On the Rim: Looking for the Grand Canyon (review)

On the Rim: Looking for the Grand Canyon. By Mark Neumann. Minneapolis: Minnesota University Press, 1999; pp. xi + 373. $29.95.

Mark Neumann's emphasis on discourses of seeing makes it appropriate to begin this review by describing the appearance of On the Rim. Its larger-sized, gold-colored cover and elegant design evoke the aura of a traditional environmental coffee table book. The photographs displayed throughout the text immediately seduce one's fingers to eagerly anticipate the next page. One cannot help but imagine that the author of these striking images, primarily Neumann himself, has equally provocative insights to offer through his writing. The title further tantalizes the reader. We find ourselves with the prospect of looking for the Grand Canyon, a place both vast and renowned. Why and how are we looking? This question indicates the dual and self-reflexively ironic purpose of the book. Neumann simultaneously invites us to see the expansive spectrum of narratives informing our desires to visit the canyon and to recognize that each of these perspectives remains only part of the picture, each narrative provides only part of the answer.

Intellectually, this project stands out as noteworthy for environmental communication scholarship, because it not only draws upon over ten years of ethnographic research, but also a wide range of theories from fields such as cultural studies, anthropology, leisure studies, performance studies, and environmental history. Neumann's ability to depict vivid scenes throughout this multi-layered drama highlights the affective significance of storytelling to public life. Overall, On the Rim offers a skillful example of the ways in which theories might flesh out the significance of ethnographic observations without smothering the intricacies and insights of field experiences.

Neumann argues that the narratives and the performances that shape perceptions of the Grand Canyon "are not the familiar stories of geology, nature, and history rehearsed over and over again by rangers, guides, and piles of canyon literature. Instead, . . . to watch visitors exercise their free time is to witness people self-consciously and unknowingly dramatize the sphere of leisure as a place of critique, compensation, space, and fantasy" (216). As a contribution to the growing literature that argues that those concerned with public affairs must more seriously address vernacular interests, Neumann's book provides a richly descriptive account of everyday life. Beyond the photographs, perhaps the most interesting contribution of this eloquently written book is the way in which Neumann traverses a vast array of too often excluded performances at the Grand Canyon, such as: suicide, lovers' quarrels, employees' disdain of visitors, effects by and on Native Americans, gendered interpretations of travel, and racial/ethnic interactions. In addition, he illustrates how experiences of the canyon are organized through and alongside popular media representations of it: how many people mistakenly believe the canyon is the site of the final scene in Thelma & Louise, how exchanges among tourists are mobilized by references to films (such as Grand Canyon), and how tourists point out where Alice hurt her leg during a family vacation on an episode of The Brady Bunch.

Neumann also depicts the more heightened moments of performance that are edited from the postcard images we commonly attribute to the canyon. He describes the appearances of famous visitors (i.e., Albert Einstein, Tony Danza, and Maxine Hong Kingston) and spends most of his final chapter on the attempt of Danny Ray Horning, an escaped prisoner, to lose the FBI in the park. For Neumann, these narratives provide evidence of the ways in which the Grand Canyon, as a text, continually shifts meanings. In this fluid terrain, we see what we choose to see; thus, the canyon always has been "a dumping ground for rhetoric" (90).

In light of these relatively hidden transcripts, Neumann is frustrated by people who attempt to "educate" visitors on how to interpret the canyon and by literature that attempts to totalize visitors' experiences as always sublime, romantic, or nostalgic. Instead, he relishes those...