Cannibal Tours is a 1988 documentary film by Australian director and cinematographer Dennis O'Rourke. While it borrows heavily from ethnographic modes of representation, the film is a biting commentary on the nature of modernity. The film is also widely celebrated for its depiction of Western touristic desires and exploitation among a 'tribal' people.
The film follows a number of affluent European and American tourists and ecotourists as they travel from village to village along the middle Sepik River in Papua New Guinea. Most of the villages in the film are inhabited by the Iatmul people.[lower-alpha 1] The film shows the tourists driving hard bargains for local handcrafts such as woodcarvings and baskets, relentlessly taking photos of local people, handing out cigarettes, balloons, and perfume, viewing staged dance performances, and offering naive comments on native people living in harmony with nature. The film, too, tacks between the tourists and black-and-white photographs from the era of German colonialism of New Guinea (1880s–1914). With some prodding, the tourists unwittingly reveal an unattractive and pervasive ethnocentrism to O'Rourke's cameras. The tourists thus become somewhat dehumanized by the filmmaker's camera even as they themselves dehumanize and exoticize even the most mundane aspects of Sepik River life.
The title of the film can be read in at least a couple of ways. At one point early in the film, a German tourist, clearly titillated, describes the bygone practice of raiding and cannibalism. He is obsessed with cannibalism, asking local men about the former practice, and snapping photos of locations where local people once practiced headhunting; other tourists also attempt to discuss the "symbolic" meaning of cannibalism. But the narrative plot of the film is to portray the tourists as the real cannibals who consume the world through their arrogance, acquisitiveness, primitivist fantasies of indigenous people, and photography (the cameras in the film double for the guns of past colonial administrators). In short, the film presents the tourists as the people driven by truly bizarre beliefs and behaviors. By contrast, the local people are represented as eminently practical and reasonable. Thus the 'natives' display the rationale logic of modernity, while the Western tourists are guilty of the very irrational traits they attribute to the natives. The climax of the film is when a group of tourists, faces painted in 'native fashion' by local men from one village (Tambunum), prance, dance, and assume a boxing stance to the music of Mozart. The message is clearly: we have finally succeeded in our quest for the primitive, and he is us.
Burns, P. and J. Lester (2005) 'Using Visual Evidence: The Case of Cannibal Tours', pp.49–61 in B. Ritchie, P. Burns and C. Palmer (eds) Tourism Research Methods: Integrating Theory with Practice. Oxfordshire: CABI.
Coiffier, Christian.- 199L '"Cannibal Tours,' l'Envers du Decor. Mani Bilong Waitman,"journal de la Societe des Oceanistes 92/93:181–187.
Errington, Frederick, and Deborah Gewertz. 1989. "Review of Cannibal Tours." American Anthrapologjst 91:274–275.
Huang, W.-J. and B. C. Lee (2010) 'The Tourist Gaze in Travel Documentaries: The Case of Cannibal Tours', Journal of Quality Assurance in Hospitality & Tourism 11(4): 239–59.
Lutkehaus, Nancy Christine. 1989. "'Excuse Me, Everything Is Not All Right': On Ethnography, Film, and Representation: An Interview with Filmmaker Dennis O'Rourke." Cultural Anthropology 4:422–437.
O'Rourke; Dennis. 1997. "Beyond Cannibal Tours: Tourists, Modernity and 'The·Other."' In Tourism and Cultural Deve_lopment in Asia and Oceania. Shinji Yamashita, Kadir H. Din, and J. S. Eades, eds. Pp.32–47.Bangi: Penerbit Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia.
Palmer, C. and J. Lester (2007) 'Stalking the Cannibals: Photographic Behaviours on the Sepik River', Tourist Studies 7(1): 83–106.
Silverman, Eric. (1999) 'Art, Tourism and the Crafting of Identity in the Sepik River (Papua New Guinea)’, pp.51–66 in R. Phillips and C. Steiner (eds) Unpacking Culture: Art and Commodity in Colonial and Postcolonial Worlds. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.
Silverman, Eric. (2003) 'High Art as Tourist Art, Tourist Art as High Art: Comparing the New Guinea Sculpture Garden at Stanford University and Sepik River Tourist Art', International Journal of Anthropology 18: 219–30. (Reprinted in Venbrux, E., P. S. Rosi and R. L. Welsch (eds) Exploring World Art. Long Grove, IL: Waveland Press, pp.271–84).
Silverman, E. (2004) 'Cannibalizing, Commodifying, and Creating Culture: Power and Creativity in Sepik River Tourism', pp.339–57 in V. Lockwood (ed.) Globalization and Culture Change in the Pacific Islands. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice-Hall.
Silverman, Eric. (2013). After Cannibal Tours: Cargoism and Marginality in a Post-Touristic Sepik River Society. The Contemporary Pacific 25: 221–57.
Silverman, Eric. (2012). From Cannibal Tours to Cargo Cult: On the Aftermath of Tourism in the Sepik River, Papua New Guinea. Tourism Studies 12: 109–30.
Young, Katherine. 1992. "Visuality and the Category of the Other: The Cannibal Tours of Dean MacCannell and Dennis O'Rourke." Visual Anthro-pology Review 8:92–96.
Gregory Bateson was an English anthropologist, social scientist, linguist, visual anthropologist, semiotician, and cyberneticist whose work intersected that of many other fields. His writings include Steps to an Ecology of Mind (1972) and Mind and Nature (1979).
The Korowai, also called the Kolufo, are the people who live in southeastern Papua in the Indonesian provinces of South Papua and Highland Papua. Specifically their tribal area is split by the borders of Boven Digoel Regency, Mappi Regency, Asmat Regency, and Yahukimo Regency. They number about 3,000 people.
Michael Clark Rockefeller was a member of the Rockefeller family. He was the son of New York Governor and later U.S. Vice President Nelson Rockefeller, a grandson of American financier John D. Rockefeller Jr. and a great-grandson of Standard Oil co-founder John D. Rockefeller Sr.
Tayap is an endangered Papuan language spoken by fewer than 50 people in Gapun village of Marienberg Rural LLG in East Sepik Province, Papua New Guinea. It is being replaced by the national language and lingua franca Tok Pisin.
Tobias Schneebaum was an American artist, anthropologist, and AIDS activist. He is best known for his experiences living and traveling among the Harakmbut people of Peru, and the Asmat people of Papua, Indonesia.
The Sepik–Ramu languages are an obsolete language family of New Guinea linking the Sepik, Ramu, Nor–Pondo, Leonhard Schultze (Walio–Papi) and Yuat families, together with the Taiap language isolate, and proposed by Donald Laycock and John Z'graggen in 1975.
The culture of Papua New Guinea is complex and multifaceted. It is estimated that more than 7000 different cultural groups exist in Papua New Guinea, and most groups have their own language. Because of this diversity, in which they take pride, many different styles of cultural expression have emerged; each group has created its own expressive forms in art, dance, weaponry, costumes, singing, music, architecture and much more. To unify the nation, the language Tok Pisin, once called Neo-Melanesian has evolved as the lingua franca — the medium through which diverse language groups are able to communicate with one another in Parliament, in the news media, and elsewhere. People typically live in villages or dispersed hamlets which rely on the subsistence farming of yams and taro. The principal livestock in traditional Papua New Guinea is the oceanic pig.
The Asmat are an ethnic group of New Guinea, residing in the province of South Papua, Indonesia. The Asmat inhabit a region on the island's southwestern coast bordering the Arafura Sea, with lands totaling approximately 18,000 km2 (7,336 mi2) and consisting of mangrove, tidal swamp, freshwater swamp, and lowland rainforest.
The Ramu–Lower Sepika.k.a.Lower Sepik–Ramu languages are a proposed family of about 35 Papuan languages spoken in the Ramu and Sepik river basins of northern Papua New Guinea. These languages tend to have simple phonologies, with few consonants or vowels and usually no tones.
The Sepik or Sepik River languages are a family of some 50 Papuan languages spoken in the Sepik river basin of northern Papua New Guinea, proposed by Donald Laycock in 1965 in a somewhat more limited form than presented here. They tend to have simple phonologies, with few consonants or vowels and usually no tones.
Rhoda Bubendy Métraux was a prominent anthropologist in the area of cross-cultural studies. She collaborated with Alfred Métraux on mutual studies of Haitian voodoo. She also studied the Iatmul people of the middle Sepik River in Papua New Guinea and made three fieldwork trips to Tambunum village of 6-7 months each in 1967-1968, 1971, and 1972-1973 that focused on music. During one of her studies, Métraux administered the Lowenfeld Mosaic Test in Tambunum, developed by a Margaret Lowenfeld. Additionally, Métraux did fieldwork in Mexico, Argentina, and Montserrat in the West Indies and enrolled at Yale University to study for her doctorate under the tutelage of Bronisław Malinowski. During World War II, Métraux headed the section on German morale for the US Office of Strategic Services (OSS).
Chambri are an ethnic group in the Chambri Lakes region in the East Sepik province of Papua New Guinea. The social structures of Chambri society have often been a subject in the study of gender roles. They speak the Chambri language.
The Ndu languages are the best known family of the Sepik languages of East Sepik Province in northern Papua New Guinea. Ndu is the word for 'man' in the languages that make up this group. The languages were first identified as a related family by Kirschbaum in 1922.
The Papuans are one of four major cultural groups of Papua New Guinea. The majority of the population lives in rural areas. In isolated areas there remains a handful of the giant communal structures that previously housed the whole male population, with a circling cluster of huts for the women. The Papuan people are Melanesian people composed of at least 240 different peoples, each with its own language and culture. Sago is the staple food of the Papuan supplemented with hunting, fishing and small gardens.
In 1994, Jim Mason, a graduate student in the Department of Anthropology at Stanford University, arranged for two groups of men from the Sepik River region of Papua New Guinea to carve the New Guinea Sculpture Garden at Stanford University. The men were from several communities or villages of the Iatmul people and the Kwoma people.
The Hewa are an indigenous people that live in the Koroba Lake Kopiago Electorate of Hela Province of Papua New Guinea near the junction of the Strickland River. They were one of the last peoples in Papua New Guinea to come into contact with the outside world. They number about 2,000 persons, and their rugged rainforest terrain comprises about 1,000 square miles (2,590 km2), some of which was unexplored until 2008. Their language belongs to the Sepik Hills family.
The Sepik is the longest river on the island of New Guinea, and the second largest in Oceania by discharge volume after the Fly River. The majority of the river flows through the Papua New Guinea (PNG) provinces of Sandaun and East Sepik, with a small section flowing through the Indonesian province of Papua.
Kambota.k.a.Ap Ma, is a Keram language of Papua New Guinea. Compared to its nearest relative, Ambakich, Kambot drops the first segment from polysyllabic words.
The Iatmul are a large ethnic group of about 10,000 people inhabiting some two-dozen politically autonomous villages along the middle Sepik River in Papua New Guinea. The communities are roughly grouped according to dialect of the Iatmul language as well as sociocultural affinities. The Iatmul are best known for their art, men's houses, male initiation, elaborate totemic systems, and a famous ritual called naven, first studied by Gregory Bateson in the 1930s. More recently, Iatmul are known as a location for tourists and adventure travellers, and a prominent role in the 1988 documentary film Cannibal Tours.
Eric Kline Silverman is an American cultural anthropologist, formerly a tenured Full Professor and Research Professor of Anthropology at Wheelock College in Boston, which was dissolved as an independent institution in summer 2018. He is also a long-standing Scholar at the Women's Studies Research Center at Brandeis University. Additionally, Eric is also a Research Scholar and Writer with The Rhodes Project, a research initiative to study the lives and careers of female Rhodes Scholars, based in the UK at McAlister Olivarius.
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