Crafting emotional comfort: interpreting the painful past at living history museums in the new economy

摘要

This essay offers ethnographic accounts of two living history museums, HistoricFort Snelling in St. Paul, Minnesota, and Conner Prairie, in Fishers, Indiana.While Snelling's programming worked to erase the history of slavery at the site,Conner Prairie fore-grounded the trauma of slavery in a special after-hours eventwherein customers paid to role-play for 90 minutes as fugitive slaves on Indiana'sunderground railroad in 1836. As different as the sites were with regards to howthey dealt with slavery, both shared a common goal of 'keeping the customersatisfied'. The author argues that in practice, this service economy directivetranslated into a preoccupation with keeping the customer comfortable, and thatthis preoccupation with comfort ultimately shaped the delivery of interpretationat both sites