Cycle de conférences en anthropologie: Organizing the Image in Primitivist Tourism Encounters: Staging, Nudity, and Photography

Cycle de conférences en anthropologie / Lectures in Anthropologie : 

Title : Organizing the Image in Primitivist Tourism Encounters: Staging, Nudity, and Photography

Intervenant : Rupert Stasch (University of Cambridge)

Abstract:

Meetings between Korowai of West Papua and international tourists often resemble the famous Far Side cartoon depicting islanders hiding their TV set and other appliances as two anthropologists approach, and more generally they resemble the processes of “staging” highlighted by MacCannell in The Tourist (1976). Namely, Korowai temporarily undress and hide away their clothes, and they perform emblematic cultural activities in places, times, and manners adapted or invented to give tourists the image-experience they seek. This talk looks at Korowai ethical understandings of staged performance, and at details of Korowai and tourist thought about sight and images, to understand better the structure of these voyeuristic, spectatorial interactions as part of tourism’s “middle ground” (after White 1991). 

Bio:

Rupert Stasch is a Professor of Social Anthropology at the University of Cambridge. He previously taught for sixteen years at Reed College and University of California-San Diego. He is the author of Society of Others: Kinship and Mourning in a West Papuan Place (2009), and articles on a range of subjects drawing on fieldwork since 1995 with Korowai people. He is completing a book on interactions between Korowai and international tourists and media workers, from which this talk is a chapter.