authenticity and the implications that such constructions have for resistance. I argue that outdoor retailers, such as REI and Patagonia, have appropriated some of the historically resistant sensibilities of the outdoor recreation subculture to construct authentic visions of nature, people, and experiences that will appeal to certain consumers and sell more products. In this chapter, I conceptualize outdoor recreation as a fluid subculture that has been more precisely defined and expanded into a "market" by contemporary outdoor retailers than by members themselves. Drawing from theories postulated by scholars who study subculture, authenticity, and consumerism, I contend that the 37 constructions of authenticity that retailers build rely on environmentalism and "making do" aspects of an outdoor recreator identity. I also suggest that outdoor retailers use specific strategies to construct what counts as authenticity in outdoor recreation and then offer that construction for sale. Such appeals shift the nature of resistance as well as ideas about what constitutes "making do" so that environmentalism itself is changed to be at once more accepted and mainstreamed but also more connected with consumerism. Outdoor Recreation as a Resistant Subculture In this section, I demonstrate how the literature about subcultures, authenticity, and consumerism has excluded examination of outdoor recreation. Furthermore, I contend that outdoor recreation, as conceived of historically, had sensibilities commensurate with environmentalism. Like other subcultures and subgroups,2 marketing and consumerism have appropriated some tenets for the purposes of increasing profits. Beginning with a discussion of how and why this happens among subcultures, I establish an appropriation framework through which I will articulate outdoor recreation. Appropriating Resistance Resistance to mainstream social values often manifests in clothing (e.g., suspenders or boots), products (e.g., safety pins or a certain brand of beer), and behaviors (e.g., creating street art or graffiti, taking drugs [or not], or reading certain publications).3 The clothing and products become symbols that begin to 38 mean "resistance" and identify the wearers as different from what they consider to be "mainstream."4 Stores such as Hot Topic commodify subcultures, at once increasing their visibility and undermining that "difference from mainstream," which is why concerns about the authenticity of products from such stores emerge. Communicating authenticity, which is assumed to represent an essential self, and resistance through outward appearance creates some complications in this appropriation equation. Appropriation is dependent on nonmembers taking the tenets or values implied in products and using these symbols for their own ends. Assuming that retailers-sometimes represented through a more totalizing term "mainstream culture"-appropriate symbols of resistance assumes that they are necessarily not part of the movements. This is troublesome, especially in outdoor recreation, because some stores undoubtedly would consider themselves (and are considered by their customers) to be representatives of the movement rather than appropriators. The concept of appropriation is dependent on authenticity, that is, the authenticity of some members and the fakeness of nonmembers. Theorizing authenticity in terms of resistance complicates understandings of appropriation and identity, particularly with regard to subcultures. In punk and hip-hop subcultures, for example, people alter mainstream products to show their dissent and demonstrate their subculture membership. Punks took mass produced goods like safety pins and made them into symbols of their resistance of mass-produced culture.5 Hip-hop artists took the logos from many products and made clothing with new meanings of self-empowerment out 39 of them.6 Both of these actions show how subcultures can appropriate the stuff of mainstream society and turn it into symbols of resistance. This strategy involves Michel de Certeau's concept of "making do." He explains that oppressed groups of people, "Indians" in his example, "made something else out of the laws, practices, and representations that were imposed on them." Consuming goods, symbols, and norms "maintained their difference in the very space that the occupier was organizing."7 Such practices ensure cultural survival by allowing the subculture to maintain values and boundaries within a dominant system while also seizing power at key moments. In the face of a dominant cultural paradigm, resistive subcultures must find ways to continue to privilege the beliefs and attitudes that make them different. By transforming pieces of a dominant culture into things that have new meanings, members of subcultures can empower themselves. The meanings of subcultural items are dynamic rather than static; once these products become a part of society, they take on a complex set of meanings. Then, of course, retailers reproduce the resisted use of subculture artifacts and practices and sell them back to people in the resistance movement or people who what to look as if they are part of the culture. For example, a website called Urban Counterfeiters documents a few designs that it argues Urban Outfitters has lifted from small-time designers. The small-time designers in this case represent an artistic resistance movement whose symbols represent independence from large corporations.8 Under these circumstances, authenticity becomes important to subcultures because it is a strategy of maintaining difference that helps distinguish 40 members and define identities. When subculture-defining cultural materials- such as relabeled clothing-are mass-produced, authenticity becomes scarce and its value increases. Mass production undermines claims of authenticity. Therefore, the authentic becomes something difficult to accomplish or find. For example, in an era of mass production of subcultural artifacts, punk subcultures may cease to value studded belts because they can be bought at Hot Topic or even Macy's. However, the worn, distressed-looking studded belt that someone bought at a thrift store may have added value because it was not bought at a mainstream store, there were not twenty identical versions, and it took some time for the wearer to find it. The tension between identifying what or who is authentic and maintaining subculture boundaries causes some scholars to question what authenticity is. People sometimes identify the authentic by calling attention to the negative: the fake or inauthentic. For example, Richard Todd questions his own disdain for clothing with logos on it, which he perceives as inauthentic in its overt promotion of a particular brand. He is at once calling attention to what he perceives to be the falseness of mass consumerism and brand promotion while challenging his own perceptions of the real by examining his reactions. He considers that people who buy clothing with large logos might be in on a "postmodern joke," utilizing their savvy consumer skills to ironically undermine the brand but ultimately argues that buying such clothing is consumerism perpetuating itself.9 Critical of such perpetuation, Anne Elizabeth Moore explicates the lure for artists to sell their art to corporations so that they can turn a profit. She questions the line that she 41 herself walks when she agreed to run a zine workshop for Starbucks. On the one hand, she gets paid for art; on the other, she gets paid by a global corporation. Calling attention to what is fake assumes a solid, straight, and narrow demarcation between authentic and inauthentic. However, these attempts to make the fake salient call attention only to the constructedness and slipperiness of authenticity. Instead of finding a clear boundary between the real and the fake, these authors find that the gray area between dominates. In attempting to define authenticity, these scholars look to what is inauthentic. But they also complicate matters by revealing the inconsistencies in their own performances, preferences, and identities. The blurry nature of authenticity makes resistance more difficult (and some may argue impossible). A subgroup, for example bike messengers, can elect to drink a beer like PBR because it does not advertise much at all, which is perceived to be resistant to consumerism. However, Rob Walker suggests that PBR adopts a different marketing style by not advertising but still embraces the capitalist production model by outsourcing all of its brewing. He states, "PBR's blue-collar, honest-workingman, vaguely anticapitalist image-the image attached to it by consumers-is a sham. You really couldn't do much worse in picking a symbol of resistance to phony branding."10 The ironic part of the PBR example is that PBR never claimed or built this image for itself; consumers did. PBR did nothing, of course, to counter such an image. Therefore, even claiming that mainstream society appropriates subcultural sensibilities is messy. Authenticity, resistance, and appropriation in any subculture are subject to the 42 behaviors and beliefs of those in that subculture as well as attempts to capitalize on those behaviors and beliefs. Resistance Through Outdoor Recreation I argue that outdoor recreation is a resistant subculture that has not been considered in such terms before by scholars focused on authenticity. As with many subcultures, outdoor recreation has different interest levels, priorities, and skill levels. Among outdoor recreators and outdoor retailers several groups of outdoor recreators exist: car campers, backpackers, glampers,11 and urban recreators.12 Car campers include various skill and interest levels and are the same as tent campers. These are people who drive vehicles to camp sites, set up tents and other equipment, and go on day hikes.13 Backpackers carry everything they need with them in backpacks and hike to camping spots. Glampers are car campers-sometimes mobile home campers-who invest in a lot more gear than car campers or backpackers to cushion the experience of outdoor recreation.14 Glamping can describe range of activities from a preassembled campsite with the basics (e.g., tents, sleeping bags, stoves and cook wear, etc.) to "camping" in the sense applicable to well-to-do explorers in the early 1900s (e.g., large canvas tents, beds, lights, carpets, chairs, and someone else to cook meals). Urban recreators hike, bike, and climb, also known as "buildering,"15 around urban areas. With these discrete categories and a nebulous "scene," unifying goals that can be appropriated are difficult to determine. However, I argue that historical and 43 contemporary practices of outdoor recreation connect most of these people with environmentalist sensibilities. Examining the history of outdoor recreation shows that the first outdoor recreators in the United States were aligned with proenvironmental attitudes. Significantly, this positioned them as resistant to the mainstream culture that focused on battling against nature or using it for resources (not much different from dominant contemporary perspectives16). For example, Henry David Thoreau more or less rejected the dominant culture in which he grew up-taking a "two-year sojourn" at 27 from "his family's pencil business and built a cabin on the shores of Walden Pond"17-and suggested that walking connected one with nature.18 David Wescott explains that a "traditional" (meaning with little technology) approach to camping is a way for many people to "reconnect . . . with themselves and the earth."19 The Wilderness Society also sought to connect people with nature through outdoor recreation for the purposes of increasing the amount of land preserved.20 As a result of their efforts, environmentalist sensibilities did become more popular even if they still allowed some less-than-pure environmental policies such as mining and lumbering in wilderness areas.21 When the National Forest Service wanted to show people that they did more than collect timber, they launched a campaign to attract recreators.22 And technological developments further mainstreamed outdoor recreating and environmental sensibilities because more people were getting involved without as much effort.23 This moment represents the beginning of the congealing of outdoor recreation as a subgroup. Quality 44 equipment is an investment, but after buying it, camping became an inexpensive alternative to other kinds of vacations. After decades of everyday people making do "with a tent that would keep [them] fairly dry, a pan that wouldn't burn [their] flapjacks, and a bit of road, trail, or stream to separate them from the masses,"24 retailers began to realize that they could make money in outdoor recreation products. In other words, historically the sensibility of outdoor recreation was to make and invest in what was needed, and then make do with that. This is an idea that has changed very much in more recent decades. With an increase in interest in outdoor recreation, retailers recognize the potential to sell a much broader variety of products to a much broader variety of people. Wescott laments, "as camping became a more democratic pastime, those who camped and those who knew wilderness living became more and more estranged."25 Now, companies in addition to recreators define what it means to be an outdoor recreator. As environmentalism has moved from radical to chic,26 companies have tried to milk this trend by developing a loosely defined group of products that resonate as natural, environmental, or green-and outdoor recreation, with its historical connection to environmentalism, is not excluded. Anne Marie Todd contends that "environmentally minded businesses" have cultivated a "unique environmental aesthetic" to attract new consumers.27 I suggest that this aesthetic is at work among outdoor retailers. The buyer at a local ski and bike shop told me that companies that used to make and sell "hard goods" (e.g., climbing ropes, 45 carabiners, or ice axes) started manufacturing "soft goods" as well (e.g., T-shirts and lounge pants). Prana is a good example. Prana used to make only mountain climbing gear but has expanded out to make several lines of clothes-such as its yoga line-that have little to do with climbing. My informant at the shop explained that people want to look like they do yoga even if they do not. The comfort and style of such outdoor recreation clothing is appealing to customers whether or not they actually practice yoga. Although it has a reputation as a climbing company still, that is less part of its brand identity than the yoga clothes it manufactures. The comments on a blog, All Climbing, indicate this. One commenter assumed that Prana started as a yoga clothes company that expanded to include climbing gear. After being corrected, (s)he stated, "I guess my point really is that I suspect that the real money is in selling yoga gear and not climbing gear." Tom Markiewicz, the blog author, agreed.28 Prana is an example of a company that followed the consumer trend interested in stylish clothes, couched in an outdoor recreation logic of comfort. It capitalizes on an ideology of simplicity represented through the "unique environmental aesthetic" motif. The "dirt bagger" look (something that logically would be impossible to buy), another line of clothing highlighted on the Prana website, and the yoga look are the things that sells these clothes.29 In developing an aesthetic associated with "natural" products and practices, outdoor retailers rely on a symbolic representation of historical connections between outdoor recreation and environmentalism. To summarize, it is the look of the clothing and 46 not the ethics behind it that determines if Prana is a success or not, an idea that is antithetical to assumptions of authenticity in activities and clothing. Outdoor recreation may have a different underlying ideology than punk and hip hop fashion, but the cultural appropriation that happens within and to these subcultures is similar. Outdoor recreators of 100 years ago shared an organizing logic that distinguished them from most people of that era who did not care to explore woods, deserts, or rivers. People who did not engage in these activities did not desire to look as if they did. However, now the resistance (understood to some extent as simple difference) that was/is associated with outdoor recreation as well as punk and hip hop, for example, is marketed as authenticity. Although they do not discuss this move to include authenticity in terms of outdoor recreation, Thomas Frank, Matt Weiland, and Ann Elizabeth Moore bemoan the loss of authenticity and suggest ways of combating mass consumerism.30 Rob Walker explores how illusions of authenticity supported by branding impacts identity and involves subcultures that typically consider themselves antiestablishment. What these authors demonstrate is that "resistance" itself-as manifest through punk, hip hop, crafting, dirt bagging, or outdoor recreation-has been used as a sort of shorthand to communicate authenticity. Authenticity, in turn, has another definition, one associated with those things different from the mainstream. Companies encourage people to be "unique" by setting themselves apart from everyone else and valuing a "simple" way of life.31 I contend that these are appeals to authenticity. They are a rejection of mass-produced culture and a superficial embracing of "realness." In struggling to sell 47 more products, companies have weaved identities into their appeals. Simply put, scholarly discussions about a loss of authenticity and desires for authenticity apply to not only punk and hip hop subcultures but also outdoor recreation ones. Another difference is that authenticity in the context of outdoor recreation is associated with nature, giving in a feeling of being more authentic because of its perceived lack of human involvement, as I discuss more extensively in Chapters Three and Four. I contend in the next section that in order to sell products, outdoor retailers construct authentic nature, people, and experiences. Constructing Nature, People, and Experiences For this chapter, I analyzed a variety of catalogues. I examined catalogues from three retail stores: Wasatch Touring (one), REI (seventeen), and Kirkham's (four). Analyzing catalogues offers me the opportunity to closely examine the photographs, language, and context of outdoor recreation product marketing. I included these catalogs based on access and variety. In terms of access, these catalogues were readily available. REI's are the easiest for me to obtain because the company mailed them to me. However, I wanted to know if and how strategies of authenticity production existed on the local level as well, which is why I included two local companies: Kirkham's and Wasatch Touring. Third, I included analysis of gear manufacturer catalogues from Patagonia (two), Canada Goose (one), Icebreaker (two), and Snow Peak (one). I picked up both the Patagonia and Icebreaker catalogs at stores. At the Outdoor Retailer Show in Salt Lake City, I visited with some manufacturers of which I had not heard and 48 requested their catalogues: Canada Goose and Snow Peak. I acknowledge that I am making a somewhat false distinction between manufacturers and stores because these entities cross-over.32 However, I am making the distinction anyway because, in most cases, the manufacturer only sells its products through a catalogue, online, or in a store it does not own. I mention this only to clarify my artifacts and demonstrate the variety I have included here. This variety allows me to develop a clear sense of the patterns in contemporary U.S. catalogues. These layers of meaning in retailer discourses hang together loosely and reveal subtle rather than heavy-handed authenticity claims. To enrich my analysis I also critiqued my fieldnotes from participant observation at two locations: (1) a local Salt Lake City outdoor recreation store that specializes in bikes, skis (all kinds except Alpine), and kayaks; and (2) an international company's outlet store in Salt Lake City. I selected these two because they represent different spectrums of the outdoor recreation world. Although both make connections between their brand and environmentalism, the locally-based store caters to a backcountry recreation crowd by selling among other things kayaks, bikes and skis, and the international company sells mostly apparel. Because I am interested in outdoor recreation as a subculture, I did not examine the rhetoric of a place like WalMart. Even though many people buy outdoor recreation gear there, WalMart does not build its brand on and develop stores devoted specifically to outdoor recreation. Focusing on companies branded as outdoor recreation suppliers allows me to make claims about outdoor recreation as a subculture. 49 I suggest that outdoor retailers' efforts to define and sell authenticity in their products construct ideas about nature, people, and experiences. Strategies to do this overlap and conflict with one another, revealing the messiness of authenticity. Before I articulate the strategies, I must explain that these tensions arise from different articulations of authenticity. In attempting to construct authentic nature, people, and experiences, these companies evoke forms of authenticity that resonate culturally. First, I contend that appeals to resistance speak to contemporary society's desire for uniqueness and difference. Second, I argue that appeals to "making do" offer customers feelings of ruggedness often absent in today's world. Although these companies evoke other kinds of authenticity-for example, that based on a celebrity athlete using the product-I focus my attentions on these two articulations because these are the ones that appropriate some tenets of outdoor recreation subculture and change the nature of resistance. Authenticity in this chapter operates on two levels. On the first, retailers try to construct themselves and their products as the authentic aspects of outdoor recreation. On the next level, to do this, they also construct what counts as nature, what makes people real, and what it means to have authentic experiences in nature. Therefore, my three subcategories of nature, people, and experiences are ways that the retailers construct what these things mean always already in the service of making the retailers and their products perceived to be authentic. As they construct nature, people, and experiences in relation to their products, they draw on the tenets of resistance and making do that have been appropriated from 50 the subculture (but are also being redefined). These appeals to authenticity interpellate-or call forth-audiences who desire the implicit uniqueness of resistance and implicit ruggedness of making do. In calling forth audiences, outdoor retailers construct authentic nature, people, and experiences. Constructing Authentic Nature When the outdoor recreation retailers that I examined construct a conception of authentic nature in relation to their outdoor recreation products, they typically evoke the notions of both making do and resistance. Outdoor retailers do this by constructing authenticity in an ideal sense. That is, when nature is the focal point of a message-when consumers get messages about nature-retailers portray nature in its ideal form as huge, remote, and unpeopled. This view of nature is a common one that contrasts nature with culture.33 Although the word nature might call forth this kind of image in our minds about what nature is, scholars such as Kevin DeLuca trace the positive and negative consequences (e.g., setting aside protected areas of land and clearing indigenous people off of land intended for protection) of this ideal form of nature.34 This constructs a view of nature that is authentic in that it resonates with cultural scripts about where outdoor recreation is assumed to take place. It also implies the type of person who ventures into the ideal form of nature. Making nature seem huge and people or products seem small communicates outdoor recreators' level of commitment to the subculture, distinguishing the recreator from the rest of society and replicating a feeling of uniqueness and thus authenticity. Constructing 51 nature as remote, enormous, and challenging asserts that people who venture into nature are unique. Therefore, people who buy products that are designed to help them venture into ideal nature are unique. In this conception, both ideal nature and uniqueness are equated with authenticity. This strategy is pervasive, and I have selected examples from the catalogue covers, their inside pages, and a product tag that demonstrate it. The covers of the catalogues from Wasatch Touring, Kirkham's, REI both from 1973 and 2007, Patagonia in 1991, and Snow Peak all feature photographs of mountains, lakes, or canyons with comparatively tiny or nonexistent people or products in the photos. Neither Canada Goose nor Icebreaker follow this convention on their covers, however they do in photographs on the inside. Canada Goose features a photograph of a dark mountain in the background of a picture of a lake. The person and raft in the middle of the photo are about an eighth of the size of the mountain. The Icebreaker catalogue has a double-page spread of a cliff in the foreground on the right side of the photo, while a person paraglides over a vast tan landscape. The tag of a Patagonia Synchilla vest features a gray-scale waterfall with a tiny human standing next to it. In all the photographs of nature where people or products are small or nonexistent, what is implicitly stressed is the lack of people (or the insignificance of people in relation to nature). Showing the expansiveness of nature necessitates a lack of people because, by common definition, what is natural is not peopled. When people recreate outdoors, often, though not always, they want to get away from people they do not know. In my interviews, both online and in-person, this 52 was a common theme-people want to get away from other people when they recreate, but they also want to spend time with family and friends. These photographs deliver on this expectation by depicting nature that extends for miles and miles without other people visible. The beauty of nature also often depends upon a lack of people. Natural beauty when referring to nature-and women, interestingly-means beauty without human interference or effort.35 This contemporary strategy privileges a view of nature as expansive and beautiful and connects the companies that use it to mainstream environmentalism's historical agenda. That is, mainstream environmentalism sought to preserve "undisturbed" wilderness. Therefore, evoking these historical tenets through a contemporary photographic strategy perpetuates a particular conception of authentic nature because it reminds audiences of what nature is "supposed to" be. I suggest that this style of photography replicates a nature photography convention, which was born out of a desire to depict nature "as it really is."36 Of course, "as it really is" is itself a construction, but under this convention that meant using a sharp focus and establishing distance to gain a perspective of enormity. Group f.64, named for "one of the smallest apertures available on large-format cameras" of the 1930s, was comprised of photographers who rejected "the hand-manipulated, soft-focus imagery of" other schools of photography in the 1920s. "Use of the f.64 aperture resulted in images of great clarity and depth of field." This "aesthetic was drawn from the idea that a physical response to nature was important."37 Nature photographers set out to connect with audiences by 53 presenting what they would consider unadulterated photographs, hoping that seeing the vastness of the land, the danger of the wilderness, in short, the sublime, would evoke a visceral reaction. The use of this style of nature photography in retailer discourses supports the historical connection of outdoor recreation with environmentalism. In other words, by replicating the photographic conventions that made some lawmakers want to preserve large tracts of land, these retailers align themselves with these implicit environmental values.38 However, this style of photography can also be problematic because it upholds the ideal standard of nature. In attempting to portray nature without the photographic conventions of the time (e.g., soft focus), this group actually constructed a contemporary ideal of nature, extending the bucolic paintings of earlier eras.39 Rebecca Solnit compares nature photography (equivalent to that depicted on nature calendars) to "pinup girl" calendars. She states, "The pinup girls and waterfalls in these calendars have some curious things in common, not least among them a highly defined aesthetic that narrows down the categories to some very specific subspecies and representational styles."40 The result, then, of attempting to portray nature in a more authentic way-that is, without altering the film by hand or adjusting the focus to soften the image-is a limited view of nature that implies other kinds of nature are not authentic. Solnit argues, "The image of a virgin wilderness legitimizes and relieves the images of a ravaged earth."41 Her point is that photography that portrays an ideal form of nature justifies the destruction of less-than-ideal forms of nature-a practice with which the environmental justice movement has taken issue42-and 54 creates an opportunity to ignore environmental degradation in less-than-ideal natures. Although this type of photography is useful for protecting land, it also creates a misperception of where nature is, who lives on it, and what we should do about it.43 Yet, despite the photographic convention of nature without people, the retailer products catalogues do include people. Except for a Patagonia cover with no human or product on it, all the rest have a small reminder of the purpose of the catalogue: to sell products that people can use in nature. Showing people encourages a particular view of action as occurring in a remote wilderness and the self as an adventurer regardless of activity or experience level. The people in these pictures also function as reference points to demonstrate the largeness of nature. Finally, they communicate a perspective about nature and humans' role within this context: that humans are small. This is an environmental message about how we are not the most important beings, nature is the focus or should be the focus in outdoor recreation. In depicting nature as huge and people and products as small, outdoor retailers create two kinds of authenticity appeals. The first cultivates a sense of resistance in that it portrays nature, rather than humans, as the focus. In the anthropocentric world in which we live, humans are most often the focus of discourse.44 However, in countering this trend, outdoor retailers highlight nature and align themselves with environmentalist sensibilities such as reverence for people-less nature. The second form of authenticity at work is the interpellation of audience members. By showing people and products as small, the challenge of 55 making do in the "great outdoors" seems a bit ominous. In opposition to contemporary U.S. advertisements for trucks, for example, that often show humans' ability to conquer nature, these photographs suggest that people who recreate in nature must have a certain stamina or desire for contest.45 Because the focus of these photographs is not the person, or even the product for sale, nature becomes the focus. The person matters only enough to reinforce the beauty, the otherwise "emptiness," and the size of the places emphasized. Authenticity in this realm is made to feel more real because it refers to an assumed prediscursive material reality-nature. In other words, by constructing an image of something presumably unchangeable, retailers use authenticity in ways that politicians, hip-hop and punk artists, and antique enthusiasts cannot. They construct an authenticity that feels more real than other authenticity claims. Interestingly, this depiction of people is not sustained throughout the catalogues. Although the covers overwhelmingly adhere to this rhetorical strategy, pages inside the catalogues construct different kinds of authentic people. Constructing Authentic People Frequently, constructions of authentic people invite the consumer to think of him/herself as the person in the advertisement. In this section, I discuss how outdoor retailers imply making do and resistance through two specific rhetorical strategies that pertain to people: deobjectifying models and earning "trail cred." These constructions of "real" people create characters who meet audience expectations and with whom audiences can identify. In the first strategy, retailers 56 portray people as imperfect, encouraging audiences to see them not as objects but as recreators. As imperfect recreators, people must make do in the outdoor recreation situations they encounter. Products help people do that. The second strategy, earning "trail cred," communicates both a sense of making do and resistance by explaining companies' histories. In connecting the company to a history, retailers often discuss their local or regional beginnings, which contrast, in some cases, directly with the current nature of the company. The sense of making do and resistance depend on audiences believing, at least in part, the stories of recreators and company founders bucking trends, blazing trails, and surviving in an environments that care nothing for them. Deobjectifying People Outdoor retailers deobjectify people-that is, retailers construct people as people rather than objects on which to hang clothes-to make them seem real to audiences. I will not argue that people in catalogues are not objects; however, I use the term "deobjectify" to mean that retailers would like audiences to believe the people in their ads are "real" recreators in "real" situations as opposed to models. Therefore, strategies of deobjectification may still render people objects, but such strategies aim to persuade audiences of the realness of the people using outdoor recreation products. "Real" in this rhetorical strategy contrasts with someone staged or fake. To accomplish this, retailers use the strategy of naming their models. 57 Naming people. Retailers use real names to not only imply that real people use their products, but also to tap into the resistive nature of these people. The construction of real people in Patagonia's (2006-2007) catalogues involves giving the names of people in the photos. It features Kina Pickett, a professional skier, skiing in Wyoming; Amy Rasic in California dressing after having a dip in a hot spring while skiing; biologist Heather Augustin in British Columbia; and Chris Figenshau and Josh Langdon at Jackson Hole.46 These people become real through naming instead of acting merely as anonymous objects on which clothes are arranged. The realness of the people makes thoughts of resistance and making do possible. Patagonia suggests that when Chris Figenshau and Josh Langdon trek across the side of a mountain to pick their way down, they demonstrate the possibility to resist "mainstream" forms of recreation such as watching TV, walking the dog, going shopping, or riding a roller coaster. Moreover, when Heather Augustin and Kina Pickett, for example, wear Patagonia's clothes in the backcountry, they show that work does not always happen in an office. By resisting the type of work that most people do, these real people sell Patagonia's claims of authenticity. In other words, the deobjectification of these people illustrate that resistance to mainstream society is possible even today. Patagonia depends on these constructions of real people to communicate that its products are authentic. More significantly, Patagonia takes the focus off of its products and places it on the people doing outdoor recreation. Therefore, just as in the case of constructing authentic nature, Patagonia attempts to sell an image of authenticity, associated with people in this case, as its brand. 58 Canada Goose also utilizes the strategy of naming for a man who appears in many of the photographs in their catalog, "Mitch Mitchell, Canadian Ranger and Goose Person." Canada Goose privileges a gloomy view of nature, one that poses risks for humans who try to contend with it. In many of the photographs, nature looks vast and dark because skies of endless, thick clouds gather overhead. The text uses words such as "punishing" and "mind-numbing" to characterize nature.47 Throughout the catalogue, the company presents its jackets as the necessary means for making do in tough situations like at an arctic research center or on a four-wheeler patrolling an area. Mitch Mitchell stands in for those professionals who need gear that is reliable all of the time. In one way, he makes do because the circumstances are so harsh. But in another sense, he has the best gear, which negates the need to make do. The connection between authenticity, the person showing the products, and products is more apparent in this catalogue than in the Patagonia examples. Canada Goose not only calls its products "authentic," it also positions the people who need them as such. Historical people. Patagonia (1991) also deobjectifies the people in its catalogue by offering historical background about famous environmentalists. By highlighting real environmental activists, the retailers tap into both resistance and making do. For example, in "An Intimate Profile" of Mardy Murie, Terry Tempest Williams recounts this activist's stand against antienvironmental policies. This strategy again makes the possibility of resistance more real for consumers because the catalogue features a real person. Moreover, this example more strongly demonstrates the connection between constructing authenticity in 59 the vein of resistance. Acts of resistance can also be instances of making do. In an abstract sense-and indeed, in the sense proposed by de Certeau-making do means going against mainstream activities and paradigms; it means carving out a space for one's own power in a system that typically denies power.48 Therefore, that Patagonia depicts environmental activists' activities aligns this company with both resistance movements and their efforts at making do. Although making do and resistance are difficult, readers are called to understand their importance not only to a better society but also to a more authentic self. The products that Patagonia and other outdoor retailers produce interpellate audiences through the images and abstract authenticity associated with them. Broadly, this strategy of deobjectifying those people in the catalogues by offering their names, paints authenticity-resisting "mainstream" culture and making do-as possible and desirable. It also ultimately constructs the image of the retailer as authentic. Naming people, connecting them with real people, subtly associates the retailer, and its products by consequence, as a way for readers to become (or stay) authentic in their minds. Retailers appropriate and construct ideas of realness to encourage audiences to see them and their products as authentic. Deobjectification reinforces this perception by creating the feeling that the people in the catalogues are real. They are at once ordinary and extraordinary in their lives. Focusing on people also allows retailers earn "trail cred." 60 Earning "Trail Cred" What I call "trail cred" is the outdoor recreation equivalent of "street cred," credibility earned based on experience, behaviors, and markers of membership.49 People in outdoor recreation earn it through experience and communicate that experience through stories about making do. Outdoor recreators position themselves as authentic recreators by recounting tales that earn them trail cred. The unstated assumption is that by experiencing situations in which one must make do, (s)he resists a mainstream life. Retailers emphasize that the people who run these companies understand outdoor recreation priorities and needs. They communicate that by giving histories of the owners and products. In this case, the histories of the companies-established through the construction of authentic people and sometimes products-serve as indicators of the know-how of the people behind them. By showing the people behind the products, outdoor retailers construct a mythic sort of realness. These folks become legends of sort. They lend a provenance to an organization, connecting to the values and tenets of outdoor recreation as initially conceived because of their demonstrated links to the outdoor recreation subculture. Provenance is an especially important concept in judging authenticity. In antiques dealing, for example, having a good story to accompany a piece allows the dealer to further mark up the price.50 When, in contemporary outdoor retail shops, consumers buy a brand image, a good story about the origins of the company lends an air of authenticity, constructing the founders as real people who not only understand outdoor recreation but also sell 61 quality products based on that understanding and experience. These stories that reveal experience and provenance establish trail cred. The people who start companies earn and demonstrate their credibility through histories of the companies. History through owners. Highlighting the owners of outdoor retailers creates the character and authenticity of the store or company. Basic information about the companies' founders serves to establish them as real people, with trail cred, in whose vision the company now exists. The catalogues do this in a variety of ways. Wasatch Touring puts a photograph and the names of the store owners at the front of the catalog and includes a short story about the conception of the store. Snow Peak offers similar information about its founder, Yukio Yamai, explaining how the company started and where Yumai liked to hike. Both Wasatch Touring and Snow Peak connect their founders' history with the evolution of the sports. For example, Wasatch Touring states, "As these sports have become more popular, Wasatch Touring has grown and continues to take part in the evolution of these sports."51 Snow Peak weaves a more detailed story, including information about what materials were available when Yamai took an interest in mountain climbing and how his reputation grew as interest in the sport did. Connecting specific people and histories to products and companies helps these companies make claims about what is authentic and what is not. History through products. Canada Goose explicitly appeals to authenticity to discuss the people who wear its coats. Later in the catalogue, it describes the origins of the Constable Parka, a jacket. Like the inclusion of the owners' 62 histories, recounting the process by which this piece of clothing came into existence lends an air of authenticity and necessity to the product. The catalogue states: The Constable Parka came to life through a collaborative process with local police and special forces. Every design element from pockets to side zippers (for quick access to holster) was developed with purpose, and today we bring that functionality to our civilian customers as well as elite tactical units.52 Canada Goose and other companies build authenticity through an intricate and subtle web of provenance and professionalism. They construct a history for themselves and the people who founded the companies, the serious outdoor recreators and professionals for whom the available goods were not good enough. In doing so, they evoke their trail cred. Even though this is a product history, the company makes sure to name the people for whom they created the coat. While evoking the product history, Canada Goose relies on the authenticity of some people to make its point. The implicit message is that products borne out of necessity will be better. In addition to people histories and product histories, readers also see company histories. The histories that these companies offer about themselves position the people that make up their companies as people with whom audience members could identify. They resisted conventions of their eras and sought the best products. They found that the gear available was not the best and so they made do with what they could make themselves, in some cases. These are stories of experiences that center around resistance and making do. They also construct a local or artisan feel for companies that, in most cases, are anything but those 63 things. In contemporary society, this move toward rejecting mass-produced culture among some subcultures-particularly middle to upper class ones-has a complementary implication, people prefer things goods appear to be local and companies that appear to privilege a the regional or organic. Therefore, in establishing a company's (or a product's) history, the company suggests another, more subtle form of resistance that resonates for contemporary target consumers. Broadly in constructing authentic people in these catalogues, these companies interpellate audiences by showing that resistance is possible (within the pages of the catalogue), making do is sexy, and experiences that support these conclusions are important. Deobjectifying people in catalogues speaks to who consumers are-they are real people. Establishing trail cred, on the other hand, constructs who the people selling products are; they are also real people. In both cases, the strategies stress how outdoor recreators make do in difficult environments or with less-than-adequate gear and resist mainstream culture. By linking outdoor recreation subculture tenets (e.g., environmentalism) and subculture values-such as making do and resistance-retailers link these abstract concepts to material goods, seemingly commodifying and undermining those values. These catalogues also construct experiences for the same purposes with similar results. Constructing Authentic Experiences In constructing authentic experiences, outdoor retailers appeal to a sense of what could happen as well as what has happened in consumer's lives during 64 outdoor recreation. They link their products to these "typical" outdoor experiences, thus infusing the products and the company with authenticity. They construct experiences by incorporating slight exaggerations and evoking stories of singular moments in people's lives (e.g., the time we got to breach the lift and get to the top of the ski slope before anyone else or the time we camped on the beach and got stuck in the sand). These are experiences that are realistic but not mundane; they are also experiences that speak to resisting a mainstream life and having to make do in the uncertain situations generated by such a choice. However, they are depicted in catalogues as if they are mundane, as if they happen all the time. Authentic experiences in outdoor retailer catalogues are "caught" through photographs; they depict or imply situations that suggest outdoor recreators make do (and do it well); and they include settings outside the wilderness ideal previously discussed. "Unplanned" Photographs Photos of people "caught" in unplanned moments abound in all of the catalogues. This specific rhetorical strategy functions like deobjectification in that it supports not just a certain kind of authenticity but the resonance of it for audience members. It makes these situations seem more possible rather than not. In this way, showing "unplanned" photographs does not have a direct connection with resistance or making do, but it does support the possibility of both of these in audiences' lives. 65 Resistance. In REI catalogues, photos of people engaged in outdoor recreation activities (e.g., hiking, running, biking, or kayaking) as well as eating ice cream, cooking, sitting around, shoveling snow, or gathering firewood mark all of the pages. The apparent pleasantness of these situations is appealing. They illustrate that incorporating a "closer" relationship with nature into everyday life can be enjoyable (for example, REI shows people celebrating holidays by decorating their campsites); resistance can be enjoyable. The resistive act is rejecting "mainstream" vacations and values such as indulgence at celebrity resorts. In the same vein as REI, Kirkham's includes photos of people hiking and laughing but also falling down or getting stuck. Some seem reminiscent of vacation photos. For example, in one, a person is doing yoga; in another they are rolling up a tent; in yet another, a woman is peaking into a tent, giving the photograph an amateur look. The style and content of these photographs shows that one can encounter difficult outdoor recreation situations and still have experiences worth remembering. It aligns with REI's message that resistance can be fun and adds that making do has its advantages as well. Making do. While REI's "unplanned" photographs make resistance attractive and easy, Icebreaker creates a sense of making do. Icebreaker's "unplanned" photos include people hiking and running through the forest or water, while carrying a bicycle; a woman standing in a boat in her underpants as if she just woke up; and a person sitting in the driver's seat of an old truck with a dog. To contrast its in situ depictions, Icebreaker also uses posed models for some of their displays.53 To showcase the clothing, models pose in front of a white 66 background and stand or climb on white boxes. This contrast draws attention to the "unplanned" feel of the other photos. The impromptu-looking photographs demonstrate people making do in the best ways they can-running through a creek, seeking shelter in a bare room. These "unplanned" photographs in the catalogues contribute to the assumed authenticity of the products just as the real people in Patagonia's catalogues do. They give the impression that real people use the products for resistance and making do. Not only does this communicate the idea that the products will do what they are supposed to but also, and more significantly, that the activities one does with them are more authentic than what most of society does with its free time. For example, REI positions people who do outdoor recreation as against the "mainstream" when it contrasts outdoor recreation with "vegging out," exercising with DVDs, a "drive-through window," a "super mall," fancy restaurants, "a luxury cruise," a "dream home," "celebrity sunbathers," and "a theme park."54 Framing resistance as, first, connected to consumerism and, second, as easy at once creates more opportunities for "resistance" and undermines or dilutes politically-focused resistance. Taken together, making do as a means of fun is resistant to most of society. I observed this sentiment frequently in interviews with participants. They enjoy feeling like they make do in outdoor recreation and see themselves as different than most people, as I discuss in Chapter Four. Therefore, this retailer authenticity claim resonates with subculture members. 67 "Real" Situations Food and drink. To give the impression that outdoor recreators remain authentic in their outdoor recreation, outdoor retailers photograph authentic-looking situations. They purport to show "how things really are" in outdoor recreation and demonstrate their knowledge of such situations. According to the Snow Peak and Patagonia catalogues, both food and alcohol are part of the outdoor recreation culture. Often, Snow Peak features a full table with plenty of food and beer. Sometimes people are around and other times the reader feels as if they just missed the people. Patagonia gives the reader a look into the tent of a "real" camper. This tent is messy with the stuff of outdoor recreation. Among the socks and sleeping bags is a bottle of whiskey, implicating what people do after they get done hiking. These details lend an air of authenticity, a sense of knowing to these photographs. An aspect of making do in outdoor recreation involves having fun despite limited resources, which cultivates a feeling of simplicity and resistance to mainstream consumer culture. Although this might seem ironic- feeling simplicity while buying and bringing a car-full of gear to enjoy "nature"- by contrast to typical U.S. lifestyles (i.e., having a house-full of gear to accommodate everyday life), outdoor recreation does seem both simplistic and resistant. The dual appeals of resisting materialism (among other things) and making do with what is available (or in somewhat undesirable situations) pervade the discourses of outdoor retailers and work together to construct a desirable form of authenticity. Moreover, the retailers show that they understand what camping 68 looks like, again reinforcing their own knowledge, experience, and, by extension, authenticity. Not smiling faces. To further contribute to the feeling of realness in the photographed situations, models in the photographs are not always smiling. Frequently, they have a look of concentration or fatigue. REI, Patagonia, Icebreaker, and Canada Goose all replicate this convention, which aligns with my earlier analysis of how these companies construct authentic people in outdoor recreation through "unplanned" photographs. Coupling the authentic nature pictures with these kinds of depictions of people produces the message that outdoor recreation experiences are not always easy, but they are always "worth it." This is a message that resonates with outdoor recreation communities, as my interviews indicated consistently. Again, this speaks to audiences' senses of what is real, of making do, because anyone who has been camping knows that sometimes it sucks. What is significant here is that outdoor retailers do not picture only people who are happy. By including the contemplative looks or the tired expressions, retailers nod to the "reality" of recreation experiences without delving too far into it. This strategy constructs experiences as reflected through the people in them. To communicate experience is difficult and to communicate an authentic version of it takes a subtle hand. Thus, by focusing on the expressions of the people in these experiences, the audiences receive knowledge of what has happened before the photo was taken and what might happen after, creating a sense of time. This is an articulation of the way recreation could be or the way that people remember recreation situations, as I discuss in Chapter Four. 69 These depictions of "real" situations in catalogues normalize or idealize certain outdoor recreation actions, speaking all the while to an authenticity that the consumer should feel. Including pictures of messy tents, meals, and unsmiling faces functions as a "textual wink" to outdoor recreators.55 Retailers rely on audiences to have a rough sense of what outdoor recreation involves and then appeal to that sense, constructing authenticity and appropriating facets of outdoor recreation subculture. Expanded Settings Finally, instead of showing people solely in forests, mountains, deserts, and swamps (calling forth idealized notions of nature), some catalogues show a greater number of settings for outdoor recreation such as cities, small towns, and in vehicles.56 These expanded settings show a kind of mentality that interpellates the audience as comprised of people who are willing to "be themselves," their outdoor recreating selves, under any circumstances. In this way, they resist pressures to conform even in situations where outdoor recreation gear is unnecessary. Like the inclusion of real environmentalists in the Patagonia catalogue, showing people in broader settings appeals to an abstract sense of making do. Instead of facing challenges of weather or insufficient gear, recreators under these circumstances make do by adhering to outdoor recreation identities even in places not commonly associated with outdoor recreation. Urban settings. First, companies such as REI have begun selling products to use in urban areas, showing that the same resistant attitudes present in outdoor 70 recreation in more typical settings are also options here. To match this, their marketing shows people using products in urban areas. The people in these photos are similar to the ones in photos taken against the more typical depiction of nature in that people are laughing or concentrating and always showcasing the products. For example, in one photograph, four people, carrying REI bags and wearing REI clothes, walk down a small street lined with parked cars on one side and a shop on the other. If the bags were not clear enough indicators that these people are traveling, the text confirms, "These shoes were made for traveling."57 Most often REI depicts the people urban settings as travelers, which necessarily makes them different from the denizens. It also sells "adventure trips" that take people to cities all over the world. This strategy expands the market for outdoor recreation clothing. It also has the potential to expand definitions of nature. If people consider themselves outdoor rec