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Organizing the Image in Primitivist Tourism Encounters

Publié le 25 mars 2024 – Mis à jour le 25 mars 2024

Organizing the Image in Primitivist Tourism Encounters: Staging, Nudity, and Photography
 
Rupert Stasch
 
Meetings between Korowai of West Papua and the 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.
Date(s)
Le 26 mars 2024

de 16h à 18h

Lieu(x)

ULB - Campus du Solbosch

Institut de Sociologie (bâtiment S)

Salle Rokkan - 12e étage

44 avenue Jeanne - 1050 Bruxelles