Movie Summary
The movie Cannibal Tours gives a visual ethnography of tourism in Melanesia. The tourist who plays a key role in the movie have travelled from different parts of the world to the Sepik Valley to experience the unique “Primitive People” whom they claim live in a state of nature and practices cannibalism (O’Rourke). The Movie presents tourists in an untested as neocolonial subjects. They offer stories about the simple people existing harmoniously with nature and who establishes viable social systems unmediated by modernism.
The movie seeks out the locals and stresses them to share about cannibalism, they do this even taking them to places where people have been sacrificed and consumed. The tourist in the movie desires for and obsessively gathers the relics and other palpable symbols of variance. With their extensive cameras, they determinedly try to seizure the locals and their strange world. The scenes combined with the reflections of the natives on tourists and their interfaces with them emphasize the importance of consumption, ethno-centrality and socio-political opportunity to cross-cultural tourist locations (O’Rourke).
Consequently, the Cannibal Tours also focuses on incorporation, consumption and appropriation. It implicitly argues that, the cannibals as asserted by the title are not the locals but the tourists. Transforming familiarities and personalities shaped out of the imageries and alteration of the Melanesians tourist develops cannibals, their dehumanizing practices mythical utilize the locals and their lives (O’Rourke).
West Civilization
According to Beatle, the tourists experience their myth as hysteria and signs, whereas, the New Guineans perceive it as an enduring experience of their culture (56). This can be illustrated in the book when an old man gives a story about the reactions of New Guineans to the arrival of the first ship carrying the Germans colonialists he says “ our dead descendants have come back!”, he also continues with a huge smile and says “.. when we watch the tourists…. We conclude the dead have resurrected”. The old man asserts that what they say. Although, in the real sense, they believe that they are not there dead ancestors (O’Rourke).
Neocolonialism
The Cannibal Tours focuses on two different cultures. The culture consists of a group of wealthy tourists who are able to meet affluent and elegant trip along River Sepik of New Guinea aboard a deluxe cruise ship, known as The Melanesian Explorer. This situation illustrates the power and social delineation present between the tourist, super culture and the natives or the primitive, who cannot afford the luxurious holidays because of economic condition. The movie critic the political nature of tourism, it brings out the ineffable and the conceptual aspects of tourism.
Political aspects of tourism are characterized with when the tourist returns, they carry along their experiences anchored on the photographs and artifacts they carry along. Consequently, on their mind, they have a sense of anomie i.e. no one can be linked in the sense that, people who survived in a pantheistic civilization are. Besides, we have seen the failure of Christianity, the holocaust. This can be argued that modernity and western civilization have had little effect in peoples mind. This is because they don’t understand what it means. The culture recognizes the ordinary people who don’t even think about it for living. This is illustrated by the River Sepik villages where the tourists visit. The movie depict the ecstatic moment when Iatmul village men paints tourists with designs conventionally used to sanctify the dead ancestors, moreover, tourist are seen dancing to slow music of Mozart while aboard a cruise ship (O’Rourke).
Race and Gender
Culture has been closely linked with race and gender. Primitivism makes the community escape the state of sexual oppression in their own culture; this is the essence of primitivism. Consequently, the connection between the western fascinations with the primitive is how sex employed as a tool in handling fears arising from others i.e. the dread of conflict constituting psychosis. Hence, the society responds by either getting attracted by strategies in containing its misuse.
As illustrated in the Movie, child pornography is mildly explored. Sex connection establishes a test of how it can be confronted and subsumes the gap existing within the society, ourselves, sexuality and our connection with the next generation. Child pornography, which is a beast of all, makes the dark side of the society and “who we are”. The Cannibal Tour exposes compassionate exploration of child pornography.
Social organization
Culture has endured to establish what Lewellen calls “basic Social organization” and “the evolution of political society (10). These descriptions stress on the physiognomies of distinct stages of sociocultural integration instead of the dynamics that trigger evolution from one level to the next. This form of assertions is drawn largely from archeology theories, rather than the cultural anthropology (Lewellen, 11). According to great archeologists, many efforts are involved in understanding the evolution occurring in state societies. Thus, the archeological and cultural aspects are linked to create “the origins of the State and Civilization” (Lewellen, 11).
Various archeologists such as Max Gluckman investigated the analysis of “situations”. These involved individuals rather than the traditional ethnographic concentration of given set norms and social norms. Consequently, Victor Turner in his book, Schism and Continuity in African Society traced a single individual through a chronology of social dramas in which individual and community influences of norms and morals were uncovered. Basing on their emphasis on the trend and conflict, a new form of political element was added; thus, individual decision making is evident in crisis situations (Lewellen, 11).
Indigenous Political Systems
According to Beatle, indigenous people globally shares a particular political context, whatever their cultural specific (63). They endeavor to compete against the legacy of disenfranchisement of their; ancestral lands, culture and society by colonizing European societies. Thus, Beatle denotes that, this point to the struggle against colonialism i.e. the acquisition, management and exploitation of a country’s resources by European powers. This is one of the experiences shared by the indigenous people (Beatle, 63).
Works Cited
Beatle, Keith. Documentary Screens; Non-Fiction Film and Television, New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004.
Lewellen, Tedd. Political Anthropology, Connecticut: Praeger Publishers, 2003.
O’Rourke, Dennis. Cannibal Tours. 1988. Web. .