on Davis
For-profit or non-profit, the tourist production is also a cultural reproduction as well as cultural capital (Bourdieu). The Colonial Williamsburg or Lower East Side Tenement Museum tries to establish new culture discourses of the United States while Sea World itself becomes part of the theme park culture in the U.S. Nevertheless, they have different targets of audience and thus different strategies in running the organization. In brief, the non-profit institution has a limited and well-educated audience who went there for specific purposes concerning their historical and cultural identity. For-profit tourist attraction, like Sea World, whose aim is to make as much money as possible, has every one in the world as its target audience.
Sea World claimed its performance “universal” for any one to go, and the family is the best target. The parents paid the tickets, foods, and souvenirs for themselves and for the kids. For profits and kids, Sea World excludes “heavy thinking” (164) and any possible “sexual references” (163) in its performances. All its energy is used in organizing its relationship with the guests, keeping them around the park as long as possible and driving them to consume the more the better. It claimed to serve the purpose of education, but as what Davis mentioned in her Spectacular Nature, the “education” is limited in Sea World. The education is more like to impose the cultural capital upon the children rather than teach the children what nature is.
From the theme park in general to Sea World to the Shamu Show, Davis brought her readers to the back region of Sea World step by step. But I still want to know more about how such cultural capital or education work differently on the staff of the theme park, on the parents, and on the children. Why do the parents bring their kids to theme parks? Is it out of a limited choice of family entertainment or out of convention like seeing the children’s play? Can the adults find the “kid inside” at all? What’s the children’s relation to the artificial nature? For what purposes are we preserving the nature in the museum and theme park? What’s our relation to the displayed animals?
Tourists go around the world to search for authenticity, but there are always places they were unable to reach because of financial problem or any other reasons. But the animal theme park or the zoo brings the world/nature to people in a local exhibition space. It saves people’s money and time to know the world at any rate, though the world is manipulated and the knowledge partial and shallow.