Touristic Turn Inward

           This desire of outsiders and tourists to be recognized when venturing to new places is often explored in anthropologist Jenny Huberman’s writings. It perhaps seems paradoxical that a tourist’s pursuit might not be to discover an authentic “other,” but rather to have to have that other discover and acknowledge them, but Huberman theorizes that perhaps this desire for recognition is grounded in the commodification of places that transpires when the tourism industry becomes paramount in the experience of a place. What she describes as a ‘touristic turn inward’ is outlined as a manifestation of capitalist consumption, marking a shift in the subjectivity of the late modern tourist, where experience itself becomes a commodity involving exchanges of interactions. In Hammond’s writing he uniquely seeks recognition of his significance not necessarily in the human locals of the Adirondacks, but in the experience of dominating animals in the natural world. Among other examples, in writing about deer he describes:

“Our visit will long be remembered by them. The story will go down "to their children, and their children's children," as the epoch of the advent of strange monsters, who came among them in the night to frighten their fathers from their property, but to our credit it will be told, that we left them unharmed, save by the terrors of our transient presence." (32)

“That deer will remember us to his dying day, - nor shall we soon forget him.” (36)

The tone of Hammond’s writing makes these sentiments seem less founded in a concern that he has deliberately broken principles of Leave No Trace ethics and more so in a desire to actively penetrate the natural landscape, navigating places as a dominant force possessing control over one’s surroundings. At one point he says “It was no boy's play to overtake that deer” – perhaps boys become men when their power games becomes concretely manifested, making ownership and control over places that which marks the transition into elite white manhood. And yet, wilderness and the animals that occupy it seem to be objects to be overpowered in what often is described in Hammond’s narrative as a game with child-like competition.