Between Plantation, President, and Public: Institutionalized Polysemy and the Representation of Slavery, Genocide, and Democracy at Andrew Jackson’s Hermitage

Abstract

This dissertation challenges dominant understandings of social memory as a unified product generated through conflict between competing ideologies. Rather, multiple representations of a given past can comingle in a seemingly incoherent way, such that representations not only shift across sites, but within them. At Andrew Jackson’s Hermitage, visitors are met with a barrage of competing images of “the People’s President” as they relate to his career and family life, as well as his legacies of slavery and genocide amidst democratization. This comingling of contrasting images—termed institutionalized polysemy—manifests in uses of the site, tour and program offerings, and merchandise sold on-site. This institutionalized polysemy is produced by a combination of aesthetic, historical, geographic, organizational, and interactional factors. This dissertation is based on nearly a year of participant-observation as a historic interpreter at Andrew Jackson’s Hermitage; on latent content analysis of museum materials, signage, and websites; and on supplementary in-depth interviews with staff members in middle management positions. It integrates the sociology of organizations, occupations, and work with social memory studies and the sociology of tourism by arguing that the customer service triangle (Subramanian and Suquet 2018) and competing organizational logics (Thornton and Ocasio 1999) play an underappreciated role in memory production at heritage sites. Revisiting Sykes and Matza’s (1957) neutralization theory, this dissertation suggests that this framework for understanding the justification of individual crime can be applied to human rights violations by historical figures.