Abstract :
A brilliant book `Vinyl Leaves ¿ Walt Disney World and America¿ by Stephen M Fjellman, a leading American anthropologist, starts with the following description: ¿There is a tree in Central Florida. It is maybe 90 feet high and huge around the base and has a crown that stretches across almost as many yards as the tree is tall. From the top of this tree, when the wind is still, you can see almost to the Caribbean. The trunk looks about as much like that of a live oak as one might wish. The bark is deeply grained and covered with that pea-soup green colored stuff you see on the trees in hot, wet places. It¿s a big nice tree, a good place for the treehouse that adorns it. But it¿s not made of wood. The trunk and the branches are formed out of pressed concrete wrapped around a steel-mesh frame. The bark and green stuff that cover much of it are painted on. The leaves ¿ all 800,000 of them ¿ are made of vinyl.¿ Stephen Fjellmam proceeds to explain that the tree, Disneyodendron eximus (`out-ofordinary Disney tree¿)¿ is in the Adventureland part of Walt Disney World¿s Magic Kingdom. For him, it became a symbol of technology-assisted `commodification¿ of modern American culture. During my many months in the USA, I came across numerous real-life examples of such artificially engineered `commodification¿, the most impressive being, without doubt, Las Vegas.
