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Cannibal tours
Ann& ofTourism
Research, Vol. 21, No. 4, pp. 886-891, 1994 Copyright 0 1994 Elscvier Science Ltd Printed in the USA. All rights reserved 0160-7383194 $6.00 + .OO
Pergamon
FILMS
IN REVIEW
This Department publishes reviews of recm~ visual media, such asfXn, vi&o, still photography, and musewn exhibits. Individuals interestid in sugpting matniaLr for review or in submitiirg reviews themrlucs should inquire directly to the Associate Editor for Films in Review, Dcirdre Euans-Pritchard (2045 Pinehurst Road, Los An&es CA 90068, U&A). Unrolicilcd submissions arc not accepted.
l
Review Essay
Cannibal
Tours
Produced by Dennis O’Rourke. Direct Cinema Angeles CA 90069, USA) 1987, 77 minutes, format, $995 (16 mm), $350 (video).
Limited (PO Box 69799, Los 16 mm film and l/2” video
University
Yoshinobu Ota of Kyushu, Japan
Cannibal Tours is a film about wealthy European and American tourists on a cruiseship, Melanesian Explorer, traveling up the Sepik River in Papua New Guinea. The film consists of numerous scenes of interactions between local people and tourists (who appear to be always involved in either taking pictures of the local people and the “spirit house” or negotiating the price of artifacts). The activities that the tourists avariciously pursue-taking pictures and negotiating prices-symbolize the meanings of ethnic tourism in Papua New Guinea; namely, that tourism there inevitably objectifies the local people and forces them into unfair economic relationships. Caught in the web of world capitalism, the people of the Sepik River cannot help but enact images of the primitive for the tourists. “In the past,” an elderly Papuan man reminisces, “we used to say that the white people were our ancestors. We no longer believe in that. But, we say it to the tourists.” Many of the interviews the filmmaker conducts with both the tourists and the local people clearly disclose what MacCannell(1992:26) has recently called the “performative” nature of interactions between them. The people of Papua New Guinea are performing as “the primitive” for tourists who are in search of their own concepts of primitivity. In the late 20th century, so-called “primitive people” exist only as images (or simulacra) in the minds of Western tourists. But the (economic) power imbalance between the tourists and the people of Papua New Guinea is naturalized as cultural difference; “the primitivity” is inscribed as part of being New Guinean. Thus, the fdrn becomes an eloquent testimony to the condition of modernity that affects everyone on earth. 886
FILMS
IN REVIEW
887
The film is interspersed with still photographs from the colonial period. As Bruner (1989:433) suggests, it is hard to resist connecting past colonialism with present tourism. This may not be an overinterpretation since all of O’Rourke’s previous works have dealt with the disturbing issue of domination - technologically and economically - of Western countries over the less powerful peoples: Yap: How Did You Know We’d Like TV (1980), Couldn’t Be Fairer (1984), and Half Life: A Parablefor the Nuclear Age (1986), to name only a few. Cannibal Tours is also a visual commentary on this same issue, something that researchers on international tourism can never lose sight of. Parenthetically, the Japanese national television, NHK, broadcast the slightly abbreviated version of this fnm on 12 September, 1989, under the title “Civilized People Are Coming” (Bunnaezjin ga Yattekita). This translation lacks any reference to anthropophagy. Cannibal Tours-why cannibals? As O’Rourke states, a subtext of this film is “the place of ‘the Other’ in popular imagination” (cited in MacCannell 1992: 25). In the imagination of Western tourists there exists an ambivalence toward the act of cannibalism: the feelings of fascination and repulsion. A German tourist exemplifies this when he asks a local person: ‘Where have you killed the people?” Knowing full well that cannibalism is no longer practiced, the tourist becomes fascinated with the displaced sign of cannibalism: the stone used for beheading. “Now, I need a photograph of the two of us before the stone” says the tourist, “for the memory.” (Memory for whom? For what purpose?) This statement is immediately relativized when a New Guinean man, responding to a question from the filmmaker, says: “The Germans also killed many of us. What is the difference [between their killing and cannibalism]?” O’Rourke constantly decenters the idea that somewhere primitive people are still living in a world that is “out of time.” In the world of international ethnic tourism what seems to be happening is-to borrow an apt phrase from Michael Taussing“the mirror dance” of desire, a performance that tourists produce with assistance from local people who are driven to participate by sheer economic necessity. Many informative reviews of this film already exist. Within an anthropological purview, with which this writer is most familiar, a selective list of such reviews includes Bruner (1989), Errington and Gewertz (1989), Lutkehaus (1989), and MacCannell(l992). All of these reviews direct the viewer’s attention to the “constructedness” of this film. That is, the film is not simply “ethnographic” in the sense of passively recording the interactions of the tourists with the local people. O’Rourke, in fact, disparagingly accuses anthropologists of not comprehending his belief that “film is the text” (Lutkehaus 1989: 433). This writer opts for taking O’Rourke’s plea seriously: that none of his films should be considered merely “ethnographic.” Since any text, whether literary or cinematic, is open to interpretation, investigations into how the film may be received in non-professional circles (such as a group of students in introductory anthropology courses) may be useful in supplementing the already long roster of reviews written by professionals. Indeed, this topic, which Martinez (1992) terms a theory of film spectatorship, needs to be explored more not only in cinematic domain, but also in tourism research. One ought to stereotype neither the local Papua New Guineans nor the tourists and avoid producing very uniform, flat representations of tourism. Since the spring of 1990, this writer has been showing Cannibal Tours to the students in his introductory anthropology courses, after having explained for a semester of basic concepts in the discipline. Immediately after showing the film, students are asked to write whatever they felt about the film. Some of the comments made by the students are quite insightful, while others are disturb-
888
FILMS IN REVIEW
ing enough to make one question the effectiveness of this writer’s own teaching. In sympathy with the people of New Guinea, a student wrote “tourists appear to look down on the people in those villages because they were showing off the things that they have but the people of New Guinea don’t have, like tape-recorders, cameras, and camcorders.” Another student noticed the objectifying gaze of the tourists: “the tourists were looking at the New Guinean people as if they were animals.” Yet another one stated that she had felt guilty because she herself might have looked down on these people had she visited the same place as a tourist. But some students identified themselves with the tourists. A student expressed his puzzlement upon seeing a New Guinean woman bitterly complaining about the fact that tourists do not buy things from her, and that when they do, they always ask for second price. She wrote “Why should the woman feel angry? Everyone knows that tourist items are always over-priced. She should feel happy that tourists come at all. After all, those tourists support her family’s lives.” One student realized how wonderful his own life has been in Japan: “I learned that the people there are really living like ‘the primitive people’ [miX&jin]. Visiting for a few days is line, but living there for a long time would be unbearable. I am glad that I was not born there.” Yet another student succeeded in producing, perhaps inadvertently, a discourse almost identical with a version of apartheid: “I think these people in New Guinea are really satisfied with their own lives. But their lives are very hard for me to imagine. They don’t seem to understand how [capitalist] economy works; otherwise, they would not have said that they couldn’t understand why the tourists have so much money. That is what the culture of this island is all about. I felt nothing but the cultural difference.” These comments are disturbing because they show that some students are capable of overriding any critical reflection on the issue of ethnocentrism that was discussed in an earlier session. They are also capable of easy identification with the power that the tourists in the film appear to exercise over the local people. Although some students sympathize with the local people, developing a sense of critical consciousness toward tourists and themselves, others align themselves with the tourists, feeling superior to the local people and adopting a simple hierarchy between the civilized and the primitive. Admittedly, these responses to the film may be induced by the peculiar ideological milieu in Japan, the tendency, since 1867, for Japan to count itself as a member of the Western industrial nations. Moreover, the unreflective, uncharitable, and unsympathetic views of the students towards the people of New Guinea suggest that, in general, spectators bring their own personal experiences to bear upon the film: the cinematic text, in O’Rourke’s words. When this film was used as a part of teaching, it was absolutely essential to explicitly relate the film to other studies of tourism, particularly those focusing on issues of representation, power, and meaning. Cannibal Tours is one of the most interesting contributions to tourism research in any form, not only because it succeeds in capturing so well power relations between tourists and locals, but also because, as the student responses to the film indicate, it -like any “pleasurable” text-allows views to produce many meanings, discussions of which possess a considerable pedagogical value. Thus, Cannibal Tours becomes a valuable cinematic “text” open to many creative uses for anyone interested in researches on ethnic tourism as a product of modern Western consciousness. 0 0 Yoshinobu Ota: Graduate School of Social and Cultural Studies, 80, Japan.
University of Kyushu,
Fukuoka
FILMS
IN REVIEW
889
REFERENCES Bruner, Edward Cultural Anthropology 4:4381989 Of Cannibals, Tourists, and Ethnographers. 445. Errington, Frederick, and Deborah Gewertz 1989 Cannibal Tours. American Anthropologist 91:274-275. Lutkehaus, Nancy C. 1989 “Excuse Me, Everything Is Not All Right”: On Ethnography, Film, and Representation. Cultural Anthropology 4:422-437. MacCannelI, Dean 1992 Empty Meeting Grounds: The Tourist Papers. London. Routledge. Martinez, Wilton 1992 Who Constructs Anthropological Knowledge? Toward a Theory of Ethnographic Film Spectatorship. In Film as Ethnography, Peter Crawford and David Turton, eds., pp. 131-161. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Assigned 28 August 1993 Submitted 18 October 1993 Accepted 15 November 1993
l
0160-7383(94)E0024-L
Film Review
Innocents Abroad Produced and narrated by Vikrarn Jayanti, directed and filmed by Les Blank, edited and sound recorded by Chris Simon. A Dox Deluxe presentation, produced in association with Flower Films (10341 San Pablo Avenue, El Cerrito CA 94530, USA) 1991, 84 minutes, $99.95 (VHS).
Edward M. Bruner University of Illinois, USA This is a film about a group of 40 American tourists who take a bus tour of Europe going to 22 cities in 10 countries in 14 days. Sites visited include London, Amsterdam, Heidelberg, The Black Forest in Germany, Lucerne, Innsbruck, Venice, Rome, Florence, Pisa, Nice, Avignon, and Paris. It is a fast-paced whirlwind budget tour organized by Globus Gateway, one of the big European travel companies. There are two foci of interest for scholars of tourism in Innocents Abrond. One is that the film shows what it looks and feels like to be on a bus tour moving at such a breakneck speed. Images of the scenery are seen from inside the bus as it travels along European highways, interspersed with images of the sites themselves, pictures that could have been taken from any travel brochure or guidebook. The sense of movement, travel, and motion is beautifully depicted, as are the specifics of the tour, the shopping, the conflicts over who sits where on the bus, the sense of humor and relaxed irony among the tour participants, the dependency of the members of the group on the tour guide, and the sense of communitas and sociability that develops among the tourists, initially a group of strangers.
Research, Vol. 21, No. 4, pp. 886-891, 1994 Copyright 0 1994 Elscvier Science Ltd Printed in the USA. All rights reserved 0160-7383194 $6.00 + .OO
Pergamon
FILMS
IN REVIEW
This Department publishes reviews of recm~ visual media, such asfXn, vi&o, still photography, and musewn exhibits. Individuals interestid in sugpting matniaLr for review or in submitiirg reviews themrlucs should inquire directly to the Associate Editor for Films in Review, Dcirdre Euans-Pritchard (2045 Pinehurst Road, Los An&es CA 90068, U&A). Unrolicilcd submissions arc not accepted.
l
Review Essay
Cannibal
Tours
Produced by Dennis O’Rourke. Direct Cinema Angeles CA 90069, USA) 1987, 77 minutes, format, $995 (16 mm), $350 (video).
Limited (PO Box 69799, Los 16 mm film and l/2” video
University
Yoshinobu Ota of Kyushu, Japan
Cannibal Tours is a film about wealthy European and American tourists on a cruiseship, Melanesian Explorer, traveling up the Sepik River in Papua New Guinea. The film consists of numerous scenes of interactions between local people and tourists (who appear to be always involved in either taking pictures of the local people and the “spirit house” or negotiating the price of artifacts). The activities that the tourists avariciously pursue-taking pictures and negotiating prices-symbolize the meanings of ethnic tourism in Papua New Guinea; namely, that tourism there inevitably objectifies the local people and forces them into unfair economic relationships. Caught in the web of world capitalism, the people of the Sepik River cannot help but enact images of the primitive for the tourists. “In the past,” an elderly Papuan man reminisces, “we used to say that the white people were our ancestors. We no longer believe in that. But, we say it to the tourists.” Many of the interviews the filmmaker conducts with both the tourists and the local people clearly disclose what MacCannell(1992:26) has recently called the “performative” nature of interactions between them. The people of Papua New Guinea are performing as “the primitive” for tourists who are in search of their own concepts of primitivity. In the late 20th century, so-called “primitive people” exist only as images (or simulacra) in the minds of Western tourists. But the (economic) power imbalance between the tourists and the people of Papua New Guinea is naturalized as cultural difference; “the primitivity” is inscribed as part of being New Guinean. Thus, the fdrn becomes an eloquent testimony to the condition of modernity that affects everyone on earth. 886
FILMS
IN REVIEW
887
The film is interspersed with still photographs from the colonial period. As Bruner (1989:433) suggests, it is hard to resist connecting past colonialism with present tourism. This may not be an overinterpretation since all of O’Rourke’s previous works have dealt with the disturbing issue of domination - technologically and economically - of Western countries over the less powerful peoples: Yap: How Did You Know We’d Like TV (1980), Couldn’t Be Fairer (1984), and Half Life: A Parablefor the Nuclear Age (1986), to name only a few. Cannibal Tours is also a visual commentary on this same issue, something that researchers on international tourism can never lose sight of. Parenthetically, the Japanese national television, NHK, broadcast the slightly abbreviated version of this fnm on 12 September, 1989, under the title “Civilized People Are Coming” (Bunnaezjin ga Yattekita). This translation lacks any reference to anthropophagy. Cannibal Tours-why cannibals? As O’Rourke states, a subtext of this film is “the place of ‘the Other’ in popular imagination” (cited in MacCannell 1992: 25). In the imagination of Western tourists there exists an ambivalence toward the act of cannibalism: the feelings of fascination and repulsion. A German tourist exemplifies this when he asks a local person: ‘Where have you killed the people?” Knowing full well that cannibalism is no longer practiced, the tourist becomes fascinated with the displaced sign of cannibalism: the stone used for beheading. “Now, I need a photograph of the two of us before the stone” says the tourist, “for the memory.” (Memory for whom? For what purpose?) This statement is immediately relativized when a New Guinean man, responding to a question from the filmmaker, says: “The Germans also killed many of us. What is the difference [between their killing and cannibalism]?” O’Rourke constantly decenters the idea that somewhere primitive people are still living in a world that is “out of time.” In the world of international ethnic tourism what seems to be happening is-to borrow an apt phrase from Michael Taussing“the mirror dance” of desire, a performance that tourists produce with assistance from local people who are driven to participate by sheer economic necessity. Many informative reviews of this film already exist. Within an anthropological purview, with which this writer is most familiar, a selective list of such reviews includes Bruner (1989), Errington and Gewertz (1989), Lutkehaus (1989), and MacCannell(l992). All of these reviews direct the viewer’s attention to the “constructedness” of this film. That is, the film is not simply “ethnographic” in the sense of passively recording the interactions of the tourists with the local people. O’Rourke, in fact, disparagingly accuses anthropologists of not comprehending his belief that “film is the text” (Lutkehaus 1989: 433). This writer opts for taking O’Rourke’s plea seriously: that none of his films should be considered merely “ethnographic.” Since any text, whether literary or cinematic, is open to interpretation, investigations into how the film may be received in non-professional circles (such as a group of students in introductory anthropology courses) may be useful in supplementing the already long roster of reviews written by professionals. Indeed, this topic, which Martinez (1992) terms a theory of film spectatorship, needs to be explored more not only in cinematic domain, but also in tourism research. One ought to stereotype neither the local Papua New Guineans nor the tourists and avoid producing very uniform, flat representations of tourism. Since the spring of 1990, this writer has been showing Cannibal Tours to the students in his introductory anthropology courses, after having explained for a semester of basic concepts in the discipline. Immediately after showing the film, students are asked to write whatever they felt about the film. Some of the comments made by the students are quite insightful, while others are disturb-
888
FILMS IN REVIEW
ing enough to make one question the effectiveness of this writer’s own teaching. In sympathy with the people of New Guinea, a student wrote “tourists appear to look down on the people in those villages because they were showing off the things that they have but the people of New Guinea don’t have, like tape-recorders, cameras, and camcorders.” Another student noticed the objectifying gaze of the tourists: “the tourists were looking at the New Guinean people as if they were animals.” Yet another one stated that she had felt guilty because she herself might have looked down on these people had she visited the same place as a tourist. But some students identified themselves with the tourists. A student expressed his puzzlement upon seeing a New Guinean woman bitterly complaining about the fact that tourists do not buy things from her, and that when they do, they always ask for second price. She wrote “Why should the woman feel angry? Everyone knows that tourist items are always over-priced. She should feel happy that tourists come at all. After all, those tourists support her family’s lives.” One student realized how wonderful his own life has been in Japan: “I learned that the people there are really living like ‘the primitive people’ [miX&jin]. Visiting for a few days is line, but living there for a long time would be unbearable. I am glad that I was not born there.” Yet another student succeeded in producing, perhaps inadvertently, a discourse almost identical with a version of apartheid: “I think these people in New Guinea are really satisfied with their own lives. But their lives are very hard for me to imagine. They don’t seem to understand how [capitalist] economy works; otherwise, they would not have said that they couldn’t understand why the tourists have so much money. That is what the culture of this island is all about. I felt nothing but the cultural difference.” These comments are disturbing because they show that some students are capable of overriding any critical reflection on the issue of ethnocentrism that was discussed in an earlier session. They are also capable of easy identification with the power that the tourists in the film appear to exercise over the local people. Although some students sympathize with the local people, developing a sense of critical consciousness toward tourists and themselves, others align themselves with the tourists, feeling superior to the local people and adopting a simple hierarchy between the civilized and the primitive. Admittedly, these responses to the film may be induced by the peculiar ideological milieu in Japan, the tendency, since 1867, for Japan to count itself as a member of the Western industrial nations. Moreover, the unreflective, uncharitable, and unsympathetic views of the students towards the people of New Guinea suggest that, in general, spectators bring their own personal experiences to bear upon the film: the cinematic text, in O’Rourke’s words. When this film was used as a part of teaching, it was absolutely essential to explicitly relate the film to other studies of tourism, particularly those focusing on issues of representation, power, and meaning. Cannibal Tours is one of the most interesting contributions to tourism research in any form, not only because it succeeds in capturing so well power relations between tourists and locals, but also because, as the student responses to the film indicate, it -like any “pleasurable” text-allows views to produce many meanings, discussions of which possess a considerable pedagogical value. Thus, Cannibal Tours becomes a valuable cinematic “text” open to many creative uses for anyone interested in researches on ethnic tourism as a product of modern Western consciousness. 0 0 Yoshinobu Ota: Graduate School of Social and Cultural Studies, 80, Japan.
University of Kyushu,
Fukuoka
FILMS
IN REVIEW
889
REFERENCES Bruner, Edward Cultural Anthropology 4:4381989 Of Cannibals, Tourists, and Ethnographers. 445. Errington, Frederick, and Deborah Gewertz 1989 Cannibal Tours. American Anthropologist 91:274-275. Lutkehaus, Nancy C. 1989 “Excuse Me, Everything Is Not All Right”: On Ethnography, Film, and Representation. Cultural Anthropology 4:422-437. MacCannelI, Dean 1992 Empty Meeting Grounds: The Tourist Papers. London. Routledge. Martinez, Wilton 1992 Who Constructs Anthropological Knowledge? Toward a Theory of Ethnographic Film Spectatorship. In Film as Ethnography, Peter Crawford and David Turton, eds., pp. 131-161. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Assigned 28 August 1993 Submitted 18 October 1993 Accepted 15 November 1993
l
0160-7383(94)E0024-L
Film Review
Innocents Abroad Produced and narrated by Vikrarn Jayanti, directed and filmed by Les Blank, edited and sound recorded by Chris Simon. A Dox Deluxe presentation, produced in association with Flower Films (10341 San Pablo Avenue, El Cerrito CA 94530, USA) 1991, 84 minutes, $99.95 (VHS).
Edward M. Bruner University of Illinois, USA This is a film about a group of 40 American tourists who take a bus tour of Europe going to 22 cities in 10 countries in 14 days. Sites visited include London, Amsterdam, Heidelberg, The Black Forest in Germany, Lucerne, Innsbruck, Venice, Rome, Florence, Pisa, Nice, Avignon, and Paris. It is a fast-paced whirlwind budget tour organized by Globus Gateway, one of the big European travel companies. There are two foci of interest for scholars of tourism in Innocents Abrond. One is that the film shows what it looks and feels like to be on a bus tour moving at such a breakneck speed. Images of the scenery are seen from inside the bus as it travels along European highways, interspersed with images of the sites themselves, pictures that could have been taken from any travel brochure or guidebook. The sense of movement, travel, and motion is beautifully depicted, as are the specifics of the tour, the shopping, the conflicts over who sits where on the bus, the sense of humor and relaxed irony among the tour participants, the dependency of the members of the group on the tour guide, and the sense of communitas and sociability that develops among the tourists, initially a group of strangers.