I went to Disneyland this weekend.
A part of me wishes I had a professional anthropological reason to go (to do an ethnography of the happiest place on earth, maybe?) but the reality is this: I was stressed. Six weeks of graduate school made me want to do nothing except go on easy roller coaster rides and eat churros. Ergo, I decided Disneyland would be a fun weekend excursion. It was fun, absolutely, and I got to ride Splash Mountain two times in a row, which is pretty much the cure for the grad school blues.
But I digress. While I was there, I decided to go on the “It’s a Small World” ride. I typically don’t venture on the poignantly named “happiest cruise that ever sailed!” because of multiple reasons I won’t get into here, but I had this week’s readings on my brain, especially Ritchie’s Ventriloquist Folklore. So, I came to the stark realization that I could never really escape grad school, hopped on a ‘boat,’ and took the intercontinental expedition that is “It’s A Small World” while thinking about representation.
For those of you who haven’t been to Disneyland, or haven’t been in a while, or avoid the ride on every trip to the Magic Kingdom, a youtube video of the ride is here:
And the official Disneyland description of the ride is here:
The couple in front of me had a small child, and throughout the ride would gleefully point out the different nationalities that the boat sailed past to the youngster. “Look! Those are little Hawaiian children! There are the Chinese babies!” The family pointed at each new country, as if they were singular entities, being represented by the wooden dancing toddlers of all nationalities (who inexplicably all loved holding balloons). “It’s A Small World’ was eight minutes of a highly orchestrated leitmotif of Culture with a capital c. What would Ritchie say about it, especially in relation to ventriloquist folklore?
We can not ignore the presence of the ‘master narrative’ on the ride, one that “gathers people together in order to formulate them as a People subject to the inscription of a particular master narrative: usually that of the democratic nation-state” (Ritchie 1993: 368).” After all, “It’s A Small World” was created by Walt Disney for a World’s Fair in the mid ‘60s (during the folk revival, no less) and was such a beloved spectacle there that it was shipped to California and rebuilt in Disneyland. Walt Disney, it seems, was the ultimate ventriloquist, who utilized the ride to present “the true voices of those otherwise lost to an audience so eager for diverse articulations that they fail to note this ‘diversity’ – the signs of another world – issues from folklore's single disciplinary throat" (Ritchie 1993: 366). The passengers on “It’s A Small World” were certainly eager to get their dose of multiculturalism in between the Teacups and Peter Pan’s Magical Flight, and the ride provided the benign, singing, dancing children from around the world to do so. There was no room for questioning, no nod to intra-national variation or strife. For all the ‘multiculturalism’, there was just one song, on repeat.
What seems so clear, after reading this week’s readings, is how muted other cultures really were in Disneyland, and particularly on the “It’s A Small World” ride. There was no difference between members of a given group, just clear differences between groups. The theme music on the ride subtly shifted to incorporate instruments from whatever foreign land one sailed past (maracas by Mexico, sitars by the amorphous middle-east country!), but the children all sang the same refrain – “It’s a small world after all…” And isn’t it, indeed? Ritchie states, “Hence, while insisting on the right of folk groups to representation might well interrupt, however briefly, the master narrative of modernism as high culture, the signifying basis-the episteme- of modernism remains fully intact in such a move, and it becomes only a matter of time before the existence of a folk group simply reifies the hold of high culture" (Ritchie 1993: 369). In Disneyland, modernism, capitalism, consumerism, so many other isms have taken hold. On “It’s A Small World,” the representation of an international set of dancing wooden children seemed to give voice to the many ‘others’ – yet after the ride was over, we disembarked from the boat and walked away without learning a thing, except that for eight minutes, the world was made to seem a little too small, after all.
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