Primitivist tourism and anthropological research: awkward relations★

Abstract

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.

“Don't gamble for money with friends”

“…It is in an effort to avoid these issues that a growing set of anthropologists have developed processualization approaches, arguing that we should turn our attention from reified categories, moralities, and types to processes of categorization, moralization, and typification (Agha 2007; Lempert 2013; Simoni 2016; Stasch 2019). To do this thoroughly, however, requires an understanding of the heterogeneity of categorization: the tacit things that people do to reflexively frame their lives, the generic and specific ways they explicitly put what they and others do under a description, and the differences between these practices.…”

“…This can create an analytical tension. To navigate this tension, some anthropologists have tried to processualize their objects of study, shifting their focus from nouns to nominalized verbs, from categories to “categorization” (Stasch 2019), morality to “moralization” (Lempert 2013; Simoni 2016), and types to “typification” (Agha 2007; Rumsey 2014). The hope is that such processualization can provide a way to study local categories without either essentializing them or erasing local attempts at doing so (Çalışkan and Callon 2009, 370).…”

Exquisite Corpses and backward glances: European social anthropology 2019

“…Primitivist tourism is an easy target for the anthropologist’s loathing. Stasch (2019) undertakes an ethnographic study of participants in this puzzling but increasingly popular leisure vacational phenomenon. His results are a lesson in the complexity that lies within the ethnographic encounter.…”