ABSTRACT
Although anthropologists have examined the capacity of tourist art to express cultural, national and ethnic values (e.g. Shenhav-Keller 1995; Harrison 1992; Silver 1979), its capacity to convey deeply religious sentiment among its producers is not well documented. Nevertheless, religious tourist art may be remarkably common. I have argued elsewhere that the Polynesian Cultural Center (the Center, or PCC), an ethnic theme park owned and operated by the Mormon church in Laie, Hawaii, is laden with religious significance. In fact, as one of Hawaii’s most popular tourist attractions, the Center annually conducts nearly a million visitors through a forty-acre enterprise that is as much a monumental work of Mormon art as it is a work of tourist art (Webb 1994a; 1994b). This paper probes the depth of the PCC’s religious content by examining the formal and symbolic similarities between the Center and the Mormon temple ceremony, which is the most sacred of Mormon ordinances.
