Situating the Local by Inventing the Global: Community Festival and Social Change

Every year during its Winter Carnival, the village of McCall, located in the mountainous region of west central Idaho, transforms itself into an outdoor museum of snow and ice. Sculptures made entirely of snow and as large as buildings can be found on street corners, in front of buildings, and in the park. The "local" sculptures are ostensibly made by townspeople and are extraordinarily realistic, drawing upon literature, popular culture, and local life. Visitors might see a giant Snoopy or Darth Maul rendered in ice, wild bears frolicking over fallen logs, or a Model T car stuck in the snow. "State" sculptures are part of a state competition, located in the park, and are less detailed and often abstract. All are festive objects and designed to attract tourists to this remote and scenic resort town, who travel around to view them as part of the Carnival's activities. The other primary festival attraction is the main parade, which entails a Mardi Gras theme, but somewhat incongruously concludes with a quasi-Chinese dragon that wends its serpentine way down main street and is manned by local schoolchildren.

It turns out that not only the snow competition but also the entire festival is fraught.1 Winter Carnival is plagued by a host of problems common to modern Chamber of Commerce tourist productions, including a continual shortage of volunteers, burn-out, and general ambivalence (Thoroski and Greenhill 2001). The festival's purpose is to generate dollars during a slump in the winter season, but people here are ambivalent about tourists and dislike Winter Carnival crowds. Despite Chamber of Commerce rhetoric that Winter Carnival is "[economically] good for the community," many businesses claim they don't make a cent during Winter Carnival, since their regular customers stay away.2 "Local" snow sculptures are often outsourced to outside groups. As an all-volunteer event, it takes a tremendous amount of effort to produce Winter Carnival, and many people wonder why they do it. Residents breathe a sigh of relief when it is over. But Winter Carnival continues to occur annually. Why? What is going on? And why does the Mardi Gras parade conclude with a Chinese-Mardi Gras hybrid dragon anyway?

This article illustrates how the McCall Winter Carnival, and more specifically the snow sculptures and the parade, are a primary means through which local residents reflect on and negotiate major recent controversial socioeconomic transformations. The cultural performances that constitute Winter Carnival are collective productions grounded in and emerging from local culture and social life, in a setting in which local culture and social life have undergone major change over the past decade.

The McCall area has been affected primarily by the reorganization of industrial capital, which in turn has reconfigured local space. McCall is situated on the shores of Fayette Lake and surrounded on all sides by national forest, which is in turn adjacent to the Frank Church River of No Return Wilderness Area. It is a quiet, beautiful scenic area that has been primarily a logging community since it was founded in 1889. The prominent Brown family owned the local timber mill for most of the twentieth century, and the mill employed many people in McCall during that time. McCall also served as a social hub for loggers working in lumber camps in the backcountry, who came into town on weekends to dance, drink, and socialize. The Forest Service has played an important role in the economy, since almost eighty-eight percent of land in the county is federally owned.3 The headquarters for the Payette National Forest has been located in McCall since 1908 (Preston 1998) and McCall has been a smokejumper base since 1943. The timber industry, government agencies such as the Forest Service and Fish and Game, and the surrounding ranching areas have cultivated an outdoors-oriented population, the majority of whom work closely with the natural environment.

Summer tourism also has always played an important secondary role. McCall's location on the shores of Payette Lake has made it a site for summer cabins since 1906, and the area has attracted visitors for the purposes of fishing, hiking and camping, and other outdoor recreation due to its immediate access to mountain lakes, rivers, and primitive wilderness areas. Yet tourism remained of secondary importance until the 1960s and 1970s, when winter tourism began to be developed, transforming tourism from a single season industry to a year-round business. The area has developed increasingly into a destination resort for the very wealthy since that time, but particularly during the past decade. The entire region is replete with the discourse of crisis that comes with the restructuring of capital as it has transformed from logging town into elite resort.

This transformation has its roots in the 1960s. In 1964, the Brown family sold the timber mill to the Boise-Cascade corporation, a sign of coming deindustrialization. Citing pressure from environmental policies, Boise Cascade closed the McCall mill in 1977, forcing workers to seek employment in other Boise Cascade mills throughout the region. The area also began emphasizing winter sports activities during the 60s to supplement the traditional summer season. Local residents had always participated in winter sports such as skiing, dog sledding, and skating-indeed, in addition to a culture of logging the area historically had cultivated a culture of skiing and had been very active in the development of skiing as a sport throughout the twentieth century-but winter activities that had primarily been local pastimes now began to be exported to new audiences. Brundage Ski area, for example, opened in 1961 as the area's first modern ski lift with the help of Corey Engen, an Olympic ski sensation whose family founded Alta ski resort in Utah. The increase in popularity of snowmobiles such as the Ski-Doo during the same period allowed visitors to access forest land during the winter in addition to the summer season. And in 1965, the newly formed Area Chamber of Commerce revived Winter Carnival in order to attract tourists during the slow winter season. The regional timber industry fully deindustrialized during the late 1990s and in 2000, when Boise Cascade closed all of its regional mills in west-central Idaho. The Fayette Lakes area has become a major blip on investment radar screens since the closure of the mills, primarily through land speculators who purchased old Boise Cascade lands as well as lakeshore property for investment portfolios. These speculations capitalized on the largely untouched, scenic nature of the region and spurred the development of exclusive golf courses, private clubs, and vacation mansions. The most important development was the 2004 opening of Tamarack ski area eleven miles soudi of McCall by French developer Jean-Pierre Boespflug. The Brundage ski area is largely an area attended by residents of the state, but Tamarack markets itself as a world class destination ski and golf resort. It was visited by President George W. Bush on his vacation to Idaho in August 2005 and "star investments" include a luxury hotel owned by tennis superstars and resort investors Steffi Graff and André Agassi.