Date of Award

12-2019

Thesis Date

12-2019

Degree Type

Honors Thesis-Unrestricted

Degree Name

B.A.

Department

Anthropology and Sociology

Degree Program

Anthropology

Director

David Beriss

Abstract

As the symbolic and functional heart of the New Orleans tourism industry, the French Quarter has been described as the city's "number one factory". Using this evocative image as a starting point, this paper explores workaday life within this factory. I argue that the political economy of tourism brings together the world of work and the world of leisure in such a way that neither can be meaningfully understood apart from each other. To get at this point, I examine the commodity which at the heart of the tourist economy, which, I contend, is the touristic experience. Drawing on data gleaned from interviews, participant observation, and analysis of tourist discourse, I show that the production of this commodity – immaterial as it may appear – is in fact quite labor intensive. Furthermore, as tourism has become the driving sector of the New Orleans economy, the social and economic arrangements that the industry entails have extended out from the factory, integrating a broader swath of the city's geography into its structure than is generally supposed.

Rights

The University of New Orleans and its agents retain the non-exclusive license to archive and make accessible this honors thesis in whole or part in all forms of media, now or hereafter known. The author retains all other ownership rights to the copyright of the honors thesis.

Creative Commons License

Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-Share Alike 4.0 International License.

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