Cannibal Tours
In "Cannibalizing, Commodifying , or Creating Culture? Power and Art in Sepik River Tourism," Silverman makes several critiques of O'Rourke's Cannibal Tours. Silverman argues that O’Rourke constructed a limited view of the New Guinea tribes. Silverman attributes the eroding ‘authenticity’ to the tourists’ pursuit for entertainment in exchange for money. For instance, O’Rourke’s interviews mostly covered reactions from tourists and how they gawked over the natives, arrogantly depicting their primitive lives. Silverman argues that the film “portrays tourism as a process that only disempowers local people and erodes from their lives all genuine, meaningful dimensions of their culture”(Silverman 1996). Tourism is much more than O’Rourke is presenting on the surface. In fact, Silverman suggests that its advantages go far deeper than monetary value, but attribute to growing, complex hybrid cultures. In Silverman’s opinion, “ Tourism is often a context in which local people exercise subtle forms of power and resistance, and artistically express novel hybrid concept of personal, ethnic, national, and transnational modern identities” (Silverman1996). Throughout O’Rourke’s film, the tourists, either through action or inaction, seem to be going against Silverman’s idea for tourism. For example, the local people are unable to exercise subtle forms of power; but instead, they experience disempowerment from the tourists’ unfair bargaining for already cheap, primitive art that expresses their ‘personal, ethnic, national, and transnational modern identities’. Silverman suggests that the impact of tourism in this area has turned authentic customs and traditions into a westernized act in exchange for money, thus eroding the cultures authenticity.
Dennis O’Rourke’s film, Cannibal Tours, has been a topic for much controversy. In defense, I believe that O’Rourke would argue first and foremost that his film was not meant to be viewed from an anthropologic perspective. Secondly, in an interview, O’Rourke explains that the film is supposed to be about two separate journeys. The first being the obvious journey of the wealthy tourists traveling through the Sepik. The second journey is supposed to be a ‘metaphysical’ one. Which O’Rourke describes as “An attempt to discover the place of the other in the popular imagination” (Lutkehaus 1989). This offers the audience a peek into why tourists come to encounter the primitive. Silverman’s main critique of the film was that O’Rourke did not try and depict what was wrong with tourism. However this was not one of O’Rourke’s goals. O’Rourke did not wish to say this is tourism and this is why it is bad; instead, he wanted to tell the audience yes we know tourism exists, but why does it exist? If O’Rourke had to defend himself against Silverman I think he would say something like this: The film, Cannibal Tours, was not made to be perceived ethnographically or even to explain how tourism effects primitive cultures, but that the film was made to portray the interaction between the primitives and ‘the others’ and to give the audience the ability to play the role as a tourist or primitive, thus invoking thought on the whole process and why it happens.
In Cannibal Tours, the tourists are consumers on vacation, collecting photos and souvenirs not to understand the world outside of their own but as little trophies to be stowed away at home when this is all over. They are not there to absorb the culture or gain any personal knowledge; they are there only to objectively observe for their own amusement. Anthropologists and filmmakers differ greatly from the tourists in this situation. The filmmaker is sort of the in-between of the tourists and anthropologist. For example, O’Rourke himself is not portrayed in the same manner that the other tourist are, but in the eyes of the local people, he is as much of a tourist as anyone for the simple fact that he is white. However O’Rourke differs from the tourists because he is on their land with a goal in mind of creating a film. Lastly, the anthropologists are different from the latter because they go to primitive cultures with a broader view to understand cross-cultural perspective. Meaning, that they have the job of studying and understanding one culture, but it is equally as important to compare those finding with customs of another culture.