From Cooperstown to Dyersville: Spatial and Historical Practices of Baseball Nostalgia

Book excerpt: This dissertation incorporates a broad disciplinary spectrum, encompassing interpretive and symbolic anthropology, cultural studies and critical theory, political economy, history, and geography. Based upon eight months of fieldwork, the project is a "multi-locale" ethnography, as advocated by George Marcus, of two small towns, Cooperstown, New York and Dyersville, Iowa, each of whose main attraction is a tourist site constructed within the discourse of baseball nostalgia. I focus upon how--at each of these tourist sites--a gendered, hegemonic social order is reproduced via the production and consumption of tourist space. The historical and cultural meaning of these two sites is explored in so far as each dialogically articulates with symbols of pastoralism, nation, and family. Beginning with what are considered to be tourist sites animated by conservative discourses of "America," the project encapsulates a cultural critique in which the final chapter is dedicated to analyzing how various radical feminist works challenge the masculinely gendered foundations of baseball.