SeaWorld as Sanitized Nature: A Visitor Ethnography

The Lure of Managed Adventure

A visit to SeaWorld might not seem very adventurous. It might not seem to mean very much of anything at all — except perhaps a relatively pleasant, if rather expensive, way to spend an afternoon.

However, part of both the appeal and the marketability of going to a place like SeaWorld is that it speaks to something inside us that longs for adventure. Very few of us will ever get to swim with dolphins in the ocean or to see puffins in their native nesting grounds. What a place like SeaWorld does is offer us the sense that we have traveled to distant places.

We feel like explorers, like ethnographers, as we set off through the gates of SeaWorld. We feel that we are going somewhere — if not perhaps where no one has gone before, then at least somewhere we ourselves have never been. We are not engaged in the petty business of capitalism, but in the great project of finding ourselves.

This may simply seem like overblown advertising rhetoric from a SeaWorld television spot, but in fact it comes authentically from my own recent experiences visiting SeaWorld and from individuals I spoke with while there. The following description of my visit will help analyze what it is about SeaWorld that makes it such a fascinating place.

A Choreographed Nature: Observations on the Ground

It should be noted first of all that everything at SeaWorld is perfectly choreographed. Nothing is left to chance, and nothing is left to nature. This does not surprise me as I enter the grounds, pay for my ticket, and get my hand stamped — even without being asked whether I wish to leave the park and return before my ticket expires. The assumption, of course, is that no one would choose not to return, that everyone would want to spend as long as possible in the wonders of SeaWorld.

This particular style of hyper-manicured presentation will be immediately familiar to anyone who has ever visited a theme park. There is just enough nature to make one feel that one has indeed left the usual constraints of the urban world and entered some other, more exotic, more enticing sphere. And yet this nature is kept beautifully tidy. There are no weeds anywhere. I keep a lookout for them all day but fail to find a single one. Even the dirt seems clean, perhaps because it is sprinkled with little flecks of white.

I am not quite sure what these little white flecks are made of, but I do not believe they are organic. They come with the potted plants one buys from nurseries — they are not the native dirt you see along the roadside as you drive into the park. This might not seem important, but it is precisely in such details, once one begins to notice them, that one comes to understand how essentially artificial SeaWorld is.

SeaWorld is supposed to provide the visitor with a sense of what it is like to experience nature up close. But every honest aspect of nature seems to have been expunged from the place. Even the dirt is clean. The water in all of the tanks smells of chlorine — which, while a naturally occurring element, is not something that would naturally be found in the environments of dolphins or sharks. We experience at SeaWorld something that happens all the time in private gardens, but here it is carried to an even greater extreme. The garden, as Kincaid (2001) suggests through her collection of essays on gardening, is a place in which we simultaneously want to display our appreciation of nature and our ability to control it.

This is most certainly the case at SeaWorld. We want to show how much we love the little sea creatures in all their natural glory — and we also want them forced to act as entertainment for us. One fourteen-year-old visitor from Lansing, Michigan, said this about the dolphins:

Commerce, Souvenirs, and the Constructed Wild

The dolphins are my favorite and I really like coming here to see them because you can actually look at them. My family and I went on a whale-watching boat last year and there were whales and dolphins out in the water, but you could barely see them. Everyone was getting all excited about some fins and some tails. And the boat couldn't get any closer because I guess there are laws or rules about that. But there really didn't seem to be any point to it — it cost my parents a lot of money and we barely got to see anything. Here we have passes so we can come back and you actually get to see the dolphins. This is what it should be like in the ocean.^[1]

A visit to SeaWorld consists of a series of stops at different attractions, each of which hosts a single species or a few compatible species, along with those immaculate flower beds, too few places to sit down, little carts selling drinks (some in ridiculous souvenir cups), and gift shops tied to the theme of the nearest animals.

This is niche marketing at its finest, one assumes. If people are inclined to go and look at real, live puffins — and who could resist them, with their fiercely pumping underwater flight, their quick if awkward movements on land, their silly crests — then surely they will want to take home a memento of these adorable creatures. A stuffed animal, perhaps. Or a mug. Or some socks or a T-shirt emblazoned with their image.

And people certainly did flock to buy these souvenirs. One nine-year-old girl bought three stuffed puffins, all in different sizes:

We decided to come here for vacation months ago and I've been saving every dollar I got. I had some Hanukkah money saved up still, and I got some money for my birthday, and then I've been doing extra chores to earn a little more. And I knew that I would spend it all at the puffin shop. We came here last year and that's when I decided that puffins would be my favorite animals. But last year we went to see the dolphins first and I spent all my money on dolphin things. This year I begged and begged to come here first so that I could spend all of my money here. This way I can pretend that I'm back here whenever I want, because I'll have my very own puffin family.^[2]