ÌìÃÀÓ°ÊÓ

In his much-discussed film Cannibal Tours, Dennis O'Rourke offers a visual
ethnography of tourism in Melanesia. The tourists who figure centrally in
the film have traveled from Europe and America to the Sepik River valley to
encounter the exotic, to come into contact with what they term primitive
peoples, who they believe until recently lived in a state of nature and
practiced cannibalism. Cannibal Tours presents the tourists in the raw, as
neocolonial subjects.

They tell stories to themselves and O'Rourke about simple peoples living in
harmony with nature who create authentic cultural forms unmediated by
modernity. They seek out locals and press them to talk about cannibalism,
and even take them to the places where individuals were sacrificed and
consumed. They long for and obsessively collect artifacts and other
tangible markers of difference. And with their ubiquitous cameras, they
tirelessly strive to capture the natives and their alien world.

These scenes combined with the reflections of locals on tourists and their
interactions with them underscore the centrality of ethnocentric
stereotypes, consumption, and sociopolitical privilege to cross-cultural
tourist sites. Above all else, Cannibal Tours, dwelling as it does on
appropriation, consumption, and incorporation, implicitly argues that the
cannibals of the title are not the natives but the tourists.

Fashioning experiences and identities out of the images and alterity of the
Melanesians, tourists become cannibals. Their dehumanizing practices
literally eat up these people and their lives.



Read more about film.

Presented by Saskia Lillepuu