Thirty years ago, a corporation mascoted by a mouse took up residence in central Florida on a parcel of land twice the size of Manhattan, extracting from the state government exemptions from building and safety codes, permissions to operate its own police force and to issue tax-free municipal bonds, and even, should it ever be deemed necessary, the concession to build its own nuclear power plant. All this was plotted by an organization synonymous with children's entertainment. Few educated people will find this so terribly surprising, and thus may find a 400-page elaboration on this point less than enthralling. Fjellman's book does, however, provide a diverting primer to applied cultural anthropology - an application of anthropological theory to a place with which most of us are already intimately familiar, but have never examined as text.

Throughout Walt Disney World (WDW), Fjellman suggests, we are exposed to an onslaught of sensory stimuli so intense that it defeats our attempts to understand it as a construction. The sheer number of sensations and the pretend authenticity in which they are packaged - the vinyl leaves on The Swiss Family Robinson Treehouse - make it almost impossible to analyze our experience dispassionately. "WDW is organized according to the principle of cognitive overload," for when people are so thoroughly overwhelmed with stimuli they are easier to sway. WDW, Fjellman posits, "is an epicenter for decontextualization": Donald Duck and American history, the fake and the real, are given equal footing in the Magic Kingdom. Essentially, it is the ethos of television commercials: decontextualize an idea and recontextualize it as a product attribute. One becomes trained to think not of the Old West but of Marlboro Country, not Generation X but the Pepsi Generation. WDW is in some sense a gigantic commercial writ large, but with unprecedented levels of control over the consumer. Rides are computer-controlled, attractions are focus-grouped, and interactions with employees are carefully scripted.

Walt Disney World is much more, however, than a gigantic commercial. WDW embodies a culture of its own that is not randomly organic but carefully planned. "A good way to make sure that people police themselves is to get them to believe essentially the same stories about what the world is": WDW is the most successful and complex site of indoctrination into the consumerist culture of commodified existence that is the late-twentieth century. It is where we learn to be Americans.

To those with any background in cultural anthropology, Fjellman's contention that conflicts between people are often fought through "competing cultural understandings" comes as no surprise. Any culture can be a tool of dominance, but some culture, some shared system, is necessary for any sort of communication at all. It makes little difference whether this shared culture is the English language, the "Great Books," or Disney cartoons. From the perspective of the Disney corporation, our shared cultural canon may as well be the Disney canon of films, products, and theme parks. And to a large extent, it now is.

Fjellman is particularly interested in Epcot Center, the 1981 addition to WDW. Like the traditional World's Fairs on which it was modeled, Epcot is divided into two halves: a section showing new technologies (Future World), and a section showing pavilions of foreign countries (World Showcase). Where Future World attractions are sponsored by technological multinationals, the exhibits of the World Showcase are sponsored largely by the foreign countries depicted. But despite this collaboration (or perhaps because of it) World Showcase not only commodifies foreign countries, it confirms stereotypes in a very calculated way: "World Showcase represents what people would expect to find on their travels rather than what they actually will see in a given countries' shops." In Morocco's exhibit, for instance, one can buy carpets, "exotic" jewelry, and somewhat bland Moroccan food. World Showcase deliberately offers the tourist exactly what one would imagine: expect the expected. Just as "It's a Small World" represents the children of the earth through "touristic icons," World Showcase depicts the entire world through these icons of tourism. To visit World Showcase is to witness Disney commodifying the world.

Though Fjellman analyzes every part of WDW, his primary interest is in Epcot Center's Future World, where he writes that Disney creates a "rhetorical metastory of corporate ideology." It is in Future World that Disney harnesses the publicity engines of various corporations to create a single meta-tale of the glories of consumerism and trust in technology. More subtly, almost all these corporate tales (written or co-written by Disney) ask us to place our faith in a rhetorical "we" that simultaneously (and deceptively) stands for the audience of tourists, humanity, and powerful multinational corporations. Exhibit after exhibit solemnly intones that "we" have a bright future ahead if only "we" can work together - that is, if we trust in GE, AT&T, GM, Exxon, and the other sponsors of attractions at Epcot's Future World. Through the all-embracing "we," tourists are allied with the companies who wish their acquiescence.

Fjellman is at his keenest in his analysis of Future World. Both Future World in Epcot and Tomorrowland in the Magic Kingdom are about the past, he says: Tomorrowland is about the way the past looked at the future (a Jules Verne and Art Nouveau sort of 1950's futurism), and Future World is about the present looking at the past. Epcot's Future World, largely underwritten by huge American corporations, is interested in preserving the status quo: Exxon's "Universe of Energy" exhibit looks at past sources of energy and concludes that we must continue to rely on oil (and that we need government subsidies for oil exploration), and GM's "World of Motion" exhibit looks at the "silly" methods man has used to travel in the past and ends with an actual GM showroom. We're so dazzled with Epcot's attractions we hardly realize we've waited in line for a commercial. But it is more than a commercial - it is how we learn our history and thus learn who we are.

Fjellman does not subscribe to the view often associated with postmodernism that one shared culture is as good as another. Quoting Langdon Winner and Albert Borgman, he suggests that the centralization and hierarchical organization of Western technological systems is not value-neutral and that modern technocracy itself (rather than simple commodification) is a primary cause of the postmodern fascination with appearance and division - that the technocratic Disney culture we've been consuming is bad for us. After 400 pages about Walt Disney World's control of the consumer, few readers would disagree.

Fjellman has clearly done his research, and quotes not only from highbrow anthropological texts but also from Dave Barry, the Sacramento Bee, and the Quincy [Mass.] Patriot-Ledger. Unfortunately, he has stretched himself too thin. He attempts to analyze (or at least mention) every single attraction, ride, restaurant, and shop in Walt Disney World. Many are presented without any meaningful analysis, and many more are analyzed without contributing to the text as a whole. There is a clear, Micheneresque lack of editing, and Vinyl Leaves is as exhausting as it is exhaustive. This may not be entirely accidental: the overload of detail, the sensation of being led willy-nilly through WDW, and the horrific puns (of theorist Baudrillard: "Does Bo, one wonders, know 'drillard?") of Fjellman's book are uncannily akin to those of its subject matter. Whether Fjellman is seriously over-indulging in postmodern playfulness or simply poisoned by Disney over-exposure is ultimately unimportant and unsolvable. This Disney style is tolerable for a chapter or two, but no more. However, Fjellman has managed to see the Magic Kingdom from the inside. He understands the Mouse's empire and leaves a record, sometimes useful and clever, of his journeys in that kingdom.