Premium
Primitivist tourism and anthropological research: awkward relations ★
Author(s) -
Stasch Rupert
Publication year - 2019
Publication title -
journal of the royal anthropological institute
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.62
H-Index - 62
eISSN - 1467-9655
pISSN - 1359-0987
DOI - 10.1111/1467-9655.13081
Subject(s) - tourism , categorization , indonesian , sociology , modernity , diversity (politics) , character (mathematics) , aesthetics , anthropology , mode (computer interface) , history , epistemology , art , archaeology , philosophy , linguistics , computer science , geometry , mathematics , operating system
Many anthropologists dislike the tourism depicted in the film Cannibal tours (1988), which values visited people for their supposed embodiment of an archaic mode of life, isolated from capitalist modernity. Here I approach such tourism through how its participants relate to anthropology, based on research into encounters between tourists and Korowai of Indonesian Papua. I juxtapose three patterns. First, Korowai sometimes assimilate me to ‘tourist’ or ‘tour guide’. Second, tourists often embrace ‘anthropology’ as an adjunct to their primitivist goals. Third, certain tourists investigate their own primitivism, in ways that parallel my research on that topic. This diversity of alignments of tourist, anthropologist, and Korowai calls for an analytic strategy not of seeking out the ultimate basic relations between these character‐types, but of understanding categorization as a practice of its own, through which categorizers grapple with broader historical conditions.