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.A display on African-Ameri-can heritage features Salem s notable eighteenth- and nineteenth-centuryblacks, but no mention is made of 1692 or of Tituba, who has come to beknown perhaps erroneously as Salem s most notable  black woman.Where are the witches? In the lobby area, they are in two places: in thegift shop, and in the minds of the tourists who are visiting.In the gift shop, approximately 50 percent of items for sale are witch-related.This includes everything from books about the witchcraft trialsto key chains and other mementos.In Salem, witches are good business,and even the most  educational of sites stock their share of coffee mugsfeaturing witches on broomsticks.Interestingly, this commercializationwhich might seem to posit tourists as nothing more than unthinking con-sumers of goods actually stems from a history that viewed tourists as partof a  heroic undertaking. Scholar Judith Adler writes,The kind of seeing first consciously cultivated by the methodologists of apost Renaissance secular art of travel was intimately bound to an overarchingscientific ideology which cast even the most humble of tourists as part of.158Five: Selling the Storythe impartial survey of all creation.Such seeing, strikingly reminiscent of thetaking of inventory, was accompanied by significant collecting activity, astravelers transferred antiquities and other natural and manmade  curiositiesfrom many parts of the world to the private estates and scientific academiesof their home countries [24].In other words, as tourists load up on tarot cards and witch mugs, theyboth consume some might say  swallow  the packaged, commercial-ized version of the past that is fed to them at the same time as they appro-priate that packaging, taking it in and recontextualizing it into their ownlandscapes.Whether they purchase out of parody or earnestness, con-sumers in Salem use souvenirs to establish a link between themselves andthe city.This link is parallel to the link that Salem works to establishvia the use of reiterative performances not unlike the hundreds of mugsthat line the Visitor Center shelves between itself and the past.As theVisitor Center struggles with a shame about its own investment in witcheswhile simultaneously investing heavily in witch souvenirs, it highlights acommon phenomenon in Salem: souvenirs seem to signify both Salem ssuperficial failures to lift itself out of the pit of low entertainment andSalem s slyly successful deployment of commerce to help connect visitorsto the past.The fact that the  commercial sections of the Visitor Center arequarantined to the corner of the building demonstrates how Salem s hightourist sites discourage patrons from focusing on the witch trials.Touristsinterviewed in Salem consistently reply to the question  Why are you inSalem? with just one word:  witches. Charles and Nancy Pappas fromWilmington, Illinois, tourists interviewed outside of the Visitor Center,had their  misplaced attractions to Salem corrected upon their arrival. What I had heard before I came here was the witch thing, said Charles, But I learned right away that that was only a small, tiny, minute part ofit (Pappas).Mr.Pappas emphasis on the diminutive importance of thewitch trials in Salem history is a direct result of his  education in Salem,particularly, he said, the education he received from the Visitor Center film,Where Past is Present. Our story is about much more than the infamous witch trials, a local voice narrates at the beginning of the film,  It s about cultural evo-lution and change (Where Past).The fact that the trials are  infamous159The Making of Salemseems to be the main reason that they are so systematically de-emphasizedby the Visitor Center.In fact, in the entire film which runs nearly anhour in length virtually no description of the trials is given.The filmfocuses on maritime trade and the fishing industry, with smaller segmentson millwork and early entrepreneurs.Despite the fact that  what hap-pened during 1692 is not described, the film is not completely silent onthe subject of witchcraft. The Puritan treatment of natives, and later theirbehavior during the witch trials, have become unforgettable symbols ofintolerance, the narrator intones (Where Past).As in Usovicz s statement,where the witch trials are syntactically subordinated to Hawthorne, herethe trials are both validated and overshadowed by the dominant phraseregarding Puritan-Native relations.The film, which spends significant timeexamining Native culture and the effects that European settlement had onnative populations, uses the Native issue to both eclipse and make educa-tional the witch issue.This is not to say, of course, that I believe that thegenocide of the Native people of Essex County should not receive moreemphasis than the hanging of a handful of settlers for witchcraft,6 butwhat is so compelling is the way that these two historical events get assignedvalue based not on the number of lives lost, but on the seemingly  intrin-sic educational value each event has.Despite the film s condemnation of the negative impact of Europeanson Native people, it still works hard to vindicate the Puritans as far as thewitch trials are concerned. In [the Puritans ] defense, claims the narra-tor,  they truly believed that witchcraft existed as a terrible threat.Onepositive outcome [of the trials is that] to this day the witch hysteria remindsus to be on guard against intolerance (Where Past).What is importantabout the witch trials to the National Park Service, who produced thefilm, is that the trials can function today as a learning tool and a codifierof proper moral behavior.Unlike the Native genocide, which is allowedto stand as an atrocity, the witch trials must be recuperated and rescuedfrom the realm of history.Transplanted from historical narrative to morallesson, the witch trials become a symbol of the process of education itself [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]