On the Road to Fiction Narrative Reification in Austrian Cultural Tourism1

The paper exa m i nes the i n tcn:;cciion of tourist productions and materi a l i zed fiction such as Mii n:hen and other narrative genres in themed environments. On the backdrop of the rarely cons idered history of the materialization of genres such as t ho f( J i kta le , a spectru m of tou ri stic s i tes in Carinthia (Kiirntcn), Austria , a rc exa m i ned i n terms of their acsthoiic , generic, and ideological components. I n the co nil uence of cultural commodification, market, and touristic utopias, the tens ions between a globalizing economy and local aesthetic, educational and economic p ractices becom e apparent.

Stocked in colorful dispenser boxes at Austrian freeway rest stops, train stations, and amuse ment parks, Radomir Runzelschuh's folktales can be obtained for little more than candy, condoms , snacks , tampons, and similarly es sential commodities typically available from sale-machines in such locations. A mere twenty Austrian Schilling and a turn of the crank on the Miirchenautomat (Folktale Automat) re leases a colorful envelope whose con tents can be read out loud in the car, as the family drives on to their destination. For the family on the road to a holiday destination in the south of Austria, the Runzelschuh tales are a suitable means to set the mood. They promise magic, escape, and comfort, and are but one among many strips of narrative turned material that is awaiting them. For the ethnographer in late twentieth century Europe, Mr. Runzelschuh and his automats are an icon representing the confluence of cultural commodification, market, and touristic utopi as.
The intersection of tourist productions and "children's tales" is a fruitful arena to consider for understanding the materialization of men tifacts, specifically popular fictions . Of course people all over the globe have always rendered narration (mythological and otherwise) in pic torials or artifacts ranging from vessels to cloths. If language is at the core of how we structure and enact cultural patterns (Urban 199 1), ren dering visible and graspable the codes in our heads creates the material extensions of such patterns. While there are continuities in such patterns of transformation, changing social and economic circumstances also bring forth alter nate ways and purposes for materializing fic tion. Drawn from Austrian tourist sites, the cases I discuss show elements of a globalizing economy of cultural production intertwined with local aesthetic, educational and economic prac tices. Mter some brief reflections on the in terre lationship of materialized fiction and the hu man patterning of landscape , I will turn to a discussion of several tourist sites in the Austri an state of Carinthia (Kiirnten), and conclude by placing the case studies in the broader Euro pean context of cultural tourism and narrative materialization.
A sample folktale letter of The Runzelschuh series.

The Materialization of Tales and the Theming of Landscapes
Asked about the reasons behind his innovation, Ferry Ebert alias Radomir Runzelschuh wrote me a letter excerpting aspects ofhis life history. He emphasized long periods of a kind of nomad ism in search of himself. His recovery from uncertainty coincided with discovering his love for narratives and his hope for a better future based on nurturing the good in children. His tales are a mix of traditional plots and newly crafted ones , and each tale is followed with an invitation to children to write back to him and send him their tales, and he in turn promises to set them into circulation through his automats . From European narrative researchers I learned that the Runzelschuh idea germinated not only from a utopian vision of celebrating children's narrative thirst. Ebert had made a living for years in the quasi-nomadic profession of re stocking the very dispensers for life's necessi ties next to which the Miirchenautomaten are now sometimes stationed. 2 The automats are rectangul ar boxes, pai nted with the :o a m c mo tives f()und al ong th e ri m of each tal c. Ebert a l so oilers card board varieties, fashioned like :,;mall trca:o ure chc:ot:o , w hich he recommend:,; ftlr cvcnts or locations where a more nostalgic locus of narration is called for. The only place I en coun tered them outside of Ebert's promotion al f()]d er was in front of Vienna's opera house, where a new to urist conveyance was attempti n g to break into a market saturated with horse drawn carriages: an upstart sedan chair operation, staffed by two young men in medicv al c:oque costume, tried to lure potential customers into taking a ride. On the red plush scat sat a Runzelschuh fairy tale treasure chest, and any one taking the service would receive a free tale envelope." The folktale has a rarely considered history of materialization; Runzelschuh's work is but one of the more recent permutations . If it was not for collectors who assiduously rendered narratives into texts and texts into handsomely bound volumes, the material appeal of tcxtual ized oral narrative might not have established itself as broadly as it has. We tend to dwell on folktale, song or epic's role in solidifying the nationalist imaginationthe scholarship on such verbal arts' ties into the national proj ect since Herder's time is substantial (e.g. , Dundes 1985, Herzfeld 1982, Oinas 1978, Wilson 1976).
In the process perhaps we have overlooked the very "solidity" or material presence such reified fictions take in our lives. Rendered into books, tales acquire an appeal to material ownership and they engage our sense of touch and sight, especially in illustrated form. Tales have in spired not only illustrations but also theatrical enactment (e.g. , puppetry, ballet or opera) and more recently film and animation.
My specific focus here, however, is how the tourism and heritage industry has taken on the job of making concrete the kind of mental con nections between holiday experience and fic tion an individual might have. Travel as a means to experience the realm of fiction and fantasy has considerable history (Jafari and Gardner 199 1). Reaching Tibet or visiting Bali have been rendered as fulfillments or concreti zations of fairy land imaginations (Dann 1996: 124-125). Touristic promotion has also latched on to the idea o l' rccapt. u ri n g f tccLs o f'ch i l dhood , such as advertisements pro m i s i n hol i d ays fa cilitating the recovery of chi ldhood vacation experien ces . D raw in on fieldwork in the Austrian state of Carinthia i n 1996, l w i l l di scuss words, visuals and statuary that denote the pl anned "thcm i ng"'1 of land scape a n d built env i ronments in a different way: here, statuary, enactment, or perhaps most poi nantly put, "thin s" drawn from fic tion arc suppl ied to enhance the experience uf the rea l . " ''Thcmi ng i s certainly nut new. Certain types of garden i ng or landscapi ng as practiced by nobility in the Austrian realm as well as else where in Europe deny the assumption that "theming" is a postmodern phenomenon .5 The countless calvaries (Kaluarienberge) in Catho lic Austria are poignant evi dence of mapping the twelve stations of the cross onto the land scape . Konrad Kostlin characterizes the archi tectural and enacted stations of the cross as a means to render the landscape cultural , and to provide specific meaning an d memory through "religious impregnating of regionality (Kostlin 1991 :432). Enacting the stations of the cross thus expands a rite into a "route of passage" (Kostlin 199 1 : 436). The themed environments in Austria draw some of their layout from such religious predecessors -not because their plan ners intended to craft them according to the religious model, but perhaps because dotting the landscape with a sequence of related themes is a familiar pattern. However, the sources, styles, and intent of the themes are not asser tions of a single (religious) dogma. They rather stem from various historical, secular layers of narration and pictorialization. The potential meaning to be gleaned from ambling through them is not overtly dogmatic and affirming of collective belief as is a calvary. Rather, as is typical of reflexive modernization, the onus of interpretation is placed on the individual. The sites promise enchantment through "experi ence" which in turn is the latest commodified step in modernity's quest to achieve selfhood.6 Aspects ofthese Austrian "things" are clear ly inspired by narrative turned theme park in American Disneylands and -worlds . Through architecture, props, and costumed staff, they "attempt to place the 'guest' into narratives" (The P roject on Disney 1 995:81 ). Yet un l i ke the totalizing experience aimed for by corporations like Disney and by animal experience parks such as Sea World (cf. Davis 1 997) and satiri zed by Eco as TI·auel. in Hyperreality ( 1 986), the Austrian examples arc a great deal more f'ra mentcd and fragmenting. Materialized narra tion can tell us a lot about the disjunctu re between individual experience -which ulti mately remains fully known only to the self and th e experience that is constructed, adver tised, and to be paid for.

Materiali zed Fiction s m Aus trian Tourist Sites
The tourist industry has evolved from market ing landscapes , accommodations, health, an d facets of culture to the absorbing or controlling of what people purportedly wish to do and feel while being tourists . Dean MacCannell, among others , has articulated the traveler's endless effort to push beyond the touristic offering into realms of uncommodified experience ( 1989:97ft). It should not surprise that the industry inevita bly recognizes this demand and commodifies it7, bringing forth in turn what Feifer has called post-tourists -people at play with what they know to be staged experiences (Feifer 1985).
The key term in the leisure market at this point is "experience". In Carinthia, in the summer of 1996, this encompassed everything from ad venture-experience to taste-, Marchen-, and water-experience.
The number of Carinthian sites denoting narrative is remarkable, and a special tourist credit card (the Karnten Card) introduced in the 1996 season offered reduced entrance fees in almost all ofthem. During a stay in the region south of the Worthersee, acquaintance with such sites and associated "theming" is almost unavoidable: aside from brochures in freeway rest stops, at information booths, reception desks , and in guest rooms, many inns and hotels have appropriated elements , however minor, as part of their decor. Driving through rural streets, garden dwarves placed ostenta tiously into the front yard can be a visual indicator for available guest rooms , supporting w h utovor add ition a l signagc there m ight be. I n the case o f e�;iobl ish monts gea red iowu rd fa m il ie�;, �;tut u u ry und pictori a l �; referencing narra ti ve u re parti c u l a rly n u merou�;. At a fa m i ly hotel on Ro u�;chcle:;ee, fiH· instance, the house itse l f was painted with fo l ktale fi gu res, the ba rn w i th a n i mals rese mbl i ng ch i l d ren's books ill ustrations, and ihc extensive garden held a Sn ow W h i te siaiue i n ch arge of a great many more dwarves than one is accustomed io expect from ih o iale. Tho l i ve geese were na med after th ei r l i terary cou sins in Sel m a Lag-crli.if's chi l dren's clas1:1ic Nils Holge rsson ( 1 99 1 1 1 907 1 ) . Scrutiny ofbroch ure:; ofCarin th ian guest facil ities from1996 through 1998 demonstrates that moi:it establ i shm ents wanti ng to earn the desig nation family hotel make such concessions in in-and outdoor decor. " The mi xtu re of sou rce references from 19th and 20th century children's books to traditional popular narrative and mass medi ated narra tions such as cartoons is characteristic of the entire Carinth ian spectru m of tourist sitesthose overtly focusing on materialized fiction and those centering on different themes . Heidi Aim Falkert, for example, can be reached by foot or by cable way, and once one reaches the proper altitude, one will find plastic figurines along a trail, mapping J ohanna Spyri's classic Swiss story ( 1994 [1879 ] ) over what used to be an alpine pasture . In the Gurktal, one can board a train into a Dwarf Park (Zwergenpark), to see everything from dwarf mythology to Bat man dwarves . Elsewhere awaits the Stuffed Animal Zoo Experience (Plilschtier Zoo Erleb niswelt) -with animals near wishing wells, stalked by cartoon protagonists Garfield and the Pink Panther. Some sites incorporate just a few referents to tale imagery, such as inflatable archetypes of a "fairy castle" and a "peasant home" to bounce on, amidst waterslides and other rides at the 1. Carinthian Experience Park (1. Karntner Erlebnispark, Pressegger see ).
In some instances, the entire site takes its characters and scenes from fiction. A good ex ample is the Magic Forest in the Carinthian lake valley (Zauberwald , Rauschelesee). A por tion of the forested hill side sloping down to ward the lake has been augmented from an 32 o rca for recreational w a l king to a s i te fi l led w i th plywood statuary, m a ke sh i ft stru ct u res intended to resemble fortresses, hu ts , a w i sh i ng well, cic. As one enter the !o rosi, cut out heads of generic ghouls peak out from the trees , evoking no particular (and thus all kinds of) talc, legend or myt h. Mixed i n amongi:ii them arc figures from Maurice Sendak's ch i l d ren's book Where the Wi ld Things Are, generic w i tch es and Little Red Riding Hood." The Magic Fo rest serves as a gigantic pl aygro u nd for chil dren to take possession of at w i l l . The 1:1 u ggested themes arc fairy tales, but also -thanks to the fori and tho Indian teepee -the soWer vs. Indian conflict, or medieval robber vs. baron games. There are no guards or other safety measures in this rocky, in places steep forest, the natural terrain is part of the experience for those veering from the path. Here resides one of the differences between these locally generated tourist sites and Disney-type env iron ments where safety and thus containment are writ large, and the experience -whether imaginary or real -is much more controlled . An other telling difference resides in the materializa tions themselves. Disney, perhaps more so than any other theme park enterprise, standardizes its visual images to fit within the overall Disney style. Characters drawn from vernacular nar rative appear in the look employed in Disney films, surrounded by enactments of cartoon animals bearing Disney looks . It is the same ness of the style in creatures, buildings and rides that creates the ambiance. A place such as this Austrian Magic Forest, by contrast, con tains a bricolage alluding to highly diverse narrative vehicles and visual inheritances . There is no effort to give all the source materials the same kind of unifying gloss . The assump tion, rather, is that the glue making for the desired experience will come from the fantasy play of the children themselves, with the occa sional bit of assistance from an animator.
The Keutschach tourist office in whose do main the forest is located hires a number of tale animators .10 Their task is to facilitate more structured ways to interact with this forest. With their help, "walks in the magic forest" differ drastically depending on the animator's vision of magic, narration, and childhood. Thus one such walk was a peaceful amble through the forest, with parents and kids occasionally gathering in a clearing, and getting treated to what folklorists would happily index as a typi cal magic tale. This walk concluded with each child receiving a magic story stone from the animator's magic story stone box -material evidence for the experience, as well as for the generic magic gift of a folktale; they were dis pensed with the promise that each stone would bring more stories if carefully placed under one's pillow.
An early evening walk with Del Vede, a storyteller who occasionally appears on Ger man TV, set a very different tone. He began by reversing authority between children and their parents . Face paint given to each child and wild play marked a 'reality' of childhood, within which parents were labeled as extraterrestrial or otherwise disturbing creatures. This narra tor completely ignored the icons of famili ar tales and books sprinkled through the forest. Instead he told fragments of nature myths, animating the trees and stones among which everyone sat. Into this fiction entered an elderly woman, seemingly just walking her dog. Del Vede greeted her as the forest witch, a role she clearly had enacted for him before, and from here the evening segued into a lesson on envi ronmental protection and witchcraft's connec tion to it. Another reality was placed atop the fragile fictional one, when the forest witch re minded Del Vede that he had not made good on his promise to feature her on one of his story tapes . . Y The most elaborate site to be discussed is, Dwarf statuary along the diaper hiking mile.
literally, arranged as a road through fiction: the "Diaper Hiking Mile" (Windelwandermeile) lo cated above the village of Trebesing. Its en trance is flanked by dwarves in guard houses, and dwarves appear throughout this walk, nes tled between roots , sitting on tree branches, or as part of tale statuary. From a brochure about a different site we learn that dwarves are the ideal means to bridge between work/reality and leisure/fantasy. 12 Given what kinds of things dwarves tend to do in folk narrative -working hard in mines and accumulating riches -and given that the most common garden dwarves tend to be toiling away with wheelbarrows, shovels and axes , this interpretation already points toward what is arguably true oftouristic endeavor in general : being a tourist is exhaust ing work, and most people look, like dwarves , funny or aberrant from their habitual existence while they are engaged in it. Other symbols of this nature are lady bugs -made of painted flat stones, but dwarves are more potent and more numerous, in this and many other sites. Trebe sing claims to be the first village in the world to be exclusively devoted to baby tourism. Its choice of marketing strategy grew from seren dipitous circumstance . 13 According to one Car inthian tourism administrator, "Carinthia was a place where even in 1980 you couldn't get a high chair in a restaurant." The baby hotel, and, building on it, the baby village, was at least for this area an ingenious innovation. Fifteen years later, there are many imitations in other re gions of Austria14, and the diaper hiking mile was developed in the early 1990s precisely to keep up with the growing competition. Though perhaps inspired by large scale theming enter prises such as Germany's Die Deutsche Miir chenstrasse 15, the diaper hiking mile is pedes trian not just in practice but also in artistic execution.
The dominant element in this site is nature. The path is broad in places, and sufficiently even to push a baby cart, but walking amidst huge pine trees, or along a slippery wooden bridge passage next to a cliff, one cannot forget for a moment that one is outdoors in a high altitude environment. Along the path , stories turned into painted cardboard, wood and plas tic are placed atop the natural landscape. Lucky Hans is recognizable by the goose under his arm; a little wooden structure can be identified as Han sel and G retel':; gi ngerbread house, and Snow W h i te and the Seven Dwarves l ook i n g distinctly Disney-esqu e arc here as well.
For tho:;c intcre:;tcd i n the tradi ti onal narra tive experience of the li terate West, story texts are provided on metal pl ates made to look vague ly like story books , and ch a i n ed to a metal stor age recepta cl e. Families arc meant to sit on the bench , then the narrator can pull the :;tory book out of its niche and read, for example, the tale of The Magi c Table ( Tisch lein Deck -Dich ). Afler the reading, the book is to be put back in to its storage space on the bench . Thus while figurines are nestled into the landscape , signaling the unruly forest and mountain as the space where such fiction resides, their association with books to be read out loud is scripted into this set-up as well . The folkloristic endeavor of tale collecting and publication, as well as the romantic spirit that located European legendry and tales in the wilds of nature, are then al l part of what shaped this particular touristic endeavor.
To further control the way a family might take in this mile, a checklist and pencil are handed out to each child at the beginning of the mile, asking questions about all the tale and legend characters to be spotted, as well as about various plants and tree species that are flagged along the way. A field of learning and knowing is thus created, mixing real/natural and mate rialized/fictional elements. Filling out the form correctly results in further material benefit -a lollipop to be picked up in an inn at the end of the trail. Suddenly we realize that the experi ence of hiking through fiction, and the sense of vacation as play and time "away from it all" have acquired an undercurrent of school-like test and reward structures. otherwise require a lengthy account: in this European setting the American frontier experi ence and the Native American encounter with whites has been mediated by fiction. Playing Cowboy and Indian often enacts very specific fictional texts -typically drawing from Karl May's popular trilogy about Winnetou and Old Shatterhand (cf. Plaul 1989). These fictions certainly saturate the popular imagination, further enriched by the fact that a neighboring valley holds annual Karl May open air plays , geared toward adult and youth consumption alike . The film industry has provided far more concrete templates for materialized imagina tion than the Grimm tales and similar folktale collections, and hence it should not surprise that among all the elements of this particular site, the Wild West play ground is by far the most elaborate structure . 18 The diaper hiking mile thus assimilates and synchronizes diachronic layers of narration and fiction which took shape at particular historical j u n ct u res a n d w h i c h th rough w ri t i n g, p ri nt i ng, fi l m , and enactment took on concrete contou rs at variou s m o m e n ts in t i m e . Un l i ke u theme pa rk e n v i ro n m e n t thut sccks to fu l ly con trol the vis i tor's experi ence, the 1'rcbcs i ng set-u p docs no more than dot the l andscape . Any major rai n or snow storm a ffects the structures; poten tial ly it coul d el imin ate the enti re s i te .

Concluding Questions
Wh ut is to be gl ea n ed from exu m p l es such as these, and what ki nds of questions arise from them? For one, the Carin thian n arrative them ing oflandscapcs and built environ ments dem onstrates the swj{u;e domin ance of particu lar styles and corresponding ideologies in narra tive materialization, as well as the localized interpretations and al terati ons of a global izing strategy (cf. Robertson 1994). Disney aims to deliver an authoritative, gl obally adaptable system of narrative materialization, enforced wi th a reach into the intern ati onal market that is quite unparal leled. Disney's narrative adap tations, whether in film or in theme park, are cordoned off and aiming for totalizing perfec tion -in terms of style, content, and control (The Project on Disney 1995).
The quality of materialized narrative in Car inthia, heterogeneous and perhaps amateurish to those who have experienced a closed-off theme park site of the Disneyland variety, is evidence for a quite different and fragmented ideology. It attests to the layered, sometimes competing constituencies in Austrian tourism development and consumption. The Coca-Colonization of Austria (Wagnleitner 199 1) has not necessarily transformed native aesthetic and economic pat terns. Behind the borrowed products and imag es reside older preferences of display, and very different scales of conceiving of profit to be gained from materialized fiction. The Diaper Hiking Mile was free of charge for those who held the Carinthia Card, and almost free for everyone else -it was meant as an attraction enhancing the location, and the real profit was to be made through nights and meals sold. By comparison, the Miirchenwald (tale forest) in Styria's St. Georgen, founded in 1993, is slight ly more costly, but here, too, it is the profit made from selling meals and tri nkets that carries the en tcrpri se. 1 !1 R u n by the Sch nitzelwirt (u l so known as "Gasthof Sonncnhof"), whose menu predictably con si st:; of Sch n it:wl, thi::; site con sists of a mixture oflargely animated site:; (with hedgehog and bear figures familiar from Ger man pi cture book illustrations), pl ay equip ment, and quite elaborate talc scenes nestled into the forest. Though an attempt i::; made to pipe children's music into the space , it is ulti mately the tall trees and the loud voice:; of chil dren at p l ay th at dominate the envi ron menL. 11 The idea of a Miirchenpark enjoyed popular ity already in the early 20th century (cf. Stein 1 997), and in the margins of present-day high tech amusement parks one sometimes finds remnants of such earlier, milder pleasures. They were generally located near urban centers, un like the kinds of sites discussed here which thematize fractions ofthe natural environment for vacationers far from cities. The folktale as utopia remains consistent, but its place of ma terialized residence is shifting.
As sites of narrative materialization and consumption, each of these sites is fascinating in its own right. The placement and nature of statuary reveals cultural assumptions about where narrative resides. The popularity of the forest setting (a quite Germanic idea), embla zoned on the collective imagination in framed story collections (e.g. , the German Das Wirts haus im Spessart) lives on in name, even if some touristic tale forests are more tamed and peo pled. Yet the bourgeois sentiment of a tale properly belonging into a book is also preserved here, as "abbreviated" a book a metal tablet chained to a bench might be. Each site practices a wild co-existence of narrative genres and allusions to narrative media. Is it only the themed environment that wildly mixes illus trated children's books, folktales, young adult fiction, histories of conquest, and mythologies of so called "primitive peoples", thereby flying in the face of scholarly efforts at generic differ entiation between the oral and the literate, and between countless genres amongst them? Or are fields of experience such as those in Carin thia testimony to the ways in which layers of narrative media and genres, as well as layers of history a n d col o n i a l a p p ropriation a l l coal esce into a te ntative, tram;cu l t u ral and tram; encric spacea �; pace where not gen rm; and media, but exper ie n ce�; of fi ctio n a l po�;�; i bi l itie�; , pa�;t and present, a rc con s u med?
The narrative theme-�; i tes oflcred in Cari n thia co u l d, precisely because o f the ir heteroge neous an d amateurish exec ution, contain a greater potential fo r con �;tru cting s uch a utopi an space than the homogeneously styled worlds of Dis n ey. But u topi as -a n d the potential up heaval associ ated w i th i t -is hardly the goal of a tourist enterprise. The tourist industry rather appeals to the touristic desire for utopi an difference , and profits from the desire . And here, the heterogeneity of Carinthia's sites is less of an asset, for how can one predict how and through which kinds of artifacts visitors will relate to or generate narrative memory? How predictable is a common denominator for such artifacts? Themed environments like Trebes ing's bank on the broad appeal of a very narrow aesthetic selecti on from the vast store of art historical evidence of narrative reification. Lack ing the unifying gloss ofthe successfully themed environment, the bricoleed images invoke (but do not spell out) a common denominator where there may not be one . Radomir Runzelschuh's folktale automat discussed at the beginning epitomize the serialized artifact 'folktale' (Lau n.d.). The narrative reifications in themed envi ronments seek to serialize tale or more broadly narrative experiences into a profitable branch of tourism. Yet the jump between a folktale dispenser and a fiction-based experience-dis penser is vast, and possibly negotiated far more effectively in virtual space than atop very real natural landscapes.
Though initiated in an attempt to shore up unstable tourism revenue, the frailty of some of these sites parallels the frailty of Austrian tour ism. Although Austria looks back at two hun dred years of touristic practice, the competition from destinations spanning the globe is strong and rising.21 Perhaps, for a touristically ex hausted region such as Austria, constructing a fictional overlay is not just an effort to copy American practices. Perhaps it rather seems like a natural course of action, not least because the wonder and magic of Austria's real land :;cape arc bel ieved to be too fa m il i a r fi 1r pote n t i a l con s u m e r;; .
The tourist trade builds on global econ om i c p resumptions and con necti ons . !t is the biggc;;t, and perhaps most u npredi ctab le trade to p u r sue, precisely because the market highs sh i ll from the Alps to Tibet, and from luxury to adventure with l i ttle warning. For a cou n t ry with a long history and dependency on touri stic development, the global reach of tourism is devastating. It forces family businesses en meshed in local tou r i s m rivalries to acq uaint themselves with marketing strategies and na tional or even European Union policies spe ll i ng out which kind of tourism will receive state support. Better than the analyses ofdistra u ht Austrian industry experts could ever explain it , the Carinthian narrative materializations embody their producers' wavering between glo bal strategies, European horizons and local sensibilities. Notes 1. The fieldwork was supported by summer re search grants from the University of Pennsylva nia Research Foundation. Thanks go to the tour ist industry representatives who were inter viewed and who provided me with a great deal of print materials on aspects of Carinthian tour ism. The writing was supported by a National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship for university teachers. Versions of this article were presented at the American Folklore Society Meet ings in Austin, Texas, October 1997, and at the International Society for Narrative Research Congress in Gottingen, Germany, July 1998.  between people . It is the outcome ( . .. ) which researchers and th e tou r i s m i ndustry constan tly evaluate to establ ish ifthe actual experience met the tourist's expectations. In other words, the 'tourist expe ri e nce' is a co m pl ex a m alga m o f factors which sh ape the tourist's feelings and attitude towards his or her visit. Yet as tourism motivation and consumer research suggests, it is al most i mpossi ble to p redi c.:t tou rist responses to individual situations but a series of interrelated impacts may affect the tourist's experience" (Page 1995:24). 8. This is of course in accordance with the tourist market in general which is driven by supply di!Ierentiation. The growth of a family oriented tourism supply will also bring with it the growth of establishments or services for adults on ly in addition to services such as child care or chil dren's camps to free up parents for the adult-only offering. 9. During sum mer 1996, there were small posters all over the Carinthian region between Klagen furt and Villach advertising locally produced Little Red Riding Hood dolls. During Villach's big summer fair in August, the annual Kirchtag, we even encountered someone impersonating Little Red Riding Hood hawking her own image, this very doll. 10. One of the animators I observed in several set tings and subsequently interviewed indicated that creative artists like himself had been prac ticing in the area for more than two decades, and the formalization of their tie-in into the Carin thian tourist offerings was a more recent devel opment, associated with the increasing -but not 38 necessari ly successfu l -emnts t. o coord i n at u t he tou rist i n d ustry on t he stnte n n d fed e ra l leve l .
I I . The local tourist offices adj ust t o D e l Vede's i ndependent spi rit, as he is a b i g drnw fin· m a ny c h i l dren and th u s a l so t h e i r parents. One day I was there, Del Vede fa i led to m a ke the how, a nd a s ubstitute had to be fo u n d quickly. "He'l l :;ay that he's an artist, and a rtist:; c.:annot n l wnys be bothered," hol lered the exasperated i n n keeper at the fi1ci l i ty w h ere the show was to take p l ace.
"But good a rt ists honor t h e i r comm itments!" More than fifty famil ies w ith chi ld ren w e re m i ll ing about th e premises, :mrl the i n nkeeper· n a t u ra l l y feared fo r h is reputati on, for Del Vede' was wel l establ ished .
12. Acco rdin g to nanologi st (=dwarf researcher) Gerolf Urban : "G arden d w a rve:; represe n t hu mankind's eternal longing for enliveni ng nature. C h ildhood is a ti me of u n l i m i ted fantasy w hich w e never compl etely conquer. The d warve:; offer us a return into this beautiful, and -compared to our total life span -much too short time" (cited li·om the Dwarf Park's 1 996 brochure). 13. According to one field consultant, the genesis was as follows: a young man inherited a family i nn close to bankruptcy; he had small chi ldren himself, and the idea to target families with very small children germin ated over many rou nds of drink with friends also in the tourist business. 14. The summer 1998 advertising for Swiss tourism was also very heavily geared toward fa milies, but in interesting ways it was trying to steer away from the "tasteless" and "touristic" by ad vertising itself as "non-touristic." Is this the ultimate in post-tourism? or just a spr uced-up version of the old dichotomy between the tourists and the (positively valued) others who merely travel or vacation? See Buzard ( 1993)  16. With a stretch of the imagination, one might see here a latent reference to 100 1 nights, esp. since oasis is not a word usually associated with dia pering. 17. For an American audience, the association of Wild West and Indian play acting devoid of any guilt is perhaps startling, but in the German speaking area it is at least as widespread as the dwarves. 18. The history of travel, exploration and conquest turned fiction turned play turned tourist desti nation is in itself an intriguing narrative that should be further explored. 19. While Disney Environments or parks such as Sea World in Southern California (Davis 1997) also make considerable profit off concessions, toys and trinkets, the entrance fee alone is al ready exorbitant, because the destination itself is conceptualized as the draw, not an added benefit to a vacation setting chosen for its land scape, ru rn l a rc h itect.u re or hote l fa ci l i ty.

20.
Thou"h I do n o t have access t o any statistics , any ob crv a n t traveler i n the a l p i ne regions o f Aus tri a , S w i tw r l a n d a n d Ge rmany w i l l notice that the n u m ber o f si tes of th i s nature is "row i ng, a l ong ide the cflilrL t.o expand and d i ve rs i fy "f:lJ'll ily to u rism" o l'fc r i n gs. A more com plex event, su pport ed by sch o l a rs fm m l n nsbruck U n iversi ty, is the 1¥roler Bel'jJsai-fr>n Fe. tival, h e l d fil r the seco nd Lime i n ,J u ly a n d A u "ust 1 998 in Matrc i , Ty ro l i a . Here natu re tou r i s m i s cou pled w i th a rev i s i ting of "magic" i n l a nd:;cape, a rt exh i bi ti ons, enact m ent.s and rea d i ngs of legends, a book p u b licati on a n d partici patory acti v i t. icR for old and young. The fest i v a l won fi n.;t p rice i n the catc"ory "event tou rism" sponsored by a nation al to u ri s m trade maga i n c i n 1 997. 2 1 . In 1998, Austria ga i ncd, fin· the fi rst time in more th a n a decade, in some sectors o ftou rism reve nue; however, most of these ga i n s w e re i n u rban centers, esp . Vien n a , where i n 1 998 the 1 OOth ann ive rsary of Em press Sisi's death brought forth a flurry of special ex h i b i ts .
22. Throughout the 1990s, articles in the Austrian magazine Profil, as well as materials from the Austrian federal and state level tou rism b u rea us, not to speak of the local press voiced their distresR about the AuRtrian i n abi lity to hop onto the new waves, to get with it, to play in the big tourism stakes, to streamline housing oilers, to col l ectively advertise, to eli m i n ate outdated in n s and hotels.