Interpretation of Culture
Muir
Oct. 9, 2015
Cannibal Tour Comparison
As an anthropologist, Eric R. Wolf focuses on the history of various civilizations and emphasizes the importance of societies in globalization. He speculates that communities do not exist on their own; they trade and exchange ideas with other cultures. If given the chance to sit down and watch Dennis O’Rourke’s “Cannibal Tours,” Wolf would find fault with the movie on a social, economic, and semiotic level. One of the primary issues Wolf would see in the film is the way the documentary frames the people of the Kanganaman village as a singular society. Wolf believes in going “beyond the portrayal of distinctive tribes, culture areas, and civilizations to delineate the …show more content…
When buying masks and ornaments, they rudely haggle the prices down to a fraction of the product’s worth and ignore that these villagers need a livelihood. One village women questioned the tourists by saying, “How is it that the tourists have money, but not us?” (Cannibal Tours). Wolf would remark that the tourists are predisposed to divide culture from the gritty realities of economics. They see the village as self-sustaining but ignore the fact that capitalism plays a major role in the lives of the villagers. These tourist have based their assumptions off of “a Western point of view [which] tended to ignore or to caricature” the economic prowess of other civilizations (Wolf 24-25). By viewing the villagers as ‘other’, the tourists failed to see the harm that their haggling did to the local …show more content…
In his words, the tourists see the village as retaining their ‘culture’, of being “precontact”(Wolf 71) even after hundred of white tourists visit. They are convinced that the village is totally symbolic, where they can ogle at the sacred artifacts and old cannibal customs. However, the tourists are the true cannibals; they feast on the culture and eat up the lives of the villagers. Lila Abu-Lughod, another anthropologist, brings up a similar problem in her writing. In response to the tourists, Abu-Lughod would ask that they “living in this privileged and powerful part of the world, might examine [their] own responsibilities for the situations in which others in distant places have found themselves” (Abu-Lughod 789). She and Wolf share the idea that we, as a society, “do not stand outside the world, looking out over the sea of benighted people…; we are part of that world” (789). What the tourists fail to understand is that the villagers of Papa New Guinea do not symbolize some “primitive” form of man. The only difference between the villagers and the tourists are experiences and
Muir
Oct. 9, 2015
Cannibal Tour Comparison
As an anthropologist, Eric R. Wolf focuses on the history of various civilizations and emphasizes the importance of societies in globalization. He speculates that communities do not exist on their own; they trade and exchange ideas with other cultures. If given the chance to sit down and watch Dennis O’Rourke’s “Cannibal Tours,” Wolf would find fault with the movie on a social, economic, and semiotic level. One of the primary issues Wolf would see in the film is the way the documentary frames the people of the Kanganaman village as a singular society. Wolf believes in going “beyond the portrayal of distinctive tribes, culture areas, and civilizations to delineate the …show more content…
When buying masks and ornaments, they rudely haggle the prices down to a fraction of the product’s worth and ignore that these villagers need a livelihood. One village women questioned the tourists by saying, “How is it that the tourists have money, but not us?” (Cannibal Tours). Wolf would remark that the tourists are predisposed to divide culture from the gritty realities of economics. They see the village as self-sustaining but ignore the fact that capitalism plays a major role in the lives of the villagers. These tourist have based their assumptions off of “a Western point of view [which] tended to ignore or to caricature” the economic prowess of other civilizations (Wolf 24-25). By viewing the villagers as ‘other’, the tourists failed to see the harm that their haggling did to the local …show more content…
In his words, the tourists see the village as retaining their ‘culture’, of being “precontact”(Wolf 71) even after hundred of white tourists visit. They are convinced that the village is totally symbolic, where they can ogle at the sacred artifacts and old cannibal customs. However, the tourists are the true cannibals; they feast on the culture and eat up the lives of the villagers. Lila Abu-Lughod, another anthropologist, brings up a similar problem in her writing. In response to the tourists, Abu-Lughod would ask that they “living in this privileged and powerful part of the world, might examine [their] own responsibilities for the situations in which others in distant places have found themselves” (Abu-Lughod 789). She and Wolf share the idea that we, as a society, “do not stand outside the world, looking out over the sea of benighted people…; we are part of that world” (789). What the tourists fail to understand is that the villagers of Papa New Guinea do not symbolize some “primitive” form of man. The only difference between the villagers and the tourists are experiences and