Natalie Alvarez, Immersions in Cultural Difference: Tourism, War, Performance

This book documents cultural encounters facilitated in immersive role-play scenarios of military and counterinsurgency training, dark tourism, and pedagogy based on history, topography, and the politics of human rights violations. Among the four case studies, two concern training for North American combatants engaged in declared and covert wars in the Middle East; two feature Indigenous cultures claiming control over their narratives, designed to proactively alter a people’s future; and whereas one relies on a built simulation three others utilize the natural landscape to shape encounters. Like studies by Scott Magelssen and Coco Fusco, among others, Natalie Alvarez’s work is invested in formal characteristics of the cases, such as live immersive situations, for paradigm-building. Yet, more importantly, it is cultural ethnography that first destabilizes then reorients the ethnographer’s understanding of kinds of knowledge and leads to sensitization to local cultures and ethical experiences of learning. It matters less whether the cases cohere in terms of formal elements of performance than that, through field work and ethnographic reflection, performance is indispensable in promoting personal encounters imbued with empathy. Over the course of many years, Alvarez’s field work—at CFB Camp Wainwright’s Afghan Village training site, the private company Aeneas Group International’s course on Countering Insurgency in Complex Environments held in the Utah mountains, a nighttime walk led by Indigenous Hñahñu in Hildalgo northeast of Mexico City simulating perils encountered by border-crossing migrants, and a tour of Shoal Lake 40 Reserve conducted by a community leader and settler-ally through this Anishinaabe reserve in southeastern Manitoba—accumulates into a profound meditation on experiences of encounter.