Between the Road and the Town: An Ethnographic Study of the Education of Traveling Attractionists

One September afternoon of 2001, a woman attractionist and I were walking back toward the attraction she had put up and parked in the tree lined area between the cemetery and the hospital of Dolo,² besides all the other attractions. Abruptly, she started to tell me that one evening she had driven through another provincial town not far from where we were. At first, she had not recognized it at all, but soon after she suddenly realized that such unfamiliar looking town was one of her circuit’s regular stops and that she had in fact brought her attraction there only two weeks earlier, as she did every year for the local fair. She felt dismayed by her misperception, but had to admit that indeed she did not know the quiet, sombre, and empty urban centre she was crossing. Whenever she stayed there, there were lights, music, noise, pleasant smells from the food stands, laughter, children’s delighted cries, and young people’s excited shouts, couples and families strolling around and chatting. “We bring life to towns, we make them change, and when we leave, everything disappears and it [the town] goes back to what it was,” she concluded still trying to make sense of her encounter with the unheimlich, as her experience can be appropriately described.