"The Hills Are Alive...": Sound of Music Tourism and the Performative Construction of Places

This essay analyzes how the Sound of Music tours in Salzburg function as a performative space for the construction and narration of Austrian national identity. Drawing on interdisciplinary approaches from human geography, cultural anthropology, and cultural studies, the essay uses the example of Sound of Music to study the broader role of the national at the turn of the twenty-first century. The analysis uses the discourse of tourism as a vehicle for an ethnography of the kitschy and the banal to illustrate how individuals and groups perform "places" in the context of globalization's apparent shrinkage of time and space.