Paper short abstract:

At an educational summer camp, the shifting population builds itself different camp cultures from session to session. Participants bring their home cultures in with them and leave traces behind, continuing to influence the camp culture after they have left.

Paper long abstract:

This paper explores how an educational summer camp's culture is influenced both by the culture that participants bring with them from outside and by traces left in the physical environment by previous participants.

I examine the case of a language-immersion summer camp where students receive both formal and informal instruction in French language and culture. With its educational goals, the camp functions much like a school with both students and educators in residence. The camp's shifting population dramatically affects the experience of camp life. The single site at which the camp is held becomes a different place from session to session and summer to summer because of what the individual participants bring along in terms of expectations, cultural competencies, and personalities. The very character of the camp's 'French' language and culture depends on that summer's proportions of American, French, Québecois and West African staff. Although the camp ostensibly represents French culture, the home places that participants bring with them form the building blocks from which the camp's culture is built and rebuilt.

Participants also mark the camp's physical environment. Traditions of painting benches and murals, either to mark specific moments or simply to leave traces of one's presence behind, create contact points between different iterations of the camp's population. In this way, participants use the physical site to extend their influence over the camp in time, leaving artistic messages in bottles. What is brought in from outside resonates within the campsite and influences future incarnations of the site's culture.