Imagining the ‘Primitive’ Other: The Impact of Global Images on
Tribal Identities
Comparative Literature MA
15 June 2014
General Introduction 1
1. The Contemporary Desire for the ‘Primitive’ Other
1.1 Introduction 6
1.2 ‘Authenticity’ in the ‘primitive’ encounter 7 1.3 From the page of anthropology, to the eye of popular culture 11
1.4 Nostalgia for a present way of life 14
1.5 Post-modern in-authenticity 18
2. Virtual Tourism: Accommodating the Postmodern Viewer
2.1 Introduction 22
2.2 Tailoring the “tourist gaze” 23
2.3 Marking the ‘primitive’ encounter 28
2.4 Experiencing the ‘primitive’ Other in a postmodern world 31
2.5 The force of imagination 33
3. Mediating Representations: Constructing the ‘Primitive’ Other
3.1 Introduction 35
3.2 Objectively narrating the ‘primitive’ encounter 36
3.3 Visualising the ‘primitive’ Other 39
3.4 The power of re-presenting representations 44 3.5 Representing reality in the “mediapolis” 47
Conclusion 51
General Introduction
We are living in an age that is indisputably characterised by global connectivity and
technological advancement. Globalisation has significantly impacted on the accessibility to distant cultures and ways of life, both physically and virtually. In the advent of a global communication system, we can now readily access cultural Others through various platforms, be it travel, news, television or Internet to name a few. With the immediacy and fluidity of virtually disseminated information, people are now, more than ever, aware of the diverse cultures of the world. Images and information of faraway peoples are infiltrated into the everyday lives of those who have access to the global network. The connection to the cultural Other that was previously limited to travel is now a prevalent availability in the realm of everyday social life. With this increased awareness of, and metaphorical closeness to, the distant cultures, it has been said that we live in a “global village”; one that replaces fragmented single cultures with one global collective unity (McLuhan 33). McLuhan proposes the notion that electro-magnetic discoveries that enable a global communication system have united the human family under the conditions of the “global village” (36). This concept suggests that the images being circulated are evenly mediated, enabling each and every culture equal agency in the representations being distributed. The virtual connectivity of the global village is perceived to provide a platform through which any and every culture can project their own cultural identity, enabling a space in which we are all connected. He argues, “We live in a single constricted space resonant with tribal drums” as the global unity created through electronic capability has eliminated the distinctions between ‘primitive’ and ‘civilised’ (36). Therefore, the global village marks any concern with the ‘primitive’ in contemporary global society irrelevant: in the global village, we are all tribal. In order to assess the validity of this claim, I will analyse two documentaries that situate tribal peoples at
the centre of their focus. In examining the representation of tribal peoples in the documentary
Human Safari, and the documentary-series Meet the Natives, I will explore how the identities
of the tribal peoples function in an increasingly virtually connected world.
Human Safari is a documentary made in 2013 by VICE Germany about the
exploitation of the indigenous Jarawa tribe on India’s Andaman Islands. It focuses on the tourism industry’s exploitation of the tribe, which permits tourists to drive by the busload through the supposedly protected Jarawa Tribe Reserve. The Jarawa’s rights are completely disregarded, resulting in the tribe being treated like animals in a safari park while the tourists drive through to catch a glimpse of the ‘stone-age’ tribe. The documentary addresses how tour operators advertise the Jarawa as primitive and uncivilised in order to capture the interest of the tourists.
Meet the Natives is a documentary-series made by the British television broadcaster
Channel 4 in 2007. The series follows five men from the South Pacific island of Tanna as they travel around the United Kingdom, recording their experiences while being hosted by three groups of people who act as representatives of the ‘tribes’ of British society: the working class, the middle class, and the upper class. The series claims itself to be an attempt to “turn traditional anthropology on its head” by placing the Tannese men in the role of the anthropologists observing the ‘exotic’ British culture. Through the Tannese men’s cultural encounter with the three British ‘tribes’, the five ambassadors of Tanna offer insights into the British culture by comparing it to their own.
Both documentaries are made by western production companies and they are both available through western portals; thus implying that the originally intended audiences of both are indeed western. With this in mind, a close reading of Human Safari and Meet the
Natives will allow me to explore how the respective tribal peoples are represented from and
‘primitive’ Other is a term that I will apply throughout the thesis in order to remind my reader of the perspective from which each representation is made. The term ‘primitive’ is used frequently in relation to tribal communities, and is damaging to the rights of tribal peoples. ‘Primitive’ implies being stuck in the past, and is a term that is used as an excuse to deny tribal communities their rights (“Proud not Primitive”). Therefore, through an analysis of the representations of the Jarawa tribe and the Tannese tribesmen, I will explore to what extent each representation maintains this notion of the ‘primitive’. I will conduct a comparative study of Human Safari and Meet the Natives in order to examine how tribal peoples are represented in touristic and mediatised encounters, which will allow me to assess the significance of the ‘primitive’ Other in the imaginations of the receiving audiences.
With an increasing awareness of distant cultures through virtual platforms,
representations of the ‘primitive’ Other are now more easily distributed than ever before. Due to the immediacy of the images, representations of the ‘primitive’ Other filter into people’s lives on a daily basis. Therefore, in today’s age of global connectivity, virtual representations of cultural Others become naturalized into a daily view of the world. As Arjun Appadurai asserts, due to how infiltrated electronic capabilities are in so many people’s social life on a global scale, they become an influential tool in shaping subjectivity (3). The representations of the Jarawa in Human Safari and the Tannese men in Meet the Natives work to mould the subjectivity of the viewer and the tourist alike. As we will see, they become part of an understanding of the world that is determined by the virtually circulated images of faraway and distant cultures. Roger Silverstone terms the space in which an image of the world is created through mediatised representations the “mediapolis”. The mediapolis is mediated and regulated, and therefore provides an asymmetrical perspective of cultural Others (30). He argues that the power of the mediapolis power lies in the ability to materialise electronic reality into the viewer’s reality. Thus, the ways in which we experience the world today has
been appropriated to the virtual realm. Therefore, this thesis will examine how the
representations of the ‘primitive’ Other in Human Safari and Meet the Natives fit into this notion of the mediapolis, and what this can reveal about the agency of tribal peoples in contributing to the global image. In turn, I will explore how the implication of mediatised representations of the ‘primitive’ Other can impact on the identities of tribal peoples in a global order; one that is being increasingly determined by virtually disseminated information through a communication network that is potent in shaping reality.
In order to do so, the thesis will be separated into three chapters that will enable me to move systematically through my argument, starting from the touristic representation of the Jarawa in Human Safari, through the mediatised representation of the Tannese men in Meet
the Natives, and ending with Human Safari’s mediatised representation of the Jarawa. In
chapter one, I will look at how the touristic encounter is advertised to the tourists as the chance to encounter the ‘primitive’ Other. I will compare this to the mediatised representation of the Tannese men in Meet the Natives to gauge how prevalent this notion of the ‘primitive’ Other is in constructing an experience with tribal peoples. By comparing the notion of ‘primitive’ Other in tourism and television, I can evaluate how widespread the desire for the ‘primitive’ Other is. In discussing the interdisciplinary nature of the ways in which the tourist or viewer can access the ‘primitive’ Other, I will draw on the postmodern nature of the way we experience things in today’s world. This will allow me to productively assess the
relationship between tourism and watching television in the context of contemporaneity. I will then move from comparisons between the content of both representations in the first chapter, to the structure of both encounters in the second chapter. This will allow me to draw comparisons between the touristic encounter of Human Safari and the viewer’s experience of
Meet the Natives; which in turn will enable me to question to what extent our experiences of
third chapter in which I will specifically focus on the mediatised representation of the Jarawa in Human Safari. Through a comparison to that of the Tannese men in Meet the Natives, I will question the significance of stereotyping in representing and understanding the
‘primitive’ Other. With particular reference to Stuart Hall’s prolific work Representation and
the Media, I will dissect each representation in order to see what it can reveal about the extent
to which the ‘primitive’ Other is embedded in the receiving audiences’ cultures. This will allow me to evaluate the power of mediatised representations in a world where image is the “saturating idiom, of communication worldwide” (Hall 5).
Through these three chapters I will enable myself to effectively evaluate the implication of the ‘primitive’ Other in contemporary global society defined by the
comprehensive network of virtually circulated images. I will use the representations of the Jarawa in Human Safari and the Tannese men in Meet the Natives to evaluate the wider pressing notion of how the implication of mediatised representations of the ‘primitive’ Other can impact on the identities of tribal peoples in a contemporary global order, and to question whether we are in fact living in a “global village”.
Chapter one
The Contemporary Desire for the ‘Primitive’ Other
1.1 Introduction
This chapter will look at how the Jarawa are constructed as the ‘primitive’ Other for the tourists in Human Safari, and how this relates to the mediatised representation of the Tannese men in Meet the Natives. With specific focus on the source of both objects, I will discuss the relevance of an ‘authentic’ ‘primitive’ encounter in a global context. The originally intended audience of Meet the Natives, as the series was made by a British television company, was indeed British. However, the tourists depicted in Human Safari bring in a global context as the documentary illustrates how the tours consist of national and international tourists alike. With this in mind, the following chapter will look closely at the similarities in representations of the ‘primitive’ Jarawa tribe in Human Safari, and the ‘primitive’ Tannese men in Meet the
Natives in order to open up larger questions about the role of the ‘primitive’ Other in a
contemporary global context. In order to do so, the chapter will be divided into three sections that address elements that will be key in forming an understanding of the construction of the ‘primitive’ Other: Authenticity, Anthropology, and Nostalgia.
The first section will look specifically at the discourse of authenticity in the encounter with the ‘primitive’ Other. I will discuss how the mediatised representation of the Tannese men in Meet the Natives echoes the touristic representation of the Jarawa in Human Safari, and explore how both do so in order to provide the viewer/tourist with a plausibly authentic encounter. The focus on each source’s depiction of the ‘authentic’ ‘primitive’ will allow me to align the importance of the ‘primitive’ subjects as ‘authentic’ to the focus on the
‘primitive’ in anthropological practice in my second section. In constructing the Jarawa tribe and the Tannese men as ‘genuinely’ pre-historic, the documentary makers of Meet the
Natives and the tour operators in Human Safari provide the opportunity for their consumers
to engage in an anthropological encounter with the ‘primitive’ object. I will refer to Johannes Fabian’s argument in Time and the Other that pertains to the way anthropologists represent the objects of their studies as existing in a time that pre-dates the anthropologist himself. Fabian’s argument will allow me to align the representations of the ‘primitive’ in Human
Safari and Meet the Natives to anthropological discourse; this will permit me to draw on the
self-reflective nature of western anthropology and apply it to the constructions of the Jarawa and the Tannese men as ‘authentically’ ‘primitive’ objects. In the third section, I will set out on a detailed analysis of the Tannese men in Meet the Natives in order to assess what this ‘authentic’ experience of the ‘primitive’ Other in the documentary, as well as in the tourism depicted in Human Safari, can reveal about the nostalgic role tribal peoples play in the minds of contemporary tourists and viewers. By comparing the differing forms of each encounter, I will address how the prevalent quest for the ‘authentic’ ‘primitive’ object spans social practices and global people. This three-part analysis of Human Safari and Meet the Natives will enable me to delve into the question of how the ‘primitive’ Other is perceived in a wider global cultural context.
1. 2 ‘Authenticity’ in the ‘primitive’ encounter
Björn Scholz, the narrator of Human Safari, states in his commentary that the highlight of the tourist’s trip into the Jarawa reserve is the chance to catch a glimpse of the ‘uncivilised’ humans. The tours are advertised to the tourists as an opportunity to experience an intimate encounter with a truly ‘primitive’ tribe. It is the promise of an encounter with ‘primitivism’ that draws in the extensive daily amount of tourists. The appeal of the experience hinges on the tribe’s ‘primitive’ and ‘uncivilised’ existence. This sentiment is echoed in the
viewer with images of the men that highlight their ‘primitive’ existence, which is exemplified by the title image of each episode. It is an image of the men in their cultural dress, consisting of only penis sheaths made from palm leaves, against the backdrop of the London skyline. Filming equipment is superimposed into the image making it look as though the men are holding the equipment. The metropolitan skyline and the high-tech equipment juxtapose the men’s cultural dress. This image is accompanied by music played by a ukulele. Ukuleles originated and thus are most commonly associated with Hawaii (Lester 36). Therefore, the fact that the makers use this instrument for the men’s motif suggests an essentialising of the men as Pacific islanders. Moreover, the image is substantiated by cultural incongruities, which draws attention to the men as being culturally opposite to their surroundings.
Consequentially, the men are highlighted as coming from a non-industrial community. This juxtaposition of cultural images paints the men as exotic and primitive. As the title image is emblematic of the series, it illustrates that the makers are advertising the Tannese men to the viewer on the premise of their ‘primitivism’. In the case of the Jarawa and the Tannese being advertised as ‘primitive’ and ‘uncivilised’, it is evident that this image is provided for the purpose of the viewer.
By the same token, the Jarawa tribe are known to live in an isolated existence. They are a small community of hunter-gatherers who reject contact with the world beyond their land. Tour companies advertise the tribe’s isolation as a way of highlighting them as exotic and ‘uncivilised’ tribe, allowing the Jarawa to be perceived as ‘authentically’ primitive. The Oxford English Dictionary defines “primitive” as “An original inhabitant, an aboriginal; a person belonging to a preliterate, non-industrial society”, and, “The earliest stages; the beginnings”. Compared to the globalising world around them, the Jarawa are perceived to be in the earliest stage of the historical development of the world, and thus preliterate and primitive. Their disconnection from the rest of the world positions them as authentically
primitive in the minds of the tourists and tour operators. The aspect of authenticity is, as Jonathan Culler argues, central to tourism. He emphasizes, “tourists do set out in quest of the authentic” (4); so for the tourists setting out to see the ‘primitive’ Jarawa, their quest for authenticity is achieved due to how primitivism is understood as a way of life that predates industrial society. Culler explains that the idea of seeing the “real” side of a culture “is a major touristic topos, essential to the structure of tourism” (5). He further discussed the paradoxical element of tourism and authenticity, to which I will return later. It is his notion of authenticity as a touristic topos that can be applied to the popularity of the human safaris. The hundreds of tourists per day participating in the human safaris is indicative of how this encounter is indeed perceived to be authentic; and as the appeal of the encounter is the tribe’s ‘primitivism’, it is evident that the Jarawa are believed to be authentically primitive.
However, in the case of Meet the Natives, it befalls the makers of the documentary to supply their viewers with evidence of the ‘authenticity’ of the Tannese men – or what seems to be evidence. By orchestrating situations that highlight the men as culturally Other, the makers succeed in depicting the men as ‘authentic’ in their ‘primitivism’. For example, when the men are visiting their middle-class hosts, the men are given a vacuum cleaner. There is no clear reason as to why they have been given it, other than to provide the viewer with an amusing scene that illustrates the men’s cultural Otherness. Joel, one of the Tannese men, expresses his unfamiliarity with such machines, which is translated into English subtitles. He states, “As you can see I’m using the floorsweeper but even though I’m holding it I’m afraid of it. If it shocks me I will jump away and leave it”. While the men themselves are jokingly playing with the vacuum cleaner, the scene has clearly been planted by the makers to highlight that the men come from a society that do not have such machines. This informs the viewer that the men live in a non-industrial community, therefore locating them as ‘behind in time’, and hence ‘authentically’ ‘primitive’.
While authenticity is key to the structure of tourism, it is the specific focus on the authenticity of the ‘primitive’ that tie the two sources together. In the case of the tourism in
Human Safari, the tourists flock to the Jarawa land primarily for the chance to encounter the
‘primitive’ Jarawa. The advertising of the Jarawa’s ‘primitivism’ is echoed by the representation of the ‘primitive’ Tannese men in Meet the Natives; this indicates that the desire for authenticity is present in tourist and viewer alike. Moreover, it is telling of how this desire for the authentic ‘primitive’ encounter is latent in an international range of people.
Meet the Natives was made by a British television company, therefore it was originally
intended for a British audience. However, Human Safari shows tourists participating in the tours from all over the world. There are national and international tourists, attesting to a global desire for an ‘authentic’ encounter with the ‘primitive’ Other.
Additionally, both sources are telling of the relation between the desires for an authentic ‘primitive’ encounter and contemporary times. In the case of Human Safari, while it is difficult to make comment on when the human safaris started, over the past two years there has been an increasing number of media campaigns and organisations fighting against them. This increased action is indicative of increased activity in the Jarawa land. This is reflected in the increasing number of people interested in television series that provide their viewers with an ‘authentic’ ‘primitive’ subject indicated by a surge of documentary-series on British television. Meet the Natives is just one in a string of similar programmes, such as
Tribe made in 2005 (BBC), The Return of the Tribe in 2007 (Channel Five), and Tribal Wives in 2008 (BBC), to name a few. Several of these shows were adapted to American
television, which is also the case with Meet the Natives. The increased interest in the ‘primitive’ Other spans over a range of cultures as well as mediums. Therefore, as the ‘authentic’ ‘primitive’ is the allure of both sources for different audiences, it becomes clear
that the desire for a ‘primitive’ encounter that is perceived to be authentically and satisfyingly pre-historic is increasingly relevant in a contemporary global society.
1. 3 From the pages of anthropology, to the eye of popular culture
The fascination with the ‘primitive’ that catalyses each encounter in Human Safari and Meet
the Natives is telling of a shift in focus from anthropological discourse into the public eye.
The tourists in Human Safari and the viewers of Meet the Natives want to experience cultures that are comparably ‘behind in time’. The interest in cultures that are seen as stuck-in-time is characteristic of anthropological discourse, which forms the basis of Johannes Fabian’s prolific work on the temporal structures that determine an anthropological object. In Time
and the Other, he addresses the contradiction between the real time in which an
anthropologist conducts their fieldwork, and the way they present their objects spatially, and above all, temporally. He states this contradiction in the following way,
The Other’s empirical presence turns into his theoretical absence, a conjuring trick which is worked with an array of devices that have the common intent and function to keep the Other outside the time of anthropology (xli).
Anthropology and ethnography, he argues, have assigned categories to certain groups of people that allot them temporally before the time of the researcher, resulting in what he terms a “denial of coevalness” (32). By denying the anthropological object contemporaneity, anthropological discourse concretes the notion of tribal communities as existing in a time before that of the researcher and his/her readers. The ‘primitive’, therefore, “is a category, not an object of Western thought” (18); and it is this temporal categorisation that determines tribal people as the centre of anthropological discourse. Therefore, the contemporary rising interest in the ‘primitive’ can be explicated as a contemporary shift of the ‘primitive’ object from anthropological study into popular culture. In regards to Human Safari, the tourists are drawn
in by the opportunity to catch a glimpse of the ‘primitive’ object that exists in a pre-historic state. The anthropological interest in temporally behind objects is adopted in this context of contemporary tourism, indicating that what was previously limited to anthropologists and ethnographers is now desirable in the realm of leisure culture. Moreover, a tourist in Human
Safari tells Scholz, “I wanted to see the Jarawa people. It is a very interesting tribe”. His use
of the word “interesting” connotes that he views this experience as being able to provide something of an intellectual capacity. It implies there is knowledge to be learnt. The subject, the Jarawa tribe, has aroused his curiosity; the experience is not for a momentary thrill, but he desires to satisfy his intellectual curiosity. The single word “interesting” to describe the encounter with the Jarawa tribe is demonstrative of how anthropological discourse is supplanted into contemporary touristic practices.
The anthropological essence of Meet the Natives is stated clearly in the series’ tagline. It states: “Intriguing documentary that turns traditional anthropology on its head. Five
tribesman from a remote South Pacific island travel 10,00 miles to observe the natives of a strange and exotic land –Britain” (“Meet the Natives”). At the outset, the makers are addressing an anthropological interest of the potential viewers by placing the word “anthropology” in the written introduction to the series, in turn illustrating how
anthropological discourse has infiltrated into popular culture. Secondly, the documentary’s claim to reverse anthropology, by placing the Tannese men in the role of observer, is
significantly foiled by the consistent representations of the men as the ‘primitive’ Other. This claim is prominently refuted by the repeated dances that the men perform at the end of each episode when leaving their hosts. Each time, the men perform a traditional dance for the hosts and their guests. For the dance, the men wear their traditional dress, which aesthetically contrasts to that of the British people watching. This conflicting visual works to emphasise the men as ‘primitive’ and acts as a marker for the viewers of their ‘primitivism’, which I will
return to in detail in the following chapter. Furthermore, when conducting fieldwork, it is not the anthropologist who performs their traditional dances and customs for the object of the anthropological study. The men are performing for the purpose of their hosts, and
consequentially the viewers of the series. If anthropology were truly reversed in this case, then the British people would perform traditional customs for the Tannese men. Instead, by
performing their dances for their hosts, and consequently the viewers, the men remain the object of scrutiny, therefore enabling the viewers to become, what David Morley and Kevin Robbins term “armchair anthropologists” (7).
Morley and Robbins state that in today’s globalising world, people “have only to sit on a couch and press a button to behold the exotic Other”, enabling viewers to become “armchair anthropologists or ethnographers, nightly witnesses to the strange customs of Others” (7). The construction of the Tannese men as the ‘primitive’ object enables the viewers to examine the men and their cultural customs as if they were the articles of an anthropological study. The repetition of scenes like the dances, is suggestive of the construction of the men as the ‘primitive’ object. As the subject matter of any televised representation reflects the viewers’ desires (Bandura 107), this construction of the Tannese men is emblematic of the viewer’s anthropologically situated interest in the ‘primitive’ Other. Moreover, considering that this series is one in a string of similarly focused series, the desire to be able to become an “armchair anthropologist” can be understood to be widespread amongst British (and American) viewers. What is telling of a globally imbued desire for an anthropological encounter with the ‘primitive’ Other, is the popularity of the Jarawa tours in Human Safari amongst tourists from all over the world. Therefore, the way the Jarawa and the Tannese men are represented as anthropological objects is symptomatic of a desire for the ‘primitive’ Other that has infiltrated into popular culture on a global scale. The shift of the ‘primitive’ object
from anthropological study to popular culture, like tourism and watching television, is in response to a widespread desire for an ‘authentic’ encounter with the ‘primitive’ Other.
1.4 Nostalgia for a present way of life
Anthropology is contextualised in The Oxford Handbook of the History of Eugenics as a response to the “prospect of human extinction” in the face of colonial modernity (Bashford, Levine). It explains that as imperialism progressed, the discourse of anthropology flourished. Increasing modernity posed a threat to indigenous communities, and so it is a discourse dedicated to preserving the cultures of dwindling ways of life. Anthropology is concerned with loss. Therefore, as the Jarawa and the Tannese men are treated as anthropological objects, they too are associated with loss. This is made clear in various moments in Meet the
Natives where we see the men interacting with the British people. For example, when the men
are having dinner in the home of their middle-class hosts, Bobby and Simon, Bobby is explaining British cultural nightly rituals. She asks the men what they do after dinner on Tanna, and then tells them that people in England go and watch television because they have “lost the art of sitting together telling stories”. This sentiment is expressed later in the series by a rabbit hunter named Ian. The viewers are presented with a scene where the Tannese men help Ian rabbit hunting. The men tell Ian that on Tanna they all work together, to which Ian responds nostalgically that people in Britain have lost the desire to “muck in together”. These insights are telling in two ways.
First, it illustrates that the Tannese men are seen as living in a way that Bobby and Ian believe they once did; the Tannese men are perceived as living in the past of British society. The Tannese way of living is seen as pre-existing their own way of life indicating that they are viewed as primitive. Secondly, the way both Bobby and Ian link qualities of togetherness – of telling stories together, of “mucking in together”, to the men who are viewed as living in their
past, denotes how they relate communal togetherness to ‘primitive’ living. The affectionate way Ian says “mucking in together”, and Bobby’s use of the term “lost of the art of”, illustrate that this “lost” quality of togetherness is looked on fondly; consequentially indicating a sense of nostalgia for a previous way of life that they believe to have had. They exemplify what Arjun Appadurai terms, “nostalgia without memory” (30). Bobby and Ian express nostalgia for a previous way of life that is embodied by the Tannese men despite never having lived this way personally. In expressing nostalgia for a way of life that the men presently live, it
becomes clear that Bobby and Ian are projecting their own cultural self onto their
understanding of the men. The Tannese tribesmen, therefore, become a reflection on British society; the anthropological study becomes a practice of self-reflection.
Appadurai explains further, that in today’s globalising world, “the past is now not a land to return to in a simply politics of memory. It has become a synchronic warehouse of cultural scenarios, a kind of temporal casting” (4), and it is through repeated cultural scenarios that locate tribal people as ‘primitive’ that leads the wider public to believe their past can be located in tribal communities. In other words, tribal people from developing nations are perceived as the ‘developed’ world’s past, due to the way they are nostalgically represented through cultural platforms, such as television and tourism. I will go further into the details of mediatised representations of the ‘primitive’ Other in Human Safari and Meet the Natives in chapter three, but for now I will focus specifically on the representation of the Tannese men as the ‘primitive’ Other as a way of reflecting on the viewer’s own sense of nostalgia for a lost way of life. This is exemplified by the claim of the documentary to “turn anthropology on its head”, and its subsequent failure. In order to expand on this I will examine one scene in particular where the Tannese men visit Manchester.
This scene is revealing in two ways. Firstly, on their visit to Manchester the men are overwhelmed by the amount of homeless people they see sleeping and begging on the streets.
They cannot understand why these people are homeless when countless buildings with empty space surround them. The men are saddened by the loss of unity there is amongst fellow nationals. Their response to the homelessness of the cosmopolitan city works to highlight the fact that the men come from a non-industrial community, which in turn paints them as ‘primitive’ in the eyes of the viewer. The men live in a society that is free from economic structures that determine class inequality. In their village on Tanna, everyone is equal. Their response to the latent homelessness makes them seem naïve, as their inability to understand the economic inequality that is so embedded in industrial societies paints them as innocent. While this is indeed the men’s real response, this scene is given prominent weighting in the episode implying that it is deemed important by the makers. The scene is the longest scene in the episode, and the men’s responses are given significant focus. This implies that the men’s untainted responses are useful to the makers in communicating a message to the viewer. As throughout the documentary there are copious hints at the men’s ‘primitivism’, it can be deduced that this scene is to highlight the men as ‘authentically’ ‘primitive’, expressing naïve and ‘primitive’ cultural beliefs in the face of ‘advanced’, industrial Britain.
This scene presents the men as the ‘primitive’ object, therefore fuelling the perception of them as the anthropological entity. Anthropology, as Diane Lewis states, is a way to “fill in the gaps of Western men’s knowledge of himself” (582). Therefore, by constructing the Tannese men as the ‘authentic’ anthropological object, the men’s observations of British culture become a literal example of Lewis’s definition of anthropology. As the documentary is made for the western viewers, the men’s observations of the homelessness in Britain are directly providing information for the gaps in the potential viewer’s knowledge of himself/herself. The framing of the men in this context as the ‘authentic’ anthropological object offering observations of British culture, therefore, becomes an embodied metaphor for the way anthropology is conducted to provide anthropologists with information of their own
culture and self. In the same vein that anthropology is self-reflective, the Tannese men as the anthropological object enable the armchair anthropologists to assess their cultural present through the observations of what they believe to represent their cultural past.
Secondly, if seen in the context of anthropology as self-reflective, when the men address the loss of togetherness in British society pertaining to homelessness, the scene provides the opportunity for reflection on “lost” cultural qualities. When the men express sadness of the lack of national unity in British society, speaking as the symbol of the lost way of life, their observations directly speak to potential viewers’ senses of nostalgia for a
previous way of life as expressed by Bobby and Ian. The symbol of a lost way of life (the Tannese men) lamenting the loss of togetherness heightens the sadness of this loss. William Cunningham Bissell states that for nostalgia to exist, “a sense of linear historical time is essential”, and the flow of time must “not only be irretrievable but tinged with loss” (221). The way the men express sadness towards the loss of national unity in British culture thus tinges the timeline of British society with loss, and reinforces the irretrievability of this way of life. Bissell explains that “nostalgia requires an object world to seize on – buildings, fashion, images, and the ephemera of everyday life” (221). As the men’s way of life is perceived to be the past, the comparison between British and Tannese cultures based on loss of unity offers the opportunity for the viewer to ‘seize’ the Tannese way of life as the object for their nostalgia for a loss of cultural togetherness.
Therefore, when these two points are combined, it sheds light on how the construction of the Tannese men as the ‘primitive’ anthropological object has bearing on a larger context of the western viewer’s nostalgia for a lost way of life. As I have discussed, anthropology is self-reflective; thus, the interest in tribal cultures is actually an interest in the self. The increased interest in anthropologically focused series, like Meet the Natives, is testament to how this desire for self-reflection is wide spread. As addressed above, the increased number of such
series in the past ten years relates to the recent increase of international and national tourists partaking in the Jarawa tours in Human Safari, denoting the prevalence of this desire on a contemporary global scale. The lure of encountering each ‘primitive’ object is that they live in a way that is ‘pre’ the societies of the viewers and tourists. It is the effects of globalisation that enable the tourists to partake in human safaris, and for the viewers to watch the cultural encounter between the British and the Tannese. The qualities that people express nostalgia for, such as togetherness and unity, are perceived as relating to the tribal peoples’ ‘primitive’ existence, which is deemed ‘primitive’ by its disconnection from outer forces of the
globalising world. Therefore, through an analysis of this particular scene of Meet the Natives in comparison to the popularity of the tours in Human Safari, one argues that the loss that is felt is as a result of being implicated in the impacts of a globalising world. The encounter with the respective ‘primitive’ object in Human Safari and Meet the Natives is a self-reflective experience that can enable the tourist/viewer to indulge in a growing sense of nostalgia for a ‘together’ way of life untainted by the forces of globalisation.
1.5 Post-modern in-authenticity
Thus far, I have analysed the construction of the ‘primitive’ Other as the object of an
‘authentic’ anthropological encounter in Human Safari and Meet the Natives. As anthropology is self-reflective by nature, I explored the relation each ‘primitive’ encounter has to a nostalgic desire for a lost way of life that is embodied by tribal peoples. I will now conclude by turning to the problematic nature of accessing this ‘authenticity’ through the mediums of tourism and watching television, and question if this has any bearing on the expectations of experiencing the world for the contemporary viewer/tourist.
In the instance of Human Safari, the exclusion from the outside world makes the Jarawa seem ‘authentically’ ‘primitive’ to the tourists. However, by entering the Jarawa land
to catch a glimpse of the isolated tribe, the tourists themselves shatter the authenticity of the ‘primitive’ isolated tribe. Their presence hinders the true ‘authenticity’ they seek. Therefore, the ‘authenticity’ of a by-gone way of life is rendered inauthentic by the practices that allow them to access the ‘authentically’ ‘primitive’ Jarawa. Once the experience is labelled as authentic for the purpose of the tourist, it subsequently becomes inauthentic, which Culler argues is characteristic of touristic practices. He argues that in the tourist’s quest for authenticity, they look for signs that mark the object worth seeing. He asserts,
The dilemma of authenticity, is that to be experienced as authentic it must be marked as authentic, but when it is marked as authentic it is mediated, a sign of itself, and hence lacks the authenticity of what is truly unspoiled, untouched by mediating cultural codes (8).
In the case of Human Safari, the presence of the tours marks the experience as authentic, as it declares that there is something to see in the reserve. The tribe are viewed as ‘authentically’ ‘primitive’ due to their isolation, which is due to the way they are advertised by tour
companies; their ‘exclusion’ from the outside globalising world deems them satisfyingly ‘primitive’. Tour companies themselves are the markers of this authenticity, as it tells the tourists that the Jarawa encounter is a tourist attraction. Paradoxically, the tour also becomes the means through which people can access the ‘authentic’ experience. In order to access the isolated tribe tourists partake in these tours, which immediately shatters the tribe’s isolation that deems them ‘authentic’ in the first place. In this case, the marker is directly responsible for spoiling the unspoilt, acting as a literal example of Culler’s definition of the paradoxical nature of the tourist’s quest for authenticity.
This paradoxical quality that Culler equates to tourism, however, is no longer only true of touristic encounters. In the case of Meet the Natives, what denotes the Tannese men as ‘authentically’ ‘primitive’ is also their ‘exclusion’ from the globalising world around them. As
the series consistently points out, the men come from the South Pacific island of Tanna where they live a peaceful and harmonious life amongst their fellow tribesman. The fact that they originate from this way of life is what forms the basis for the cultural encounter at the heart of the documentary. The process of making a documentary around this cultural encounter is the marker of the men’s ‘authenticity’; it is claiming that the men offer something worth seeing to the viewer. This marking is therefore what subsequently damages the authenticity of the men’s ‘primitivism’. By displacing the men into the British culture, the ‘authenticity’ of the ‘primitive’ Tannese men is shattered. The documentary is actually an example of just how far globalising forces have infiltrated far-reaching corners of the earth. Taking five men from a remote island in the South Pacific and placing them in Britain for the purpose of a
documentary is an example of how accessible encounters with Others are in an age of global mobility. The series constructs a notion of the ‘authentic’ ‘primitive’ in a way that parallels the tourists’ expectations of the Jarawa in Human Safari.
Culler’s concept of authenticity of being key to tourism is significant to my comparison between the touristic encounter in Human Safari and the virtual encounter of
Meet the Natives. If this marking of authenticity is characteristic of tourism, and it is done in
an equivalent way in Meet the Natives to the same end, then it implies that this defining feature of touristic encounters has transcended the border between tourism and television, and from the physical world to the virtual realm. The similarities between Human Safari and Meet
the Natives suggest that in the context of today’s world where information is increasingly
digitized, people’s expectations of experiences have shifted. Both the touristic platform and the virtual offer an opportunity to glimpse at the ‘primitive’ Other. The way that Meet the
Natives mirrors key touristic structures by appropriating them to a virtual realm indicates that
it constructs a virtual touristic encounter. Not only is this representative of how images of cultural Others are digitized, but it also indicates that experiences themselves are virtualised.
In providing a platform through which its viewers can become virtual tourists, Meet the
Natives is emblematic of a shift in the way we can experience the world in an age marked by
virtualisation. It epitomises the post-modern tendency facilitated by electronic capabilities to dissolve barriers, not only between practices of tourism and watching television, but also between the real and the virtual.
Chapter two
Virtual Tourism: Accommodating the Postmodern Viewer
2.1 Introduction
In the previous chapter I discussed how the representations of the tribal peoples in Human
Safari and Meet the Natives are symptomatic of a desire for an ‘authentic’ encounter with the
‘primitive’ Other. Not only do the respective encounters share a focus on the ‘primitive’ Other, but they also resemble each other in form. In this chapter I will look specifically at how the mediatised encounter of the Tannese men in Meet the Natives structurally echoes the touristic encounter of the Jarawa in Human Safari. In doing so, I will discuss how Meet the
Natives creates an on-screen version of the touristic encounter depicted in Human Safari,
facilitating a form of ‘virtual tourism’. This virtual appropriation implies a shift in the way contemporary viewers experience on-screen images, which in turn signifies a blurring of barriers between corporeal and virtual tourism.
The first section will address how both media and tourism privilege the aspect of the gaze in order to analyse how the camera gaze of Meet the Natives constructs and applies a gaze that virtually simulates the “tourist gaze” (Urry) held by the tourists in Human Safari. The second section, with particular reference to the works of Dean MacCannell and Jonathan Culler, I will examine the way the key structural relationship between marker, sight and tourist, is appropriated in Meet the Natives. Looking in detail at this crucial cornerstone of touristic experiences and applying it to a reading of Meet the Natives will allow me to explore how the series constructs itself as a form of virtual tourism, and the impact this could have on the traditional role of the viewer. The following section will situate my analysis in the context of postmodernism, and question how the interdisciplinary nature of postmodernity can be seen to facilitate a role for the viewer as virtual tourist. This will lead me to my final section,
in which I will discuss the concept of virtual tourism in relation to Arjun Appadurai’s notion of the power of imagination in today’s globalising world. I will address the postmodern fluidity of social structures, leading me to question how the prevalence of virtual representations impacts on the way we experience the world.
2. 2 Tailoring the “tourist gaze”
The privileging of sight is a crucial factor to media and tourism alike. A primary part of both mediums is satisfactorily presenting the object of the gaze for the onlooker. In the case of
Meet the Natives, the way in which the show positions the Tannese men as the object of the
camera’s gaze, consequently the viewer’s gaze, mirrors the way in which the Jarawa are positioned as the object of the tourist’s gaze in Human Safari. As both mediums rely heavily on visual representation to reach their audiences, the transition of Meet the Natives into the realm of virtual tourism is predicated primarily on the construction and assertion of the gaze. The attraction of Meet the Natives is the opportunity to see how the Tannese men behave in British society. It provides the chance to watch from afar the embodiment of the ‘primitive’ Other in an extraordinary cultural encounter, something that is exampled by the touristic encounter in Human Safari.
Dennis Giles, who writes for the local newspaper Andaman Chronicle, tells us that “thousands of tourists travel everyday just to see the Jarawa” (Human Safari) [my emphasis]. Thus, the premise of the tourists’ reason to travel in Human Safari mimics that of the
attraction of Meet the Natives: the opportunity to see the ‘primitive’ Other. Sight is the catalyst for both encounters. While this is self-evident in forms of media and tourism, what permits Meet the Natives to be defined as virtual tourism, is the way in which it constructs the seeing of the ‘primitive’ object. It is the construction of the Tannese men as a tourist
allows us to see the exemplification of what Sarah Gibson terms, the “changing mobilities of tourism” (157). In applying John Urry’s theory of the tourist gaze – one that is crucial to my own argument, Gibson examines the shift from “a corporal mobility conventionally
associated with tourist movements to a virtual (im)mobility” via the screen (157). She argues that through providing the viewer with a visual encounter “with a place that is coded as distant, both spatially (elsewhere) and temporally (elsewhen)” (160), the construction of the place through the camera’s gaze can supplant the viewer’s desire to travel. She argues that through watching the visual on screen, the viewer is provided with a virtual mobility, therefore allowing the tourist to become what Fussell terms a “stationary tourist” (qtd. in Gibson 161). This, I argue, is what Meet the Natives enables its viewers to do by virtually appropriating the structures of tourism depicted in Human Safari. While the shared privileging of the gaze is what allows tourism to become virtually assimilated, it is the replication of key structural concepts that transposes the camera gaze in Meet the Natives into a tourist gaze that explicitly mirrors that of the gaze belonging to the tourists in Human
Safari.
Urry defines the “tourist gaze” as central to a touristic encounter in the sense that it is the opportunity to gaze upon a scene that is out of the ordinary that provides at least part of the gazer’s experience (1). He argues that the gaze organises the tourist’s encounter with the Other as it allows the tourist to determine what is extraordinary, and therefore worth gazing upon in a touristic experience (14). Therefore, the tourist gaze is constructed on what the gazer expects to see. This expectation is moulded by a “particular filter of ideas, skills, desires, and expectations” and therefore becomes a tool that “orders, shapes, and classifies, rather than reflects the world” (2). Thus, tourism companies tailor their experiences in order to meet the expectations of the tourist gaze. Tourist attractions and experiences do not happen independently from the tourist’s preconceived expectations. As Scholz tells his viewers in
Human Safari, the tourists are promised, “intimate access with one the most endangered
tribes in the world” [my emphasis]. The Jarawa are advertised as ‘endangered’, ‘dangerous’, ‘mysterious’ to the tourists, which therefore works to add to the already existent notion of the tribe’s exotic ‘primitivism’. For the tour companies, this building up of the tribe’s
primitivism is important in enticing tourists as it feeds into the desire for an ‘authentic’ experience, as discussed in chapter one.
Consequently, when the tourists enter the reserve and see the Jarawa from their buses, their experience is validated because they have seen the object of their tourist gaze. Due to the way their expectations are previously conditioned by mediated images, the single act of seeing a tribe member substantiates the entire experience. This is exhibited when Scholz and the tourists are leaving the reserve and he asks the tourists about their experience. A tourist replies, “we saw four, five Jarawa!”, and another proudly exclaims, “two Jarawa!”. It is the initial response of both tourists to tell Scholz how many Jarawa they saw, and their
excitement is telling of their satisfaction with the experience. They do not offer details about the tribe; their excitement is solely based on the number of tribe members they saw. The culture of the Jarawa is irrelevant to them, and instead their excitement lies in being able to claim they caught a glimpse of a number of Jarawa. The presupposed conditions of the gaze enable the tourist’s satisfaction with their sighted encounter. The gaze provides meaning for their encounter, because as Urry explains, the gaze determines what is worth gazing upon.
Furthermore, gaze is key to the media encounter with the Tannese men in Meet the
Natives. The series claims to turn conventional anthropology on its head by reversing the
traditional roles of object and onlooker. Thus it attempts to reverse the traditional power of the gaze, and endeavours to create what Darya Maoz terms a “mutual gaze”. Maoz sets up her argument in the context of Urry’s notion of the tourist gaze alongside her term of the “local gaze” (222), which enables the local people the opportunity to exert agency. She argues that
the local people are not always passive in the tourism dynamic despite the industry’s
commitment to the tourists. Hence, the mutual gaze is when both host and guest watch each other, resulting in the regulation of both parties’ behaviour. The interrelation of the tourist and local gaze results in a new realm in which both parties become aware of being watched, which therefore becomes in some way reflective for both groups. By placing the Tannese men in the role of the gazer, the makers of Meet the Natives are attempting to facilitate the mutual gaze between the men and the viewers. The men are gazing on the British culture while the viewers are gazing upon the men. The intention of placing the men in this role is to allow the viewers to gain insight into their own way of life when contextualised by an outside gaze, as well as the men gaining insight into British culture. However, the reversed gaze in
Meet the Natives fails in its attempt to create a mutual gaze due to the way it repeatedly
represents the men as the ‘primitive’ Other. The framing of the men as Other through the camera lens works to present the men through a series of tropes that indicate ‘primitivism’. This results in a representation of the men that mirrors the tourist’s expectations of the Jarawa in Human Safari. In a failed attempt to subvert the gaze, Meet the Natives presents an image of the ‘primitive’ Tannese men that denotes the expectations of the tourist gaze regarding tribal communities, and one that mirrors the gaze asserted by the tourists in Human Safari.
A prominent example is given when the men are eating a meal with their middle-class hosts, Bobby and Simon. While the rest of the group are participating in a conversation, the camera zooms in on Chief Yapa. The camera’s focus is solely on the Chief and how he is eating the butter. We see him pick up the butter, taste it, and then scrape it in its entirety onto his plate. While Bobby is conversing with Jimmy Joseph, the Tannese translator, about their respective cultural eating habits, the camera’s focus is on the Chief and the way he is
incorrectly (to British standards) eating the butter. The conversation that Bobby and Jimmy Joseph are having is more conducive to the intended anthropological study of the
documentary, as it specifically entails the meeting of the two cultures, thus providing a potential platform for the mutual gaze. Instead however, the camera’s gaze is focused on the way the Chief is eating the butter. The slow zooming in on the Chief’s personal discovery creates the sense of a scrutinizing gaze, which works to emphasise the Chief as Other from the hosts, and inevitably the viewers. This scrutinizing gaze of the camera works to represent the Chief as primitive, and is telling of the true intentions of the documentary. The focus of the camera indicates that it is not the meeting of two cultures that is interesting to the viewer, but rather seeing the way in which the men are culturally Other. The slow zooming gaze of the camera is intrusive and mocking, therefore creating the feeling that the camera gaze is superior to the culturally Other Tannese men. The camera is the mediating lens for the viewer’s gaze, and in its framing of the men as culturally Other it exemplifies how the camera’s gaze is tailored in order to present the viewer with a recognisable image of the ‘primitive’ Other.
This orchestration of a superior gaze through the camera epitomises what Mary Louise Pratt calls a “of-all-I-survey scene” (201). Pratt explains that the monarch-of-all-I-survey scene is prominent rhetoric in travel narratives and is used specifically in exploration writing. Not only does it do so in reference to the aspect detailed above, but it also does so through positioning. Pratt argues that through placing oneself above the scene, the surveyor allows himself or herself to gaze upon the scene with a sense of mastery (203). The camera’s gaze in this scene of Meet the Natives does just this. The camera gazes upon the table scene from a higher position, meaning that when it slowly zooms in on the Chief, a feeling of being visually and metaphorically above him is created. The higher position of the camera connotes a feeling of superiority, while the slow zoom illustrates a feeling of
discovery. The gaze of the camera objectifies the Chief as ‘primitive’ in his behaviour, therefore instilling the feeling of an intrepid explorer surveying the behaviour of the ‘noble
savage’. In this sense, the camera’s gaze exemplifies Pratt’s concept of the monarch-of-all-I-survey scene as it implements an “imperial trope” by taking on the role of the master of the scene through its oppressive and scrutinizing gaze (204).
This mirrors the way the tourists gaze upon the Jarawa in their reserve. The tourists look upon the Jarawa from the privileged post of their bus. The bus positions them above the Jarawa, allowing them to gaze down upon the ‘primitive’ objects of their encounter. By being situated in the bus, they are dislocated from the object of their gaze, and physically above it, allowing them to survey the scene in front of them. This clearly marks the roles of the gazer and the ‘primitive’ object, allowing the tourist to truly enjoy their ‘authentic’ experience of the Other. Without this viewer/object hierarchy, the Jarawa could not satisfy the touristic encounter of an ‘authentic’ experience. Their ‘primitivism’ is heightened in its plausibility through the advertising of the exclusion of the Jarawa from the rest of the world. If the tourists could not gaze down upon the Jarawa from the detached bus, the illusion would be shattered that they are the exotic, dangerous and isolated ‘primitive’ tribe. Moreover, the dynamic of viewer/object determines the sighting of the ‘authentic’ ‘primitive’ Other, which consequently validates the touristic encounter. Therefore, the monarch-of-all-I-survey scene is key to the touristic encounter of seeing the Jarawa depicted in Human Safari. This device plays a key role in the tourist gaze in Human Safari and is mirrored in the camera gaze in
Meet the Natives. Accordingly, this illustrates the way in which Meet the Natives implements
key structural tourist qualities, enabling the camera gaze to be understood as a virtual tourist gaze. Through constructing the tourist gaze through the camera, Meet the Natives enables its viewers the chance to partake in a form of virtual tourism.
In his seminal work on the dynamics of tourism, MacCannell explains that a tourist attraction is constituted by the relationship between the maker, the sight and the tourist. Conventionally, the definition of a marker, he explains, pertains to the information that is attached to or written alongside a sight. Whereas his use of the term “extends to cover any information about a sight” (110), may it be written, visual, physical: anything that allows an element to be read as an indication of the attraction. He argues that the “designation of an object as a sight […] is most often accomplished without any esthetic assistance from the object” (110), and therefore is only determined as a sight by the tourist. The tourist therefore, assigns meaning. The tourist determines what is sight-worthy according to his or her own social structure and organisation, and so they play a crucial role in determining what constitutes a tourist
attraction (101). The tourist gaze becomes a way of reading the markers as recognisable signs of the sight. The markers of the attraction provide a narrative for the gazer, leading them through a stream of identifiable tropes that validates the tourist gaze.
For example, in Human Safari, it is clear that a marker of the primitivism is the nakedness of the tribe. For the Jarawa, nakedness is simply a way of life. However, to the tourists it is indicative of what they believe the Jarawa to represent: a primitive existence. This is made clear when Scholz asks an excited tourist what she saw, to which she replies, “they were naked!”. This is the first detail she provides regarding her experience of the Jarawa. The nakedness of the Jarawa is the first visual indicator of their difference and therefore the most easily deducible marker of the Jarawa’s Otherness. The body is something that the tourists can relate to themselves, as they have their own understanding of how the human body should be represented. Therefore, seeing the naked bodies of the Jarawa allows the tourists to assign meaning to the visual encounter, because of what naked means in the tourists’ own social context. To the tourist, the naked bodies of the Jarawa serve as a marker of the attraction. The way that the tourist’s assign meaning to the nakedness of the Jarawa as
a marker, elevating this visual encounter to the status of the sight epitomises MacCannell’s concept of the marker, tourist and sight relationship (109). Nakedness serves as a signifier of primitivism, allowing the initial visual encounter of the Jarawa to meet the expectations of the tourist gaze.
Comparable to the tourists’ cultural attitude in Human Safari, one prominent marker of the men’s ‘primitivism’ in Meet the Natives is their nakedness. Throughout the series, there are scenes that work to emphasise the men as primitive by highlighting the Tannese men’s nakedness. A specific example occurs when the men are performing a traditional dance for a room filled with middle-class British people. At the end of the scene, the Tannese men walk down a line of English people to shake their hands. While the men are doing this, the camera’s frame is fixed to a waist-height level. While the men walk down the line to shake the hands of the English people, the camera frame is filled with a gradual stream of the Tannese men’s buttocks. The fixed frame of the camera’s gaze works to enclose the physical and cultural differences between the Tannese men and the British crowd, as the waist-height level draws the focus towards the part of the men’s bodies that are conventionally covered in British society. This framing of the camera of the clear indicator of the men’s cultural
Otherness exemplifies Culler’s argument pertaining to the necessity of marking authenticity for the tourist. He states that, “to be truly satisfying the sight needs to be certified, marked as authentic. Without these markers, it could not be experienced as authentic” (8). The fixed frame of the camera creates the impression that the men’s nakedness is an important element to see. It certifies this visual as a sign of the men’s ‘authentic’ ‘primitivism’.
In this respect, Meet the Natives mirrors the importance of providing the viewer with markers of primitivism in order to satisfy the gaze. As the tourist gaze is not personally asserted, the camera gaze must anticipate what the viewer determines to be sight-worthy. The camera must resolve what the viewer’s social values define as Other and therefore worth
seeing, and consequentially provide markers that denote this Other. The camera gaze must look upon signifiers of the objects’ authenticity in order for the viewer to read the images as signs of the sight. Culler, in building on MacCannell’s work, explains how tourists become semioticians in touristic experiences, whereby they read everything around the object as a sign of the sight itself (2). It is the presence of markers that frames the authenticity for the tourist, as without a marker the sight cannot be experienced as authentic (8). He argues that the tourist must see markers of what they believe to be authentic in order to feel satisfied with the encounter. In order to satisfy the viewer’s expectation of the ‘primitive’ Other, the camera must provide the framework in which the markers of authenticity can be read. As the gaze is asserted for the viewer, it is important that the camera sees clear signifiers of the men’s ‘primitivism’ such as the men’s nakedness, which denotes the ‘authentic’ experience. The camera frames markers of the men’s ‘primitivism’, allowing the viewer to recognize the objects – the Tannese men, as the sight they are seeking – the ‘primitive’ Other. Therefore, the way the camera’s focus constructs the image of the Tannese men in Meet the Natives simulates the way the tourist gaze is structured as depicted in Human Safari. By replicating the interrelation between marker, sight and tourist, Meet the Natives locates itself within a touristic framework, allowing the viewer to access the experience of the ‘primitive’ Other in a similar way that the tourists experience the Jarawa in Human Safari. Consequently, the viewer is transported into the realm of virtual tourism.
2.4 Experiencing the ‘primitive’ Other in a postmodern world
The way Meet the Natives epitomises structural qualities of a touristic dynamic creates a virtual experience of the ‘primitive’ Other that simulates the corporeal touristic experience in
Human Safari. This is indicative of a shift in cultural boundaries through an intervention of
times. He states that postmodernism “involves a dissolving of the boundaries, not only between high and low cultures, but also between different cultural forms, such as tourism, art, education, photography, television […]” (74). The replicating of key touristic structural qualities in Meet the Natives of the tourism depicted in Human Safari exemplifies the breaking down of boundaries that Urry discusses. It denotes a shift in social practices, implying that the way people experience encounters is implicated in this shift. The camera gaze of Meet the Natives simulates the tourist gaze depicted in Human Safari, therefore resulting in an analogous representation of the ‘primitive’ Other. Through watching Meet the
Natives viewers can virtually encounter an image of the ‘primitive’ that is corporeally
encountered in Human Safari. Alike the way the touristic encounter is tailored to meet the desires of the tourists in Human Safari, the camera of Meet the Natives tailors the experience to meet the desires of the viewers. This subsequently implies that the way people experience the world has changed in the face of postmodern dissolving of boundaries through the infiltration of electronically distributed images.
In this sense, the viewer fits into the role of what Maxine Feifer coins, the “tourist”. The tourist, as Feifer declares, consists of three elements. Firstly, the post-tourist does not have to leave his or her house in order to gaze upon post-tourist sites, as they can access the extraordinary at the flick of a switch from the comfort of their own living room. Secondly, the post-tourist is aware of this change in tourism and accepts it. Thirdly, with the mass of mediated images of touristic encounters being consistently projected onto their screens, they no longer expect to experience authenticity in the same way (269). Urry summarizes Feifer’s definition by stating, “the post-tourist is a consumer who embraces openly the increasingly inauthentic, commercialized and simulated experiences offered by the tourism industry” (90). Therefore, the way that Meet the Natives simulates the touristic experience for the viewer indicates that it is catering to the needs of the post-tourist: someone
whose expectations of an experience have been altered as a result of the contemporary exposure to globally implicated, mass-mediated images. It is the presence of such images that has impacted on the contemporary cultural dissolving of barriers between corporeal tourism and virtual tourism, as it changes the way we experience the world. It impacts on
imagination, which consequentially informs social attitudes.
2.5 The force of imagination
It is the impact that such images of the ‘primitive’ Other have on the imagination of the viewers that indicate the dangers of mis-representation. Appadurai explains that in the globalising world of today, ‘electronic mediation and mass migration mark the world of the present not as technically new forces but as ones that seem to impel (and sometimes compel) the work of the imagination’ (4). He believes that global diasporas and the fluid circulation of mediatised images shape and mould social imagination. The more that people are exposed to mass-mediated images electronically of faraway places, the more these images come to represent reality in the mind of the viewer. The electronically mediated images determine the social imagination; and the way these images are interwoven with social practice means the “imagination is now central to all forms of agency, is itself a social fact, and is a key
component to the new global order” (31). The imagination becomes social practice, a social collective (5). Both Human Safari and Meet the Natives indicate this. The tourists in Human
Safari go on the tour in order to see the ‘primitive’ Jarawa. Their perception of the Jarawa is
constructed previously to their excursion through globally circulated images of the tribe via the Internet or information provided by tour operators. Thus previous to the tour, they anticipate the Jarawa as the ‘primitive’ Other, which therefore informs their decision to partake in the human safaris. Similarly, this is mirrored by the viewer’s expectation of the ‘primitive’ Other represented by the Tannese men in Meet the Natives. The way the camera
gaze tailors the visual experience in order to meet the viewer’s expectations indicates the way the men are perceived in the imagination of the viewer. Because of how the ‘primitive’ features in their imagination, the viewer watches the show in order to experience a satisfying encounter with the Other; thus simultaneously illustrating imagination informing social practice. In a bid to meet the “culturally specific notions” of the tourist gaze (Urry, 59) , both
Meet the Natives and Human Safari create their representations of the ‘primitive’ Other in
order to meet the expectations of the tourist and post-tourist alike.
The contextualising of the tribal cultures as the ‘primitive’ Other in the social imagination of both the tourists in Human Safari and the post-tourists of Meet the Natives informs the practice of tourism in both instances. This indicates the power of mediatised images in impacting on wider social practice. Not only does it inform social practice, but the way Meet the Natives implements touristic structures to enable its viewers the chance to become a post-tourist is telling of how mediatised representations can actually become social practice. The virtually replicated structures of corporeal tourism offer the chance for the viewer to have the same experience, only virtually. This appropriation of real experience to virtual is emblematic of a change in the way people experience the world, which I will expand on in chapter three. The more we are exposed to images of faraway places, the more mediatised representations are important in facilitating an experience of said cultures. The virtual tourism in Meet the Natives is suggestive of a wider context of how encounters projected on the screen become a virtual replacement for corporeal experiences in a world where electronically circulated images saturate our everyday lives.
